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<h2>Native Son</h2>
<h1>“My Friends”:<br>
A Fireside Chat on the War</h1>
<h3>(June 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">Originally published as a pamphlet by the Workers Party in June 1941.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 17–22.<br>
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table align="center" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h3>If We Must Die</h3>
<p class="fst">If we must die – let it not be like hogs<br>
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,<br>
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,<br>
Making their mock at our accursed lot.<br>
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,<br>
So that our precious blood may not be shed<br>
In vain; then even the monsters we defy<br>
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!<br>
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;<br>
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,<br>
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!<br>
What though before us lies the open grave?<br>
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,<br>
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!</p>
<p class="r"><em>Claude McKay</em></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">My Friends:</p>
<p class="fst">In this moment of crisis, it is proper that the voice of the working man should be heard. The President governs for all, the priests pray for all, the soldier fight for all (so, at any rate, we are told) but it is the working man who pays for all. In times of peace he pays in labor and in sweat. In war be pays in blood. It is always the working man and the farmers who are placed in the front line trenches. The sons of the rich stay behind the lines and direct. I have been to war and I know.</p>
<p>That is why I claim the privilege of a broadcast. I am a black working man, but I am a native son, as American as any white man in this country. My people were here as early as the family of President Roosevelt. We Negroes have labored and helped to make this country what it is. We have fought in all its wars, from the War of Independence to the first World War. In fact Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was the first American to die in the American Revolution. So that when the President talks about preparing America for war I demand my right to be heard. I know how to make a fireside chat. You are all sitting down listening to me and I am sitting down talking to you. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. But in order to make you feel that you will be getting the real inside dope in a confidential manner, I shall begin by saying: “My friends, let us sit down, you and I, and talk this thing over together.” That piece of baloney being out of the way, we can now get down to business.<br>
</p>
<h4>Is America in Danger?</h4>
<p class="fst">The President says that Hitler seems to be winning the European war, and for that reason, this country is in danger of being invaded. Maybe the country is really in danger. But from the start this whole invasion business seemed phony to me. I went to France in the last war, and I saw what it takes to carry a million men across the Atlantic and to keep them there. Germany is very near to England. Yet everybody says that Hitler had to capture Normandy and the Channel ports and get within a few miles of England in order to attempt a successful invasion. Who is such a fool as to believe that Hitler can transport millions of men and all the arms and supplies needed to invade this country, across nearly 3,000 miles of sea? The <em>Yankee Clipper</em> takes only 20 passengers at a time. How many clippers will Hitler need to land a million men in America? Hitler would have to spend years in preparation before he could invade this country.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the Presidents knows that all this talk about invasion is just a lot of hooey. My wife Leonora, who is a Red, told me that the other day the generals of the army and navy made an official statement that this country was in no danger of invasion. And if they know that, and I know it, the President knows it too. When I said to some of my friends, poor trembling Negroes, that they had many things to worry about but that invasion is not one of them, they asked me, “But do you think that the President is lying? Why should he lie? He only wants to protect the people.”</p>
<p>My friends, and particularly my young friends, let me show you how a President can lie. I went to hear President Wilson speak in 1916. He said that we must vote for him because he was the man who had kept us out of war. And as soon as he had won the elections he carried out the plan he had in his pocket for almost a year before the elections, and we were in the war before you could wink. Since that time, my friends, I know how Presidents can lie. Wilson wanted to get us in and he used one jive. Roosevelt wants to get us in and he is using another one. He wants to frighten us with the fear of invasion, although his own generals and admirals tell us the exact opposite.<br>
</p>
<h4>Defend What Democracy?</h4>
<p class="fst">My friends, why does the President want us to fight? He and all the writers in the papers say that it is to defend our democracy. Our democracy! My friends, when I heard that I laughed for ten minutes. Yes. Laughed. I’ll tell you why. It was because I was so damned mad that if I didn’t laugh I would have broken the radio. And that radio cost me $4 in the pawn shop and I didn’t want to break it.</p>
<p>Tell me, Mr. President, what democracy do I defend by going to fight Hitler? Hitler is a vile criminal and should be driven off the face of the earth. But I have no democracy and the democracy I haven’t got Hitler didn’t take from me. I know all those who have been taking away democracy from me and my people. They are Cotton Ed Smith, Senator Bilbo, Vice President Garner, all of them aided by you, President Roosevelt, for all of you are in one Party together, the Democratic Party, and if you were any friend of the Negro, you couldn’t be working so closely in the same Party with those Negro-hating, Negro-baiting little American Hitlers from the South. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, who discriminates against Negroes in his unions is another.</p>
<p>There are thousands of others I could name. They have been lynching me and my people, giving us the dirtiest jobs, at the lowest pay, Jim Crowing us, taking the taxes we pay to teach white children, treating us worse than they treat their dogs. They were doing all this before Hitler was born, they are doing it now, they will do it long after Hitler is dead, unless we Negroes ourselves put a stop to it. I never heard any fireside chat from you, Mr. President, I never saw any campaign carried out by the Senate, to give the American Negroes democracy – for instance, to pass the anti-lynching bill or abolish Jim Crow and the poll tax, which prevents Negroes in the South from voting. May I tell you Mr. President, politely as suits a fireside chat, that you and the hypocritical scoundrels who rule this country with you, should stop being so active in defense of democracy abroad and pay attention to the crimes against democracy at home. Instead, your newspapers spread a lot of lies about no lynchings having taken place during the past year. As if they don’t know that nowadays the Southern lynchers get together in small bands and murder any Negro whom they want to get rid of, very quietly so as to keep it out of the papers.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Fifth Column</h4>
<p class="fst">My friends, the President warns us about the fifth column. I understand that this is the new name for the enemies of democracy. Where have the President’s eyes been all this time? If he wants to find out who these fifth column people are, he just has to ask the Negroes. We know them. We spend our lives fighting against them. If the President sends a reporter to me, with a large notebook, I guarantee that between sunrise and sundown tomorrow I’ll point out to him more fifth column enemies of democracy than he can find room for in all the jails of this country. No, Mr. President, we’ll begin to listen to you about the fifth column when you begin to put in jail some of the really big enemies of democracy in this country, beginning with the United States Vice President, Jack Garner, boss of the Jim Crow state of Texas.</p>
<p>My friends, the President and all the papers say that we must stop aggression. But when Mussolini made his aggression against Ethiopia, you, Mr. President, prevented us from sending arms to Ethiopia. Where was all your hatred of aggression then? But I notice that today you have the American fleet ready to fight Japan for the Dutch East Indies. My wife Leonora, who is a Red, tells me that America wants to fight Germany to prevent Hitler taking the colonies of the Allied countries, and to keep Germany as much as possible out of the fat trade with China and Spanish America. That makes sense to me. But what I know is this, that whatever President Roosevelt wants to fight about, it is not democracy. I have no interests in the Dutch East Indies. The natives there got no democracy from the Dutch. They will get no democracy from America. They will get none from Japan. They will get some democracy only when they drive out all these leeches and take charge of their country themselves.<br>
</p>
<h4>Democracy Begins at Home</h4>
<p class="fst">My friends, it is not only the poor Negroes who get no democracy. The other day I saw a picture, The Grapes of Wrath. In it I saw whites, miserable and suffering almost as much as we Negroes suffer. Every week outside the relief station there are whites standing with me, no better off than I am. If these poor Okies and the Negroes and the white workers were to get together we could fight for some real democracy here. That is the fight I am willing to begin. I know who my enemies are. And when these same enemies come telling me about going to fight against Hitler, what I tell them in my mind is what would be very out of place in a fireside chat, so you will have to guess at it.</p>
<p>I know a Negro school teacher who says that we must fight with Roosevelt to defeat Hitler. I want to see Hitler defeated but why should I trust Roosevelt? How do I know that Roosevelt at some time or another wouldn’t turn traitor? Look at the King of Belgium. He must have told the poor Belgians to come and fight with him for democracy. Now he has surrendered to Hitler and next thing he will be helping Hitler to impose fascism on the Belgian people. That is what you get when you listen to these Kings and Presidents and Generals all urging poor people to come and fight against Hitler. I have been watching that school teacher a long time. And I think that what he wants to defend is not democracy but the $35 a week he gets for teaching in the Jim Crow school. If he want to die for democracy and his $35, that is his business. But he isn’t going to lead me into that. When he have defeated the enemies of democracy here, then we can give Hitler a beating. I would be ready to fight against Hitler then.<br>
</p>
<h4>Unite and Fight!</h4>
<p class="fst">My friends, Negroes are well known for their belief in God. And I notice that a good fireside chat always has something in it about God and prayers. But I notice too that Hitler in all his speeches talks about God and asks for his blessing. President Wilson, that smooth-tongued rascal, was full of God too. But Roosevelt, Hitler, and Wilson not only pray to God, but see to it that they have guns, battleship, and planes. So tonight, my friends, my dear friends, I want to leave out the prayers and tell you plainly what is my policy for the American people and the Negroes in particular.</p>
<p>It is this.</p>
<p>Unite and fight for our democracy here. What I as a black man want is a steady job. I want good wages, $30 a week for 30 hours a week. I want a good relief check when I am out of work. I want my black children to go to any school in the neighborhood. I want a good house and I want it where I choose to have it. I want to travel where I want, go where I want, eat where I want, join any union or organization that I want. I want this for myself, I want it for all my black people, and if any white man is prepared to join with us to fight for that, I want it for him too. And it isn’t Hitler who is keeping these things from me. It is those who are robbing, cheating, and insulting my people.</p>
<p>My friends, to win those things I am prepared to fight. I may go to jail in that fight. I may get shot down by the police but I’ll die contented. Death is death and I prefer to die fighting here for my rights and the rights of my people and those who will fight with us, than die so that President Roosevelt and his friends might get the Dutch East Indies or the British West Indies or any kind of Indies whatsoever. So, my friends, good night. I shall not quote scripture but I shall end with a piece of personal history. I went to the last war. I was treated like a dog before I went. I was treated like a dog while I was there. I was treated like a dog when I returned. I have been played for a sucker before, and I am not going to be played again.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
Native Son
“My Friends”:
A Fireside Chat on the War
(June 1940)
Originally published as a pamphlet by the Workers Party in June 1941.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 17–22.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
If We Must Die
If we must die – let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay
My Friends:
In this moment of crisis, it is proper that the voice of the working man should be heard. The President governs for all, the priests pray for all, the soldier fight for all (so, at any rate, we are told) but it is the working man who pays for all. In times of peace he pays in labor and in sweat. In war be pays in blood. It is always the working man and the farmers who are placed in the front line trenches. The sons of the rich stay behind the lines and direct. I have been to war and I know.
That is why I claim the privilege of a broadcast. I am a black working man, but I am a native son, as American as any white man in this country. My people were here as early as the family of President Roosevelt. We Negroes have labored and helped to make this country what it is. We have fought in all its wars, from the War of Independence to the first World War. In fact Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was the first American to die in the American Revolution. So that when the President talks about preparing America for war I demand my right to be heard. I know how to make a fireside chat. You are all sitting down listening to me and I am sitting down talking to you. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. But in order to make you feel that you will be getting the real inside dope in a confidential manner, I shall begin by saying: “My friends, let us sit down, you and I, and talk this thing over together.” That piece of baloney being out of the way, we can now get down to business.
Is America in Danger?
The President says that Hitler seems to be winning the European war, and for that reason, this country is in danger of being invaded. Maybe the country is really in danger. But from the start this whole invasion business seemed phony to me. I went to France in the last war, and I saw what it takes to carry a million men across the Atlantic and to keep them there. Germany is very near to England. Yet everybody says that Hitler had to capture Normandy and the Channel ports and get within a few miles of England in order to attempt a successful invasion. Who is such a fool as to believe that Hitler can transport millions of men and all the arms and supplies needed to invade this country, across nearly 3,000 miles of sea? The Yankee Clipper takes only 20 passengers at a time. How many clippers will Hitler need to land a million men in America? Hitler would have to spend years in preparation before he could invade this country.
Furthermore, the Presidents knows that all this talk about invasion is just a lot of hooey. My wife Leonora, who is a Red, told me that the other day the generals of the army and navy made an official statement that this country was in no danger of invasion. And if they know that, and I know it, the President knows it too. When I said to some of my friends, poor trembling Negroes, that they had many things to worry about but that invasion is not one of them, they asked me, “But do you think that the President is lying? Why should he lie? He only wants to protect the people.”
My friends, and particularly my young friends, let me show you how a President can lie. I went to hear President Wilson speak in 1916. He said that we must vote for him because he was the man who had kept us out of war. And as soon as he had won the elections he carried out the plan he had in his pocket for almost a year before the elections, and we were in the war before you could wink. Since that time, my friends, I know how Presidents can lie. Wilson wanted to get us in and he used one jive. Roosevelt wants to get us in and he is using another one. He wants to frighten us with the fear of invasion, although his own generals and admirals tell us the exact opposite.
Defend What Democracy?
My friends, why does the President want us to fight? He and all the writers in the papers say that it is to defend our democracy. Our democracy! My friends, when I heard that I laughed for ten minutes. Yes. Laughed. I’ll tell you why. It was because I was so damned mad that if I didn’t laugh I would have broken the radio. And that radio cost me $4 in the pawn shop and I didn’t want to break it.
Tell me, Mr. President, what democracy do I defend by going to fight Hitler? Hitler is a vile criminal and should be driven off the face of the earth. But I have no democracy and the democracy I haven’t got Hitler didn’t take from me. I know all those who have been taking away democracy from me and my people. They are Cotton Ed Smith, Senator Bilbo, Vice President Garner, all of them aided by you, President Roosevelt, for all of you are in one Party together, the Democratic Party, and if you were any friend of the Negro, you couldn’t be working so closely in the same Party with those Negro-hating, Negro-baiting little American Hitlers from the South. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, who discriminates against Negroes in his unions is another.
There are thousands of others I could name. They have been lynching me and my people, giving us the dirtiest jobs, at the lowest pay, Jim Crowing us, taking the taxes we pay to teach white children, treating us worse than they treat their dogs. They were doing all this before Hitler was born, they are doing it now, they will do it long after Hitler is dead, unless we Negroes ourselves put a stop to it. I never heard any fireside chat from you, Mr. President, I never saw any campaign carried out by the Senate, to give the American Negroes democracy – for instance, to pass the anti-lynching bill or abolish Jim Crow and the poll tax, which prevents Negroes in the South from voting. May I tell you Mr. President, politely as suits a fireside chat, that you and the hypocritical scoundrels who rule this country with you, should stop being so active in defense of democracy abroad and pay attention to the crimes against democracy at home. Instead, your newspapers spread a lot of lies about no lynchings having taken place during the past year. As if they don’t know that nowadays the Southern lynchers get together in small bands and murder any Negro whom they want to get rid of, very quietly so as to keep it out of the papers.
The Fifth Column
My friends, the President warns us about the fifth column. I understand that this is the new name for the enemies of democracy. Where have the President’s eyes been all this time? If he wants to find out who these fifth column people are, he just has to ask the Negroes. We know them. We spend our lives fighting against them. If the President sends a reporter to me, with a large notebook, I guarantee that between sunrise and sundown tomorrow I’ll point out to him more fifth column enemies of democracy than he can find room for in all the jails of this country. No, Mr. President, we’ll begin to listen to you about the fifth column when you begin to put in jail some of the really big enemies of democracy in this country, beginning with the United States Vice President, Jack Garner, boss of the Jim Crow state of Texas.
My friends, the President and all the papers say that we must stop aggression. But when Mussolini made his aggression against Ethiopia, you, Mr. President, prevented us from sending arms to Ethiopia. Where was all your hatred of aggression then? But I notice that today you have the American fleet ready to fight Japan for the Dutch East Indies. My wife Leonora, who is a Red, tells me that America wants to fight Germany to prevent Hitler taking the colonies of the Allied countries, and to keep Germany as much as possible out of the fat trade with China and Spanish America. That makes sense to me. But what I know is this, that whatever President Roosevelt wants to fight about, it is not democracy. I have no interests in the Dutch East Indies. The natives there got no democracy from the Dutch. They will get no democracy from America. They will get none from Japan. They will get some democracy only when they drive out all these leeches and take charge of their country themselves.
Democracy Begins at Home
My friends, it is not only the poor Negroes who get no democracy. The other day I saw a picture, The Grapes of Wrath. In it I saw whites, miserable and suffering almost as much as we Negroes suffer. Every week outside the relief station there are whites standing with me, no better off than I am. If these poor Okies and the Negroes and the white workers were to get together we could fight for some real democracy here. That is the fight I am willing to begin. I know who my enemies are. And when these same enemies come telling me about going to fight against Hitler, what I tell them in my mind is what would be very out of place in a fireside chat, so you will have to guess at it.
I know a Negro school teacher who says that we must fight with Roosevelt to defeat Hitler. I want to see Hitler defeated but why should I trust Roosevelt? How do I know that Roosevelt at some time or another wouldn’t turn traitor? Look at the King of Belgium. He must have told the poor Belgians to come and fight with him for democracy. Now he has surrendered to Hitler and next thing he will be helping Hitler to impose fascism on the Belgian people. That is what you get when you listen to these Kings and Presidents and Generals all urging poor people to come and fight against Hitler. I have been watching that school teacher a long time. And I think that what he wants to defend is not democracy but the $35 a week he gets for teaching in the Jim Crow school. If he want to die for democracy and his $35, that is his business. But he isn’t going to lead me into that. When he have defeated the enemies of democracy here, then we can give Hitler a beating. I would be ready to fight against Hitler then.
Unite and Fight!
My friends, Negroes are well known for their belief in God. And I notice that a good fireside chat always has something in it about God and prayers. But I notice too that Hitler in all his speeches talks about God and asks for his blessing. President Wilson, that smooth-tongued rascal, was full of God too. But Roosevelt, Hitler, and Wilson not only pray to God, but see to it that they have guns, battleship, and planes. So tonight, my friends, my dear friends, I want to leave out the prayers and tell you plainly what is my policy for the American people and the Negroes in particular.
It is this.
Unite and fight for our democracy here. What I as a black man want is a steady job. I want good wages, $30 a week for 30 hours a week. I want a good relief check when I am out of work. I want my black children to go to any school in the neighborhood. I want a good house and I want it where I choose to have it. I want to travel where I want, go where I want, eat where I want, join any union or organization that I want. I want this for myself, I want it for all my black people, and if any white man is prepared to join with us to fight for that, I want it for him too. And it isn’t Hitler who is keeping these things from me. It is those who are robbing, cheating, and insulting my people.
My friends, to win those things I am prepared to fight. I may go to jail in that fight. I may get shot down by the police but I’ll die contented. Death is death and I prefer to die fighting here for my rights and the rights of my people and those who will fight with us, than die so that President Roosevelt and his friends might get the Dutch East Indies or the British West Indies or any kind of Indies whatsoever. So, my friends, good night. I shall not quote scripture but I shall end with a piece of personal history. I went to the last war. I was treated like a dog before I went. I was treated like a dog while I was there. I was treated like a dog when I returned. I have been played for a sucker before, and I am not going to be played again.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The SWP and Negro Work</h1>
<h3>(July 1939)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><span class="info">Source:</span> SWP New York Convention Resolutions, 11 July 1939.<br>
<span class="info">Proofreading:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> (March 2016).</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary elements of the population. They are designated by their whole historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution. The neglect of Negro work and of the Negro question by the party is therefore a very disquieting sign. The SWP must recognize that its attitude to the Negro question is crucial for its future development. Hitherto the party has been based mainly on privileged workers and groups of isolated intellectuals. Unless it can find its way to the great masses of the underprivileged, of whom the Negroes constitute so important a section, the broad perspectives of the permanent revolution will remain only a fiction and the party is bound to degenerate.</p>
<p>The SWP proposes therefore to constitute a national Negro department which will initiate and coordinate a plan of work among the Negroes and calls upon its members to cooperate strenuously in the difficult task of approaching this work in the most suitable manner. Our obvious tasks for the coming period are (a) the education of the party; (b) winning the politically more advanced Negroes for the Fourth International; and (c) through the work of the party among the Negroes and in wider fields, influencing the Negro masses to recognize in the SWP the only party which is genuinely working for their complete emancipation from the heavy burdens they have borne so long. The winning of masses of Negroes to our movement on a revolutionary basis is, however, no easy task. The Negroes, suffering acutely from the general difficulties of all workers under capitalism, and in addition, from special problems of their own, are naturally hesitant to take the step of allying themselves with a small and heavily persecuted party. But Negro work is complicated by other, more profound, causes. For reasons which can be easily understood, the American Negro is profoundly suspicious of all whites, and recent events have deepened that suspicion.</p>
<p>In the past, the Negro masses have had disastrous experiences with the Republican and Democratic parties. The benefits that the Negroes as a whole are supposed to have received from the New Deal and the Democratic Party can easily be seen for the fraud that they are when it is recognized that it is the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt which by force and trickery prevents the Negroes from exercising their votes over large areas in the South.</p>
<p>The CP of the U.S.A. from 1928 to 1935 did win a number of Negroes to membership and awakened a sympathetic interest among the politically more advanced Negro workers and intellectuals. But the bureaucratic creation of Negro "leaders," their subservience to the twists and turns of the party line, their slavish dependence on the manipulations and combinations of the CP leadership, were seen by interested Negroes not as a transference of the methods and practices of the Kremlin bureaucracy to America, but merely as another example of the use of Negroes by whites for political purposes unconnected with Negro struggles. With its latest turn beginning in 1935, the CP has become openly a party of American bourgeois democracy. Not only to expand, but merely to exist in this milieu demanded that it imbibe and practice the racial discriminations inherent in that society. The Negroes, very sensitive to all such practices, have quickly recognized the new face of the CP beneath the mask of demagogy with which it seeks to disguise the predicament in which it finds itself, and the result has been a mass departure from the party (80 percent of the New York State Negro membership) and a bitter hostility to the CP, which reached a climax when well-known former Negro members of the CP testified against it before the Dies Committee. Once more the Third International has struck a deadly blow at the American working class, this time by undermining the confidence that was being slowly forged between the politically advanced sections of the black and white workers.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the awakening political consciousness of the Negro not unnaturally takes the form of a desire for independent action uncontrolled by whites. The Negroes have long felt and more than ever feel today the urge to create their own organizations under their own leaders and thus assert, not only in theory but in action, their claim to complete equality with other American citizens. Such a desire is legitimate and must be vigorously supported even when it takes the form of a rather aggressive chauvinism. Black chauvinism in America today is merely the natural excess of the desire for equality and is essentially progressive while white American chauvinism, the expression of racial domination, is essentially reactionary. Under any circumstances, it would have been a task of profound difficulty, perhaps impossible, for a revolutionary party composed mainly of whites to win the confidence of the American Negro masses, except in the actual crises of revolutionary struggles. Such possibilities as existed, however, have been gravely undermined by the CP. Today the politically minded Negroes are turning away from the CP, and Negro organizations devoted to struggle for Negro rights are springing up all over the North and East, particularly in Harlem. The nationalist tendencies of the Negroes have been fortified, and in addition to the poisoning of racial relations by capitalism, the SWP has now to contend with the heritage left by the CP and the pernicious course it is still actively pursuing.</p>
<p>The SWP therefore proposes that its Negro members, aided and supported by the party, take the initiative and collaborate with other militant Negroes in the formation of a Negro mass organization devoted to the struggle for Negro rights. <em>This organization will NOT be either openly or secretly a periphery organization of the Fourth International.</em> It will be an organization in which the masses of Negroes will be invited to participate on a working-class program corresponding to the day-to-day struggles of the masses of Negro workers and farmers. Its program will be elaborated by the Negro organization, in which Negro members of the Fourth International will participate with neither greater nor lesser rights than other members. But the SWP is confident that the position of the Negroes in American society, the logic of the class struggle in the present period, the superior grasp of politics and the morale of members of the Fourth International, must inevitably result in its members exercising a powerful influence in such an organization. The support of such an organization by the SWP does not in any way limit the party's drive among Negroes for membership, neither does it invalidate the necessary struggle for the unity of both black and white workers. But that road is not likely to be a broad highway. Such an organization as is proposed is the most likely means of bringing the masses of Negroes into political action, which, though programmatically devoted to their own interests, must inevitably merge with the broader struggles of the American working-class movement taken as a whole. The SWP, therefore, while recognizing the limitations and pitfalls of a mass organization without clearly defined political program, and while retaining its full liberty of action and criticism, welcomes and supports any attempt by Negroes themselves to organize for militant action against our common oppressors, instructs its Negro members to work actively toward the formation of such an organization, and recommends to the party members to follow closely all such manifestations of Negro militancy.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The SWP and Negro Work
(July 1939)
Source: SWP New York Convention Resolutions, 11 July 1939.
Proofreading: Einde O’Callaghan (March 2016).
The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary elements of the population. They are designated by their whole historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution. The neglect of Negro work and of the Negro question by the party is therefore a very disquieting sign. The SWP must recognize that its attitude to the Negro question is crucial for its future development. Hitherto the party has been based mainly on privileged workers and groups of isolated intellectuals. Unless it can find its way to the great masses of the underprivileged, of whom the Negroes constitute so important a section, the broad perspectives of the permanent revolution will remain only a fiction and the party is bound to degenerate.
The SWP proposes therefore to constitute a national Negro department which will initiate and coordinate a plan of work among the Negroes and calls upon its members to cooperate strenuously in the difficult task of approaching this work in the most suitable manner. Our obvious tasks for the coming period are (a) the education of the party; (b) winning the politically more advanced Negroes for the Fourth International; and (c) through the work of the party among the Negroes and in wider fields, influencing the Negro masses to recognize in the SWP the only party which is genuinely working for their complete emancipation from the heavy burdens they have borne so long. The winning of masses of Negroes to our movement on a revolutionary basis is, however, no easy task. The Negroes, suffering acutely from the general difficulties of all workers under capitalism, and in addition, from special problems of their own, are naturally hesitant to take the step of allying themselves with a small and heavily persecuted party. But Negro work is complicated by other, more profound, causes. For reasons which can be easily understood, the American Negro is profoundly suspicious of all whites, and recent events have deepened that suspicion.
In the past, the Negro masses have had disastrous experiences with the Republican and Democratic parties. The benefits that the Negroes as a whole are supposed to have received from the New Deal and the Democratic Party can easily be seen for the fraud that they are when it is recognized that it is the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt which by force and trickery prevents the Negroes from exercising their votes over large areas in the South.
The CP of the U.S.A. from 1928 to 1935 did win a number of Negroes to membership and awakened a sympathetic interest among the politically more advanced Negro workers and intellectuals. But the bureaucratic creation of Negro "leaders," their subservience to the twists and turns of the party line, their slavish dependence on the manipulations and combinations of the CP leadership, were seen by interested Negroes not as a transference of the methods and practices of the Kremlin bureaucracy to America, but merely as another example of the use of Negroes by whites for political purposes unconnected with Negro struggles. With its latest turn beginning in 1935, the CP has become openly a party of American bourgeois democracy. Not only to expand, but merely to exist in this milieu demanded that it imbibe and practice the racial discriminations inherent in that society. The Negroes, very sensitive to all such practices, have quickly recognized the new face of the CP beneath the mask of demagogy with which it seeks to disguise the predicament in which it finds itself, and the result has been a mass departure from the party (80 percent of the New York State Negro membership) and a bitter hostility to the CP, which reached a climax when well-known former Negro members of the CP testified against it before the Dies Committee. Once more the Third International has struck a deadly blow at the American working class, this time by undermining the confidence that was being slowly forged between the politically advanced sections of the black and white workers.
Furthermore, the awakening political consciousness of the Negro not unnaturally takes the form of a desire for independent action uncontrolled by whites. The Negroes have long felt and more than ever feel today the urge to create their own organizations under their own leaders and thus assert, not only in theory but in action, their claim to complete equality with other American citizens. Such a desire is legitimate and must be vigorously supported even when it takes the form of a rather aggressive chauvinism. Black chauvinism in America today is merely the natural excess of the desire for equality and is essentially progressive while white American chauvinism, the expression of racial domination, is essentially reactionary. Under any circumstances, it would have been a task of profound difficulty, perhaps impossible, for a revolutionary party composed mainly of whites to win the confidence of the American Negro masses, except in the actual crises of revolutionary struggles. Such possibilities as existed, however, have been gravely undermined by the CP. Today the politically minded Negroes are turning away from the CP, and Negro organizations devoted to struggle for Negro rights are springing up all over the North and East, particularly in Harlem. The nationalist tendencies of the Negroes have been fortified, and in addition to the poisoning of racial relations by capitalism, the SWP has now to contend with the heritage left by the CP and the pernicious course it is still actively pursuing.
The SWP therefore proposes that its Negro members, aided and supported by the party, take the initiative and collaborate with other militant Negroes in the formation of a Negro mass organization devoted to the struggle for Negro rights. This organization will NOT be either openly or secretly a periphery organization of the Fourth International. It will be an organization in which the masses of Negroes will be invited to participate on a working-class program corresponding to the day-to-day struggles of the masses of Negro workers and farmers. Its program will be elaborated by the Negro organization, in which Negro members of the Fourth International will participate with neither greater nor lesser rights than other members. But the SWP is confident that the position of the Negroes in American society, the logic of the class struggle in the present period, the superior grasp of politics and the morale of members of the Fourth International, must inevitably result in its members exercising a powerful influence in such an organization. The support of such an organization by the SWP does not in any way limit the party's drive among Negroes for membership, neither does it invalidate the necessary struggle for the unity of both black and white workers. But that road is not likely to be a broad highway. Such an organization as is proposed is the most likely means of bringing the masses of Negroes into political action, which, though programmatically devoted to their own interests, must inevitably merge with the broader struggles of the American working-class movement taken as a whole. The SWP, therefore, while recognizing the limitations and pitfalls of a mass organization without clearly defined political program, and while retaining its full liberty of action and criticism, welcomes and supports any attempt by Negroes themselves to organize for militant action against our common oppressors, instructs its Negro members to work actively toward the formation of such an organization, and recommends to the party members to follow closely all such manifestations of Negro militancy.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Laski, St. Paul and Stalin</h1>
<h4>A Prophet in Search of New Values</h4>
<h3>(June 1944)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni44_06">Vol. X No. 6</a>, June 1944, pp. 182–186.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by Damon Maxwell.</p>
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<p class="fst">The title of Laski’s new book, <strong>Faith, Reason and Civilization</strong>, is very accurate. He seeks by reason (“historical analysis”) to give civilization (capitalism in decline) a new faith (Stalinism).</p>
<p>Yet this book is strange and new. Laski, ardent supporter of the imperialist war, begins by a strong tribute to the heroic deeds of European youth in the war against Hitler. But as he sees victory approaching he fears that all his sacrifice and effort may have been in vain. Laski says that as he has so often said before, that capitalism must be superseded. But Churchill the great hero of Britain in the war, is a hopeless reactionary who admired Mussolini as long as Mussolini did not attack Britain. Everywhere the outlook for the capitalist democracies is, on the whole, gloomy. We need a new faith, new values. Then the reader, with no more preparation, is hurled 2,000 years back into the world of early Christianity.</p>
<p>“Political convulsion seems to combine with intellectual decay to wreck the foundations of the Roman civilization. But the great writers of the Bible, “Amos or the Second Isaiah ... Saint Paul,” by “the magic of their alchemy could not only promise regeneration to an Empire in decline; by the age of Constantine they had come to dominate the whole outlook of the Western world.” It is the magic of Laski’s alchemy which makes Amos and Isaiah promise regeneration to the Roman Empire. Though it is true that if they and Paul had promised any such thing they could have promised it only by magic. Let us, however, follow what Laski actually tries to do. He has by now reached Chapter IV, significantly entitled “Ideas as Acts.” The argument is now in full blast. We cannot quote indefinitely. Page 27 should be read and re-read. Briefly, “The victory of Christianity over paganism meant a revitalization of the human mind.” And Laski immediately poses the question: “I do not think anyone can examine with care our contemporary situation without being constantly reminded that we again require some faith that will revitalize the human mind. Almost as clearly as in the declining days of the Roman Empire, our scheme of values seems to have broken down.”</p>
<p>It is impossible to make head or tail of this historically. The Roman Empire really began to decline some two centuries at the very least after Amos, Isaiah and Paul. After Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion, the Roman Empire tell into greater difficulties than ever. Laski, however, goes on to give us two chapters, one on the recovery, and the other on the substance of faith. Faith. Faith. Values. Values. He then proceeds to discuss <em>The Soviet Idea and Its Perspectives</em> and <em>The Soviet Idea and Victory</em>. By now we are at Page 63. Then follows the longest chapter in the book, 57 pages on <em>The Source of New Values</em>. This is what really concerns Laski. His next chapter, on Epicurus and Lucretius, is proof of his interests in this book. It is only then that he takes up the modern theme, Bolshevism and Capitalism, and moves rapidly to a conclusion. Laski does not deign to argue about Stalinist Russia. He takes its desirability for granted. Like the Dean of Canterbury but with less excuse he falls back always on “Verily, verily, I say unto you ...”, “No one can help feeling ...”, “No one can deny ...”, and so on, whenever he wishes to make a point about Russia in particular. As the scheme of his book shows, he is concerned primarily with early Christianity and the search for values. We have written before and will write again of the “labor faker” politics of Laski. What we propose to do here is to deal with him on the ground he has chosen. He claims to be exhibiting “in a general way the Marxist approach to the issues with which [he] deals. The only way to expose satisfactorily this claim is to show what we consider the Marxist way of dealing with these issues. Thus we shall expose the falseness of his historical method which is in direct co-relation with the falseness of his political conclusions and is either the cause or the effect of them.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Intellectuals in Antiquity</h4>
<p class="fst">It is today common knowledge that the state cult of religion in the classical world was aimed deliberately at keeping the masses in subjection. In two important periods, in Greece during the time of Epicurus and in the Rome of Lucretius, a philosophical movement fiercely attacked the official state mysticism. On each occasion the movement gained wide support among intellectuals, though the extent to which it gained really popular support is disputed. It is characteristic of Laski’s historical analysis that he reports the desertion of the movement by the intellectuals because they feared the revolt of the masses, then immediately loses himself in moral denunciations of them for doing so. Their desertion, according to him, resulted in the victory of “superstition,” which dominated society and defeated “reason.”</p>
<p>This, it is presumed, is Marxism. In reality this is no more than petty-bourgeois radicalism. On a question so crucial to his whole argument, Laski does not have a single word to say n about the social relations as they developed at the given stage of the process of production. This is his fundamental error and the error of most of his kind. The intellectuals who attacked the state-religions of Greece and Rome were not intellectuals in general whose supineness we must note and beware of. They were the fruit of a rising “bourgeoisie,” and as such were the protagonists of a materialist philosophy directed against the mysticism of a land-owning aristocracy. One suggestive investigator <a id="f1" href="#a1" name="f1">[1]</a> claims that this “bourgeoisie” was an investing “bourgeoisie.” In a commercial society, the relation between debtor and creditor, producer and consumer, becomes an abstract relation. The investor therefore sees himself as an isolated individual, in opposition to the land-owner of the Gens who sees himself as part of an organic society. As carefully as he calculates his investments he calculates his pleasures, hence the hedonism of the Epicureans. In physics he sees nature as a collection of atoms united together in an ordered universe, etc. But this incipient capitalism which at various periods in the classical world was able to challenge landed property never became economically strong enough to supersede it. Marx states that the history of Rome was the history of landed property. No less and no more. No rival class emerged. The final breakdown of that economic order threw the whole society into chaos. Intellectuals, faithful or unfaithful, could not have saved it.</p>
<p>Yet Laski writes sentence after sentence like this, “The Rome that Sallust depicts for us had already begun to lose that inner integrity ...” Inner integrity indeed! Maybe that inner integrity was saved by the magic alchemy of Amos and Isaiah. But lost in the pursuit and recovery of inner integrity and faith and values, Laski shows little conception of Christianity in its relation to social forces. Hear him again, “In the result it [Christianity] had relatively little influence on the realm of social constitution because ...” Because what? Because “as it was shaped by Paul and his successors it emphasized this life only as the vestibule to eternity, and put the chief importance of its dreams on the next world rather than upon this.” Why did they do this? And if they did this, why did Christianity become ultimately such a powerful force? There is no serious treatment of this in these pages, devoted as we have seen to drawing historical inspiration and contemporary enlightenment from the study of this period. We must develop this subject ourselves briefly. The values of Christianity are as intimately related to the values of the modern world as embryo is to mature man. The true historical connection will lead us straight to the heart of the modern problem and the fallacy of Stalinism as a source of values for a decaying society.<br>
</p>
<h4>Rise of Early Christianity</h4>
<p class="fst">The rise of early Christianity took place in historical connection with the decline of Republican Rome. Ancient Rome was in unending chaos and it was only during the first century AD that the Augustan era opened up a new period of stabilization under the Caesars. The decline of the public authority broke the traditional hold upon the mind of the masses. Paul might write as he pleased. The masses for their part believed that the end of the world was at hand. They confidently expected the second coming of Christ. That was their slogan for the building of a new society. Few things are more historically dramatic, moving and significant, than this outcome of the recognition of human personality on a mass scale. But even along with that expectation of Christ’s coming the early Church tried “to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to succor the diseased, to rescue the fallen, to visit the prisoners, to for-give the erring, to teach the ignorant ...” This tremendous mass movement itself attempted to form a new society on earth. It failed as it was bound to fail, but its greatness lay in the fact that it unequivocally established that all human beings were equal in the sight of God at least. In classical society the slave was a thing. The mere presentation of the doctrine of Christianity was revolutionary. It revitalized ancient thought. Good. But let us not forget what these early Christians actually tried to do. The revitalization of the human mind was the second best and the result of the attempt to revitalize the human body.</p>
<p>When the Roman Empire which had unified European civilization finally disintegrated into the isolated manorial units, Christianity, i.e., the Church, succeeded to the power of the Emperors. (To confine the argument to the West) the Church it was which <em>organized production</em> in monastic centers. Priests and monks owned land and on the large domains <em>took the lead in the organization of agriculture</em>. Possessing such tradition of learning as remained, the Church became the most powerful economic, social, and political force in the early medieval world. The secular feudal lords worked hand in hand with the Church. In time, however, urban civilization revived in a commercial form. Once more, on this basis, a materialist philosophy, rationalism, became a force. But this time the intellectuals and rebel churchmen had a firmer social basis and Christianity had to make concessions. St. Thomas Aquinas achieved a rationalization of theology with philosophy. Catholicism proclaimed anew the unity of European civilization. But whereas the Roman Empire had unified Europe but had divided the world into civilized and barbarians, the medieval Church admitted the equality of all nations. Whereas the Roman unity had been based on slavery, the medieval serf had not only a religious but a legal personality. He could have a wife and family and own movables. And if he could not gain equality on earth, at least it could be his in heaven and meanwhile God had his representative on earth, the Catholic Church. What had been in Paul’s day the leader of a popular mass movement was now the ruler of the civilized world. Today, as for centuries past, the church, having no economic power, can only attach itself to reaction.</p>
<p>Yet Laski with his concern about values and faith, spends page after page discussing, in the twentieth century, the value of Catholicism as a source of new values. “So that when men like Mr. Dawson plead so persuasively for the return of the unity of Christian civilization, especially for its return under the aegis of the Pope, the outsider is, I think, bound to ask upon what basis, especially in the realm of mind and morals, the return is to be effected ...” How delicate a negative! Laski understands nothing of Christianity, neither the early flowering nor the late maturity nor its futility today. The first eruption did not owe its power to “mind and morals.” The Church ,in its most powerful days did not owe its power to “mind and morals.” And before seriously considering the Pope as a world-leader today, “especially in the realm of mind and morals,” Laski should reflect on the historical method of Stalin whose state is to be one source of the new values. It is reported that at one session of the Teheran Conference Roosevelt and Churchill discoursed at length on the role of the Vatican in post-war Europe. Stalin so pointedly refrained from taking part that these two co-thinkers of Laski on the importance of the Pope, asked Stalin what was his opinion. Whereupon Stalin asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The discussion ceased.</p>
<p>Yet as we have stated there is a historical (and logical) connection between Christianity and the modern world. Only the truth is exactly the opposite of what Laski, with his perpetual petty-bourgeois concern over abstract values thinks it is. Modern socialism is the concretization of the desires and demands of Christianity both in its primitive and in its advanced stages. What the masses for centuries had to transfer to heaven is now and increasingly the aim of their daily lives. This must be grasped in its entirety. The early Church did make an effort to create the kingdom of heaven upon earth by helping the poor and the afflicted. The medieval Church preached the equality of nations and the unity of European civilization under one visible ruler, the Catholic Church. So far then medieval thought represented a social ideal infinitely superior to the best classical thought. Still it was only an ideal. Its only hope of embodiment was transferred to a celestial sphere. But the outstanding feature of the contemporary world is that the <em>principles</em> for which Christianity stood in its best days are now regarded as matters of life and death by the average worker. This is no accident at all though we can only state the facts here. European civilization must become a unity? Hundreds of millions of European workers know that this must be achieved or the continent will perish. Equality of nations? That, too, the great masses of Europe passionately desire, not as an ideal but to be able to live in peace. A central government to represent the interests of all? As late as 1935, Lord Cecil could get eleven million votes in a plebiscite in Britain supporting the idea of a League of Nations. And when workers say a League of Nations and collective security they mean it. And that early attempt to succor the poor, to help the afflicted, to teach the ignorant? The great mass of the workers in European countries conceive of Labor Parties as doing just that, within the conditions of the modern world.</p>
<p>The whole history of civilization since Christianity consists in the concretization of the values proclaimed so abstractly (and in time deceitfully) by Christianity. Once the human personality had arrived at the stage of theoretical equality, the further progress of civilization is to be judged by the degree to which this equality is realized. Furthermore, every step toward greater equality has meant a deepening of the very concept of human personality. Commercial capitalism brought the Renaissance and the Humanists. The birth of industrial capitalism brought the Reformation with its principle of individual responsibility. The growing maturity of industrial capitalism brought the concept of political freedom – the Rights of Man. <em>But with the deepening profundity of thought developed the spontaneous claims of the masses of the people.</em> After the French Revolution European society produced the highest peaks of bourgeois thinking. Ricardo, Hegel, Shelley, Beethoven, Saint-Simon, Goethe, these men and their generation laid the theoretical foundations of modern society. But two decades afterward the workers in the streets of Paris demanded for the first time “the social republic.” We do not idealize the workers. Engels says quite bluntly that what this social republic was to be they did not know. But the very bourgeois society which had produced its most gifted body of thinkers and artists had also given birth to a proletariat which instinctively demanded the application to itself of every value which the philosophers and the various classes they represented had demanded through the ages.</p>
<p>He who would exhibit the Marxist method must grasp the full significance of that early uprising of the masses when Christianity proclaimed its message. We must watch not only the primitiveness and simplicity of its aims but their comprehensive scope. Then, by slow degrees, through the centuries, we see one part of the aim becoming concrete for one section of the population, and then another part for another section. Ideas arise from concrete conditions to become partially embodied in social classes and give rise to further interrelations between the spiral of real and ideal, content and form. This is the dialectic to which Marx gave a firm materialist basis in the developing processes of production. As society develops, the possibilities for the individual development of man be-come greater and greater, but the conflict of classes becomes sharper and sharper. We stand today at an extreme stage of these interrelated phenomena of social development. When a modern worker demands the right of free speech, the right of free press, of free assembly, continuous employment, social insurance, the best medical attention, the best education, he demands in reality the “social republic.” Spinoza and Kant would stand aghast at what the average worker takes for granted today. But he does not demand them as an individual or in the primitive manner the early Christian did. In America, for instance, there are some thirteen million workers organized for nothing else but the preservation and extension of these values. These are the values of modern civilization. They are embodied in the very web and texture of the lives of the masses of the people. Never were such precious values so resolutely held as necessary to complete living by so substantial and so powerful a section of society. Socialism means simply the complete expansion and fulfillment of these values in the life of the individual. This can only be attained by the most merciless struggle of the whole class against its capitalist masters. The realization of this necessity is the final prelude to full self-consciousness. This is the basis of all values in contemporary society. All talk of values which does not see this is not only pernicious. It is dangerous. No man who understood this could jump across the centuries and seek a historical parallel for a modern faith in Amos and Paul. The abstract faith of those days is the concrete truth of today choked and stifled by capitalism. And no man who understood modern values would have to go looking anywhere for them. For those with eyes to see they are as big as mountains. Least of all would he go looking and finding them in Stalinist Russia, where the ruling class is the mortal enemy of the working class. <em>If this is not so, why then the totalitarian state in Russia?</em> To see Laski wriggling in and around this dilemma is full of values as a lesson in faith. Tennyson, who looked into the future as far as human eye could see and saw the parliament of man, the federation of the world, would be in difficulties to recognize Stalinist totalitarianism as its first installment. But Laski’s “faith” he knew and described perfectly in the famous line “And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”</p>
<p>It is time to place before these intellectuals, perpetually babbling about values, some of the elementary facts of modern life. Name any value you like. Artistic integrity? But it cannot exist in the totalitarian state. So powerful is the working class in a modern society, so widespread and rapid the means of transport and communication that once the working class is chained the totalitarian rulers dare not allow any innovation in any field. All effort must serve their domination or is <em>ipso facto</em> dangerous. The artist cannot live in an ivory tower in the totalitarian state. He cannot abstain. He must emerge from the ranks and shout his <em>Heil</em> or write his <em>Ode to Stalin</em> in manner more significant than the rest in accordance with his greater gifts.</p>
<p>The long overdue emancipation of women? But the totalitarian state passes the most reactionary laws and deprives woman of the gains she has made during over half a century. Witness the laws in Stalinist Russia. The personal relation-ships of society? Where there is not free speech in public there cannot be free speech in private. There is no need to continue with the list. The values of democracy as defended by the working class are the values on which rest all other values, social, personal, artistic, critical, what you will. That is the culmination of the social development of two thousand years of civilization. If the liberties of the working class are destroyed, the whole heritage of civilization goes with them.</p>
<p>In America, Richard Wright and Martha Graham, Eugene O’Neill and John Dewey, James Farrell and Frank Capra, Wendell Willkie and Henry A. Wallace carry on their various activities by grace of the AFL and the CIO. Some of our politicos, literati, artists and others may not know this. The workers may not be aware of it either. It is true nevertheless, the great truth of our time. Furthermore, only the working class is organically a defender of democratic values. The middle class, or certain sections of it, under the whip of the social crisis, may throw over democracy and seek salvation from some fantastic doctrine. The farmers may follow their example. But organized labor occupies such a place in the social structure of an advanced community that <em>the greater the crisis, the more it must in its own self-defense defend its democratic rights</em>; and by so doing preserve all that is still valuable in the heritage of Western civilization. Where these are at stake, as they are today, isn’t it a crime to perpetuate this would-be philosophical prattle about values?<br>
</p>
<h4>Laski, the Blind</h4>
<p class="fst">We can now draw the historical argument to a Laski complains that, although we are on the eve great changes in society, the period between 1914 and 1939 saw no great theoretical works heralding the new age, as had appeared in previous periods of social preparation. What blindness is this? It is of the same type which misses so completely the significance of the social revolution attempted by early Christianity and attributes a ridiculous significance to Amos and Isaiah. First of all, what has Laski himself been living on theoretically all these years but on parts of Lenin’s <strong>Imperialism</strong>, to mention only one book. But secondly, he does not see that never before in history has social revolution been so openly and assiduously prepared for. He looks for books and does not see the Communist International in the days before Stalin began its emasculation. He looks for theories on law and government and does not see the unparalleled value for future society of the foundation of the <em>Soviet</em> state by Lenin and Trotsky and its achievements, successes and failures until Stalin finally destroyed it by the constitution of 1936. The state resting on the Soviets, the councils of the workers organized in the production process – this is what is new. How able is this professor who has not a word of analysis new state form and the mountains of controversy it still but complains that there are no books. Is greater proof needed of the bankruptcy of his historical method, alike in dealing with early Christianity, in discussing Papal leadership of modern society without a thought of the role of the Papacy in modern production, and now in bewailing the lack of great books during the last twenty-five years and using that as proof that the new society was not being prepared?</p>
<p>We denounce Laski’s impudence in calling his vacuous theories an exhibition of the Marxist method. We say that a Marxist in discussing Christianity and the modern world should have at least indicated that the ideals of Christianity are embodied in the modern working-class movement.</p>
<p>We say finally that <em>for us, today</em>, the great inspiration of early Christianity is not the faith inspired by Amos, Isaiah and Paul. It is exactly the opposite. It is the fact that the masses, as soon as they felt themselves men, began straightaway to build the “social republic,” or at least to expect it, and in our epoch we see their successors, organized labor, making mighty effort after mighty effort to destroy the hated old society and substitute the socialist order. What connection has Stalin’s totalitarian state with all this except as its open enemy? “It is not yet clear that the kind of world envisaged after victory by Mr. Churchill is the kind of world likely to appeal to Marshal Stalin. Such evidence as we have suggests that it is at least possible that they think on different lines.” O delicate phrasemaker! You cannot even convincingly deceive yourself.<br>
</p>
<h4>An Apologist for Stalinism</h4>
<p class="fst">This is the fundamental political crime of Laski’s book. He attempts to gild the totalitarian character of the Stalinist state. He says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If the Communist Party of the Soviet Union left the central principle of its faith to the chance decision of an electorate still in the phase where the denial of the socialist idea is the rule rather than the exception, that would be as remarkable as a willingness on the part of the Western democracies to see without repining the access of socialist parties to the state-power.”</p>
<p class="fst">A generation after 1917 this is what Laski has the nerve to say of the electorate of Russia. He talks glibly of communism and the soviet idea. But that communism and the soviet idea represent a stage of democracy for beyond bourgeois democracy, to that he is totally impervious. He tells us that “the soviet citizen enjoys what may perhaps be termed a democracy of the secondary order, the import of which we must not minimize.” A democracy of a secondary order! Is this one of the new values? And what, pray, is a democracy of the secondary order? “He [the Soviet citizen] may not criticize Stalin ...” In other words, he may not criticize the economic, social or political policy of the state. Nay, more. When Stalin’s sense of values decrees that Shostakovich’s music is “modernistic” and needs to have “tunes,” he cannot criticize that too. And when Molotov says that fascism is a question of taste, in as much as Molotov speaks for Stalin, the Soviet citizen cannot criticize that either. What is worse, he must immediately, at all meetings, public and private, heartily proclaim that fascism is a matter of taste. In return for this stultification, the Soviet citizen “can criticize his foreman or his manager; he can protest against the inefficiency of this factory or that farm or even department of state.”</p>
<p>This is the democracy for which Laski so diligently seeks inspiration in early Christianity. Rickenbacker, a notorious reactionary, found Stalin’s conception of the place of workers s in Stalinist society very satisfactory. And Eric Johnston, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, told the Russian leaders that when he, as an American capitalist, looked at their guaranteed profit he felt “like a hero.” The values that they found are more serious than Laski’s. That the standard of living of the Russian masses is lower than it was before 1914 has no meaning for Laski.</p>
<p>What is worse is that Laski has the imprudence to use the term elite to describe the ruling class in his new society. This is no accident. It follows automatically his attitude to the crimes committed by the Russian elite against the Russian people – “immense blunders and fantastic cruelties,” to use his own words. He brazenly says: “I accept the ugliness of all these things and I do not even attempt to excuse them.” And then this seeker after new values, having found them in this elite state, gives us a demonstration of the intellectual values with which he seeks new social values.” Few Roman Catholics would today defend the barbarities of the Inquisition; but they would deny that these barbarities disprove the validity of the Roman claim.” If the Catholics can do it, why can’t we? Once you abandon the democratic rights of the working class in contemporary society, all is lost, even logic and good sense.</p>
<p>Laski has two main points. He says that the structure of Soviet economy allows the unlimited extension of consumer demand. That, we shall have to see. Secondly, he leans heavily on the Russian military victories which have without doubt been the outstanding military feature of the war. He forgets that modern Russia is the product of a revolution which wiped out the social sores of centuries and created a modern <em>people</em> in a modern <em>state</em>. No one in his senses denies that. And this modern state the workers and peasants decided to defend despite the crimes of the elite. What they really think of the elite we shall all have the opportunity of seeing in the coming period. We venture the opinion, however, that they will not think what Laski thinks.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Value-Seekers</h4>
<p class="fst">Laski’s book is characteristic of an increasing intellectual disintegration among intellectuals of all types. He may say, as he does in this one, that the intellectuals must take their stand with the masses. Any intellectual with Laski’s ideas who takes his stand with the masses can only help to corrupt them. Daniel Bell in the May issue of <strong>Politics</strong> attacks Laski, but these two are of the same brand. Laski, running away from Churchill and proletarian power, embraces the Stalinist “ethos” and bathes himself in the faith it gives. Bell detests the doctrine but agrees that it is religion. “The dividing line which modern society strove to maintain between religious and social facts has disappeared in Russia ... That is what gives it the unity and cohesion.” From both of these the Marxists have to separate themselves with an unrelenting hostility. The Russian proletariat of today is the product of the development of European civilization. Nothing on earth can prevent its struggle for proletarian democracy. Bell confounds a modern proletariat with the masses of antiquity. It is Laski turned inside out.</p>
<p>It will be instructive to end with a glance at some of the most outstanding of those who, in recent years, whatever their differences, and we do not deny or minimize these differences, have one thing in common, rejection of the international socialist revolution as analyzed by Lenin. Ortega y Grasset [<em>sic</em>], a Spanish intellectual, wrote a book some years ago called <strong>The Revolt of the Masses</strong>. Values concerned him. He was not looking for new ones. He wished to defend the old ones against the workers. They are now in the safe keeping of Franco. Julien Benda created a furore with his <strong>The Treason of the Intellectuals</strong>. They, these unfortunates, were not sufficiently concerned with spiritual values. Presumably these are now safe with Petain and Laval. After a long lifetime spent in defending the sacred values of liberalism, Croce sought to put them into practice in the cabinet of Badoglio. Santayana, who wrote exquisitely on values for many years, now declares his sympathy for the values established and preserved as long as possible by Mussolini. Laski seeks and finds his spiritual home in Stalin’s “democracy of a secondary type.”</p>
<p>Sidney Hook, another expert shuffler of the value-cards, now concerns himself with the “hero” in history. Burnham goes back for inspiration to Machiavelli. At least he drew the line at Amos and Isaiah. And so they gyrate.</p>
<p>We, on the contrary, stand on the Leninist ground that the present epoch is an epoch of imperialist war and proletarian revolution. We, under all circumstances, place foremost the defense of the working class as the defense of modern civilization. Our task is to help in making the workers aware by precept and organization of their great task of emancipation in a society which increasingly shoves the whole of humanity down the road to barbarism. Those are the values by which we live and we are the merciless enemy of those who, under whatever banner, seek to inject other values into the working-class movement.</p>
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<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="endnote"><a id="a1" name="a1" href="#f1">1.</a> A.D. Winspear, <strong>Science and Society</strong>, Vol. IV, No. 4, page 458.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Laski, St. Paul and Stalin
A Prophet in Search of New Values
(June 1944)
From New International, Vol. X No. 6, June 1944, pp. 182–186.
Transcribed & marked up by Damon Maxwell.
The title of Laski’s new book, Faith, Reason and Civilization, is very accurate. He seeks by reason (“historical analysis”) to give civilization (capitalism in decline) a new faith (Stalinism).
Yet this book is strange and new. Laski, ardent supporter of the imperialist war, begins by a strong tribute to the heroic deeds of European youth in the war against Hitler. But as he sees victory approaching he fears that all his sacrifice and effort may have been in vain. Laski says that as he has so often said before, that capitalism must be superseded. But Churchill the great hero of Britain in the war, is a hopeless reactionary who admired Mussolini as long as Mussolini did not attack Britain. Everywhere the outlook for the capitalist democracies is, on the whole, gloomy. We need a new faith, new values. Then the reader, with no more preparation, is hurled 2,000 years back into the world of early Christianity.
“Political convulsion seems to combine with intellectual decay to wreck the foundations of the Roman civilization. But the great writers of the Bible, “Amos or the Second Isaiah ... Saint Paul,” by “the magic of their alchemy could not only promise regeneration to an Empire in decline; by the age of Constantine they had come to dominate the whole outlook of the Western world.” It is the magic of Laski’s alchemy which makes Amos and Isaiah promise regeneration to the Roman Empire. Though it is true that if they and Paul had promised any such thing they could have promised it only by magic. Let us, however, follow what Laski actually tries to do. He has by now reached Chapter IV, significantly entitled “Ideas as Acts.” The argument is now in full blast. We cannot quote indefinitely. Page 27 should be read and re-read. Briefly, “The victory of Christianity over paganism meant a revitalization of the human mind.” And Laski immediately poses the question: “I do not think anyone can examine with care our contemporary situation without being constantly reminded that we again require some faith that will revitalize the human mind. Almost as clearly as in the declining days of the Roman Empire, our scheme of values seems to have broken down.”
It is impossible to make head or tail of this historically. The Roman Empire really began to decline some two centuries at the very least after Amos, Isaiah and Paul. After Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion, the Roman Empire tell into greater difficulties than ever. Laski, however, goes on to give us two chapters, one on the recovery, and the other on the substance of faith. Faith. Faith. Values. Values. He then proceeds to discuss The Soviet Idea and Its Perspectives and The Soviet Idea and Victory. By now we are at Page 63. Then follows the longest chapter in the book, 57 pages on The Source of New Values. This is what really concerns Laski. His next chapter, on Epicurus and Lucretius, is proof of his interests in this book. It is only then that he takes up the modern theme, Bolshevism and Capitalism, and moves rapidly to a conclusion. Laski does not deign to argue about Stalinist Russia. He takes its desirability for granted. Like the Dean of Canterbury but with less excuse he falls back always on “Verily, verily, I say unto you ...”, “No one can help feeling ...”, “No one can deny ...”, and so on, whenever he wishes to make a point about Russia in particular. As the scheme of his book shows, he is concerned primarily with early Christianity and the search for values. We have written before and will write again of the “labor faker” politics of Laski. What we propose to do here is to deal with him on the ground he has chosen. He claims to be exhibiting “in a general way the Marxist approach to the issues with which [he] deals. The only way to expose satisfactorily this claim is to show what we consider the Marxist way of dealing with these issues. Thus we shall expose the falseness of his historical method which is in direct co-relation with the falseness of his political conclusions and is either the cause or the effect of them.
The Intellectuals in Antiquity
It is today common knowledge that the state cult of religion in the classical world was aimed deliberately at keeping the masses in subjection. In two important periods, in Greece during the time of Epicurus and in the Rome of Lucretius, a philosophical movement fiercely attacked the official state mysticism. On each occasion the movement gained wide support among intellectuals, though the extent to which it gained really popular support is disputed. It is characteristic of Laski’s historical analysis that he reports the desertion of the movement by the intellectuals because they feared the revolt of the masses, then immediately loses himself in moral denunciations of them for doing so. Their desertion, according to him, resulted in the victory of “superstition,” which dominated society and defeated “reason.”
This, it is presumed, is Marxism. In reality this is no more than petty-bourgeois radicalism. On a question so crucial to his whole argument, Laski does not have a single word to say n about the social relations as they developed at the given stage of the process of production. This is his fundamental error and the error of most of his kind. The intellectuals who attacked the state-religions of Greece and Rome were not intellectuals in general whose supineness we must note and beware of. They were the fruit of a rising “bourgeoisie,” and as such were the protagonists of a materialist philosophy directed against the mysticism of a land-owning aristocracy. One suggestive investigator [1] claims that this “bourgeoisie” was an investing “bourgeoisie.” In a commercial society, the relation between debtor and creditor, producer and consumer, becomes an abstract relation. The investor therefore sees himself as an isolated individual, in opposition to the land-owner of the Gens who sees himself as part of an organic society. As carefully as he calculates his investments he calculates his pleasures, hence the hedonism of the Epicureans. In physics he sees nature as a collection of atoms united together in an ordered universe, etc. But this incipient capitalism which at various periods in the classical world was able to challenge landed property never became economically strong enough to supersede it. Marx states that the history of Rome was the history of landed property. No less and no more. No rival class emerged. The final breakdown of that economic order threw the whole society into chaos. Intellectuals, faithful or unfaithful, could not have saved it.
Yet Laski writes sentence after sentence like this, “The Rome that Sallust depicts for us had already begun to lose that inner integrity ...” Inner integrity indeed! Maybe that inner integrity was saved by the magic alchemy of Amos and Isaiah. But lost in the pursuit and recovery of inner integrity and faith and values, Laski shows little conception of Christianity in its relation to social forces. Hear him again, “In the result it [Christianity] had relatively little influence on the realm of social constitution because ...” Because what? Because “as it was shaped by Paul and his successors it emphasized this life only as the vestibule to eternity, and put the chief importance of its dreams on the next world rather than upon this.” Why did they do this? And if they did this, why did Christianity become ultimately such a powerful force? There is no serious treatment of this in these pages, devoted as we have seen to drawing historical inspiration and contemporary enlightenment from the study of this period. We must develop this subject ourselves briefly. The values of Christianity are as intimately related to the values of the modern world as embryo is to mature man. The true historical connection will lead us straight to the heart of the modern problem and the fallacy of Stalinism as a source of values for a decaying society.
Rise of Early Christianity
The rise of early Christianity took place in historical connection with the decline of Republican Rome. Ancient Rome was in unending chaos and it was only during the first century AD that the Augustan era opened up a new period of stabilization under the Caesars. The decline of the public authority broke the traditional hold upon the mind of the masses. Paul might write as he pleased. The masses for their part believed that the end of the world was at hand. They confidently expected the second coming of Christ. That was their slogan for the building of a new society. Few things are more historically dramatic, moving and significant, than this outcome of the recognition of human personality on a mass scale. But even along with that expectation of Christ’s coming the early Church tried “to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to succor the diseased, to rescue the fallen, to visit the prisoners, to for-give the erring, to teach the ignorant ...” This tremendous mass movement itself attempted to form a new society on earth. It failed as it was bound to fail, but its greatness lay in the fact that it unequivocally established that all human beings were equal in the sight of God at least. In classical society the slave was a thing. The mere presentation of the doctrine of Christianity was revolutionary. It revitalized ancient thought. Good. But let us not forget what these early Christians actually tried to do. The revitalization of the human mind was the second best and the result of the attempt to revitalize the human body.
When the Roman Empire which had unified European civilization finally disintegrated into the isolated manorial units, Christianity, i.e., the Church, succeeded to the power of the Emperors. (To confine the argument to the West) the Church it was which organized production in monastic centers. Priests and monks owned land and on the large domains took the lead in the organization of agriculture. Possessing such tradition of learning as remained, the Church became the most powerful economic, social, and political force in the early medieval world. The secular feudal lords worked hand in hand with the Church. In time, however, urban civilization revived in a commercial form. Once more, on this basis, a materialist philosophy, rationalism, became a force. But this time the intellectuals and rebel churchmen had a firmer social basis and Christianity had to make concessions. St. Thomas Aquinas achieved a rationalization of theology with philosophy. Catholicism proclaimed anew the unity of European civilization. But whereas the Roman Empire had unified Europe but had divided the world into civilized and barbarians, the medieval Church admitted the equality of all nations. Whereas the Roman unity had been based on slavery, the medieval serf had not only a religious but a legal personality. He could have a wife and family and own movables. And if he could not gain equality on earth, at least it could be his in heaven and meanwhile God had his representative on earth, the Catholic Church. What had been in Paul’s day the leader of a popular mass movement was now the ruler of the civilized world. Today, as for centuries past, the church, having no economic power, can only attach itself to reaction.
Yet Laski with his concern about values and faith, spends page after page discussing, in the twentieth century, the value of Catholicism as a source of new values. “So that when men like Mr. Dawson plead so persuasively for the return of the unity of Christian civilization, especially for its return under the aegis of the Pope, the outsider is, I think, bound to ask upon what basis, especially in the realm of mind and morals, the return is to be effected ...” How delicate a negative! Laski understands nothing of Christianity, neither the early flowering nor the late maturity nor its futility today. The first eruption did not owe its power to “mind and morals.” The Church ,in its most powerful days did not owe its power to “mind and morals.” And before seriously considering the Pope as a world-leader today, “especially in the realm of mind and morals,” Laski should reflect on the historical method of Stalin whose state is to be one source of the new values. It is reported that at one session of the Teheran Conference Roosevelt and Churchill discoursed at length on the role of the Vatican in post-war Europe. Stalin so pointedly refrained from taking part that these two co-thinkers of Laski on the importance of the Pope, asked Stalin what was his opinion. Whereupon Stalin asked, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The discussion ceased.
Yet as we have stated there is a historical (and logical) connection between Christianity and the modern world. Only the truth is exactly the opposite of what Laski, with his perpetual petty-bourgeois concern over abstract values thinks it is. Modern socialism is the concretization of the desires and demands of Christianity both in its primitive and in its advanced stages. What the masses for centuries had to transfer to heaven is now and increasingly the aim of their daily lives. This must be grasped in its entirety. The early Church did make an effort to create the kingdom of heaven upon earth by helping the poor and the afflicted. The medieval Church preached the equality of nations and the unity of European civilization under one visible ruler, the Catholic Church. So far then medieval thought represented a social ideal infinitely superior to the best classical thought. Still it was only an ideal. Its only hope of embodiment was transferred to a celestial sphere. But the outstanding feature of the contemporary world is that the principles for which Christianity stood in its best days are now regarded as matters of life and death by the average worker. This is no accident at all though we can only state the facts here. European civilization must become a unity? Hundreds of millions of European workers know that this must be achieved or the continent will perish. Equality of nations? That, too, the great masses of Europe passionately desire, not as an ideal but to be able to live in peace. A central government to represent the interests of all? As late as 1935, Lord Cecil could get eleven million votes in a plebiscite in Britain supporting the idea of a League of Nations. And when workers say a League of Nations and collective security they mean it. And that early attempt to succor the poor, to help the afflicted, to teach the ignorant? The great mass of the workers in European countries conceive of Labor Parties as doing just that, within the conditions of the modern world.
The whole history of civilization since Christianity consists in the concretization of the values proclaimed so abstractly (and in time deceitfully) by Christianity. Once the human personality had arrived at the stage of theoretical equality, the further progress of civilization is to be judged by the degree to which this equality is realized. Furthermore, every step toward greater equality has meant a deepening of the very concept of human personality. Commercial capitalism brought the Renaissance and the Humanists. The birth of industrial capitalism brought the Reformation with its principle of individual responsibility. The growing maturity of industrial capitalism brought the concept of political freedom – the Rights of Man. But with the deepening profundity of thought developed the spontaneous claims of the masses of the people. After the French Revolution European society produced the highest peaks of bourgeois thinking. Ricardo, Hegel, Shelley, Beethoven, Saint-Simon, Goethe, these men and their generation laid the theoretical foundations of modern society. But two decades afterward the workers in the streets of Paris demanded for the first time “the social republic.” We do not idealize the workers. Engels says quite bluntly that what this social republic was to be they did not know. But the very bourgeois society which had produced its most gifted body of thinkers and artists had also given birth to a proletariat which instinctively demanded the application to itself of every value which the philosophers and the various classes they represented had demanded through the ages.
He who would exhibit the Marxist method must grasp the full significance of that early uprising of the masses when Christianity proclaimed its message. We must watch not only the primitiveness and simplicity of its aims but their comprehensive scope. Then, by slow degrees, through the centuries, we see one part of the aim becoming concrete for one section of the population, and then another part for another section. Ideas arise from concrete conditions to become partially embodied in social classes and give rise to further interrelations between the spiral of real and ideal, content and form. This is the dialectic to which Marx gave a firm materialist basis in the developing processes of production. As society develops, the possibilities for the individual development of man be-come greater and greater, but the conflict of classes becomes sharper and sharper. We stand today at an extreme stage of these interrelated phenomena of social development. When a modern worker demands the right of free speech, the right of free press, of free assembly, continuous employment, social insurance, the best medical attention, the best education, he demands in reality the “social republic.” Spinoza and Kant would stand aghast at what the average worker takes for granted today. But he does not demand them as an individual or in the primitive manner the early Christian did. In America, for instance, there are some thirteen million workers organized for nothing else but the preservation and extension of these values. These are the values of modern civilization. They are embodied in the very web and texture of the lives of the masses of the people. Never were such precious values so resolutely held as necessary to complete living by so substantial and so powerful a section of society. Socialism means simply the complete expansion and fulfillment of these values in the life of the individual. This can only be attained by the most merciless struggle of the whole class against its capitalist masters. The realization of this necessity is the final prelude to full self-consciousness. This is the basis of all values in contemporary society. All talk of values which does not see this is not only pernicious. It is dangerous. No man who understood this could jump across the centuries and seek a historical parallel for a modern faith in Amos and Paul. The abstract faith of those days is the concrete truth of today choked and stifled by capitalism. And no man who understood modern values would have to go looking anywhere for them. For those with eyes to see they are as big as mountains. Least of all would he go looking and finding them in Stalinist Russia, where the ruling class is the mortal enemy of the working class. If this is not so, why then the totalitarian state in Russia? To see Laski wriggling in and around this dilemma is full of values as a lesson in faith. Tennyson, who looked into the future as far as human eye could see and saw the parliament of man, the federation of the world, would be in difficulties to recognize Stalinist totalitarianism as its first installment. But Laski’s “faith” he knew and described perfectly in the famous line “And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
It is time to place before these intellectuals, perpetually babbling about values, some of the elementary facts of modern life. Name any value you like. Artistic integrity? But it cannot exist in the totalitarian state. So powerful is the working class in a modern society, so widespread and rapid the means of transport and communication that once the working class is chained the totalitarian rulers dare not allow any innovation in any field. All effort must serve their domination or is ipso facto dangerous. The artist cannot live in an ivory tower in the totalitarian state. He cannot abstain. He must emerge from the ranks and shout his Heil or write his Ode to Stalin in manner more significant than the rest in accordance with his greater gifts.
The long overdue emancipation of women? But the totalitarian state passes the most reactionary laws and deprives woman of the gains she has made during over half a century. Witness the laws in Stalinist Russia. The personal relation-ships of society? Where there is not free speech in public there cannot be free speech in private. There is no need to continue with the list. The values of democracy as defended by the working class are the values on which rest all other values, social, personal, artistic, critical, what you will. That is the culmination of the social development of two thousand years of civilization. If the liberties of the working class are destroyed, the whole heritage of civilization goes with them.
In America, Richard Wright and Martha Graham, Eugene O’Neill and John Dewey, James Farrell and Frank Capra, Wendell Willkie and Henry A. Wallace carry on their various activities by grace of the AFL and the CIO. Some of our politicos, literati, artists and others may not know this. The workers may not be aware of it either. It is true nevertheless, the great truth of our time. Furthermore, only the working class is organically a defender of democratic values. The middle class, or certain sections of it, under the whip of the social crisis, may throw over democracy and seek salvation from some fantastic doctrine. The farmers may follow their example. But organized labor occupies such a place in the social structure of an advanced community that the greater the crisis, the more it must in its own self-defense defend its democratic rights; and by so doing preserve all that is still valuable in the heritage of Western civilization. Where these are at stake, as they are today, isn’t it a crime to perpetuate this would-be philosophical prattle about values?
Laski, the Blind
We can now draw the historical argument to a Laski complains that, although we are on the eve great changes in society, the period between 1914 and 1939 saw no great theoretical works heralding the new age, as had appeared in previous periods of social preparation. What blindness is this? It is of the same type which misses so completely the significance of the social revolution attempted by early Christianity and attributes a ridiculous significance to Amos and Isaiah. First of all, what has Laski himself been living on theoretically all these years but on parts of Lenin’s Imperialism, to mention only one book. But secondly, he does not see that never before in history has social revolution been so openly and assiduously prepared for. He looks for books and does not see the Communist International in the days before Stalin began its emasculation. He looks for theories on law and government and does not see the unparalleled value for future society of the foundation of the Soviet state by Lenin and Trotsky and its achievements, successes and failures until Stalin finally destroyed it by the constitution of 1936. The state resting on the Soviets, the councils of the workers organized in the production process – this is what is new. How able is this professor who has not a word of analysis new state form and the mountains of controversy it still but complains that there are no books. Is greater proof needed of the bankruptcy of his historical method, alike in dealing with early Christianity, in discussing Papal leadership of modern society without a thought of the role of the Papacy in modern production, and now in bewailing the lack of great books during the last twenty-five years and using that as proof that the new society was not being prepared?
We denounce Laski’s impudence in calling his vacuous theories an exhibition of the Marxist method. We say that a Marxist in discussing Christianity and the modern world should have at least indicated that the ideals of Christianity are embodied in the modern working-class movement.
We say finally that for us, today, the great inspiration of early Christianity is not the faith inspired by Amos, Isaiah and Paul. It is exactly the opposite. It is the fact that the masses, as soon as they felt themselves men, began straightaway to build the “social republic,” or at least to expect it, and in our epoch we see their successors, organized labor, making mighty effort after mighty effort to destroy the hated old society and substitute the socialist order. What connection has Stalin’s totalitarian state with all this except as its open enemy? “It is not yet clear that the kind of world envisaged after victory by Mr. Churchill is the kind of world likely to appeal to Marshal Stalin. Such evidence as we have suggests that it is at least possible that they think on different lines.” O delicate phrasemaker! You cannot even convincingly deceive yourself.
An Apologist for Stalinism
This is the fundamental political crime of Laski’s book. He attempts to gild the totalitarian character of the Stalinist state. He says:
“If the Communist Party of the Soviet Union left the central principle of its faith to the chance decision of an electorate still in the phase where the denial of the socialist idea is the rule rather than the exception, that would be as remarkable as a willingness on the part of the Western democracies to see without repining the access of socialist parties to the state-power.”
A generation after 1917 this is what Laski has the nerve to say of the electorate of Russia. He talks glibly of communism and the soviet idea. But that communism and the soviet idea represent a stage of democracy for beyond bourgeois democracy, to that he is totally impervious. He tells us that “the soviet citizen enjoys what may perhaps be termed a democracy of the secondary order, the import of which we must not minimize.” A democracy of a secondary order! Is this one of the new values? And what, pray, is a democracy of the secondary order? “He [the Soviet citizen] may not criticize Stalin ...” In other words, he may not criticize the economic, social or political policy of the state. Nay, more. When Stalin’s sense of values decrees that Shostakovich’s music is “modernistic” and needs to have “tunes,” he cannot criticize that too. And when Molotov says that fascism is a question of taste, in as much as Molotov speaks for Stalin, the Soviet citizen cannot criticize that either. What is worse, he must immediately, at all meetings, public and private, heartily proclaim that fascism is a matter of taste. In return for this stultification, the Soviet citizen “can criticize his foreman or his manager; he can protest against the inefficiency of this factory or that farm or even department of state.”
This is the democracy for which Laski so diligently seeks inspiration in early Christianity. Rickenbacker, a notorious reactionary, found Stalin’s conception of the place of workers s in Stalinist society very satisfactory. And Eric Johnston, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, told the Russian leaders that when he, as an American capitalist, looked at their guaranteed profit he felt “like a hero.” The values that they found are more serious than Laski’s. That the standard of living of the Russian masses is lower than it was before 1914 has no meaning for Laski.
What is worse is that Laski has the imprudence to use the term elite to describe the ruling class in his new society. This is no accident. It follows automatically his attitude to the crimes committed by the Russian elite against the Russian people – “immense blunders and fantastic cruelties,” to use his own words. He brazenly says: “I accept the ugliness of all these things and I do not even attempt to excuse them.” And then this seeker after new values, having found them in this elite state, gives us a demonstration of the intellectual values with which he seeks new social values.” Few Roman Catholics would today defend the barbarities of the Inquisition; but they would deny that these barbarities disprove the validity of the Roman claim.” If the Catholics can do it, why can’t we? Once you abandon the democratic rights of the working class in contemporary society, all is lost, even logic and good sense.
Laski has two main points. He says that the structure of Soviet economy allows the unlimited extension of consumer demand. That, we shall have to see. Secondly, he leans heavily on the Russian military victories which have without doubt been the outstanding military feature of the war. He forgets that modern Russia is the product of a revolution which wiped out the social sores of centuries and created a modern people in a modern state. No one in his senses denies that. And this modern state the workers and peasants decided to defend despite the crimes of the elite. What they really think of the elite we shall all have the opportunity of seeing in the coming period. We venture the opinion, however, that they will not think what Laski thinks.
The Value-Seekers
Laski’s book is characteristic of an increasing intellectual disintegration among intellectuals of all types. He may say, as he does in this one, that the intellectuals must take their stand with the masses. Any intellectual with Laski’s ideas who takes his stand with the masses can only help to corrupt them. Daniel Bell in the May issue of Politics attacks Laski, but these two are of the same brand. Laski, running away from Churchill and proletarian power, embraces the Stalinist “ethos” and bathes himself in the faith it gives. Bell detests the doctrine but agrees that it is religion. “The dividing line which modern society strove to maintain between religious and social facts has disappeared in Russia ... That is what gives it the unity and cohesion.” From both of these the Marxists have to separate themselves with an unrelenting hostility. The Russian proletariat of today is the product of the development of European civilization. Nothing on earth can prevent its struggle for proletarian democracy. Bell confounds a modern proletariat with the masses of antiquity. It is Laski turned inside out.
It will be instructive to end with a glance at some of the most outstanding of those who, in recent years, whatever their differences, and we do not deny or minimize these differences, have one thing in common, rejection of the international socialist revolution as analyzed by Lenin. Ortega y Grasset [sic], a Spanish intellectual, wrote a book some years ago called The Revolt of the Masses. Values concerned him. He was not looking for new ones. He wished to defend the old ones against the workers. They are now in the safe keeping of Franco. Julien Benda created a furore with his The Treason of the Intellectuals. They, these unfortunates, were not sufficiently concerned with spiritual values. Presumably these are now safe with Petain and Laval. After a long lifetime spent in defending the sacred values of liberalism, Croce sought to put them into practice in the cabinet of Badoglio. Santayana, who wrote exquisitely on values for many years, now declares his sympathy for the values established and preserved as long as possible by Mussolini. Laski seeks and finds his spiritual home in Stalin’s “democracy of a secondary type.”
Sidney Hook, another expert shuffler of the value-cards, now concerns himself with the “hero” in history. Burnham goes back for inspiration to Machiavelli. At least he drew the line at Amos and Isaiah. And so they gyrate.
We, on the contrary, stand on the Leninist ground that the present epoch is an epoch of imperialist war and proletarian revolution. We, under all circumstances, place foremost the defense of the working class as the defense of modern civilization. Our task is to help in making the workers aware by precept and organization of their great task of emancipation in a society which increasingly shoves the whole of humanity down the road to barbarism. Those are the values by which we live and we are the merciless enemy of those who, under whatever banner, seek to inject other values into the working-class movement.
Footnotes
1. A.D. Winspear, Science and Society, Vol. IV, No. 4, page 458.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Pamphlet Points at Scandal of “Jim-Crow in Uniform”</h1>
<h3>(24 May 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_21" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 21</a>, 24 May 1943, p.–6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><strong>The War’s Greatest Scandal, Jim Crow in Uniform</strong> is the title of a pamphlet (published by the March on Washington Committee, five cents) on Negroes in the United States Army; and Jim Crow, ugly, barbarous and detestable as he is wherever he appears, is more than usually hideous when dressed in the uniform, and carrying out the commands, of American imperialism.</p>
<p><em>Take this: “Alexandria, La., January 11, 1942. – Twenty-eight Negro soldiers shot or clubbed in a race riot provoked by the attempt of a white MP to arrest a Negro soldier. Three thousand Negro soldiers put under arrest by white MPs and city and state policemen. Basic cause of riot: lack of recreational facilities for 16,000 Negro troops stationed in nearby camps: refusal of Army authorities to allow colored MPs.”</em></p>
<p>There you have the main point which this pamphlet makes. We must note not only the persecution and the brutal mistreatment and humiliation of the Negro troops by the reactionary elements of the population, both inside and outside the Army. It is the refusal of the <em>Army authorities themselves</em> to protect their own Negro soldiers, which gives another glaring proof that the war is. not a war against Nazi racialism, but is a war for nothing else but the maintenance of the capitalist system.<br>
</p>
<h4>Government Fosters Jim Crow</h4>
<p class="fst">How could the Army, in this society, in such a war, do otherwise than join in the savage persecution of the Negroes? The Army segregates the Negroes in its ranks and thereby not only breaks the law with impunity, but encourages racial feeling. Winfred Lynn has challenged the evil at its legal root by bringing suit against the Army authorities for inducting him into a Jim Crow regiment. But whatever the legal aspects, of the case, which the pamphlet goes into with brevity and precision, it is too much to expect that this case can act as anything more than a focus of exposure and agitation. For the Navy discriminates against the Negroes as if they have the plague; the Air Corps will not allow them any but the most meager opportunities; the Red Cross segregates their blood, in defiance of all science except the scientists of the Hitler regime.</p>
<p><em>For those hypocritical scoundrels who counsel the Negro to, trust in Roosevelt, the record of this so-called friend of the Negro is briefly but pregnantly summarized. Here is a beautiful quotation: “We are inexpressibly shocked that a President of the United States at a time of national peril should surrender so completely to enemies of Democracy who would destroy national unity by advocation of segregation. Official approval by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of such discrimination and segregation is a stab in the back of democracy.”</em></p>
<p>Who are the perpetrators of this piece of hypocrisy? Walter White of the NAACP, Arnold Hill of the National Urban League. Of course! And the latest addition to these two is A. Philip Randolph, of the March on Washington Committee. As usual they are at their old game, jumping in front whenever the Negro people are deeply stirred by intolerable injustice, running to Roosevelt and, when they are kicked in the pants, protesting to the world how deeply surprised and shocked they are.<br>
</p>
<h4>Jim Crow Continues</h4>
<p class="fst">Yet, despite the repeated kicks and repeated shocks and surprises of Walter White and Philip Randolph, the Jim Crow in the Army continues. The Negro press is filled with examples every week. Why it continues so flagrantly is also to be observed in this pamphlet.</p>
<p><em>The executive secretary of the MOW contributes a foreword: people may think it is unwise to raise these questions now, but it is necessary to struggle. The Negro people WERE READY to struggle! It was their determination that gave rise to the March on Washington Committee, whose aim was in its very title. But Randolph and White called off the march – called it off because they could not break with Roosevelt, called it off because they are all-out in support of the war and still want to oppose and put an end to one of the basic proofs of the American imperialist system. You cannot do both; and thus, when ever they run up against the consequences of their pro-war policy, all that they can do is to bleat: “We are surprised, we are shocked.”</em></p>
<p>Nevertheless, the Jim Crow, as usual, continues. The great arsenal of democracy sends its armies and its arms abroad. But by its very nature it piles up an arsenal of weapons against itself in its incessant attacks against the elementary democratic rights of the people. These weapons need to be collected and put in handy form at the disposal of the masses.</p>
<p><em>This pamphlet, the work of Dwight and Nancy Macdonald, is a good arsenal. In the hands of people who know how to use it, it would be a powerful aid in the struggle for true and honest democracy. But though Randolph’s organization can publish this pamphlet, it cannot use its material to any effect. To achieve any results it must be used to direct the Negro masses straight to the fountainhead – to march to the President himself in Washington.</em></p>
<p>Will Randolph do this? Only when the Negro people themselves stick him in the middle of the marchers and take him along with them, whether he wants to or not. Then, <em>and only then</em>, will Jim Crow begin to tremble.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Pamphlet Points at Scandal of “Jim-Crow in Uniform”
(24 May 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 21, 24 May 1943, p.–6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The War’s Greatest Scandal, Jim Crow in Uniform is the title of a pamphlet (published by the March on Washington Committee, five cents) on Negroes in the United States Army; and Jim Crow, ugly, barbarous and detestable as he is wherever he appears, is more than usually hideous when dressed in the uniform, and carrying out the commands, of American imperialism.
Take this: “Alexandria, La., January 11, 1942. – Twenty-eight Negro soldiers shot or clubbed in a race riot provoked by the attempt of a white MP to arrest a Negro soldier. Three thousand Negro soldiers put under arrest by white MPs and city and state policemen. Basic cause of riot: lack of recreational facilities for 16,000 Negro troops stationed in nearby camps: refusal of Army authorities to allow colored MPs.”
There you have the main point which this pamphlet makes. We must note not only the persecution and the brutal mistreatment and humiliation of the Negro troops by the reactionary elements of the population, both inside and outside the Army. It is the refusal of the Army authorities themselves to protect their own Negro soldiers, which gives another glaring proof that the war is. not a war against Nazi racialism, but is a war for nothing else but the maintenance of the capitalist system.
Government Fosters Jim Crow
How could the Army, in this society, in such a war, do otherwise than join in the savage persecution of the Negroes? The Army segregates the Negroes in its ranks and thereby not only breaks the law with impunity, but encourages racial feeling. Winfred Lynn has challenged the evil at its legal root by bringing suit against the Army authorities for inducting him into a Jim Crow regiment. But whatever the legal aspects, of the case, which the pamphlet goes into with brevity and precision, it is too much to expect that this case can act as anything more than a focus of exposure and agitation. For the Navy discriminates against the Negroes as if they have the plague; the Air Corps will not allow them any but the most meager opportunities; the Red Cross segregates their blood, in defiance of all science except the scientists of the Hitler regime.
For those hypocritical scoundrels who counsel the Negro to, trust in Roosevelt, the record of this so-called friend of the Negro is briefly but pregnantly summarized. Here is a beautiful quotation: “We are inexpressibly shocked that a President of the United States at a time of national peril should surrender so completely to enemies of Democracy who would destroy national unity by advocation of segregation. Official approval by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of such discrimination and segregation is a stab in the back of democracy.”
Who are the perpetrators of this piece of hypocrisy? Walter White of the NAACP, Arnold Hill of the National Urban League. Of course! And the latest addition to these two is A. Philip Randolph, of the March on Washington Committee. As usual they are at their old game, jumping in front whenever the Negro people are deeply stirred by intolerable injustice, running to Roosevelt and, when they are kicked in the pants, protesting to the world how deeply surprised and shocked they are.
Jim Crow Continues
Yet, despite the repeated kicks and repeated shocks and surprises of Walter White and Philip Randolph, the Jim Crow in the Army continues. The Negro press is filled with examples every week. Why it continues so flagrantly is also to be observed in this pamphlet.
The executive secretary of the MOW contributes a foreword: people may think it is unwise to raise these questions now, but it is necessary to struggle. The Negro people WERE READY to struggle! It was their determination that gave rise to the March on Washington Committee, whose aim was in its very title. But Randolph and White called off the march – called it off because they could not break with Roosevelt, called it off because they are all-out in support of the war and still want to oppose and put an end to one of the basic proofs of the American imperialist system. You cannot do both; and thus, when ever they run up against the consequences of their pro-war policy, all that they can do is to bleat: “We are surprised, we are shocked.”
Nevertheless, the Jim Crow, as usual, continues. The great arsenal of democracy sends its armies and its arms abroad. But by its very nature it piles up an arsenal of weapons against itself in its incessant attacks against the elementary democratic rights of the people. These weapons need to be collected and put in handy form at the disposal of the masses.
This pamphlet, the work of Dwight and Nancy Macdonald, is a good arsenal. In the hands of people who know how to use it, it would be a powerful aid in the struggle for true and honest democracy. But though Randolph’s organization can publish this pamphlet, it cannot use its material to any effect. To achieve any results it must be used to direct the Negro masses straight to the fountainhead – to march to the President himself in Washington.
Will Randolph do this? Only when the Negro people themselves stick him in the middle of the marchers and take him along with them, whether he wants to or not. Then, and only then, will Jim Crow begin to tremble.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>Race Prejudice Is Capitalist Product</h1>
<h2>(27 May 1946)</h2>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_21" target="new">Vol. X No. 21</a>, 27 May 1946, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">During the last few weeks this column has laid great emphasis upon the importance for the Negroes and for the nation as a whole of “Operation Dixie.” It is necessary now to draw attention to another aspect of the Negro question, as it affects the national life.</p>
<p>First of all the nation is shaken to its economic vitals by the coal strike. The politicians, the newspaper writers and the columnists concentrate their fire upon John L. Lewis. Yet even these dishonest propagandists know that the strength of John L. Lewis is in the support that he gets from the United Mine Workers. Few people, however, stop to remember that the United Mine Workers contains over a 100,000 Negroes, among its half million members. Everyone speaks of “the miners” and rightly so. Whatever differences and difficulties there may be between white and Negro workers in the UMW, they are of such an insignificant character as not to disrupt, even in public estimation, the rock-like front which the miners present to the mine owners and to the capitalist government. This should be noted by those Negroes in particular, who frequently wonder what the fate of Negroes would be in a socialist society, that is to say, a society run by the workers. Instead of speculating as to whether race prejudice is not permanent among Americans, they should do well to study the industrial record of the United Mine Workers during the last 20 years.<br>
</p>
<h4>At the Steel Convention</h4>
<p class="fst">Two recent conventions of labor unions have brought to the fore the question of the relationship between white and Negro workers in the union movement. I have heard an account of how the question was raised at the recent steel workers convention. The account goes as follows:</p>
<p>Towards the end of the convention a Negro worker raised the question of a third vice-president for the steel workers union who should hot be elected but appointed. He reasoned that inasmuch as Negroes were only 25% of the steel workers he saw little opportunity of a Negro being elected as one of the two vice-presidents. However, inasmuch as Negroes had special problems in the factories and in the union, a Negro vice-president should not be elected, but appointed so that a Negro, familiar with Negro problems, should occupy a leading position in the officialdom of the union.</p>
<p>It will be remembered that a similar problem was faced by the UAW in its convention a few weeks ago.</p>
<p>I do not propose for one minute here to take up either in general or in detail the rights and wrongs of these and similar proposals. I wish instead to draw attention to certain facts which may be lost sight of in discussing these <em>union</em> problems.<br>
</p>
<h4>Class <em>versus</em> Class</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>Labor Action</strong> and the <em>Workers Party</em>, in fact Marxists of all shades, have repeatedly maintained that the solution of the Negro problem in the United States rests with the organized labor movement. The capitalist class abolished slavery in the Civil War. That is true. But it must never be forgotten that the organized labor movement in the North was one of the most powerful supports of Lincoln and the Republican Party. Furthermore, when the Civil War was over, the capitalist class used the Negroes only insofar as it was necessary for capitalism to consolidate itself in the South. As soon as it had done so, it had abandoned the Negroes to the mercy of the old slave owners.</p>
<p>Many Negroes, keenly aware of this, are profoundly sceptical as to the future fate of the Negro minority after a successful proletarian revolution.</p>
<p>First of all, the capitalist <em>class</em> which led the Civil War for the abolition of slavery had nothing in common with the <em>class</em> of Negro slaves once the power of the slave owners was broken. As a matter of fact, once the power of the slave owners was broken, the capitalist class had much more in common with the class of cotton plantation owners than they had with Negro labor. Both of them could unite and had to unite because both were protectors of the dominant property relations in the United States. If space allowed we could show how similar treachery was practiced against the serfs or semi-slaves in every European country whether slavery or serfdom had to be broken by the capitalists.</p>
<p>The class position of the workers puts the white workers into a fundamentally different relation with Negro workers. “Operation Dixie” is a case in point. The capitalist class of 1861–1876 had had no basic solidarity with the Negro slaves and therefore could desert them as soon as the battle was won. Today organized <em>labor</em> moves into the South to organize <em>workers</em>, white and Negro, knowing that it must maintain <em>labor</em> solidarity as a condition for the future development of the <em>labor movement</em> as a whole in the United States. The class solidarity is evident. It is not a question of the racial prejudices of this or that individual worker. It is a question of class interests and class solidarity which molds the minds of the large majority of the workers and in the last analysis is decisive. It is this which explains the tremendous advances the CIO has made in handling the race problem in its own ranks. It is this class solidarity which will more than ever assert itself after a social revolution in the United States.</p>
<p><em>Why? Because the race prejudice that exists is fundamentally a product of capitalism. It is instilled into the working class by capitalist propaganda which by now has become almost instinctive in the capitalist press and in capitalist society as a whole. Not only is labor working out its own proletarian attitude to these questions. When labor breaks the power of capitalism, it will break the fundamental source of race prejudice and what is today a difficult task, its struggle for racial equality, in a socialist society it will be able to accomplish with infinitely greater ease.</em></p>
<p>That Negro workers in the UAW, and in the steel workers union should raise their problem is a healthy sign. The capitalists have created this problem, as they have created so many others for the labor movement. Labor tackles them and deals with them on their merits. But it is a tremendous sign of progress that society as a whole speaks of the miners, of the steel workers, of the UAW and never stops to consider what a large proportion of these are Negroes. Negroes themselves raise problems, not outside the union, but as a regular part of <em>union</em> procedure in the solution of <em>union</em> difficulties. That, properly understood, is a sign not of weakness but of strength.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
Race Prejudice Is Capitalist Product
(27 May 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. X No. 21, 27 May 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
During the last few weeks this column has laid great emphasis upon the importance for the Negroes and for the nation as a whole of “Operation Dixie.” It is necessary now to draw attention to another aspect of the Negro question, as it affects the national life.
First of all the nation is shaken to its economic vitals by the coal strike. The politicians, the newspaper writers and the columnists concentrate their fire upon John L. Lewis. Yet even these dishonest propagandists know that the strength of John L. Lewis is in the support that he gets from the United Mine Workers. Few people, however, stop to remember that the United Mine Workers contains over a 100,000 Negroes, among its half million members. Everyone speaks of “the miners” and rightly so. Whatever differences and difficulties there may be between white and Negro workers in the UMW, they are of such an insignificant character as not to disrupt, even in public estimation, the rock-like front which the miners present to the mine owners and to the capitalist government. This should be noted by those Negroes in particular, who frequently wonder what the fate of Negroes would be in a socialist society, that is to say, a society run by the workers. Instead of speculating as to whether race prejudice is not permanent among Americans, they should do well to study the industrial record of the United Mine Workers during the last 20 years.
At the Steel Convention
Two recent conventions of labor unions have brought to the fore the question of the relationship between white and Negro workers in the union movement. I have heard an account of how the question was raised at the recent steel workers convention. The account goes as follows:
Towards the end of the convention a Negro worker raised the question of a third vice-president for the steel workers union who should hot be elected but appointed. He reasoned that inasmuch as Negroes were only 25% of the steel workers he saw little opportunity of a Negro being elected as one of the two vice-presidents. However, inasmuch as Negroes had special problems in the factories and in the union, a Negro vice-president should not be elected, but appointed so that a Negro, familiar with Negro problems, should occupy a leading position in the officialdom of the union.
It will be remembered that a similar problem was faced by the UAW in its convention a few weeks ago.
I do not propose for one minute here to take up either in general or in detail the rights and wrongs of these and similar proposals. I wish instead to draw attention to certain facts which may be lost sight of in discussing these union problems.
Class versus Class
Labor Action and the Workers Party, in fact Marxists of all shades, have repeatedly maintained that the solution of the Negro problem in the United States rests with the organized labor movement. The capitalist class abolished slavery in the Civil War. That is true. But it must never be forgotten that the organized labor movement in the North was one of the most powerful supports of Lincoln and the Republican Party. Furthermore, when the Civil War was over, the capitalist class used the Negroes only insofar as it was necessary for capitalism to consolidate itself in the South. As soon as it had done so, it had abandoned the Negroes to the mercy of the old slave owners.
Many Negroes, keenly aware of this, are profoundly sceptical as to the future fate of the Negro minority after a successful proletarian revolution.
First of all, the capitalist class which led the Civil War for the abolition of slavery had nothing in common with the class of Negro slaves once the power of the slave owners was broken. As a matter of fact, once the power of the slave owners was broken, the capitalist class had much more in common with the class of cotton plantation owners than they had with Negro labor. Both of them could unite and had to unite because both were protectors of the dominant property relations in the United States. If space allowed we could show how similar treachery was practiced against the serfs or semi-slaves in every European country whether slavery or serfdom had to be broken by the capitalists.
The class position of the workers puts the white workers into a fundamentally different relation with Negro workers. “Operation Dixie” is a case in point. The capitalist class of 1861–1876 had had no basic solidarity with the Negro slaves and therefore could desert them as soon as the battle was won. Today organized labor moves into the South to organize workers, white and Negro, knowing that it must maintain labor solidarity as a condition for the future development of the labor movement as a whole in the United States. The class solidarity is evident. It is not a question of the racial prejudices of this or that individual worker. It is a question of class interests and class solidarity which molds the minds of the large majority of the workers and in the last analysis is decisive. It is this which explains the tremendous advances the CIO has made in handling the race problem in its own ranks. It is this class solidarity which will more than ever assert itself after a social revolution in the United States.
Why? Because the race prejudice that exists is fundamentally a product of capitalism. It is instilled into the working class by capitalist propaganda which by now has become almost instinctive in the capitalist press and in capitalist society as a whole. Not only is labor working out its own proletarian attitude to these questions. When labor breaks the power of capitalism, it will break the fundamental source of race prejudice and what is today a difficult task, its struggle for racial equality, in a socialist society it will be able to accomplish with infinitely greater ease.
That Negro workers in the UAW, and in the steel workers union should raise their problem is a healthy sign. The capitalists have created this problem, as they have created so many others for the labor movement. Labor tackles them and deals with them on their merits. But it is a tremendous sign of progress that society as a whole speaks of the miners, of the steel workers, of the UAW and never stops to consider what a large proportion of these are Negroes. Negroes themselves raise problems, not outside the union, but as a regular part of union procedure in the solution of union difficulties. That, properly understood, is a sign not of weakness but of strength.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>On a Central Point in the Workers Party Program:</h4>
<h1>We Say “Transform PAC Into a Labor Party”</h1>
<h3>(6 January 1947)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1947/index.htm#la11_01" target="new">Vol. 11 No. 1</a>, 6 January 1947, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">At the recent National Committee Meeting the Workers Party reiterated its advocacy of the slogan, “Transform PAC into a Labor Party.” A statement motivating this slogan appeared in <strong>Labor Action</strong> of December 2, 1946. The statement dealt with the necessity of continuing with the slogan, despite the victory of the Republican Party and the rout of the Democratic Party. It showed that the very defeat of the Democrats would compel its working class followers to seek more seriously than ever a medium of political expression and political action to deal with the urgent problems which face the workers and the whole nation. The problem is complicated by the fact that, contrary to 1944, PAC took a beating in the 1946 election. It is true that PAC is more than ever under the control of the reactionary labor bureaucracy. If the need of the hour is independent political action by labor than PAC is a quintessential example of dependent political action of labor. It is being used by a capitalist political organization for capitalist ends, sneered at and distrusted when it helps to win victories as in 1944 and bearing the whole blame for defeat as in 1946. Furthermore it can be granted freely that PAC was formed for the special purpose of deflecting labor’s growing demands for an independent labor party. Today the labor leadership, at its wits’ ends, is off on another defensive tactic.</p>
<p>If circumstances compel a break with the discredited Democratic Party, then the labor leadership stands ready, is already preparing the way, to tie PAC to some kind of middle class third party. Its guiding principle is: above all, no independent labor politics. To be granted also, is the fact that the actual organization of the PAC, unlike for example, the organization of the UAW, is bureaucratic in the extreme. PAC is organized from the top downwards and the bureaucracy holds all the levers of control. Why then did we, knowing all this, advocate the slogan in the past and now continue to do so, despite the increased sharpening of the class struggle? The basic reason is simple to state. It is because PAC sets into political motion and holds the political attention of millions of organized workers. It is there that not only labor politics in general, but revolutionary politics must begin.</p>
<p>This organization has not only all the vices of the bureaucratically dominated organizations of labor, but is openly and admittedly capitalist in theory and in practice. But our use of the slogan in these circumstances involves one of the most fundamental concepts of socialist theory and practice. In fact, it is not too much to say that the political problem involved here faces the revolutionary socialist movement at all stages of its development. Upon the successful solution of this problem, in ever varying concrete circumstances, depends the growth of the party of the workers, at times the safety of the working class, at critical moments the success or failure of workers’ power itself.<br>
</p>
<h4>Role of Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">The working class in capitalist society at all times contains within itself a duality. It is the most oppressed class in a barbarous society, bearing all the scars of that society; <i>at the same time,</i> it is the only consistently progressive class in that society, the class destined to emancipate itself from capitalist degradation, and by emancipating itself to emancipate the great majority of the nation. Woe betide that revolutionary organization which confuses the two aspects and does not at all times and under all circumstances strenuously analyze, probe, check and recheck the relation of these two aspects to propaganda, agitation, slogans and practical activities. In <i>Section II</i> of the <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong> Karl Marx poses this question at the very outset.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><i>“In what relation do the Communists</i> <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> <i>stand to the proletarians as a whole?</i></p>
<p class="quote">”<i>The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties.</i></p>
<p class="quote"><i>“They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.</i></p>
<p class="quote"><i>“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.”</i></p>
<p class="fst">The whole section is not easy and is worth reading and re-reading, and, in fact, close study. For the time being we propose to give some random but highly instructive examples of the duality of the proletariat and the corresponding duality imposed upon the revolutionary party. In September 1917 Lenin, driving with all his might for the establishment of workers’ power as the only solution to the problems of Russia, offered to support a government of Mensheviks (reform Socialists) and Social Revolutionaries (revolutionary peasants’ party), the very people he had consistently accused of betraying the revolution. As far as he knew the masses were not quite ready to turn <i>en masse</i> to the Bolsheviks. Hence he was ready to advocate his own program within the framework of the stage reached by the masses. Trotsky made a bold and fruitful application of the same principle when he recommended that the American Trotskyist movement reverse its stand on a Labor Party and meet the rising demands of the working class by itself raising the slogan.<br>
</p>
<h4>America’s Social Crisis</h4>
<p class="fst">The crisis of the U.S. workers today is a social crisis of the nation. It reaches into every sphere of social life. It affects the workers on the immediate spheres of wages and its relation to prices. Not only does the housing shortage exhaust the energy and fray the nerves of the workers on whom it imposes the greatest hardships. Tomorrow it will affect their budget. Unless a serious nationwide struggle is waged by the proletariat leading the nation, rent control will not be maintained by the Truman government. In the factories themselves the conditions of production, the speed-up, the persecution of labor by the agents of big business, create a pervading bitterness and frustration among the workers. The Negroes are the subject of a concentrated attack by the reactionary elements in the population; these are emboldened by the absence of government action and the web of legalisms behind which the official guardians of law and order hide their acquiescence in the lynching, beating-up and vilification of the Negroes. The latest development is the use of the judiciary by the government to reinstitute control of labor by injunction, while the armed forces of the nation are held in not too inconspicuous reserve.</p>
<p><i>The working class struggles against all these manifestations of the social crisis. The response of the miners to Lewis; the rallying of AFL and CIO to the support of the UMW, lame and halting though it was, sufficiently testify to the sentiments of the workers. The Oakland General Strike also shows what deep currents of dissatisfaction are moving among the masses. The common front of the UAW, the Steel Workers and the Electrical Workers on the coming wage demands show in another sphere the tendency toward united action and resistance to being beaten down which exists among the workers. The preparations among AFL and CIO workers in Detroit for a joint 24-hour stoppage in support of the UMW, show the same in yet another sphere.</i></p>
<p>But the very urgency of the situation and the need for immediate action only underline the necessity for overall <i>political</i> action. Yet it is precisely here that the working, class is most baffled. How to translate into immediate action the need for independent labor politics? It is not merely a question of program here. The Workers Party in <strong>Labor Action</strong>, its pamphlets, etc., urges its <i>Transitional Program</i>, constantly adapted to the changing situation. It has embraced the <i>GM Program</i> advocated by Reuther (a program which it has itself long advocated) when the UAW strike initiated the present crisis. This program can be fought for in the unions individually and by unified action. But the working class needs a sphere, a medium, an organizational form in which <i>today at once</i> it can begin the enormous task of mobilizing its political weight for action.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Is PAC?</h4>
<p class="fst"><i>PAC is a medium to hand.</i> The basic strength of the Democratic Party in the nation is organized labor, yet the organizational power of that party is in the hands of the capitalists, the government bureaucracy, and the Southern Bourbons. PAC is in this respect the exact opposite. It is tied to the Democratic Party, but without the labor rank and file and the labor bureaucracy which runs it, PAC would be nothing. Its very formation marked a process of differentiation within the Democratic Party. The labor bureaucrats organized PAC to forestall independent labor action in the nation as a whole. But it was organized also to crystallize the power of labor in the increasing tensions within the Democratic Party itself. If that was so in 1944, the pressure of the social crisis and the open turn of Truman and the administration against labor, increases the tendencies toward disintegration within the Democratic Party and stretches unbearably the tie of PAC to the official Democratic organization.</p>
<p>In advocating that the workers turn PAC into a Labor Party we do not minimize our program, we do not adapt it in any way to the reactionary mold of PAC. We do not confine ourselves to PAC as a vote-catching organization. We do not propose that the workers submit themselves to its bureaucratic organization. We propose that precisely all these features of PAC be busted wide open and the organization transformed into a living working class organization, politically active today. PAC is a shell. Filled with workers actively determined to make it work for the labor movement it can become the nucleus for a nationwide independent political party.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Should Be Done</h4>
<p class="fst">Can it be done? And here comes in what we have stated is the indispensable corollary to starting with the working class where it is—the revolutionary confidence in its power by experience to transcend its limitations. But whenever the American proletariat seeks a genuine independent proletarian activity, its main obstacle will be the labor bureaucracy. Inside PAC or outside PAC it will face the obstructive, confusing and demoralizing tactics of these gentlemen who mortally fear the prospect of facing the national and international crisis outside of the umbrella of the traditional parties. While PAC is not the sole predetermined form by which the proletariat will find its way to independent political action, to concede in advance that any struggle by the proletariat within the PAC is doomed to defeat, is not far from saying that any struggle with the labor bureaucracy is doomed to defeat. It is not for one moment to be forgotten that the question of separating PAC from the Democratic Party does not alone concern the proletariat. The dominant capitalist elements in the Democratic Party have been restless at this would-be independent organization of labor even though it has been subordinated to Democratic Party policy and organization. Should the working class really open a struggle to make PAC in reality, and not only in form, its own instrument, its efforts for independence will be supplemented by the panic which will be created in the Democratic Party leadership.</p>
<p>It is precisely such a struggle which in the present situation, can forestall the efforts of the labor leaders to channelize labor party sentiment toward a third party, dominated by the middle class politicians, liberals, and others, and capitalistic in aim and practice. The workers and the workers’ movements can be best manipulated when they are quiet. On the other hand their increasing restlessness, the need for political action which is being hammered into their heads by the objective situation, these demand that we point out to them the existing concrete organization, built with their money their efforts and their name, which is being used against their general interests and urgent needs.</p>
<p><i>Finally, It would be wrong to too PAC purely in terms of the 1944 elections. The 1947 legislative program of Congress, the use of the Judiciary, and the armed forces against labor, the burning question of prices, the remoter question of war and peace, there is not one single one of them which will not be immediately affected by the determined emergence of labor as q political force within the present limited but infinitely expandable confines of PAC. It is a commonplace in all sections of the workers’ movement that the failure of PAC to be the decisive force in the recent elections was its miserable subordination to the official program of the senile Democratic Party. The converse in this case holds equally true. The regeneration of PAC by a militant working class means a greater possibility of political development than the tremendous stride forward which was made ten years ago when the incipient CIO broke away not from a capitalist, but from another labor organisation.</i></p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Not to be confused with Stalinists who are in no sense Communists.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
On a Central Point in the Workers Party Program:
We Say “Transform PAC Into a Labor Party”
(6 January 1947)
From Labor Action, Vol. 11 No. 1, 6 January 1947, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
At the recent National Committee Meeting the Workers Party reiterated its advocacy of the slogan, “Transform PAC into a Labor Party.” A statement motivating this slogan appeared in Labor Action of December 2, 1946. The statement dealt with the necessity of continuing with the slogan, despite the victory of the Republican Party and the rout of the Democratic Party. It showed that the very defeat of the Democrats would compel its working class followers to seek more seriously than ever a medium of political expression and political action to deal with the urgent problems which face the workers and the whole nation. The problem is complicated by the fact that, contrary to 1944, PAC took a beating in the 1946 election. It is true that PAC is more than ever under the control of the reactionary labor bureaucracy. If the need of the hour is independent political action by labor than PAC is a quintessential example of dependent political action of labor. It is being used by a capitalist political organization for capitalist ends, sneered at and distrusted when it helps to win victories as in 1944 and bearing the whole blame for defeat as in 1946. Furthermore it can be granted freely that PAC was formed for the special purpose of deflecting labor’s growing demands for an independent labor party. Today the labor leadership, at its wits’ ends, is off on another defensive tactic.
If circumstances compel a break with the discredited Democratic Party, then the labor leadership stands ready, is already preparing the way, to tie PAC to some kind of middle class third party. Its guiding principle is: above all, no independent labor politics. To be granted also, is the fact that the actual organization of the PAC, unlike for example, the organization of the UAW, is bureaucratic in the extreme. PAC is organized from the top downwards and the bureaucracy holds all the levers of control. Why then did we, knowing all this, advocate the slogan in the past and now continue to do so, despite the increased sharpening of the class struggle? The basic reason is simple to state. It is because PAC sets into political motion and holds the political attention of millions of organized workers. It is there that not only labor politics in general, but revolutionary politics must begin.
This organization has not only all the vices of the bureaucratically dominated organizations of labor, but is openly and admittedly capitalist in theory and in practice. But our use of the slogan in these circumstances involves one of the most fundamental concepts of socialist theory and practice. In fact, it is not too much to say that the political problem involved here faces the revolutionary socialist movement at all stages of its development. Upon the successful solution of this problem, in ever varying concrete circumstances, depends the growth of the party of the workers, at times the safety of the working class, at critical moments the success or failure of workers’ power itself.
Role of Labor
The working class in capitalist society at all times contains within itself a duality. It is the most oppressed class in a barbarous society, bearing all the scars of that society; at the same time, it is the only consistently progressive class in that society, the class destined to emancipate itself from capitalist degradation, and by emancipating itself to emancipate the great majority of the nation. Woe betide that revolutionary organization which confuses the two aspects and does not at all times and under all circumstances strenuously analyze, probe, check and recheck the relation of these two aspects to propaganda, agitation, slogans and practical activities. In Section II of the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx poses this question at the very outset.
“In what relation do the Communists [1] stand to the proletarians as a whole?
”The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties.
“They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.”
The whole section is not easy and is worth reading and re-reading, and, in fact, close study. For the time being we propose to give some random but highly instructive examples of the duality of the proletariat and the corresponding duality imposed upon the revolutionary party. In September 1917 Lenin, driving with all his might for the establishment of workers’ power as the only solution to the problems of Russia, offered to support a government of Mensheviks (reform Socialists) and Social Revolutionaries (revolutionary peasants’ party), the very people he had consistently accused of betraying the revolution. As far as he knew the masses were not quite ready to turn en masse to the Bolsheviks. Hence he was ready to advocate his own program within the framework of the stage reached by the masses. Trotsky made a bold and fruitful application of the same principle when he recommended that the American Trotskyist movement reverse its stand on a Labor Party and meet the rising demands of the working class by itself raising the slogan.
America’s Social Crisis
The crisis of the U.S. workers today is a social crisis of the nation. It reaches into every sphere of social life. It affects the workers on the immediate spheres of wages and its relation to prices. Not only does the housing shortage exhaust the energy and fray the nerves of the workers on whom it imposes the greatest hardships. Tomorrow it will affect their budget. Unless a serious nationwide struggle is waged by the proletariat leading the nation, rent control will not be maintained by the Truman government. In the factories themselves the conditions of production, the speed-up, the persecution of labor by the agents of big business, create a pervading bitterness and frustration among the workers. The Negroes are the subject of a concentrated attack by the reactionary elements in the population; these are emboldened by the absence of government action and the web of legalisms behind which the official guardians of law and order hide their acquiescence in the lynching, beating-up and vilification of the Negroes. The latest development is the use of the judiciary by the government to reinstitute control of labor by injunction, while the armed forces of the nation are held in not too inconspicuous reserve.
The working class struggles against all these manifestations of the social crisis. The response of the miners to Lewis; the rallying of AFL and CIO to the support of the UMW, lame and halting though it was, sufficiently testify to the sentiments of the workers. The Oakland General Strike also shows what deep currents of dissatisfaction are moving among the masses. The common front of the UAW, the Steel Workers and the Electrical Workers on the coming wage demands show in another sphere the tendency toward united action and resistance to being beaten down which exists among the workers. The preparations among AFL and CIO workers in Detroit for a joint 24-hour stoppage in support of the UMW, show the same in yet another sphere.
But the very urgency of the situation and the need for immediate action only underline the necessity for overall political action. Yet it is precisely here that the working, class is most baffled. How to translate into immediate action the need for independent labor politics? It is not merely a question of program here. The Workers Party in Labor Action, its pamphlets, etc., urges its Transitional Program, constantly adapted to the changing situation. It has embraced the GM Program advocated by Reuther (a program which it has itself long advocated) when the UAW strike initiated the present crisis. This program can be fought for in the unions individually and by unified action. But the working class needs a sphere, a medium, an organizational form in which today at once it can begin the enormous task of mobilizing its political weight for action.
What Is PAC?
PAC is a medium to hand. The basic strength of the Democratic Party in the nation is organized labor, yet the organizational power of that party is in the hands of the capitalists, the government bureaucracy, and the Southern Bourbons. PAC is in this respect the exact opposite. It is tied to the Democratic Party, but without the labor rank and file and the labor bureaucracy which runs it, PAC would be nothing. Its very formation marked a process of differentiation within the Democratic Party. The labor bureaucrats organized PAC to forestall independent labor action in the nation as a whole. But it was organized also to crystallize the power of labor in the increasing tensions within the Democratic Party itself. If that was so in 1944, the pressure of the social crisis and the open turn of Truman and the administration against labor, increases the tendencies toward disintegration within the Democratic Party and stretches unbearably the tie of PAC to the official Democratic organization.
In advocating that the workers turn PAC into a Labor Party we do not minimize our program, we do not adapt it in any way to the reactionary mold of PAC. We do not confine ourselves to PAC as a vote-catching organization. We do not propose that the workers submit themselves to its bureaucratic organization. We propose that precisely all these features of PAC be busted wide open and the organization transformed into a living working class organization, politically active today. PAC is a shell. Filled with workers actively determined to make it work for the labor movement it can become the nucleus for a nationwide independent political party.
What Should Be Done
Can it be done? And here comes in what we have stated is the indispensable corollary to starting with the working class where it is—the revolutionary confidence in its power by experience to transcend its limitations. But whenever the American proletariat seeks a genuine independent proletarian activity, its main obstacle will be the labor bureaucracy. Inside PAC or outside PAC it will face the obstructive, confusing and demoralizing tactics of these gentlemen who mortally fear the prospect of facing the national and international crisis outside of the umbrella of the traditional parties. While PAC is not the sole predetermined form by which the proletariat will find its way to independent political action, to concede in advance that any struggle by the proletariat within the PAC is doomed to defeat, is not far from saying that any struggle with the labor bureaucracy is doomed to defeat. It is not for one moment to be forgotten that the question of separating PAC from the Democratic Party does not alone concern the proletariat. The dominant capitalist elements in the Democratic Party have been restless at this would-be independent organization of labor even though it has been subordinated to Democratic Party policy and organization. Should the working class really open a struggle to make PAC in reality, and not only in form, its own instrument, its efforts for independence will be supplemented by the panic which will be created in the Democratic Party leadership.
It is precisely such a struggle which in the present situation, can forestall the efforts of the labor leaders to channelize labor party sentiment toward a third party, dominated by the middle class politicians, liberals, and others, and capitalistic in aim and practice. The workers and the workers’ movements can be best manipulated when they are quiet. On the other hand their increasing restlessness, the need for political action which is being hammered into their heads by the objective situation, these demand that we point out to them the existing concrete organization, built with their money their efforts and their name, which is being used against their general interests and urgent needs.
Finally, It would be wrong to too PAC purely in terms of the 1944 elections. The 1947 legislative program of Congress, the use of the Judiciary, and the armed forces against labor, the burning question of prices, the remoter question of war and peace, there is not one single one of them which will not be immediately affected by the determined emergence of labor as q political force within the present limited but infinitely expandable confines of PAC. It is a commonplace in all sections of the workers’ movement that the failure of PAC to be the decisive force in the recent elections was its miserable subordination to the official program of the senile Democratic Party. The converse in this case holds equally true. The regeneration of PAC by a militant working class means a greater possibility of political development than the tremendous stride forward which was made ten years ago when the incipient CIO broke away not from a capitalist, but from another labor organisation.
*
Footnote
1. Not to be confused with Stalinists who are in no sense Communists.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Bustamente – “Uncrowned King” of Jamaica</h1>
<h3>(18 November 1946)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_46" target="new">Vol. 10 No. 46</a>, 18 November 1946, p. 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The name of Bustamente has frequently appeared in the American and British press as the leader of Jamaican labor. Nothing so illustrates what has been happening in the West Indies as the career of this “uncrowned king” of Jamaica.</p>
<p>In the years before the war Jamaica had an advanced type of Crown Colony Government. The majority of the Legislative Council was elected and this majority had some power over finance. But the governor retained final power. The governor, though appointed by the British Colonial Office, represented the interests of the colonial ruling class.</p>
<p>The influence of “the people” and their elected members can be judged from the fact that in 1939 the electorate of Jamaica amounted to only five per cent of the population. Furthermore there was a high property qualification for candidates to the legislature, excluding thereby poor men. Legislators were not paid, and only wealthy men could represent “the people.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Great Labor Strikes</h4>
<p class="fst">Great strikes of labor shook this rotton constitution to pieces. The starving peasants and the dock workers began to live a life of intense industrial and political aspiration. A great mass movement arose, based on the unions but embracing all strata of the laboring population and parts of the middle-class. At its head was Bustamente.</p>
<p>Bustamente is without any recognizable political doctrine. The people of Jamaica Were on the move after nearly 75 years of political subservience, and Bustamente was at their head. He was imprisoned, but the government had to let him out.</p>
<p><em>To add to the crisis of the British government, the U.S. had entered the West Indian scene. Global war demanded that the American fleet control West Indian waters. Control of the world market demanded that the U.S. make a bid for American influence in the islands. The U.S. demanded and got its aerial, naval and, military bases.</em></p>
<p>But the population was restless. The pressure against Britain continued unabated. Roosevelt pulled a very fast one on the British government. To their disgust he came out suddenly for universal suffrage and free compulsory education in the West Indies. In March 1942 an Anglo-American Caribbean Commission was established to plan measures for the improvement of West Indian conditions. The geographical situation of the U.S. and its powerful economy put the British in a secondary position in the Western world.<br>
</p>
<h4>The New Constitution</h4>
<p class="fst">They grudgingly proposed a new constitution for the islands. Jamaica was granted universal suffrage. Legislators were to be paid. Two houses were to be set up: the lower house to be a completely elected body and the upper house partly nominated by the governor (i.e,, the local banks, industrialists, merchants and landowners).</p>
<p><em>But there was another change of great importance. The Executive Council, the real ruling body, a sort of cabinet, was to be elected by the lower house. And these executive council members were to serve as heads of several governmental departments. The governor still had the power of veto, but he could exercise it only with the consent of the elected Executive Council.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Bustamente’s Victory</h4>
<p class="fst">Here was a constitution most helpful to Bustamente and his mass following. His political party won 23 seats out of the 32. Five Were won by the People’s National Party, a socialist group, and the other three were won by independents. The party of big business, the so-called Democratic Party, lost every seat it contested. Bustamente controlled the lower house absolutely, half the members of the executive council were members of his party, and he led the mass union movement. Hence his claim to the title of “uncrowned king.”</p>
<p><em>In politics it is splendid to have a majority. But it is more important in the long run to have a policy. Bustamente had and still has no policy. The economies of the West Indian islands are bankrupt. Nothing but a federation of independent islands, nationalization of basic industry, workers’ control of production, and planned economy can begin to give them anything like a place in the world market.</em></p>
<p>All this is beyond the limited conceptions of Bustamente. The result is, that faced with a socialist movement on the one hand and big capital on the other, he has formed an alliance with big capital.<br>
</p>
<h4>Jamaican Socialism</h4>
<p class="fst">When the big mass movement got under way one of its most respected leaders was Norman Manley, a Jamaican lawyer and former Rhodes scholar. When Bustamente was in jail, Manley led the national movement in militant and uncompromising fashion.</p>
<p>This writer believes that Bustamente is a thoroughly unprincipled demagogue. Manley found collaboration with him impossible and his party, the People’s National Party, entered its own candidates. Its program is complete self-government and nationalization of base industry, aimed in particular at Tate and Lyle, the great sugar manufacturers.</p>
<p><em>Big business recognized in Manley’s program a dangerous enemy. It has thrown all its weight into support of Bustamente against Manley. Bustamente has declared himself against self-government, against nationalization, and has now gone so far as to denounce freedom of speech. In return he has great political power, a finger in patronage, and balances between the claims of capital and the needs of his followers in the unions.</em></p>
<p>The Peoples National Party controls a small association of unionists, but the mass power is in Bustamente’s hands. Recently in an inter-union struggle, a murder was committed. Bustamente was charged with the responsibility. He was acquitted, but Jamaica is still in a state of permanent unrest.<br>
</p>
<h4>Prospects for Tomorrow</h4>
<p class="fst">In the past eight years there has taken place a political transformation unheard of by even the most ardent advocates of self-government. The masses of the people are not hostile to Manley and the PNP. They are, however, fanatically loyal to Bustamente and often express regret at the lack of unity. The PNP struggles to win the Jamaican masses to its program. Its future, like everything else about Jamaica, is uncertain. It is not a revolutionary party. But the chief hope for its development is in its allegiance to the idea of class struggle. It has a strong support among the middle classes. But its leaders do not hesitate to inform its followers that the only real basis for the realization of its program is the working masses.</p>
<p>It is to be hoped that under these pressures a genuine revolutionary socialist party will emerge from the Jamaica turmoil. Meanwhile so far the PNP is the most advanced political party in the British West Indies and has a wide following among West Indians in the U.S. where Manley is a frequent visitor.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Bustamente – “Uncrowned King” of Jamaica
(18 November 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 46, 18 November 1946, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The name of Bustamente has frequently appeared in the American and British press as the leader of Jamaican labor. Nothing so illustrates what has been happening in the West Indies as the career of this “uncrowned king” of Jamaica.
In the years before the war Jamaica had an advanced type of Crown Colony Government. The majority of the Legislative Council was elected and this majority had some power over finance. But the governor retained final power. The governor, though appointed by the British Colonial Office, represented the interests of the colonial ruling class.
The influence of “the people” and their elected members can be judged from the fact that in 1939 the electorate of Jamaica amounted to only five per cent of the population. Furthermore there was a high property qualification for candidates to the legislature, excluding thereby poor men. Legislators were not paid, and only wealthy men could represent “the people.”
Great Labor Strikes
Great strikes of labor shook this rotton constitution to pieces. The starving peasants and the dock workers began to live a life of intense industrial and political aspiration. A great mass movement arose, based on the unions but embracing all strata of the laboring population and parts of the middle-class. At its head was Bustamente.
Bustamente is without any recognizable political doctrine. The people of Jamaica Were on the move after nearly 75 years of political subservience, and Bustamente was at their head. He was imprisoned, but the government had to let him out.
To add to the crisis of the British government, the U.S. had entered the West Indian scene. Global war demanded that the American fleet control West Indian waters. Control of the world market demanded that the U.S. make a bid for American influence in the islands. The U.S. demanded and got its aerial, naval and, military bases.
But the population was restless. The pressure against Britain continued unabated. Roosevelt pulled a very fast one on the British government. To their disgust he came out suddenly for universal suffrage and free compulsory education in the West Indies. In March 1942 an Anglo-American Caribbean Commission was established to plan measures for the improvement of West Indian conditions. The geographical situation of the U.S. and its powerful economy put the British in a secondary position in the Western world.
The New Constitution
They grudgingly proposed a new constitution for the islands. Jamaica was granted universal suffrage. Legislators were to be paid. Two houses were to be set up: the lower house to be a completely elected body and the upper house partly nominated by the governor (i.e,, the local banks, industrialists, merchants and landowners).
But there was another change of great importance. The Executive Council, the real ruling body, a sort of cabinet, was to be elected by the lower house. And these executive council members were to serve as heads of several governmental departments. The governor still had the power of veto, but he could exercise it only with the consent of the elected Executive Council.
Bustamente’s Victory
Here was a constitution most helpful to Bustamente and his mass following. His political party won 23 seats out of the 32. Five Were won by the People’s National Party, a socialist group, and the other three were won by independents. The party of big business, the so-called Democratic Party, lost every seat it contested. Bustamente controlled the lower house absolutely, half the members of the executive council were members of his party, and he led the mass union movement. Hence his claim to the title of “uncrowned king.”
In politics it is splendid to have a majority. But it is more important in the long run to have a policy. Bustamente had and still has no policy. The economies of the West Indian islands are bankrupt. Nothing but a federation of independent islands, nationalization of basic industry, workers’ control of production, and planned economy can begin to give them anything like a place in the world market.
All this is beyond the limited conceptions of Bustamente. The result is, that faced with a socialist movement on the one hand and big capital on the other, he has formed an alliance with big capital.
Jamaican Socialism
When the big mass movement got under way one of its most respected leaders was Norman Manley, a Jamaican lawyer and former Rhodes scholar. When Bustamente was in jail, Manley led the national movement in militant and uncompromising fashion.
This writer believes that Bustamente is a thoroughly unprincipled demagogue. Manley found collaboration with him impossible and his party, the People’s National Party, entered its own candidates. Its program is complete self-government and nationalization of base industry, aimed in particular at Tate and Lyle, the great sugar manufacturers.
Big business recognized in Manley’s program a dangerous enemy. It has thrown all its weight into support of Bustamente against Manley. Bustamente has declared himself against self-government, against nationalization, and has now gone so far as to denounce freedom of speech. In return he has great political power, a finger in patronage, and balances between the claims of capital and the needs of his followers in the unions.
The Peoples National Party controls a small association of unionists, but the mass power is in Bustamente’s hands. Recently in an inter-union struggle, a murder was committed. Bustamente was charged with the responsibility. He was acquitted, but Jamaica is still in a state of permanent unrest.
Prospects for Tomorrow
In the past eight years there has taken place a political transformation unheard of by even the most ardent advocates of self-government. The masses of the people are not hostile to Manley and the PNP. They are, however, fanatically loyal to Bustamente and often express regret at the lack of unity. The PNP struggles to win the Jamaican masses to its program. Its future, like everything else about Jamaica, is uncertain. It is not a revolutionary party. But the chief hope for its development is in its allegiance to the idea of class struggle. It has a strong support among the middle classes. But its leaders do not hesitate to inform its followers that the only real basis for the realization of its program is the working masses.
It is to be hoped that under these pressures a genuine revolutionary socialist party will emerge from the Jamaica turmoil. Meanwhile so far the PNP is the most advanced political party in the British West Indies and has a wide following among West Indians in the U.S. where Manley is a frequent visitor.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<table width="60%" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="6" border="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(10 October 1939)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_77" target="new">Vol. III No. 77</a>, 10 October 1939, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>[In Politics Instinct Is Not Enough]</h3>
<p class="fst">Dr. Charles Petioni is a Negro of West Indian origin who is an enemy of British imperialism. Many years ago, in the island of Trinidad, his opposition to colonial tyranny led him to leave the island. Today in Harlem he is president of the Caribbean Union and is still opposed to Britain. In an interview published in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> of Oct. 5, 1939, he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“India, Africa, and the West Indies have no sympathy for Chamberlain. They will fight on the side of Britain only when forced to do so.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">So far so good. Dr. Petioni’s statement represents what we called last week in this column the powerful revolutionary instinct of the Negro masses. But in politics instinct is not enough. You must have political clarity. And the need for it is alarmingly. illustrated by Dr. Petioni’s further statement.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The imperialist countries are on the run. Russia is doing the only logical thing that could be done. When the little buffer states were set up in the Balkans during the last war, they were intended for future powder kegs to be set off the moment the big imperialist countries were ready to mop up with Russia. Now that Russia has removed these explosive the situation is much clearer.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Trap to Be Guarded Against</h4>
<p class="fst">Thus from his healthy opposition to seeing colonials fight in a war which is not theirs, Dr. Petioni takes a further step and finds himself in the Stalinist camp. The Stalinists say today (Oct 6: we have to mark the date because nobody, not even they know what they will be saying tomorrow) that the war is an imperialist war. Dr. Petioni says that the war is an imperialist war. Therefore, say the Stalinists to Dr. Petioni, let us work together against the war and for the emancipation of the colonial peoples, etc.</p>
<p>A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies. The Stalinist policy is in reality a trap to catch the Negroes and make them serve the basest interests of world reaction.</p>
<p>When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, the Stalinists were at the peak of the five-year campaign for a war of the “democracies” against the fascist aggressors. Said James Ford in his book <strong>The Negro and the Democratic Front</strong>: “My earnest opinion is that we would make a tragic error in giving our su-port to any member of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo alliance.” Even after the pact was signed, Ford continued to agitate for America’s entry into the war. In the <strong>Amsterdam News</strong> of Sept. 23, appears a letter by Ford dated Aug. 31. In it he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Soviet Union pursues the policy of peaceful intercourse with all nations and is a threat to no nation, ready at all times to enter into such alliances with the democratic powers to assure world peace.</p>
<p class="quote">“We see it as our duty as Americans to support this policy with all our power, to enlist the support of our government for cooperative action against acts of aggression and to implement this policy by strengthening the democratic rights of the people in this hour of crisis.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Swallowing a Bitter Pill</h4>
<p class="quoteb">”The strengthening of democratic rights is the sugar. The pill is to enlist the support of our government for cooperative action against acts of aggression.”</p>
<p class="fst">That meant war. The whole Stalinist policy for the previous five years was an incitement to war by the “democracies” and the Soviet Union to stop Hitler.</p>
<p>After Ford’s letter, however, the international situation developed rapidly. Russia invaded Poland and shared in its partition As time went on, it became clear that Stalin was tying the future of Russia to the victory of Hitler. If America went into the war to fight for “democracy” it meant that a very powerful country would now be allied to the enemies of Hitler, Stalin’s ally. The victory of Hitler, or if not his victory, at least the saving of Hitler from defeat, has become at the present stage, a vital necessity for Stalin and Stalinist policies. Immediately the Stalinists discover that the war is an imperialist war they begin to shed tears for the sufferings of the colonials. They raise the slogan of opposition to the war.</p>
<p>It sounds all right until you realize that what they want is to save Hitler, Stalin’s ally, from defeat.</p>
<p>Is Dr. Petioni prepared to endorse this cynical use of the Negro revolutionary masses as a mere pawn in Stalinist foreign policy? Or is he merely caught by the superficial resemblance of the Stalinist policy to his own hatred of British imperialism.</p>
<p>And if he has been trapped, what is the reason for it? It is because he has not taken his own opposition to British imperialism to its logical conclusion. Opposition to British imperialism can not stay isolated. You must be opposed to French imperialism also, to German imperialism and to American. You must maintain an undeviating opposition to all of them. You must call on Negroes, everywhere at all times, to use all their efforts to fight against imperialism in war as well as in peace. Once you grasp this, you are in a position where you will not allow yourself to be used by one imperialism against the other. And you are in a position also to see the true significance of the Stalinist change from war for democracy in August to opposition to war for democracy in September. To this very moment the Stalinists do not call on all the workers, Negroes and all, wherever they are, to prepare for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the establishment of socialism and the independence of the colonial peoples.</p>
<h4>The Road of Revolutionary Struggle</h4>
<p class="fst">They don’t because if the international position should change, as it well may, you will find the Stalinists, with that peculiar brazenness which distinguishes them, solemnly telling 150,000,000 all over the world that it is their business now to fight for British, French and American “democracy” against fascist aggression. These treacherous scoundrels have done it before and will do it again. All this the Socialist Workers Party has explained in a pamphlet <strong>Why the Negro Should Oppose the War</strong>, which will be on the market in a few days. The Caribbean Union will hold a mass meeting on Oct. 19 at St. James Presbyterian Church (St. Nicholas Ave. and 141 St.) where Harlem Negroes will discuss their attitude toward the war. Negroes should get hold of this pamphlet and current copies of the <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>. There they will see not only an analysis of the war but a program of action which will show them the road of revolutionary struggle and make them immune from capitalist propaganda and Stalinist trickery.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(10 October 1939)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 77, 10 October 1939, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
[In Politics Instinct Is Not Enough]
Dr. Charles Petioni is a Negro of West Indian origin who is an enemy of British imperialism. Many years ago, in the island of Trinidad, his opposition to colonial tyranny led him to leave the island. Today in Harlem he is president of the Caribbean Union and is still opposed to Britain. In an interview published in the Daily Worker of Oct. 5, 1939, he says:
“India, Africa, and the West Indies have no sympathy for Chamberlain. They will fight on the side of Britain only when forced to do so.”
So far so good. Dr. Petioni’s statement represents what we called last week in this column the powerful revolutionary instinct of the Negro masses. But in politics instinct is not enough. You must have political clarity. And the need for it is alarmingly. illustrated by Dr. Petioni’s further statement.
“The imperialist countries are on the run. Russia is doing the only logical thing that could be done. When the little buffer states were set up in the Balkans during the last war, they were intended for future powder kegs to be set off the moment the big imperialist countries were ready to mop up with Russia. Now that Russia has removed these explosive the situation is much clearer.”
Trap to Be Guarded Against
Thus from his healthy opposition to seeing colonials fight in a war which is not theirs, Dr. Petioni takes a further step and finds himself in the Stalinist camp. The Stalinists say today (Oct 6: we have to mark the date because nobody, not even they know what they will be saying tomorrow) that the war is an imperialist war. Dr. Petioni says that the war is an imperialist war. Therefore, say the Stalinists to Dr. Petioni, let us work together against the war and for the emancipation of the colonial peoples, etc.
A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies. The Stalinist policy is in reality a trap to catch the Negroes and make them serve the basest interests of world reaction.
When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, the Stalinists were at the peak of the five-year campaign for a war of the “democracies” against the fascist aggressors. Said James Ford in his book The Negro and the Democratic Front: “My earnest opinion is that we would make a tragic error in giving our su-port to any member of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo alliance.” Even after the pact was signed, Ford continued to agitate for America’s entry into the war. In the Amsterdam News of Sept. 23, appears a letter by Ford dated Aug. 31. In it he says:
“The Soviet Union pursues the policy of peaceful intercourse with all nations and is a threat to no nation, ready at all times to enter into such alliances with the democratic powers to assure world peace.
“We see it as our duty as Americans to support this policy with all our power, to enlist the support of our government for cooperative action against acts of aggression and to implement this policy by strengthening the democratic rights of the people in this hour of crisis.”
Swallowing a Bitter Pill
”The strengthening of democratic rights is the sugar. The pill is to enlist the support of our government for cooperative action against acts of aggression.”
That meant war. The whole Stalinist policy for the previous five years was an incitement to war by the “democracies” and the Soviet Union to stop Hitler.
After Ford’s letter, however, the international situation developed rapidly. Russia invaded Poland and shared in its partition As time went on, it became clear that Stalin was tying the future of Russia to the victory of Hitler. If America went into the war to fight for “democracy” it meant that a very powerful country would now be allied to the enemies of Hitler, Stalin’s ally. The victory of Hitler, or if not his victory, at least the saving of Hitler from defeat, has become at the present stage, a vital necessity for Stalin and Stalinist policies. Immediately the Stalinists discover that the war is an imperialist war they begin to shed tears for the sufferings of the colonials. They raise the slogan of opposition to the war.
It sounds all right until you realize that what they want is to save Hitler, Stalin’s ally, from defeat.
Is Dr. Petioni prepared to endorse this cynical use of the Negro revolutionary masses as a mere pawn in Stalinist foreign policy? Or is he merely caught by the superficial resemblance of the Stalinist policy to his own hatred of British imperialism.
And if he has been trapped, what is the reason for it? It is because he has not taken his own opposition to British imperialism to its logical conclusion. Opposition to British imperialism can not stay isolated. You must be opposed to French imperialism also, to German imperialism and to American. You must maintain an undeviating opposition to all of them. You must call on Negroes, everywhere at all times, to use all their efforts to fight against imperialism in war as well as in peace. Once you grasp this, you are in a position where you will not allow yourself to be used by one imperialism against the other. And you are in a position also to see the true significance of the Stalinist change from war for democracy in August to opposition to war for democracy in September. To this very moment the Stalinists do not call on all the workers, Negroes and all, wherever they are, to prepare for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the establishment of socialism and the independence of the colonial peoples.
The Road of Revolutionary Struggle
They don’t because if the international position should change, as it well may, you will find the Stalinists, with that peculiar brazenness which distinguishes them, solemnly telling 150,000,000 all over the world that it is their business now to fight for British, French and American “democracy” against fascist aggression. These treacherous scoundrels have done it before and will do it again. All this the Socialist Workers Party has explained in a pamphlet Why the Negro Should Oppose the War, which will be on the market in a few days. The Caribbean Union will hold a mass meeting on Oct. 19 at St. James Presbyterian Church (St. Nicholas Ave. and 141 St.) where Harlem Negroes will discuss their attitude toward the war. Negroes should get hold of this pamphlet and current copies of the Socialist Appeal. There they will see not only an analysis of the war but a program of action which will show them the road of revolutionary struggle and make them immune from capitalist propaganda and Stalinist trickery.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>The Invasion Reveals —</h4>
<h1>Labor’s Apathy to the War</h1>
<h3>(July 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_27" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 27</a>, 3 July 1944, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The invasion lights up once more the unceasing warfare waged on all fronts and with all weapons by the Allied powers. They rain lead and steel against German imperialism. At the same time they plot to clamp military government on the European peoples for whose liberation they say they are fighting. At the same time in this country the ruling class launches an assault of unparalleled vigor, range and scope against the minds of the American people.</p>
<p>According to the capitalist propagandists, never since Lucifer was thrown out of heaven were such forces of light, of progress, of freedom, of liberty, of a better world, arrayed against such darkness, such criminals, such enemies of the human race. The climax was reached by the <strong>New York Times</strong> in an editorial which expressed envy of the young men who were dying in the full flush of their manhood, and would never know the pains and sufferings and disappointments of age. A truly wonderful sentiment!</p>
<p>Unfortunately we have not been able, by the most diligent search, to find in the <strong>Times</strong> since then any accounts of mass suicides by the capitalists in America, killing themselves off in order to avoid the sorrows and disappointments of the passing years. Bravely they bear up against the terrible evils of capitalist society while the tears run down their cheeks for the good fortune of those being killed on the beaches and fields of Normandy!</p>
<p>But, despite all this pressure, most observers have noted a very sinking and perhaps unexpected mass rejection of the invasion propaganda. The great body of the American people responded to the actual news of the invasion in a manner that does them remarkable credit. They were quiet, indulged in no heroics, but insofar as they expressed themselves, showed that they were more than anything else conscious of the young lives that were being destroyed or maimed in the tragic struggle in Europe. This widespread sentiment needs some examination.<br>
</p>
<h4>What the People Want</h4>
<p class="fst">First of all it is in harmony with recent developments. Masses of workers are beginning, to think their own thoughts about the war, and to act accordingly. They are not “defeatists.” They want victory. They want the war to end. They would like to see Hitler defeated. But they strike and keep on striking an increasing numbers. <em>Thus they reject in action the “sacred unity” of the nation to which the capitalists give lip-service but which they violate at every turn.</em> The workers protest against the class character of the conduct of the war in the field where they feel it most – wages and conditions of labor.</p>
<p>But they have shown their growing rejection of capitalist ideas in another field. When the propaganda about the bombing of Germany was at its height, the press had to devote columns proving that such bombing was not only necessary but just. In Britain a Gallup pell showed that <em>a majority of the British people in the most heavily bombed areas</em> had no wish to see the German people harassed by incessant bombing. The attitude, it is true, was not very logical. War is war. But the sentiment of revolt and disgust was against the terrible brutality to which men and women like themselves were being subjected. They felt that somehow it was wrong, that there was some other way in which people should be able to live without doing these things to one another.</p>
<p><em>Now comes the invasion. The American people have the greatest confidence in the sons and daughters of America who are shedding their blood on distant battlefields. But they refuse to delude themselves with dreams that the nation is engaged on a heroic struggle for a better world, a struggle in which sacrifices, though heavy, can be borne cheerfully in view of the noble aims, etc., etc. This is what the capitalist class tried to inculcate with all the power and ingenuity at its command. This is what it signally failed to accomplish.</em></p>
<p>This sober and realistic estimate of the invasion by the masses of the people should be seen for what it is – merely a continuation of the spirit which has characterized the people not only in America but in every country. From the hour that the Second World War loomed in view no longer as a distant threat but as an imminent possibility, the masses have hated it. From country after country came authentic information of the gloom, bitterness, resignation; no enthusiasm of any kind, no songs, none of the wild hysterical outbursts of military and nationalistic pride which have characterized many wars in the past.<br>
</p>
<h4>Toward Class Action</h4>
<p class="fst">Churchill in Britain capitalized on fear of German conquest of Britain and mobilized the British people on a basis of national defense, pure and simple. But Roosevelt and Wallace found it necessary to promise the American people “four freedoms” and “the century of the common man” to whip them not only into acceptance but into enthusiasm for the war. They have, for the most part, failed. Now comes this final proof of the stubborn refusal of the American people to see the war through the same rosy spectacles as their rulers.</p>
<p>The above should not be overestimated, but it should not be ignored. It is a sign of the growing sharpness of class relations in the country. Once the CIO was organized, it not only expressed but sharpened and clarified that fundamental incompatibility of interests which characterizes the relation between the various classes in an advanced society.</p>
<p>But this instinctive resistance to being propagandized and ballyhooed where serious questions are at issue cannot be allowed to dissipate itself. It must be organized.<br>
</p>
<h4>For a Labor Party</h4>
<p class="fst">At the present stage the workers need to have political expression for all the issues on which they have a point of view of their own. At the present stage, the road to this political expression and clarification is through an Independent Labor Party. It is only there that the workers can bring their ideas, desires and aspirations before leaders of their own choice, leaders who are responsible to them.</p>
<p><em>The workers may not for the moment have that clear penetration into the economic roots of their dissatisfaction and the drastic political re-orientation which this brings. That is not an argument against but for the formation of an independent Labor Party. They cannot think their thoughts to the end. They cannot even place their powerful instinctive reactions in organized opposition to the ceaseless propaganda the ruling class beats into their ears night and day. Yet their reaction to the invasion shows that they have something of their own to say, shows it as clearly as the strikes show that when Ford and a Ford worker say “We support the war” they mean different things.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Invasion Reveals —
Labor’s Apathy to the War
(July 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 27, 3 July 1944, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The invasion lights up once more the unceasing warfare waged on all fronts and with all weapons by the Allied powers. They rain lead and steel against German imperialism. At the same time they plot to clamp military government on the European peoples for whose liberation they say they are fighting. At the same time in this country the ruling class launches an assault of unparalleled vigor, range and scope against the minds of the American people.
According to the capitalist propagandists, never since Lucifer was thrown out of heaven were such forces of light, of progress, of freedom, of liberty, of a better world, arrayed against such darkness, such criminals, such enemies of the human race. The climax was reached by the New York Times in an editorial which expressed envy of the young men who were dying in the full flush of their manhood, and would never know the pains and sufferings and disappointments of age. A truly wonderful sentiment!
Unfortunately we have not been able, by the most diligent search, to find in the Times since then any accounts of mass suicides by the capitalists in America, killing themselves off in order to avoid the sorrows and disappointments of the passing years. Bravely they bear up against the terrible evils of capitalist society while the tears run down their cheeks for the good fortune of those being killed on the beaches and fields of Normandy!
But, despite all this pressure, most observers have noted a very sinking and perhaps unexpected mass rejection of the invasion propaganda. The great body of the American people responded to the actual news of the invasion in a manner that does them remarkable credit. They were quiet, indulged in no heroics, but insofar as they expressed themselves, showed that they were more than anything else conscious of the young lives that were being destroyed or maimed in the tragic struggle in Europe. This widespread sentiment needs some examination.
What the People Want
First of all it is in harmony with recent developments. Masses of workers are beginning, to think their own thoughts about the war, and to act accordingly. They are not “defeatists.” They want victory. They want the war to end. They would like to see Hitler defeated. But they strike and keep on striking an increasing numbers. Thus they reject in action the “sacred unity” of the nation to which the capitalists give lip-service but which they violate at every turn. The workers protest against the class character of the conduct of the war in the field where they feel it most – wages and conditions of labor.
But they have shown their growing rejection of capitalist ideas in another field. When the propaganda about the bombing of Germany was at its height, the press had to devote columns proving that such bombing was not only necessary but just. In Britain a Gallup pell showed that a majority of the British people in the most heavily bombed areas had no wish to see the German people harassed by incessant bombing. The attitude, it is true, was not very logical. War is war. But the sentiment of revolt and disgust was against the terrible brutality to which men and women like themselves were being subjected. They felt that somehow it was wrong, that there was some other way in which people should be able to live without doing these things to one another.
Now comes the invasion. The American people have the greatest confidence in the sons and daughters of America who are shedding their blood on distant battlefields. But they refuse to delude themselves with dreams that the nation is engaged on a heroic struggle for a better world, a struggle in which sacrifices, though heavy, can be borne cheerfully in view of the noble aims, etc., etc. This is what the capitalist class tried to inculcate with all the power and ingenuity at its command. This is what it signally failed to accomplish.
This sober and realistic estimate of the invasion by the masses of the people should be seen for what it is – merely a continuation of the spirit which has characterized the people not only in America but in every country. From the hour that the Second World War loomed in view no longer as a distant threat but as an imminent possibility, the masses have hated it. From country after country came authentic information of the gloom, bitterness, resignation; no enthusiasm of any kind, no songs, none of the wild hysterical outbursts of military and nationalistic pride which have characterized many wars in the past.
Toward Class Action
Churchill in Britain capitalized on fear of German conquest of Britain and mobilized the British people on a basis of national defense, pure and simple. But Roosevelt and Wallace found it necessary to promise the American people “four freedoms” and “the century of the common man” to whip them not only into acceptance but into enthusiasm for the war. They have, for the most part, failed. Now comes this final proof of the stubborn refusal of the American people to see the war through the same rosy spectacles as their rulers.
The above should not be overestimated, but it should not be ignored. It is a sign of the growing sharpness of class relations in the country. Once the CIO was organized, it not only expressed but sharpened and clarified that fundamental incompatibility of interests which characterizes the relation between the various classes in an advanced society.
But this instinctive resistance to being propagandized and ballyhooed where serious questions are at issue cannot be allowed to dissipate itself. It must be organized.
For a Labor Party
At the present stage the workers need to have political expression for all the issues on which they have a point of view of their own. At the present stage, the road to this political expression and clarification is through an Independent Labor Party. It is only there that the workers can bring their ideas, desires and aspirations before leaders of their own choice, leaders who are responsible to them.
The workers may not for the moment have that clear penetration into the economic roots of their dissatisfaction and the drastic political re-orientation which this brings. That is not an argument against but for the formation of an independent Labor Party. They cannot think their thoughts to the end. They cannot even place their powerful instinctive reactions in organized opposition to the ceaseless propaganda the ruling class beats into their ears night and day. Yet their reaction to the invasion shows that they have something of their own to say, shows it as clearly as the strikes show that when Ford and a Ford worker say “We support the war” they mean different things.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Refugees – in Belgium and the Congo<br>
– in War, in Peace</h1>
<h3>(June 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>The Negro’s Fight</em>, <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1940/index.htm#la04_09" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 9, 10 June 1940</a>, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Millions of Belgians fleeing along the country roads, taking with them just as much as they can carry; women and children dropping down in the gutter, old men and children dying, children being born only to die again from exposure and want want. Tanks, heavy artillery, motorized divisions grinding their way through, for war is war, and when armies fight, they fight to win. Never were there so many refugees on the roads before; and this time armies circling and encircling, were the refugees were caught between bounded by artillery on all sides and from above. This is the fate to which capitalist society has reduced the Belgian people twenty-five years after the war to end war and to make the world safe for democracy.</p>
<p>But that is not the only Belgium. There is another area of this Belgian Empire – in Africa, a huge territory, the notorious Belgian Congo, with eleven million Negroes. All of them are refugees, have been reliable at any time to see their homes destroyed, their crops burned, themselves transported hundreds of miles to do forced labor, with violent death and disease rampant throughout the whole territory.<br>
</p>
<h4>Bring in Enough Rubber – or Else!</h4>
<p class="fst">The present Leopold’s grandfather took over the Congo in the second half of the nineteenth century. He took it just as Hitler has taken Belgium to-day, sent his soldiers, murdered and massacred. The Belgian people, the workers and peasants, had nothing to do with it. Leopold didn’t even allow the Belgian government to come in on the deal. He saw that the Belgian Congo was his personal private property. He wanted rubber, and the natives had to get it and if they did not bring in a sufficient quantity, a finger was cut off, then later another finger, often a whole hand. Get the rubber for the greater benefit of King Leopold’s private income.</p>
<p>Some of these people were backward and barbarous, but all were not. Many villages astonished explorers by the high degree of excellence and organization they had attained in agriculture and social life. Strange irony! One of the early explorers noted that the cultivation of certain fields was as fine as anything in – Belgium, of all places. But that did not save them.</p>
<p>It is easy to imagine the ruin and devastation that fell upon these unfortunate people. Wherever Leopold’s rubber-collectors passed, cultivation of food ceased, social organization went to pieces, new diseases swept away whole populations. Life reduced itself to one formula – get rubber.<br>
</p>
<h4>Natives Benefit Little from World Exposé</h4>
<p class="fst">This went on for a generation. Then in the early years of the nineteenth <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> century a tremendous campaign was waged all over the civilized world against the atrocities in the Belgian Congo. How pleasant it would be to believe all the ballyhoo that the conscience of mankind had awakened at last! What had awakened was the capitalist conscience. British and French capital didn’t see why Leopold should run this huge colony as a private estate. The Belgian Congo was a monopoly. The Belgian king laid down the conditions of trade for all outsiders. These conditions were hard. Whereupon the capitalists of Britain and France subsidized investigators and propagandists who said to the world: “Look at the poor natives. See how their fingers are cut off to get rubber for the wicked Leopold.”</p>
<p>The scandal was so great that Belgian Congo became a regular colony. The natives didn’t benefit much. Capitalist enterprise began to develop the industrial resources, for instance to build railways. As late a 1928 one piece of railway construction cost the lives of 28,000 men. Life is cheap and therefore the work that is done by machinery in Europe and America is done by muscle and bone in the Congo.</p>
<p>It is not only the drain of men for labor on European enterprises which ruin native life. When the able-bodied men from the village are rounded up for work, life in the village goes to pieces. Only the old men, the children and the women remain. They are refugees who stay at home, suffering from the blitzkrieg of the white labor-contractors.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Colony by Any Name Smells –</h4>
<p class="fst">After the war, another portion of Central Africa was handed over to Belgium. Not as a colony, oh no! The war for democracy changed that. Ruara-Urundi was given a new name – mandated territory. In 1932 M. Vandervelde, the late leader of Belgian labor, told what had recently been taking place in the mandate. Belgian officials had raped the wife of a native who, as is customary in native law, demanded compensation. The native was whipped, a fight broke out and one official was killed. White authority and prestige had to be restored. The Belgian governor organized a blitzkrieg. Armed troops swept down on the villages. The natives fled into the forest. Guerilla warfare lasted for weeks with natives using bows and arrows to defend themselves against troops armed with modern rifles. Thousands of natives, men, women and children died from bullets and starvation. The “revolt” was finally crushed.</p>
<p>Now what have the refugees in Belgium to do with all this? Nothing at all. When the Belgian Congo was first taken over they knew nothing at all about it. A small section of the Belgian workers can gel fairly good wages from the profits made by the Belgian capitalists. But of the millions of refugees in Belgium today few gain much, if at all, from the destruction of human life in the Belgian Congo. Now Leopold has made his army surrender, and the Belgian people are delivered to Hitlerite Fascism. Fascism in the colonies, fascism at home; refugees on the Belgian countryside, refugees in the Belgian Congo. That is the future of the Belgian Empire as long as capitalism lasts.</p>
<p>And Hitler? Hitler wants to exploit the Belgian colony himself. So that “war for democracy” or “war for Fascism” boils down to “war for colonies.” That is what the war was about in 1914. That is what the war is about in 1940.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Note by MIA</h3>
<p class="note"><a href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> It was actually during the early twentieth century, or the early 1900s.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Refugees – in Belgium and the Congo
– in War, in Peace
(June 1940)
The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, Vol. 4 No. 9, 10 June 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Millions of Belgians fleeing along the country roads, taking with them just as much as they can carry; women and children dropping down in the gutter, old men and children dying, children being born only to die again from exposure and want want. Tanks, heavy artillery, motorized divisions grinding their way through, for war is war, and when armies fight, they fight to win. Never were there so many refugees on the roads before; and this time armies circling and encircling, were the refugees were caught between bounded by artillery on all sides and from above. This is the fate to which capitalist society has reduced the Belgian people twenty-five years after the war to end war and to make the world safe for democracy.
But that is not the only Belgium. There is another area of this Belgian Empire – in Africa, a huge territory, the notorious Belgian Congo, with eleven million Negroes. All of them are refugees, have been reliable at any time to see their homes destroyed, their crops burned, themselves transported hundreds of miles to do forced labor, with violent death and disease rampant throughout the whole territory.
Bring in Enough Rubber – or Else!
The present Leopold’s grandfather took over the Congo in the second half of the nineteenth century. He took it just as Hitler has taken Belgium to-day, sent his soldiers, murdered and massacred. The Belgian people, the workers and peasants, had nothing to do with it. Leopold didn’t even allow the Belgian government to come in on the deal. He saw that the Belgian Congo was his personal private property. He wanted rubber, and the natives had to get it and if they did not bring in a sufficient quantity, a finger was cut off, then later another finger, often a whole hand. Get the rubber for the greater benefit of King Leopold’s private income.
Some of these people were backward and barbarous, but all were not. Many villages astonished explorers by the high degree of excellence and organization they had attained in agriculture and social life. Strange irony! One of the early explorers noted that the cultivation of certain fields was as fine as anything in – Belgium, of all places. But that did not save them.
It is easy to imagine the ruin and devastation that fell upon these unfortunate people. Wherever Leopold’s rubber-collectors passed, cultivation of food ceased, social organization went to pieces, new diseases swept away whole populations. Life reduced itself to one formula – get rubber.
Natives Benefit Little from World Exposé
This went on for a generation. Then in the early years of the nineteenth [1] century a tremendous campaign was waged all over the civilized world against the atrocities in the Belgian Congo. How pleasant it would be to believe all the ballyhoo that the conscience of mankind had awakened at last! What had awakened was the capitalist conscience. British and French capital didn’t see why Leopold should run this huge colony as a private estate. The Belgian Congo was a monopoly. The Belgian king laid down the conditions of trade for all outsiders. These conditions were hard. Whereupon the capitalists of Britain and France subsidized investigators and propagandists who said to the world: “Look at the poor natives. See how their fingers are cut off to get rubber for the wicked Leopold.”
The scandal was so great that Belgian Congo became a regular colony. The natives didn’t benefit much. Capitalist enterprise began to develop the industrial resources, for instance to build railways. As late a 1928 one piece of railway construction cost the lives of 28,000 men. Life is cheap and therefore the work that is done by machinery in Europe and America is done by muscle and bone in the Congo.
It is not only the drain of men for labor on European enterprises which ruin native life. When the able-bodied men from the village are rounded up for work, life in the village goes to pieces. Only the old men, the children and the women remain. They are refugees who stay at home, suffering from the blitzkrieg of the white labor-contractors.
A Colony by Any Name Smells –
After the war, another portion of Central Africa was handed over to Belgium. Not as a colony, oh no! The war for democracy changed that. Ruara-Urundi was given a new name – mandated territory. In 1932 M. Vandervelde, the late leader of Belgian labor, told what had recently been taking place in the mandate. Belgian officials had raped the wife of a native who, as is customary in native law, demanded compensation. The native was whipped, a fight broke out and one official was killed. White authority and prestige had to be restored. The Belgian governor organized a blitzkrieg. Armed troops swept down on the villages. The natives fled into the forest. Guerilla warfare lasted for weeks with natives using bows and arrows to defend themselves against troops armed with modern rifles. Thousands of natives, men, women and children died from bullets and starvation. The “revolt” was finally crushed.
Now what have the refugees in Belgium to do with all this? Nothing at all. When the Belgian Congo was first taken over they knew nothing at all about it. A small section of the Belgian workers can gel fairly good wages from the profits made by the Belgian capitalists. But of the millions of refugees in Belgium today few gain much, if at all, from the destruction of human life in the Belgian Congo. Now Leopold has made his army surrender, and the Belgian people are delivered to Hitlerite Fascism. Fascism in the colonies, fascism at home; refugees on the Belgian countryside, refugees in the Belgian Congo. That is the future of the Belgian Empire as long as capitalism lasts.
And Hitler? Hitler wants to exploit the Belgian colony himself. So that “war for democracy” or “war for Fascism” boils down to “war for colonies.” That is what the war was about in 1914. That is what the war is about in 1940.
Note by MIA
1. It was actually during the early twentieth century, or the early 1900s.
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">C.L.R. James</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<br>
<h4>The Negro Question</h4>
<h1>The 1919 Race Riots in Chicago</h1>
<table width="60%" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="6" border="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(29 August 1939)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">Originally published in <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_63" target="new">Vol. III No. 63</a>, 29 August 1939, p. 3.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 111–113.<br>
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Twenty years ago this summer, there took place the notorious Chicago race riots. They are a good example of how necessary it is to turn our backs on whatever the American bourgeoisie says about the Negroes.</p>
<p>What precisely happened in Chicago twenty years ago? Thousands of Negroes will unsuspectingly give you the account given by Congressman Ellender in the debate on the Anti- Lynching Bill. Many revolutionists – including J.R. Johnson – for years accepted it in outline, and it is probable that many still do, thereby subjecting themselves to the American bourgeoisie.<br>
</p>
<h4>Bourgeois History</h4>
<p class="fst">Mr. Ellender quotes extensively from the <strong>World’s Work</strong> for December 1922, whose version runs as follows.</p>
<p class="quoteb">The great exodus of Negroes from the South created problems of adjustment between whites and blacks, and of course the Negroes were the ones who caused the trouble. They were “illiterate,” their manners “uncouth,” their clothes “outlandish and bad-smelling.” When they found themselves sitting side by side with white people in trolley cars, the Negroes did not know how to behave. They “sprawled in their seats.” They insisted on sitting when white women were standing. They went to live in quarters which white immigrants had for years regarded as their own; their children began to mingle in large number with the white children in the schools. But what “caused the greatest ill feeling’’ was the increasing presence of Negro men and women in the public recreation centers. These impudent Negroes sat in considerable numbers on the park benches, played baseball and basketball on the public fields. They appeared in the municipal dance halls, they shared public bathing beaches with the whites, and, the final crime, “the mere fact that they attended band concerts in large numbers added to the ill-feeling.”</p>
<p class="fst">Thus was the atmosphere created in which any small incident could and did precipitate a fearful race riot.</p>
<p>Now the natural reaction of a Negro, or a white person who resents white arrogance to Negroes, is to say as follows. If Negroes went to the parks, played baseball and listened to concerts, they were perfectly justified in doing so, and if race riots took place, it was not the Negroes’ fault. A liberal would deplore the sad fact and rush to set up an “inter-racial” commission. A revolutionary who was not on his guard would say that here was another example of white workers being dominated by the reactionary ideas of the bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact, such a revolutionary would be himself dominated by bourgeois ideas on the Negro question. Far from being a demonstration of the difficulties of adjustment between white residents and black immigrants, the Chicago race riots are one of the greatest examples of racial solidarity in the whole history of the American working class.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Bosses Seek to Split the Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">In 1919 there were some 12,000 Negroes working on the stockyards of Chicago. The Stockyards Labor Council, founded in July 1917, had been struggling to organize the industry. The capitalist bosses countered by introducing an increasing number of plants. They hoped to influence the Negroes against the unions, and playing white against black to defeat unionization. The Stockyards Labor Council repudiated the color-line and made a drive to organize the Negroes, for without them the whites could not win. There were inter-racial socials. A Negro was elected Vice-President of the Council. In June 1919, the Council began to organize street-corner meetings of whites and Negroes. This was death for the meat-packing bosses and they used mounted police to break these meetings up. Against this, the Stockyards Labor Council called a protest strike and won, and to celebrate they called a great parade of white and Negro workers in the Negro neighborhood for July 6.</p>
<p>In come the capitalist police and with brazen impudence proclaim that this parade is going to cause racial conflict! They therefore forbid it. The Council, instead of defying the order, made Negroes and whites parade separately, but the two groups met on the Beutner playground at La Salle and 23rd Street and there was grand demonstration of nearly 30,000 Negroes and whites (despite the fact that many of these Negroes had gone to band concerts). The working-class front of black and whites held firm and the capitalists had to break it. So on July 27 they sent whites with faces blackened to look like Negroes who burned a block of houses where white stockyard workers lived. The police followed up this outrage by sending a large force of militia, police, etc., into the stockyards “to prevent racial strife,” and <em>agents provocateurs</em> were let loose among the white workers to incite them to violence.<br>
</p>
<h4>Black and White Workers Remain United</h4>
<p class="fst">The Council called a mass meeting of 30,000 white workers which unanimously voted solidarity with the Negroes and demanded that the police withdraw all its armed men from the stockyards. The 4,000 Negroes endorsed the vote.</p>
<p>During this period, the riots did take place. Police and their allies, let loose in the Negro district, led the rioting. In their efforts to keep “order,” they killed not one white man, but half the Negroes killed met their death at the hands of the police.</p>
<p>Despite this desperate provocation, the 35,000 whites and Negroes in the union remained solid and would not go back to work until the police and militia were removed from the yards. White and black union men worked together to help the wounded. The whites gave financial aid to the Negroes who came to the headquarters for assistance instead of going to the bosses’ breadlines. Among 35,000 workers there was only one single case of violence.</p>
<p>The workers black and white had caused the police to be withdrawn from the yards. On the day that they went back there wasn’t a single indication of any racial feeling. In one plant, Negroes and Slavs “met as old friends.” Many of the men “put their arms around one another’s necks.” A Negro and a Pole got on a truck and rode all around the plant to show the other workers that a good spirit still existed. Says the official report,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There was nothing in the contact of the Negro or the Pole or the Slav that would indicate that there had ever been a race riot in Chicago, and there was nothing from the beginning of the race riot to the end that would indicate there was any feeling started in the stockyards or in this industry that led to the race riots.”</p>
<p class="fst">That was twenty years ago. The full story was told in the Stalinist press ten years after, and some of it in official reports. But the bourgeois press and bourgeois publicists still circulate their lies about the Chicago race riots, and with their babble about maladjustment, they cleverly obscure one of the most significant events in American working class history. These lies penetrate even into the revolutionary movement, and will continue to penetrate, unless the revolutionary movement dos not merely content itself with saying “No” to the capitalist “Yes” but turns its back completely on whatever the capitalists say about the Negroes.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated on 13 March 2016</p>
</body> |
MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
The 1919 Race Riots in Chicago
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(29 August 1939)
Originally published in Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 63, 29 August 1939, p. 3.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 111–113.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Twenty years ago this summer, there took place the notorious Chicago race riots. They are a good example of how necessary it is to turn our backs on whatever the American bourgeoisie says about the Negroes.
What precisely happened in Chicago twenty years ago? Thousands of Negroes will unsuspectingly give you the account given by Congressman Ellender in the debate on the Anti- Lynching Bill. Many revolutionists – including J.R. Johnson – for years accepted it in outline, and it is probable that many still do, thereby subjecting themselves to the American bourgeoisie.
Bourgeois History
Mr. Ellender quotes extensively from the World’s Work for December 1922, whose version runs as follows.
The great exodus of Negroes from the South created problems of adjustment between whites and blacks, and of course the Negroes were the ones who caused the trouble. They were “illiterate,” their manners “uncouth,” their clothes “outlandish and bad-smelling.” When they found themselves sitting side by side with white people in trolley cars, the Negroes did not know how to behave. They “sprawled in their seats.” They insisted on sitting when white women were standing. They went to live in quarters which white immigrants had for years regarded as their own; their children began to mingle in large number with the white children in the schools. But what “caused the greatest ill feeling’’ was the increasing presence of Negro men and women in the public recreation centers. These impudent Negroes sat in considerable numbers on the park benches, played baseball and basketball on the public fields. They appeared in the municipal dance halls, they shared public bathing beaches with the whites, and, the final crime, “the mere fact that they attended band concerts in large numbers added to the ill-feeling.”
Thus was the atmosphere created in which any small incident could and did precipitate a fearful race riot.
Now the natural reaction of a Negro, or a white person who resents white arrogance to Negroes, is to say as follows. If Negroes went to the parks, played baseball and listened to concerts, they were perfectly justified in doing so, and if race riots took place, it was not the Negroes’ fault. A liberal would deplore the sad fact and rush to set up an “inter-racial” commission. A revolutionary who was not on his guard would say that here was another example of white workers being dominated by the reactionary ideas of the bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact, such a revolutionary would be himself dominated by bourgeois ideas on the Negro question. Far from being a demonstration of the difficulties of adjustment between white residents and black immigrants, the Chicago race riots are one of the greatest examples of racial solidarity in the whole history of the American working class.
The Bosses Seek to Split the Workers
In 1919 there were some 12,000 Negroes working on the stockyards of Chicago. The Stockyards Labor Council, founded in July 1917, had been struggling to organize the industry. The capitalist bosses countered by introducing an increasing number of plants. They hoped to influence the Negroes against the unions, and playing white against black to defeat unionization. The Stockyards Labor Council repudiated the color-line and made a drive to organize the Negroes, for without them the whites could not win. There were inter-racial socials. A Negro was elected Vice-President of the Council. In June 1919, the Council began to organize street-corner meetings of whites and Negroes. This was death for the meat-packing bosses and they used mounted police to break these meetings up. Against this, the Stockyards Labor Council called a protest strike and won, and to celebrate they called a great parade of white and Negro workers in the Negro neighborhood for July 6.
In come the capitalist police and with brazen impudence proclaim that this parade is going to cause racial conflict! They therefore forbid it. The Council, instead of defying the order, made Negroes and whites parade separately, but the two groups met on the Beutner playground at La Salle and 23rd Street and there was grand demonstration of nearly 30,000 Negroes and whites (despite the fact that many of these Negroes had gone to band concerts). The working-class front of black and whites held firm and the capitalists had to break it. So on July 27 they sent whites with faces blackened to look like Negroes who burned a block of houses where white stockyard workers lived. The police followed up this outrage by sending a large force of militia, police, etc., into the stockyards “to prevent racial strife,” and agents provocateurs were let loose among the white workers to incite them to violence.
Black and White Workers Remain United
The Council called a mass meeting of 30,000 white workers which unanimously voted solidarity with the Negroes and demanded that the police withdraw all its armed men from the stockyards. The 4,000 Negroes endorsed the vote.
During this period, the riots did take place. Police and their allies, let loose in the Negro district, led the rioting. In their efforts to keep “order,” they killed not one white man, but half the Negroes killed met their death at the hands of the police.
Despite this desperate provocation, the 35,000 whites and Negroes in the union remained solid and would not go back to work until the police and militia were removed from the yards. White and black union men worked together to help the wounded. The whites gave financial aid to the Negroes who came to the headquarters for assistance instead of going to the bosses’ breadlines. Among 35,000 workers there was only one single case of violence.
The workers black and white had caused the police to be withdrawn from the yards. On the day that they went back there wasn’t a single indication of any racial feeling. In one plant, Negroes and Slavs “met as old friends.” Many of the men “put their arms around one another’s necks.” A Negro and a Pole got on a truck and rode all around the plant to show the other workers that a good spirit still existed. Says the official report,
“There was nothing in the contact of the Negro or the Pole or the Slav that would indicate that there had ever been a race riot in Chicago, and there was nothing from the beginning of the race riot to the end that would indicate there was any feeling started in the stockyards or in this industry that led to the race riots.”
That was twenty years ago. The full story was told in the Stalinist press ten years after, and some of it in official reports. But the bourgeois press and bourgeois publicists still circulate their lies about the Chicago race riots, and with their babble about maladjustment, they cleverly obscure one of the most significant events in American working class history. These lies penetrate even into the revolutionary movement, and will continue to penetrate, unless the revolutionary movement dos not merely content itself with saying “No” to the capitalist “Yes” but turns its back completely on whatever the capitalists say about the Negroes.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Easter Rebellion</h4>
<h1>Ireland and the Revolutionary<br>
Tradition of Easter Week</h1>
<h3>(14 April 1941)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1941/index.htm#la05_14" target="new">Vol. 5 No. 14</a>, 14 April 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Easter Sunday morning, 1916. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> Three o’clock. James Connolly, Irish revolutionary leader, was talking to his daughter and. some of her friends, all asking why the revolt so carefully prepared had been countermanded.</p>
<p>Connolly knew that the arms from Germany had been intercepted, he knew that the arrangements had broken down, but he knew that the British government was going to strike. He could not let the revolt be stamped out without resistance. It seemed to him, and rightly, that the resulting demonstration would be too great. He would fight, come what may. There was a chance that if they held out long enough the whole country might rise. But, whether or not that happened, the blow had to be struck. It was in this spirit, long range revolutionary calculation, that Connolly sent the message to his followers calling on them to begin.</p>
<p>They prepared a declaration of the Irish Republic, signed by Thomas Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, P.H. Pearse, James Connolly. Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett. About noon the next day a body of Irish volunteers marched down O’Connell Street, apparently on parade, In reality they were marching en the Post Office and they seized it. At that same moment, small detachments seized other key points in the city. A little over a thousand men, workers, and a few intellectuals at their head, had challenged the whole British Empire.</p>
<p>They held the center of the city for over five days. By Friday, 60,000 British soldiers were fighting 1,000 Irishmen while Dublin blazed in flames. The revolutionaries hoped that the country would follow them – but nothing happened, nothing at any rate that could then be seen and measured. On Saturday, President Pearse ordered the surrender. To even sympathetic observers it seemed that the Irish had merely once more shown themselves a brave but irrational and unpredictable people. Except Lenin, who wrote fiercely in their defense, not only as revolutionaries but in defense of the circumstances of their revolt.<br>
</p>
<h4>A History of Bloody Repression</h4>
<p class="fst">To understand this noble, but apparently futile heroism one must have some idea, however rough, of Ireland’s past at British hands.</p>
<p>It is customary to speak of Turks in the Balkans and Tsarism in Poland as classical examples of imperialist barbarism. Nothing in six centuries of European history has ever equalled the British strangulation of Ireland. To get some adequate idea of this, one has to study the histories written by Irish nationalists, and printed in Ireland. No British historian would dare to write the history of seek the truth under the thick cake of lies that British history, official and unofficial, has laid over the facts. If he wrote it, no British printer would print it.</p>
<p>Ireland was, many centuries ago, one of teh foremost civilized nations of the world, far in advance of the British, a country producing Catholic scholars of European reputation, and the home of a flourishing association of free clansmen. The British fell upon them after the Norman conquest and plundered them for nearly 800 years. Rape and massacre and arson – arson, massacre and rape. That is the history.</p>
<p>The worst was perhaps Cromwell. Ireland is divided into four great counties, of which Connaught is the most remote and the wildest. Cromwell ordered the Irish to clear out of the three counties and go to Connaught. “To hell or Connaught.” Every Irishman knows that phrase. It signalled the depopulation of a country. That was long ago. Two hundred years later the British did it again. Hitler is doing it today. The British will do it tomorrow again. What is there to choose between the ruling classes of Europe?<br>
</p>
<h4>Deliberately Starving a People</h4>
<p class="fst">Ireland was the natural port of call for vessels from America. Today the empty warehouses, centuries old, still can be seen in Cork and other seaport towns. Britain strangled the trade, ruined Irish industry, stole Irish land, evicted Irish tenants, made Irish Catholics pay to support English bishops, taxed Ireland to pay British debts, bribed Irish parliamentarians (Englishmen and descendants of Englishmen) to sell out Ireland.</p>
<p>There is no crime in the horrors of imperialism which the British did not perpetrate against the Irish people for the “benefit of Ireland.” The last and greatest was the famine of 1847. Not one Irishman need have died. The potato crop failed. But while the millions of Irish starved, ships laden with corn sailed out of the harbors to make profits for the British landlords. Parliament voted $250,000 for Irish relief, and $500,000 for the rebuilding of His Majesty’s stables the same year. And as a million people starved and died and epidemics raged, the London <strong>Times</strong> wrote that an Irishman would soon be as rare on the banks of the Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Hudson.</p>
<p>Revolt after revolt had failed, chiefly through the cowardice of the Irish petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of the priests, both of whom hated the British but were more afraid of the revolution. After 50 years, the Liberal Party almost got a limited Home Rule Bill through Parliament. The Tory landlords started to build an army and swore they would revolt. So much for British democracy! It was in this highly charged atmosphere that the 1914 war broke out and the British began to overtax and oppress the Irish people to make them pay for a war, which they claimed, among other things, was to defend Ireland.<br>
</p>
<h4>Connolly Organizes Rebel Forces</h4>
<p class="fst">Revolutionary feeling was, to all appearances, low. During the Boer War the British had denuded Ireland of troops and there had been no revolt. The British government therefore taunted the Irish Nationalists in the House that revolutionary spirit in Ireland was dead. But these Irish Gandhis talked about revolution only to threaten the British. They were as afraid of it as the British garrison, and as soon as war broke out they declared a truce. “All for the war.”</p>
<p>In Dublin, however, James Connolly, a revolutionary Marxist, had been writing pamphlets and organizing labor, with some success. When Sir Edward Carson and the Irish aristocrats began to form their army in 1913, Irish revolutionaries countered with a volunteer army. But when the war broke out, Connolly took the lead with the Irish citizen army, a force consisting at the most of a few hundred men centering chiefly in Dublin. Apart from Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, this was the most extraordinary revolutionary organization that Europe had seen for centuries.</p>
<p>It was organized for the purpose of making a revolution, and making it soon. Connolly was determined that the war would not end without a revolt. There would be no repetition of Ireland in the Boer War and taunts of the British parliamentarians. He felt that all the Irish wanted was a lead and he was ready to give it. His followers were workers, chiefly members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. They drilled with rifles openly, under the eyes of the British garrison. They had orders that whenever called, at day or night, they were to leave whatever they were doing and assemble. At half-past three in the afternoon the call would go out. Cab drivers would leave their cabs standing in the streets, office workers their desks, assistants their shop counters, workers their jobs. Whatever they were doing, wherever they were doing it, they would stop, run for home, and ten minutes after Connolly had sent the word around, the streets of Dublin would be filled with men running, jumping on trains without paying, while buttoning up uniforms and buckling on bandoliers.</p>
<p>The British government was powerless to interfere. One of its agents visited Connolly’s office. Connolly drew a revolver on him and told him to get out. And the brave Briton, facing death or liberty, chose liberty.</p>
<p>The revolt was finally planned for Easter, 1916. Arrangements had been made for cooperation with the volunteers and other revolutionary forces of- the nationalist movement. Roger Casement, a famous explorer and humanitarian, had sought arms from Germany. But the liaison service failed. The German ship arrived and signalled but contact was not made. Word for action was sent and then countermanded. There was wide support – it was no hare-brained rash adventure – but it was far more conspiracy than mass revolution. Connolly hoped to set fire to the tinder which he knew Ireland was. He failed. The shot which killed him seemed the end of revolutionary Ireland for a generation. But he died full of hope. He was a thousand times right, mistaken though he was in his tactics and immediate objectives.<br>
</p>
<h4>British Brutality Provokes New Rising</h4>
<p class="fst">The British authorities had been trembling since 1914. They didn’t know what Ireland was thinking. They knew that a revolt had been planned, but they hesitated to strike because of the possible consequences. Now they thought they knew what Ireland thought and felt. The people were quiet – dazed. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois press condemned the senseless adventure, as they called it. Wherupon the British determined to strike while the going was good and to crush the revolutionary movement. Day after day they shot leaders of the Irish Citizen Army, and exulted over it in the press. The Irish bourgeoisie protested. On May 12 Connolly was lifted out of the hospital, propped up on a chair, and shot. The British shot and shot. They would wipe them out. And as the slaughter continued, Ireland woke again, the whole country, from end to end.</p>
<p>Under Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, the Nationalist movement began to grow. By 1918 Ireland was seething. Connolly and the Easter martyrs were national heroes. At the first election after the war, over 70 of the 100 delegates were Sinn Feiners, pledged to no cooperation with Britain. The Volunteers, the Irish Republican Army, the remnants of the Citizen Army began to prepare. From below, the civil war boiled over and the revolution began, anywhere, anyhow, without leadership, without order – a nation fighting instinctively for freedom.<br>
</p>
<h4>Guerilla Warfare from Start to Finish</h4>
<p class="fst">The history of that revolution is written in pamphlets and letters and the memories of the Irish people. No book has even faintly touched it, pitched battles of any scope there were none, until very late and then between Irish and Irish. It was guerilla warfare from start to finish. Michael Collins never had more than 2,000 men in his band. But he had the flower of the nation behind him.</p>
<p>Lloyd George could send a quarter of a million men into Ireland within 72 hours if he wanted to. He dared not do it. He couldn’t trust his own soldiers. He was pretending that the Irish were loyal, except for a few bandits. He had to dig into the garbage-and collect every crook, tough and scoundrel he could find; and sent them to Ireland to save Ireland for democracy. They and the police and the garrisons fought it out with the Irish in the streets of Dublin and wherever they found each other. At any minute, in any town of Ireland, the bullets rattled in the streets. With thousands of pounds on his head, Michael Collins went about his business in Dublin, with his plans in one pocket and a revolver in another. Eamon De Valera worked in hiding, under orders of the revolution. On a night every coast guard station in Ireland was burned down. Banks, post offices, customs houses, police station were systematically destroyed by guerilla bands.</p>
<p>Men did things which would have been laughed at as ridiculous in fiction. Dan Breen fought through the campaign, street fighting and raiding, and lived to become a deputy with 42 bullet holes in his body. Over and over again he routed half a dozen British soldiers. He and two friends fought, their way out of a house surrounded “by scores of British soldiers. He would go to his mother’s house to sleep. The British soldiers would come paying their routine visit and ask her when last she had seen him. “He is upstairs sleeping,” she replied once, and the detachment fled like a flock of chickens down the street. He was the greatest of them all, but every Irish village had its Dan Breen.<br>
</p>
<h4>Years of Bitter Civil War</h4>
<p class="fst">Meanwhile the international scandal grew. The American Irish were sending money and bringing pressure to bear through Washington. Irishmen high in the British civil service were sabotaging and acting as spies for Collins. In the tangled European situation, Britain’s voice could not be raised, while she was murdering Irishmen by shooting them down at football matches. The British workers were demonstrating for their own demands and against the invasion of Ireland in crowds a quarter of a million strong. The <strong>Manchester Guardian</strong> and the Quakers led a journalistic agitation. Egypt was pounding at Britain. The British garrison was disintegrating. The British could fight no longer. They sought peace and skilfully drove a wedge between the farmers and the petty bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Irish gentry and business men on the other. A partial peace was signed.</p>
<p>Ireland lost Ulster and the movement ended in a bitter civil war. The social question was beginning to emerge from the national question. The IRA, the real mass organization in contact with the people, in 1921, as in 1914, fought a purely national struggle. But the Irish question is the land question, and after two or three years of civil war it was beginning to find voices. The inevitable next stage would have been an agrarian revolution. The Irish compradores fell back and took help from British imperialism against the incipient social revolution.</p>
<p>British banks still dominate Ireland, but some of the chains have been struck off. Today De Valera knows that if he were to countenance aid to Britain, his doom would be sealed. Connolly had made a tactical mistake, but his faith, in the Irish hatred of British imperialism was a profound revolutionary faith, based on knowledge of his people, revolutionary courage and intuition, and a deep understanding of Irish history. His rashness was valuable beyond the timid caution of a thousand lesser men.<br>
</p>
<h4>Either in Connolly’s Way, or ...</h4>
<p class="fst">Easter week was the herald of the Irish revolution and the first blow struck against imperialism during the war at a time when the Irish revolutionary movement in Europe seemed sunk in apathy and the futile squabblings of exiles in cheap cafes. Today, 25 years after, Europe is moving through the same cycle, but this time in a society so exhausted by economic crisis and political strike, so starved and. badgered by barbarous governments, so shaken and stunned by the shocks of war, so weakened for the gigantic shocks that both sides are preparing for each other, that we can watch for the break which must appear in the artificial structure of organized repression and coercion which holds the continent in chains and drives millions to mutual destruction. It may flare and be stamped out as Connolly’s revolt flared and was stamped out. But it will count, for the reasons that Connolly’s counted. Because it shows the way out, the only way out, for people who must find a way or perish.</p>
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<h3>Note by MIA</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> “1919” in the printed text, but from the context this is obviously a misprint as well as being factually untrue.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Easter Rebellion
Ireland and the Revolutionary
Tradition of Easter Week
(14 April 1941)
From Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 14, 14 April 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Easter Sunday morning, 1916. [1] Three o’clock. James Connolly, Irish revolutionary leader, was talking to his daughter and. some of her friends, all asking why the revolt so carefully prepared had been countermanded.
Connolly knew that the arms from Germany had been intercepted, he knew that the arrangements had broken down, but he knew that the British government was going to strike. He could not let the revolt be stamped out without resistance. It seemed to him, and rightly, that the resulting demonstration would be too great. He would fight, come what may. There was a chance that if they held out long enough the whole country might rise. But, whether or not that happened, the blow had to be struck. It was in this spirit, long range revolutionary calculation, that Connolly sent the message to his followers calling on them to begin.
They prepared a declaration of the Irish Republic, signed by Thomas Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, P.H. Pearse, James Connolly. Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett. About noon the next day a body of Irish volunteers marched down O’Connell Street, apparently on parade, In reality they were marching en the Post Office and they seized it. At that same moment, small detachments seized other key points in the city. A little over a thousand men, workers, and a few intellectuals at their head, had challenged the whole British Empire.
They held the center of the city for over five days. By Friday, 60,000 British soldiers were fighting 1,000 Irishmen while Dublin blazed in flames. The revolutionaries hoped that the country would follow them – but nothing happened, nothing at any rate that could then be seen and measured. On Saturday, President Pearse ordered the surrender. To even sympathetic observers it seemed that the Irish had merely once more shown themselves a brave but irrational and unpredictable people. Except Lenin, who wrote fiercely in their defense, not only as revolutionaries but in defense of the circumstances of their revolt.
A History of Bloody Repression
To understand this noble, but apparently futile heroism one must have some idea, however rough, of Ireland’s past at British hands.
It is customary to speak of Turks in the Balkans and Tsarism in Poland as classical examples of imperialist barbarism. Nothing in six centuries of European history has ever equalled the British strangulation of Ireland. To get some adequate idea of this, one has to study the histories written by Irish nationalists, and printed in Ireland. No British historian would dare to write the history of seek the truth under the thick cake of lies that British history, official and unofficial, has laid over the facts. If he wrote it, no British printer would print it.
Ireland was, many centuries ago, one of teh foremost civilized nations of the world, far in advance of the British, a country producing Catholic scholars of European reputation, and the home of a flourishing association of free clansmen. The British fell upon them after the Norman conquest and plundered them for nearly 800 years. Rape and massacre and arson – arson, massacre and rape. That is the history.
The worst was perhaps Cromwell. Ireland is divided into four great counties, of which Connaught is the most remote and the wildest. Cromwell ordered the Irish to clear out of the three counties and go to Connaught. “To hell or Connaught.” Every Irishman knows that phrase. It signalled the depopulation of a country. That was long ago. Two hundred years later the British did it again. Hitler is doing it today. The British will do it tomorrow again. What is there to choose between the ruling classes of Europe?
Deliberately Starving a People
Ireland was the natural port of call for vessels from America. Today the empty warehouses, centuries old, still can be seen in Cork and other seaport towns. Britain strangled the trade, ruined Irish industry, stole Irish land, evicted Irish tenants, made Irish Catholics pay to support English bishops, taxed Ireland to pay British debts, bribed Irish parliamentarians (Englishmen and descendants of Englishmen) to sell out Ireland.
There is no crime in the horrors of imperialism which the British did not perpetrate against the Irish people for the “benefit of Ireland.” The last and greatest was the famine of 1847. Not one Irishman need have died. The potato crop failed. But while the millions of Irish starved, ships laden with corn sailed out of the harbors to make profits for the British landlords. Parliament voted $250,000 for Irish relief, and $500,000 for the rebuilding of His Majesty’s stables the same year. And as a million people starved and died and epidemics raged, the London Times wrote that an Irishman would soon be as rare on the banks of the Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Hudson.
Revolt after revolt had failed, chiefly through the cowardice of the Irish petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of the priests, both of whom hated the British but were more afraid of the revolution. After 50 years, the Liberal Party almost got a limited Home Rule Bill through Parliament. The Tory landlords started to build an army and swore they would revolt. So much for British democracy! It was in this highly charged atmosphere that the 1914 war broke out and the British began to overtax and oppress the Irish people to make them pay for a war, which they claimed, among other things, was to defend Ireland.
Connolly Organizes Rebel Forces
Revolutionary feeling was, to all appearances, low. During the Boer War the British had denuded Ireland of troops and there had been no revolt. The British government therefore taunted the Irish Nationalists in the House that revolutionary spirit in Ireland was dead. But these Irish Gandhis talked about revolution only to threaten the British. They were as afraid of it as the British garrison, and as soon as war broke out they declared a truce. “All for the war.”
In Dublin, however, James Connolly, a revolutionary Marxist, had been writing pamphlets and organizing labor, with some success. When Sir Edward Carson and the Irish aristocrats began to form their army in 1913, Irish revolutionaries countered with a volunteer army. But when the war broke out, Connolly took the lead with the Irish citizen army, a force consisting at the most of a few hundred men centering chiefly in Dublin. Apart from Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, this was the most extraordinary revolutionary organization that Europe had seen for centuries.
It was organized for the purpose of making a revolution, and making it soon. Connolly was determined that the war would not end without a revolt. There would be no repetition of Ireland in the Boer War and taunts of the British parliamentarians. He felt that all the Irish wanted was a lead and he was ready to give it. His followers were workers, chiefly members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. They drilled with rifles openly, under the eyes of the British garrison. They had orders that whenever called, at day or night, they were to leave whatever they were doing and assemble. At half-past three in the afternoon the call would go out. Cab drivers would leave their cabs standing in the streets, office workers their desks, assistants their shop counters, workers their jobs. Whatever they were doing, wherever they were doing it, they would stop, run for home, and ten minutes after Connolly had sent the word around, the streets of Dublin would be filled with men running, jumping on trains without paying, while buttoning up uniforms and buckling on bandoliers.
The British government was powerless to interfere. One of its agents visited Connolly’s office. Connolly drew a revolver on him and told him to get out. And the brave Briton, facing death or liberty, chose liberty.
The revolt was finally planned for Easter, 1916. Arrangements had been made for cooperation with the volunteers and other revolutionary forces of- the nationalist movement. Roger Casement, a famous explorer and humanitarian, had sought arms from Germany. But the liaison service failed. The German ship arrived and signalled but contact was not made. Word for action was sent and then countermanded. There was wide support – it was no hare-brained rash adventure – but it was far more conspiracy than mass revolution. Connolly hoped to set fire to the tinder which he knew Ireland was. He failed. The shot which killed him seemed the end of revolutionary Ireland for a generation. But he died full of hope. He was a thousand times right, mistaken though he was in his tactics and immediate objectives.
British Brutality Provokes New Rising
The British authorities had been trembling since 1914. They didn’t know what Ireland was thinking. They knew that a revolt had been planned, but they hesitated to strike because of the possible consequences. Now they thought they knew what Ireland thought and felt. The people were quiet – dazed. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois press condemned the senseless adventure, as they called it. Wherupon the British determined to strike while the going was good and to crush the revolutionary movement. Day after day they shot leaders of the Irish Citizen Army, and exulted over it in the press. The Irish bourgeoisie protested. On May 12 Connolly was lifted out of the hospital, propped up on a chair, and shot. The British shot and shot. They would wipe them out. And as the slaughter continued, Ireland woke again, the whole country, from end to end.
Under Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, the Nationalist movement began to grow. By 1918 Ireland was seething. Connolly and the Easter martyrs were national heroes. At the first election after the war, over 70 of the 100 delegates were Sinn Feiners, pledged to no cooperation with Britain. The Volunteers, the Irish Republican Army, the remnants of the Citizen Army began to prepare. From below, the civil war boiled over and the revolution began, anywhere, anyhow, without leadership, without order – a nation fighting instinctively for freedom.
Guerilla Warfare from Start to Finish
The history of that revolution is written in pamphlets and letters and the memories of the Irish people. No book has even faintly touched it, pitched battles of any scope there were none, until very late and then between Irish and Irish. It was guerilla warfare from start to finish. Michael Collins never had more than 2,000 men in his band. But he had the flower of the nation behind him.
Lloyd George could send a quarter of a million men into Ireland within 72 hours if he wanted to. He dared not do it. He couldn’t trust his own soldiers. He was pretending that the Irish were loyal, except for a few bandits. He had to dig into the garbage-and collect every crook, tough and scoundrel he could find; and sent them to Ireland to save Ireland for democracy. They and the police and the garrisons fought it out with the Irish in the streets of Dublin and wherever they found each other. At any minute, in any town of Ireland, the bullets rattled in the streets. With thousands of pounds on his head, Michael Collins went about his business in Dublin, with his plans in one pocket and a revolver in another. Eamon De Valera worked in hiding, under orders of the revolution. On a night every coast guard station in Ireland was burned down. Banks, post offices, customs houses, police station were systematically destroyed by guerilla bands.
Men did things which would have been laughed at as ridiculous in fiction. Dan Breen fought through the campaign, street fighting and raiding, and lived to become a deputy with 42 bullet holes in his body. Over and over again he routed half a dozen British soldiers. He and two friends fought, their way out of a house surrounded “by scores of British soldiers. He would go to his mother’s house to sleep. The British soldiers would come paying their routine visit and ask her when last she had seen him. “He is upstairs sleeping,” she replied once, and the detachment fled like a flock of chickens down the street. He was the greatest of them all, but every Irish village had its Dan Breen.
Years of Bitter Civil War
Meanwhile the international scandal grew. The American Irish were sending money and bringing pressure to bear through Washington. Irishmen high in the British civil service were sabotaging and acting as spies for Collins. In the tangled European situation, Britain’s voice could not be raised, while she was murdering Irishmen by shooting them down at football matches. The British workers were demonstrating for their own demands and against the invasion of Ireland in crowds a quarter of a million strong. The Manchester Guardian and the Quakers led a journalistic agitation. Egypt was pounding at Britain. The British garrison was disintegrating. The British could fight no longer. They sought peace and skilfully drove a wedge between the farmers and the petty bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Irish gentry and business men on the other. A partial peace was signed.
Ireland lost Ulster and the movement ended in a bitter civil war. The social question was beginning to emerge from the national question. The IRA, the real mass organization in contact with the people, in 1921, as in 1914, fought a purely national struggle. But the Irish question is the land question, and after two or three years of civil war it was beginning to find voices. The inevitable next stage would have been an agrarian revolution. The Irish compradores fell back and took help from British imperialism against the incipient social revolution.
British banks still dominate Ireland, but some of the chains have been struck off. Today De Valera knows that if he were to countenance aid to Britain, his doom would be sealed. Connolly had made a tactical mistake, but his faith, in the Irish hatred of British imperialism was a profound revolutionary faith, based on knowledge of his people, revolutionary courage and intuition, and a deep understanding of Irish history. His rashness was valuable beyond the timid caution of a thousand lesser men.
Either in Connolly’s Way, or ...
Easter week was the herald of the Irish revolution and the first blow struck against imperialism during the war at a time when the Irish revolutionary movement in Europe seemed sunk in apathy and the futile squabblings of exiles in cheap cafes. Today, 25 years after, Europe is moving through the same cycle, but this time in a society so exhausted by economic crisis and political strike, so starved and. badgered by barbarous governments, so shaken and stunned by the shocks of war, so weakened for the gigantic shocks that both sides are preparing for each other, that we can watch for the break which must appear in the artificial structure of organized repression and coercion which holds the continent in chains and drives millions to mutual destruction. It may flare and be stamped out as Connolly’s revolt flared and was stamped out. But it will count, for the reasons that Connolly’s counted. Because it shows the way out, the only way out, for people who must find a way or perish.
Note by MIA
1. “1919” in the printed text, but from the context this is obviously a misprint as well as being factually untrue.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>One-Tenth of the Nation</h1>
<h3>(18 December 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_51" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 51</a>, 18 December 1944, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The question of discrimination against Negroes in employment in New York is now boiling. The State Legislation has held a series of investigations up-state and is now considering a bill to curb race, creed or color discrimination in industry.</p>
<p>In Washington, the House Labor Committee favorably reported a bill for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. The voting was nine to five. A similar bill has been reported by the Senate some weeks but is not likely to reach the floor of that body before adjournment.</p>
<p>Now in, principle and in practice <strong>Labor Action</strong> supports that type of legislation. It has to be scrutinized very carefully, because bills passed by capitalist politicians, ostensibly to help, workers, frequently turn out to have clauses which are aimed, against working people as a whole. What we wish to refer to here is the agitation which is being carried on around this proposed legislation.</p>
<p><em>The reason for the legislation is clear. Congress is scared, and the House Committee on Labor stated openly that unless the rights of minorities were safeguarded there was a possibility of post-war race riots. Furthermore, the labor movement as a whole, particularly the CIO, is concerned and active about this question. And, most important of all, the Negro people, however they may have voted in the recent election, have publicly declared their deep suspicion of the insincerity of both capitalist parties in regard to the Negro question.</em></p>
<p>This is why you get this kind of loud talk at the New York State hearing in Buffalo. Former Court of Appeals Justice Charles Sears, who gave evidence, wanted an order which would compel the employers to desist in the discrimination or to rehire workers fired for Jim Crow reasons, and give compensation for the time lost. This was to be immediately enforceable, “subject, of course, to court review.”</p>
<p>The whole business has a history, too. Governor Dewey, a candidate for the presidency, made a great gesture toward Negroes. He appointed a “non-partisan” committee to investigate and make proposals on discrimination. When the committee made its findings, the Governor blissfully ignored its evidence and proposals, postponing any action and asking for further investigations! There is also involved interstate politics, represented by the struggle between the Republican and the Democrats and their efforts to form blocs and counter-blocs with the Liberal Party and the ALP.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Word of Warning</h4>
<p class="fst">I wish to sound a note of warning. This can easily mean interference by the government in the affairs of labor, which can prove a very dangerous weapon against the labor, movement as a whole. Both the Negro people, and the labor movement must be on the alert and not be carried away by the avowed intentions of these bills. If a workers’ government were doing it, that is one thing. A capitalist government is something else.</p>
<p>For instance, A. Philip Randolph has just informed us that what we require is a new party. He has now issued a statement on behalf of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC in which he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Recommendation of the bill for a permanent FEPC by the House Labor Committee soon after the election campaign is a reason for confidence in campaign pledges.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Now this is nonsense and dangerous nonsense. Randolph, more than anyone else, knows why the present FEPC was formed at all. It was formed as the only means of checking a militant mass movement of Negroes. The present bills are aimed at nothing else. They have, nothing whatever, to do with faithful keeping, of campaign pledges by capitalist parties. To preach that doctrine. is to deceive the people.</em></p>
<p>The <strong>People’s Voice</strong> seizes the opportunity to boost the liberals. It writes an article entitled: <em>Liberals Hail House Group Action on FEPC</em>.</p>
<p>This is directed against the labor movement as a labor movement and is in harmony with the Stalinist line of teaching the workers to look to the Roosevelt government and the liberals instead of to the organized workers.</p>
<p>The Stalinists are in the same game. Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., notorious member of the Communist Party and notorious deceiver of the Negro people on behalf of the Stalinist bureaucracy, introduced a resolution last February in the New York City Council calling for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. Recently the New York City Council took over this resolution adopted last February and unanimously sponsors it.</p>
<p>What is the result of all this? Both the Negro people and the labor movement are being encouraged to believe that the FEPC will be their greatest guarantee for job rights and job equality in the post-war world.</p>
<p>That this is exactly what they are thinking is proved by the result of a poll which was carried out among a cross-section of Negro workers in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta. The poll was carried out by the National Non-Partisan League in cooperation with the Chicago Defenders and the workers were asked:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Do you think that a strongly enforced FEPC can guarantee Negro job rights after the war?”</p>
<p class="fst">Eighty-five per cent of those, who replied said, yes.</p>
<p>They were asked another question:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Do you think a permanent FEPC can eliminate race discrimination?”</p>
<p class="fst">Eighty per cent who replied said, yes.</p>
<p><em>Now, as we say, we are in favor of such bills, carefully scrutinized to rid them of clauses which will place anti-labor powers in the hands of the government. But we protest most strongly against any agitation which leads Negroes to believe that race discrimination can be abolished by any kind of government bill introduced by capitalist parties and administered by a capitalist government. Race discrimination has its deepest roots in the insecurity and unemployment inseparable from capitalist society.</em></p>
<p>If, after the War a great wave of unemployment strikes this country, no kind of FEPC can prevent the most savage racial tensions developing. Whatever bills the government may pass, the solution of discrimination in employment lies in the labor movement itself, in its handling of the race problem in the unions, and <em>in its taking over the productive system and organizing it in such a way as to abolish unemployment</em>.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
(18 December 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 51, 18 December 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The question of discrimination against Negroes in employment in New York is now boiling. The State Legislation has held a series of investigations up-state and is now considering a bill to curb race, creed or color discrimination in industry.
In Washington, the House Labor Committee favorably reported a bill for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. The voting was nine to five. A similar bill has been reported by the Senate some weeks but is not likely to reach the floor of that body before adjournment.
Now in, principle and in practice Labor Action supports that type of legislation. It has to be scrutinized very carefully, because bills passed by capitalist politicians, ostensibly to help, workers, frequently turn out to have clauses which are aimed, against working people as a whole. What we wish to refer to here is the agitation which is being carried on around this proposed legislation.
The reason for the legislation is clear. Congress is scared, and the House Committee on Labor stated openly that unless the rights of minorities were safeguarded there was a possibility of post-war race riots. Furthermore, the labor movement as a whole, particularly the CIO, is concerned and active about this question. And, most important of all, the Negro people, however they may have voted in the recent election, have publicly declared their deep suspicion of the insincerity of both capitalist parties in regard to the Negro question.
This is why you get this kind of loud talk at the New York State hearing in Buffalo. Former Court of Appeals Justice Charles Sears, who gave evidence, wanted an order which would compel the employers to desist in the discrimination or to rehire workers fired for Jim Crow reasons, and give compensation for the time lost. This was to be immediately enforceable, “subject, of course, to court review.”
The whole business has a history, too. Governor Dewey, a candidate for the presidency, made a great gesture toward Negroes. He appointed a “non-partisan” committee to investigate and make proposals on discrimination. When the committee made its findings, the Governor blissfully ignored its evidence and proposals, postponing any action and asking for further investigations! There is also involved interstate politics, represented by the struggle between the Republican and the Democrats and their efforts to form blocs and counter-blocs with the Liberal Party and the ALP.
A Word of Warning
I wish to sound a note of warning. This can easily mean interference by the government in the affairs of labor, which can prove a very dangerous weapon against the labor, movement as a whole. Both the Negro people, and the labor movement must be on the alert and not be carried away by the avowed intentions of these bills. If a workers’ government were doing it, that is one thing. A capitalist government is something else.
For instance, A. Philip Randolph has just informed us that what we require is a new party. He has now issued a statement on behalf of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC in which he says:
“Recommendation of the bill for a permanent FEPC by the House Labor Committee soon after the election campaign is a reason for confidence in campaign pledges.”
Now this is nonsense and dangerous nonsense. Randolph, more than anyone else, knows why the present FEPC was formed at all. It was formed as the only means of checking a militant mass movement of Negroes. The present bills are aimed at nothing else. They have, nothing whatever, to do with faithful keeping, of campaign pledges by capitalist parties. To preach that doctrine. is to deceive the people.
The People’s Voice seizes the opportunity to boost the liberals. It writes an article entitled: Liberals Hail House Group Action on FEPC.
This is directed against the labor movement as a labor movement and is in harmony with the Stalinist line of teaching the workers to look to the Roosevelt government and the liberals instead of to the organized workers.
The Stalinists are in the same game. Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., notorious member of the Communist Party and notorious deceiver of the Negro people on behalf of the Stalinist bureaucracy, introduced a resolution last February in the New York City Council calling for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. Recently the New York City Council took over this resolution adopted last February and unanimously sponsors it.
What is the result of all this? Both the Negro people and the labor movement are being encouraged to believe that the FEPC will be their greatest guarantee for job rights and job equality in the post-war world.
That this is exactly what they are thinking is proved by the result of a poll which was carried out among a cross-section of Negro workers in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta. The poll was carried out by the National Non-Partisan League in cooperation with the Chicago Defenders and the workers were asked:
“Do you think that a strongly enforced FEPC can guarantee Negro job rights after the war?”
Eighty-five per cent of those, who replied said, yes.
They were asked another question:
“Do you think a permanent FEPC can eliminate race discrimination?”
Eighty per cent who replied said, yes.
Now, as we say, we are in favor of such bills, carefully scrutinized to rid them of clauses which will place anti-labor powers in the hands of the government. But we protest most strongly against any agitation which leads Negroes to believe that race discrimination can be abolished by any kind of government bill introduced by capitalist parties and administered by a capitalist government. Race discrimination has its deepest roots in the insecurity and unemployment inseparable from capitalist society.
If, after the War a great wave of unemployment strikes this country, no kind of FEPC can prevent the most savage racial tensions developing. Whatever bills the government may pass, the solution of discrimination in employment lies in the labor movement itself, in its handling of the race problem in the unions, and in its taking over the productive system and organizing it in such a way as to abolish unemployment.
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<h2>C.L.R. James</h2>
<h3>World Revolution 1917–1936<br>
The Rise and Fall of the Communist International</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><strong>Source:</strong> World Revolution 1917–1936.<br>
<strong>Publisher:</strong> Furnell and Sons, 1937.<br>
<strong>HTML Markup:</strong> <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm">Sally Ryan</a>.<br>
<strong>Proofread:</strong> Alvaro Miranda (August 2020–January 2021).</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="index"><a href="intro2.htm">Introduction to 1993 edition</a> – (Al Richardson)<br><br>
<a href="preface.htm">Preface</a><br>
<a href="intro.htm">Introductory</a><br>
<a href="ch01.htm">Chapter I. Marxism</a><br>
<a href="ch02.htm">Chapter II. The Forerunners of the Third International</a><br>
<a href="ch03.htm">Chapter III. The War and the Russian Revolution</a><br>
<a href="ch04.htm">Chapter IV. The Failure of the World Revolution and the Foundation of the International</a><br>
<a href="ch05.htm">Chapter V. Lenin and Socialism</a><br>
<a href="ch06.htm">Chapter VI. Stalin and Socialism</a><br>
<a href="ch07.htm">Chapter VII. Stalin Kills the 1923 Revolution</a><br>
<a href="ch08.htm">Chapter VIII. The Kulak and the British General Council</a><br>
<a href="ch09.htm">Chapter IX. Stalin Ruins the Chinese Revolution</a><br>
<a href="ch10.htm">Chapter X. The Platform and the Five-Year Plan</a><br>
<a href="ch11.htm">Chapter XI. Industry and the Plan</a><br>
<a href="ch12.htm">Chapter XII. “After Hitler, Our Turn”</a><br>
<a href="ch13.htm">Chapter XIII. The Great Retreat</a><br>
<a href="ch14.htm">Chapter XIV. The Revolution Abandoned</a><br>
<a href="ch15.htm">Chapter XV. A Fourth International, the Only Hope</a><br>
<a href="appendix.htm">Appendix on <em>Soviet Communism</em> by Sidney and Beatrice Webb</a><br>
</p>
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C.L.R. James
World Revolution 1917–1936
The Rise and Fall of the Communist International
Source: World Revolution 1917–1936.
Publisher: Furnell and Sons, 1937.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
Proofread: Alvaro Miranda (August 2020–January 2021).
Introduction to 1993 edition – (Al Richardson)
Preface
Introductory
Chapter I. Marxism
Chapter II. The Forerunners of the Third International
Chapter III. The War and the Russian Revolution
Chapter IV. The Failure of the World Revolution and the Foundation of the International
Chapter V. Lenin and Socialism
Chapter VI. Stalin and Socialism
Chapter VII. Stalin Kills the 1923 Revolution
Chapter VIII. The Kulak and the British General Council
Chapter IX. Stalin Ruins the Chinese Revolution
Chapter X. The Platform and the Five-Year Plan
Chapter XI. Industry and the Plan
Chapter XII. “After Hitler, Our Turn”
Chapter XIII. The Great Retreat
Chapter XIV. The Revolution Abandoned
Chapter XV. A Fourth International, the Only Hope
Appendix on Soviet Communism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
C.L.R. James Internet Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>Bilbo: Murderer of the FEPC</h1>
<h3>(8 July 1946)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_27" target="new">Vol. X No. 27</a>, 8 July 1946, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Senator Bilbo has called upon the white people of Mississippi to prevent the Negroes from voting, by force if need be. Certain elements of the capitalist press have distinguished themselves by violent attacks upon Bilbo as a disgrace to the nation and to the democratic tradition. This column does not become excessively excited about them. But when the Senate joins in and decides that one of its innumerable committees should investigate Bilbo’s statements and activities, then it is time to intervene.</p>
<p><em>No activities of the Senate can excuse them from direct responsibility for Bilbo.</em></p>
<p><em>Bilbo is one of the leaders of that group of southern Senators who have filibustered away the anti-lynching bill and the permanent FEPC bill. The Senate allowed Bilbo to do this.</em></p>
<p>What is Bilbo’s chief political appeal to his constituents today? It is that he, by his efforts in the Senate, was chiefly instrumental in preventing the extension of FEPC. The South, and particularly Mississippi, is very hostile to FEPC. We repeat, the Senate is responsible for Bilbo.<br>
</p>
<h4>Long Speeches in Senate</h4>
<p class="fst">Bilbo does not make offensive remarks only in Mississippi. He does it consistently in the Senate itself. Senators frequently make long speeches in the Senate, not for the benefit of other Senators, but in order that these remarks, printed in the Congressional Record at government expense, may be distributed to their constituents at home. Nobody abuses this practice more than Senator Bilbo. What is the attitude of the other Senators? They yawn and say: Don’t mind him. He is just “Bilboing.”</p>
<p><em>This is a new political term in Washington, to “bilbo” – that is to say, to use the Senate as a forum to preach race hatred, to denounce Negroes, Italians, Jews and labor leaders.</em></p>
<p>To sit and yawn over these things, and “not to mind” them, is to encourage Bilbo.</p>
<p>Senator Robert Taft says as follows to complaints about Bilbo’s conduct.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We have considered filing a petition to oust him by a two-thirds vote, but he would revel in the publicity of a trial. Of course, as a general thing, Senators cannot begin denouncing other Senators because they disagree with them, but certainly Bilbo is not in the same basis as any other Senator that I know of.”</p>
<p class="fst">What a hypocritical letter! Nobody is asking Senator Taft to take action against Bilbo in the Senate because he disagrees with Bilbo’s <em>political views</em>. Many right-minded citizens believe that Bilbo’s violent preaching of race hatred and his remarks, stinking with insults to many millions of American citizens, are offensive to <em>all persons</em>. To the extent that in his letter and his political conduct he avoids the issue, he is also responsible for Bilbo.<br>
</p>
<h4><strong>Mayor of Washington</strong></h4>
<p class="fst">Bilbo today is chairman of the Senate’s District of Columbia committee, and is virtually the mayor of the city of Washington. He is one of the main elements who help keep Washington a center of Jim Crow. But how come that this reactionary southern Senator can hold such a responsible post?</p>
<p>It is because Congress and thousands of capitalists in the United States do not want the large Negro population in Washington to exercise the vote. In this respect, also, they prefer Senator Bilbo to the exercise of democratic rights by the citizens of the nation’s capital. Here again, they are responsible for and encourage the Senator.</p>
<p><em>All mass campaigns against the Senator, all expressions of popular resentment, are valuable. But the labor movement has to ask itself: How comes it that organized labor is in the same political party with this enemy of progress? Bilbo is only a symbol. Labor has to get its own party. This party will not only exclude Bilbo from its ranks. One of its main tasks will be to wipe away him and all such from participation in American political life.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
Bilbo: Murderer of the FEPC
(8 July 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. X No. 27, 8 July 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Senator Bilbo has called upon the white people of Mississippi to prevent the Negroes from voting, by force if need be. Certain elements of the capitalist press have distinguished themselves by violent attacks upon Bilbo as a disgrace to the nation and to the democratic tradition. This column does not become excessively excited about them. But when the Senate joins in and decides that one of its innumerable committees should investigate Bilbo’s statements and activities, then it is time to intervene.
No activities of the Senate can excuse them from direct responsibility for Bilbo.
Bilbo is one of the leaders of that group of southern Senators who have filibustered away the anti-lynching bill and the permanent FEPC bill. The Senate allowed Bilbo to do this.
What is Bilbo’s chief political appeal to his constituents today? It is that he, by his efforts in the Senate, was chiefly instrumental in preventing the extension of FEPC. The South, and particularly Mississippi, is very hostile to FEPC. We repeat, the Senate is responsible for Bilbo.
Long Speeches in Senate
Bilbo does not make offensive remarks only in Mississippi. He does it consistently in the Senate itself. Senators frequently make long speeches in the Senate, not for the benefit of other Senators, but in order that these remarks, printed in the Congressional Record at government expense, may be distributed to their constituents at home. Nobody abuses this practice more than Senator Bilbo. What is the attitude of the other Senators? They yawn and say: Don’t mind him. He is just “Bilboing.”
This is a new political term in Washington, to “bilbo” – that is to say, to use the Senate as a forum to preach race hatred, to denounce Negroes, Italians, Jews and labor leaders.
To sit and yawn over these things, and “not to mind” them, is to encourage Bilbo.
Senator Robert Taft says as follows to complaints about Bilbo’s conduct.
“We have considered filing a petition to oust him by a two-thirds vote, but he would revel in the publicity of a trial. Of course, as a general thing, Senators cannot begin denouncing other Senators because they disagree with them, but certainly Bilbo is not in the same basis as any other Senator that I know of.”
What a hypocritical letter! Nobody is asking Senator Taft to take action against Bilbo in the Senate because he disagrees with Bilbo’s political views. Many right-minded citizens believe that Bilbo’s violent preaching of race hatred and his remarks, stinking with insults to many millions of American citizens, are offensive to all persons. To the extent that in his letter and his political conduct he avoids the issue, he is also responsible for Bilbo.
Mayor of Washington
Bilbo today is chairman of the Senate’s District of Columbia committee, and is virtually the mayor of the city of Washington. He is one of the main elements who help keep Washington a center of Jim Crow. But how come that this reactionary southern Senator can hold such a responsible post?
It is because Congress and thousands of capitalists in the United States do not want the large Negro population in Washington to exercise the vote. In this respect, also, they prefer Senator Bilbo to the exercise of democratic rights by the citizens of the nation’s capital. Here again, they are responsible for and encourage the Senator.
All mass campaigns against the Senator, all expressions of popular resentment, are valuable. But the labor movement has to ask itself: How comes it that organized labor is in the same political party with this enemy of progress? Bilbo is only a symbol. Labor has to get its own party. This party will not only exclude Bilbo from its ranks. One of its main tasks will be to wipe away him and all such from participation in American political life.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>British Labor and the Colonies</h1>
<h3>(2 September 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_36" target="new">Vol. 9 No. 36</a>, 3 September 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The American Negro press in particular has come out in very
gratifying jubilation over the victory of the British Labor Party in
the elections. The victory – and a very great, victory it is –
seems to herald independence or self-government for colonial peoples.
And in recent years the Negro people in the United States have shown
a serious interest in the fate of the hundreds of millions oppressed
and exploited by British imperialism.</p>
<p>True, some of the more experienced journalists, like George
Schuyler of the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, are skeptical. Schuyler,
in fact, states bluntly: “After all, British Labor has a stake
in imperialism.” This is the crux of the matter and illustrates
a fundamental problem in all Labor politics.</p>
<p>Has British Labor got at stake in imperialism? The answer depends
upon the definition of the term British Labor.</p>
<p><em>The British working class, in the majority of its millions, has
no stake in imperialism. A very small section has shared in the
profits that British capital sucked out of the Empire. These few
received higher wages than the average and formed the British
aristocracy of labor. They were the social basis of the parliamentary
Labor Party and dominated it.</em></p>
<p>The British labor leaders and the trade union bureaucrats express
the aims, wishes and ideas of this section of labor. In alliance with
them are the parliamentarians, municipal councillors, journalists,
school teachers and other white collar workers who turn away from the
regular capitalist parties and embrace the labor movement.</p>
<p>All these form a tight caucus sitting on top of the labor
movement. They certainly have a stake in imperialism. They cannot
help it. They</p>
<p>do not want any radical change in the Britain of today. Despite
their socialistic words, they have much the same type of political
mentality as Hillman and Murray. Their socialism is merely a
decoration, for a program of large public works, government
intervention in or control of banks and bankrupt industries, more
social security, better educational facilities for workers, etc.</p>
<p>This means <em>reforming</em> the capitalist system in Britain, but
giving it a new name – socialism. It sounds better.</p>
<p><em>Every child knows that capitalist Britain is bound tight to the
Empire. Without India and the African colonies the present economic
structure of Britain would fly apart into a million pieces. So that
the Labor leaders by leaving capitalist Britain virtually intact are
thereby compelled to retain all the links of empire.</em></p>
<p>But the large majority of the British workers, eighty per cent at
least, if not more, would support freedom for India and the African
colonies tomorrow. They want a new Britain – a socialist
Britain. They are not very clear in their own minds as to how this
socialist Britain will function. Roughly, they think that if
capitalist property were taken over by a socialist government, if the
land, were nationalized, and if the economy was planned, Britain
would get a new-start.<br>
</p>
<h4>Real Change Needed</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>They are perfectly right.</em></p>
<p>What is required is a total reorganization of the economy of Great
Britain AND a total reorganization of the economy of the colonies.
Instead of a relationship ox exploitation between capitalist Britain
and the colonies, what is required is a relationship of co-operation
between socialist Britain and emancipated colonies.</p>
<p><em>But so long as the Labor leaders hold on to the essentials of a
capitalistic Britain, with a camouflage of socialism, so long they
are going, to hold on to the colonial Empire, with a camouflage of
freedom.</em></p>
<p><em>Fortunately, the crisis in all fields is so sharp, today that
camouflage is on its last legs. The British masses are on the alert.
They mean business. The. colonial masses are on the alert also. They
also mean business.</em></p>
<p>The struggle for a socialist Britain and emancipated colonies has
just begun. It is not going to be easy. When the Workers Party and
revolutionary socialists celebrate the great victory of Labor in the
elections, we do so because we rejoice at the fact that the great
body of the people have placed the power in the hands of their own
party. There can be no more excuses. The Labor leaders have the
power. The masses are waiting impatiently. The leaders either must
act or expose themselves.<br>
</p>
<h4>Support the Masses</h4>
<p class="fst">The American Negroes, therefore, must cultivate no illusions about
immediate emancipation for the colonies. At the same time they must
not encourage the slightest cynicism. The thing to do now is to
encourage both the working masses of Britain and the colonial peoples
to demand genuine socialist politics from the Labor leaders. If
American Negroes, through their organizations, can make their desires
for colonial freedom known to the colonial peoples, to the Labor
government <em>and to the British masses</em> they would be doing a
valuable work.</p>
<p><em>Britain and the colonies are in a ferment over the great
victory. The progressive intervention of American Negroes could add
to the ferment, would: have a dramatic effect and push the whole
movement forward.</em></p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
British Labor and the Colonies
(2 September 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. 9 No. 36, 3 September 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The American Negro press in particular has come out in very
gratifying jubilation over the victory of the British Labor Party in
the elections. The victory – and a very great, victory it is –
seems to herald independence or self-government for colonial peoples.
And in recent years the Negro people in the United States have shown
a serious interest in the fate of the hundreds of millions oppressed
and exploited by British imperialism.
True, some of the more experienced journalists, like George
Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier, are skeptical. Schuyler,
in fact, states bluntly: “After all, British Labor has a stake
in imperialism.” This is the crux of the matter and illustrates
a fundamental problem in all Labor politics.
Has British Labor got at stake in imperialism? The answer depends
upon the definition of the term British Labor.
The British working class, in the majority of its millions, has
no stake in imperialism. A very small section has shared in the
profits that British capital sucked out of the Empire. These few
received higher wages than the average and formed the British
aristocracy of labor. They were the social basis of the parliamentary
Labor Party and dominated it.
The British labor leaders and the trade union bureaucrats express
the aims, wishes and ideas of this section of labor. In alliance with
them are the parliamentarians, municipal councillors, journalists,
school teachers and other white collar workers who turn away from the
regular capitalist parties and embrace the labor movement.
All these form a tight caucus sitting on top of the labor
movement. They certainly have a stake in imperialism. They cannot
help it. They
do not want any radical change in the Britain of today. Despite
their socialistic words, they have much the same type of political
mentality as Hillman and Murray. Their socialism is merely a
decoration, for a program of large public works, government
intervention in or control of banks and bankrupt industries, more
social security, better educational facilities for workers, etc.
This means reforming the capitalist system in Britain, but
giving it a new name – socialism. It sounds better.
Every child knows that capitalist Britain is bound tight to the
Empire. Without India and the African colonies the present economic
structure of Britain would fly apart into a million pieces. So that
the Labor leaders by leaving capitalist Britain virtually intact are
thereby compelled to retain all the links of empire.
But the large majority of the British workers, eighty per cent at
least, if not more, would support freedom for India and the African
colonies tomorrow. They want a new Britain – a socialist
Britain. They are not very clear in their own minds as to how this
socialist Britain will function. Roughly, they think that if
capitalist property were taken over by a socialist government, if the
land, were nationalized, and if the economy was planned, Britain
would get a new-start.
Real Change Needed
They are perfectly right.
What is required is a total reorganization of the economy of Great
Britain AND a total reorganization of the economy of the colonies.
Instead of a relationship ox exploitation between capitalist Britain
and the colonies, what is required is a relationship of co-operation
between socialist Britain and emancipated colonies.
But so long as the Labor leaders hold on to the essentials of a
capitalistic Britain, with a camouflage of socialism, so long they
are going, to hold on to the colonial Empire, with a camouflage of
freedom.
Fortunately, the crisis in all fields is so sharp, today that
camouflage is on its last legs. The British masses are on the alert.
They mean business. The. colonial masses are on the alert also. They
also mean business.
The struggle for a socialist Britain and emancipated colonies has
just begun. It is not going to be easy. When the Workers Party and
revolutionary socialists celebrate the great victory of Labor in the
elections, we do so because we rejoice at the fact that the great
body of the people have placed the power in the hands of their own
party. There can be no more excuses. The Labor leaders have the
power. The masses are waiting impatiently. The leaders either must
act or expose themselves.
Support the Masses
The American Negroes, therefore, must cultivate no illusions about
immediate emancipation for the colonies. At the same time they must
not encourage the slightest cynicism. The thing to do now is to
encourage both the working masses of Britain and the colonial peoples
to demand genuine socialist politics from the Labor leaders. If
American Negroes, through their organizations, can make their desires
for colonial freedom known to the colonial peoples, to the Labor
government and to the British masses they would be doing a
valuable work.
Britain and the colonies are in a ferment over the great
victory. The progressive intervention of American Negroes could add
to the ferment, would: have a dramatic effect and push the whole
movement forward.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Speech That Was Not Made<br>
at NAACP Meet</h1>
<h3>(8 July 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>The Negro’s Fight</em>, <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1940/index.htm#la04_13" target="new">vol. 4 No. 13</a>, 8 July 1940, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Mr. Chairman and Delegates:</p>
<p class="fst">The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is holding its conference, and we can truly say that it has never held a conference at a more critical period in the history of humanity. Today we live while one war rages in Europe and Africa, another rages in Asia and preparations for American entry into one, the other or both, are going on openly before us.</p>
<p>We speak in the name of the Negro people but we are all Americans. We must think in terms of the country as a whole. If the country goes to war, then the Negro people are at war.</p>
<p>The war, we are told, is a war for democracy and Mr. Spingarn, our president, has just told us that “No Negro will be found in the ranks of the Fifth Column.”</p>
<p>Now the Fifth Columnists are the enemies of democracy, the men who preach and practice race-prejudice, the enemies of human equality, the persecutors of the poor, all the things for which Hitler, France and Mussolini stands. We of the NAACP know that these enemies of the people and friends and admirers of Hitler are found in every country and we openly declare war against them. In this country you can look for them in those who propose an end to social legislation and labor unions.</p>
<p>The NAACP therefore, calls upon President Roosevelt immediately to declare:</p>
<ol>
<li>The American people are determined to stamp out race-prejudice in America so as to show the population that Hitler and Hitlerism will have no basis in this country for their criminal practices.<br>
</li>
<li>The President will summon Mr. Willkie to the White House and both will issue a statement in the Name of the Democratic and Republican parties that all poll-taxes, grandfather clauses, violence against Negroes at elections and. any discrimination whatever against them in the exercise of their lawful electoral rights shall henceforth cease and that Congress will mercilessly punish all those enemies of democracy in America who for 75 years have carried on Hitlerite practices against the Negroes.<br>
</li>
<li>The President will immediately publish an emergency decree which will prohibit any Jim-Crow practices against Negroes in any part of the country. The Federal government will heavily punish all breakers of this decree.<br>
</li>
<li>The President will summon William Green to the White House and inform him that if any union in the AFL should exclude a Negro from its ranks, or in any way discriminate against the Negroes, that union will thereby be considered an enemy of democracy and a supporter of Hitlerism and the Fifth Column.<br>
</li>
<li>The President will inform all employers that if any of them discriminate against Negroes, either as workers or office employees, they will be excluded from all government contracts.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">That we think is the plain duty of the President, and we can assure him that if he were to take the lead in enforcing these elementary laws of democracy, we would be more impressed with his anger against Hitler and Hitlerism abroad and Fifth Columnists at home.<br>
</p>
<h4>Suggestions to John L. Lewis</h4>
<p class="fst">Mr. John L. Lewis has also spoken to us and he seems to be asking us to support the Republican Party. We Negroes have supported the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the past, and wo have nothing to show for it. For the most part we are working people and Mr. Lewis is a labor leader. We therefore, as working people, propose to him the following:</p>
<ol>
<li>Mr. Lewis should within eight weeks from to-day summon a conference of all the ranks of of organized labor, poor farmers, Negroes, youth groups, and old age pension groups.<br>
</li>
<li>At the Conference Mr. Lewis should propose:<br>
a. A united working class organization on the basis of working class democracy.<br>
b. As association of poor farmers which will collaborate with the workers organization for the attainment of common ends.<br>
c. A gigantic program of public works which will give thirty dollars a week for thirty hours of work to every worker in the country.<br>
d. Sixty dollars a month for all over 60 years of age.<br>
e. A special fund to provide training and special opportunities for the youth.<br>
f. The rich to be taxed and Wall Street bankers to be expropriated to find the funds for the above program.<br>
g. That the government take over all the war industries and run them under the control of the workers.<br>
h. That the government arm the people under the control of the unions and the workers themselves so as to constitute the best defense against the real Fifth Columnists at home and Hitlerism abroad.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">On such a program the NAACP would support Mr. Lewis for President and it can assure him that it will not only mobilize 99% of the Negro vote in America but will make of every Negro a propagandist and agitator among the white workers for a real democracy in the U.S. In this way the NAACP would advance the colored people, would make its contribution to the prosperity and the well-being of all Americans, and would carry on the only real war for democracy that can be fought today.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Speech That Was Not Made
at NAACP Meet
(8 July 1940)
The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, vol. 4 No. 13, 8 July 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Mr. Chairman and Delegates:
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is holding its conference, and we can truly say that it has never held a conference at a more critical period in the history of humanity. Today we live while one war rages in Europe and Africa, another rages in Asia and preparations for American entry into one, the other or both, are going on openly before us.
We speak in the name of the Negro people but we are all Americans. We must think in terms of the country as a whole. If the country goes to war, then the Negro people are at war.
The war, we are told, is a war for democracy and Mr. Spingarn, our president, has just told us that “No Negro will be found in the ranks of the Fifth Column.”
Now the Fifth Columnists are the enemies of democracy, the men who preach and practice race-prejudice, the enemies of human equality, the persecutors of the poor, all the things for which Hitler, France and Mussolini stands. We of the NAACP know that these enemies of the people and friends and admirers of Hitler are found in every country and we openly declare war against them. In this country you can look for them in those who propose an end to social legislation and labor unions.
The NAACP therefore, calls upon President Roosevelt immediately to declare:
The American people are determined to stamp out race-prejudice in America so as to show the population that Hitler and Hitlerism will have no basis in this country for their criminal practices.
The President will summon Mr. Willkie to the White House and both will issue a statement in the Name of the Democratic and Republican parties that all poll-taxes, grandfather clauses, violence against Negroes at elections and. any discrimination whatever against them in the exercise of their lawful electoral rights shall henceforth cease and that Congress will mercilessly punish all those enemies of democracy in America who for 75 years have carried on Hitlerite practices against the Negroes.
The President will immediately publish an emergency decree which will prohibit any Jim-Crow practices against Negroes in any part of the country. The Federal government will heavily punish all breakers of this decree.
The President will summon William Green to the White House and inform him that if any union in the AFL should exclude a Negro from its ranks, or in any way discriminate against the Negroes, that union will thereby be considered an enemy of democracy and a supporter of Hitlerism and the Fifth Column.
The President will inform all employers that if any of them discriminate against Negroes, either as workers or office employees, they will be excluded from all government contracts.
That we think is the plain duty of the President, and we can assure him that if he were to take the lead in enforcing these elementary laws of democracy, we would be more impressed with his anger against Hitler and Hitlerism abroad and Fifth Columnists at home.
Suggestions to John L. Lewis
Mr. John L. Lewis has also spoken to us and he seems to be asking us to support the Republican Party. We Negroes have supported the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the past, and wo have nothing to show for it. For the most part we are working people and Mr. Lewis is a labor leader. We therefore, as working people, propose to him the following:
Mr. Lewis should within eight weeks from to-day summon a conference of all the ranks of of organized labor, poor farmers, Negroes, youth groups, and old age pension groups.
At the Conference Mr. Lewis should propose:
a. A united working class organization on the basis of working class democracy.
b. As association of poor farmers which will collaborate with the workers organization for the attainment of common ends.
c. A gigantic program of public works which will give thirty dollars a week for thirty hours of work to every worker in the country.
d. Sixty dollars a month for all over 60 years of age.
e. A special fund to provide training and special opportunities for the youth.
f. The rich to be taxed and Wall Street bankers to be expropriated to find the funds for the above program.
g. That the government take over all the war industries and run them under the control of the workers.
h. That the government arm the people under the control of the unions and the workers themselves so as to constitute the best defense against the real Fifth Columnists at home and Hitlerism abroad.
On such a program the NAACP would support Mr. Lewis for President and it can assure him that it will not only mobilize 99% of the Negro vote in America but will make of every Negro a propagandist and agitator among the white workers for a real democracy in the U.S. In this way the NAACP would advance the colored people, would make its contribution to the prosperity and the well-being of all Americans, and would carry on the only real war for democracy that can be fought today.
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<h2 class="western">J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Late Wendell Willkie:<br>
The Politician Who Came Too Late</h1>
<h3>(October 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_43" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 43</a>, 23 October 1944, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The career of Wendell Willkie is of significance to the labor movement. His “progressiveness” was similar to Roosevelt’s. In national politics it was aimed at getting sufficient votes from labor, the lower middle classes and the Negroes in order to win the election.</p>
<p>Willkie represented big business. One of his political enemies constantly and aptly called him “The barefoot boy from Wall Street.” But big business presents many different faces to the public and sometimes different faces to different sections of the public. Willkie had seen very clearly that the Republican Party had to gain some popular base in order to defeat the Democratic Party at the polls. In the present epoch of social crisis and change, the rise of organized labor and the crisis of the middle class, the old slogans of rugged individualism, free enterprise, the American way, etc., had little meaning for great numbers of the people and were actually offensive to many.</p>
<p>President Roosevelt had skillfully capitalized on this with his slogan of “the New Deal.” Willkie, energetic, with a gift for demagogic fireworks, tried to capture an expected reaction against Roosevelt by promising to carry out the New Deal better than the man who had originated it. At the same time, his past, his backers and his careful phrasing assured the conservative elements that his appeal to the masses was nothing to be scared of.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Background to Willkie’s Fight</h4>
<p class="fst">Labor and the white collar workers of the cities, from whom Roosevelt drew his main popular support, rejected Willkie. But this year’s campaign showed that he had a strong popular following among the rank and file voters of the Republican Party. Various competent observers have reported that there were many Republicans who distrusted Dewey as a reactionary both in domestic and foreign politics, and wanted to see what Willkie would do. This is what is significant.</p>
<p>All capitalist parties have a mass base. The Republicans, with the prestige of winning the Civil War, started off in great style in 1868. The great Capitalist expansion of the next thirty years kept them in almost continuous power. Organized labor for the most part was content to follow the party. Near the end of the century the farmers began to feel the full weight of capitalist exploitation. The result was the rise of Populism, and William Jennings Bryan’s campaigns against the money powers. The socialist movement began to grow. The mass support of the Republican Party was threatened.</p>
<p><em>The man who saved it for a time was Theodore Roosevelt. He had a similar gift for publicity and popularity that Willkie had. He presented himself as the leader of a reform movement against the money powers. He stole some of Bryan’s thunder. He attacked Wall Street, the United States Steel Corporation, Standard Oil and other big corporations. He passed an Employers’ Liability Act. He shook up the country with his policy of conservation of the national resources. At the end of it all, however, the trusts were stronger than ever. Stronger than before also was the Socialist Party, led by Gene Debs, whom Roosevelt bracketed with the trusts as among the greatest enemies of the country. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican Party by opposing Taft and the Democratic candidate, and Wilson won the election.</em></p>
<p>The post-war period after the First World War saw the Republican Party again in power for twelve years. This was another period of striking prosperity as the capitalists understand it. Once more the people as a whole followed those who claimed that they were responsible for the jobs and the wages. Then in 1929 came the crash. By 1932 the Republican Party had lost the confidence of millions and since that time the Democratic Party has reigned supreme. Labor and the poor farmers and the Negroes have supported the New Deal.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">What Did Willkie Offer?</h4>
<p class="fst">To the threat of Bryan, populism and socialism, the Republican Party responded with Theodore Roosevelt and got away with it for a time. In Willkie’s case, his significance is this: he is the best the Republicans could present, to do in this period what Theodore Roosevelt did in his. His failure is an index of the stage of development of capitalism as a whole. He had nothing really new to say in comparison with his rival, Franklin D. Roosevelt. All that capitalism could do had been done by Roosevelt. The result had been that there were still ten million unemployed in the spring of 1940.</p>
<p>On the question of the war there was no choice between Roosevelt and Willkie. Both of them, representatives of capitalism, were advocates of a war against German and Japanese capital. Willkie failed to capture the popular vote in 1940 and after that the Republican politicians and their capitalist masters had no use for him. Today Dewey, his successor, has no program. He also can only promise to continue with the social legislation of the New Deal. He also promises no change in the conduct of the war. He calls the New Deal Administration “bungling, incompetent, tired,” etc. But program he has none. He hopes to win on a wave of disgust with Roosevelt. “You ought to be tired of him by now,” says Dewey. “Take me instead.” And wearisomely he repeats, “It is time for a change.”</p>
<p><em>Yet the maneuvers of both Roosevelt and Dewey to win over Willkie showed that he had some strength. And the source of that strength is important to labor. The whole country is stirred by the feeling that great changes are needed both on a national and international scale. Even among many rank and file Republicans this feeling exists. They were enthusiastic for Willkie because they thought he represented something “progressive.”</em></p>
<p>But capitalism in 1944 is not capitalism in 1906. Theodore Roosevelt had scope to say plenty and do little. In these times, Willkie could say much less than Franklin Roosevelt, or only as much, and even if he got the chance could have done nothing substantially different. But the response he evoked shows that a political party with a real program can look for support not only from Roosevelt’s mass supporters, but <em>even in the Republican Party itself</em>.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">What He Meant</h4>
<p class="fst">There is a world of difference between Dewey and the interests he represents and the millions of middle class people and workers who vote Republican.</p>
<p>Organized labor can shake itself free of the Democratic Party, pull the rank and file vote from under the Southern Bourbons and tear away millions from the Republican Party. But it can do this only if it proposes what the people everywhere are looking for – a bold social program that means business.</p>
<p><em>We have the admission from Roosevelt himself that the New Deal is dead. That is a death certificate that nobody can question. The path is clear for organized labor. A Labor Party is the party of the future and can build itself on the ruin of both these corpses.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Late Wendell Willkie:
The Politician Who Came Too Late
(October 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 43, 23 October 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The career of Wendell Willkie is of significance to the labor movement. His “progressiveness” was similar to Roosevelt’s. In national politics it was aimed at getting sufficient votes from labor, the lower middle classes and the Negroes in order to win the election.
Willkie represented big business. One of his political enemies constantly and aptly called him “The barefoot boy from Wall Street.” But big business presents many different faces to the public and sometimes different faces to different sections of the public. Willkie had seen very clearly that the Republican Party had to gain some popular base in order to defeat the Democratic Party at the polls. In the present epoch of social crisis and change, the rise of organized labor and the crisis of the middle class, the old slogans of rugged individualism, free enterprise, the American way, etc., had little meaning for great numbers of the people and were actually offensive to many.
President Roosevelt had skillfully capitalized on this with his slogan of “the New Deal.” Willkie, energetic, with a gift for demagogic fireworks, tried to capture an expected reaction against Roosevelt by promising to carry out the New Deal better than the man who had originated it. At the same time, his past, his backers and his careful phrasing assured the conservative elements that his appeal to the masses was nothing to be scared of.
Background to Willkie’s Fight
Labor and the white collar workers of the cities, from whom Roosevelt drew his main popular support, rejected Willkie. But this year’s campaign showed that he had a strong popular following among the rank and file voters of the Republican Party. Various competent observers have reported that there were many Republicans who distrusted Dewey as a reactionary both in domestic and foreign politics, and wanted to see what Willkie would do. This is what is significant.
All capitalist parties have a mass base. The Republicans, with the prestige of winning the Civil War, started off in great style in 1868. The great Capitalist expansion of the next thirty years kept them in almost continuous power. Organized labor for the most part was content to follow the party. Near the end of the century the farmers began to feel the full weight of capitalist exploitation. The result was the rise of Populism, and William Jennings Bryan’s campaigns against the money powers. The socialist movement began to grow. The mass support of the Republican Party was threatened.
The man who saved it for a time was Theodore Roosevelt. He had a similar gift for publicity and popularity that Willkie had. He presented himself as the leader of a reform movement against the money powers. He stole some of Bryan’s thunder. He attacked Wall Street, the United States Steel Corporation, Standard Oil and other big corporations. He passed an Employers’ Liability Act. He shook up the country with his policy of conservation of the national resources. At the end of it all, however, the trusts were stronger than ever. Stronger than before also was the Socialist Party, led by Gene Debs, whom Roosevelt bracketed with the trusts as among the greatest enemies of the country. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican Party by opposing Taft and the Democratic candidate, and Wilson won the election.
The post-war period after the First World War saw the Republican Party again in power for twelve years. This was another period of striking prosperity as the capitalists understand it. Once more the people as a whole followed those who claimed that they were responsible for the jobs and the wages. Then in 1929 came the crash. By 1932 the Republican Party had lost the confidence of millions and since that time the Democratic Party has reigned supreme. Labor and the poor farmers and the Negroes have supported the New Deal.
What Did Willkie Offer?
To the threat of Bryan, populism and socialism, the Republican Party responded with Theodore Roosevelt and got away with it for a time. In Willkie’s case, his significance is this: he is the best the Republicans could present, to do in this period what Theodore Roosevelt did in his. His failure is an index of the stage of development of capitalism as a whole. He had nothing really new to say in comparison with his rival, Franklin D. Roosevelt. All that capitalism could do had been done by Roosevelt. The result had been that there were still ten million unemployed in the spring of 1940.
On the question of the war there was no choice between Roosevelt and Willkie. Both of them, representatives of capitalism, were advocates of a war against German and Japanese capital. Willkie failed to capture the popular vote in 1940 and after that the Republican politicians and their capitalist masters had no use for him. Today Dewey, his successor, has no program. He also can only promise to continue with the social legislation of the New Deal. He also promises no change in the conduct of the war. He calls the New Deal Administration “bungling, incompetent, tired,” etc. But program he has none. He hopes to win on a wave of disgust with Roosevelt. “You ought to be tired of him by now,” says Dewey. “Take me instead.” And wearisomely he repeats, “It is time for a change.”
Yet the maneuvers of both Roosevelt and Dewey to win over Willkie showed that he had some strength. And the source of that strength is important to labor. The whole country is stirred by the feeling that great changes are needed both on a national and international scale. Even among many rank and file Republicans this feeling exists. They were enthusiastic for Willkie because they thought he represented something “progressive.”
But capitalism in 1944 is not capitalism in 1906. Theodore Roosevelt had scope to say plenty and do little. In these times, Willkie could say much less than Franklin Roosevelt, or only as much, and even if he got the chance could have done nothing substantially different. But the response he evoked shows that a political party with a real program can look for support not only from Roosevelt’s mass supporters, but even in the Republican Party itself.
What He Meant
There is a world of difference between Dewey and the interests he represents and the millions of middle class people and workers who vote Republican.
Organized labor can shake itself free of the Democratic Party, pull the rank and file vote from under the Southern Bourbons and tear away millions from the Republican Party. But it can do this only if it proposes what the people everywhere are looking for – a bold social program that means business.
We have the admission from Roosevelt himself that the New Deal is dead. That is a death certificate that nobody can question. The path is clear for organized labor. A Labor Party is the party of the future and can build itself on the ruin of both these corpses.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1937</p>
<h3>Trotskyism</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Controversy</em>, Vol. 2, No. 1, October 1937.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Christian Hogsbjerg for Marxists.org 2007.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">Lenin, who was neither God nor Stalin, made a serious error when for twelve years he opposed Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution. He thought that the Russian Revolution would liberate Russian capitalism, put the Russian bourgeoisie in power. In his <em>Two Tactics</em> he says so about a dozen times. On p. 37, for instance: “Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution. What does this mean? It means that the democratic changes in the political regime and the social and economic changes which have become necessary for Russia do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois domination; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, properly clear the ground for a wide and rapid European and not Asiatic development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class.” On p. 38 he says: “The bourgeois revolution expresses the needs of capitalist development, and not only does it not destroy the foundations of capitalism, but on the contrary, it widens and deepens them.”</p>
<p>Trotsky, as we know, opposed this, and thus originated Trotskyism. He said that the proletariat would have to make the bourgeois revolution, but that it would have to hold the power and go on to the dictatorship of he proletariat. There was going to be no development of bourgeois democracy, no development of capitalism in revolutionary Russia. The time for that had passed. Backward Russia would begin the Socialist revolution and be saved from the consequences of its own backwardness by the Socialist revolution in Europe.</p>
<p>What saved Lenin from the grievous consequences of such a false prognosis was his clear conception of the role of the classes. The bourgeois would come into power but it was the proletariat which would put them there, and he fought for a proletarian organisation that would do the work of the bourgeoisie over the heads of the bourgeoisie and in spite of them.</p>
<p>It was this intransigence, this hostility to the bourgeoisie, though fighting for a bourgeois revolution, that kept the Bolshevik Party implacably hostile to the liberal bourgeoisie. Trotsky could never build a party – fundamentally because the Bolshevik Pasty, though preparing for the bourgeois revolution, was, under Lenin’s firm guidance, essentially a party, in organisation and outlook, ready for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks believed, too, in the coming revolution as bourgeois. But they thought that the bourgeois should lead it. For this they were opposed by both Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky, therefore, outside both groups, summed up his position thus. The counter-revolutionary nature of Menshevism, i.e., its idea of the bourgeoisie in the lead, will show itself before the revolution. But the counter-revolutionary nature of Bolshevism, i.e., its idea of a democratic republic, will show itself after the revolution. Both Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the counter-revolution in Russia would be strong enough to destroy the revolution if the European revolution did not come to the assistance of the Russians. </p>
<p>In 1917, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin and the rest in the face of the Provisional Government stuck to the old formula. But the Bolshevik Party had been so trained to the independent class action of the proletariat that it was comparatively easy for Lenin to switch it on to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky joined the Party and accepted Lenin’s ideas of party organisation. But in a preface to his book, 1905, published by the Communist International in 1921, he pointed out the previous falseness of the Bolshevik analysis and the correctness of his own theory. No one questioned it. But the European revolution failed to take place, and bureaucratic tendencies in the Soviet regime increased. Stalin being the centre of these.</p>
<p>The defeat of the German Revolution in 1923; broke the hopes of the proletarian vanguard, the only support of the Left Opposition, as the Trotskyists were then called, and thus enabled Stalin, with Zinoviev and Kamenev, to make himself master of the Soviet Party apparatus and the Government. The bureaucracy, all-powerful in a backward country, supported Stalin. To attempt in an article of this length to tell everything would succeed in telling nothing. It is sufficient to say that between 1923 and 1927 the Trotskyists advocated (a) a Five Year Plan of industrialisation, (b) the political restriction of the kulak and gradual collectivisation, beginning with the poor peasantry, (c) a break with the British General Council after the General Strike in England of 1926 and the dissolution of the Ang1o-Russian Committee, (d) the independence of the Communist Party of China in the revolution of 1925-1927 and the repudiation of Chiang-Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang as the leaders of the Chinese Revolution, (e) Party democracy as the only means of finding and carrying out correct politics. Stalin, backed by the bureaucracy, fought them successfully on each point, with disastrous results for Russia and the world revolution. His method was to purge the Party of opposition elements and through the bureaucracy fill it with persons devoted to Stalinism. Before the 15th Party Conference the Opposition was expelled.</p>
<p>By the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928 the Kulaks had grown strong enough to threaten the Soviet State. The policy of the International was a glaring failure. Stalin turned and struck at his Right-wing allies. Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, whom he had used against the Left; and embarked on the Five Year Plan.</p>
<p>In 1924 he had introduced a theory whereby it was possible to build Socialism in Russia without the aid of the European revolution. This, he said, was Leninism. Now he attempted to put it into practice. Peasants were collectivised en mass. European capitalism was to be surpassed in ten years. The International was forced to adopt the theory of Social Fascism: Social Democracy, not Fascism, was the chief enemy. Great successes were won inside Russia, but the scope of the plan led to needless chaos in industry and the destruction of vast quantities of agricultural produce. The German working-class movement was encouraged to let Hitler come into power as he would soon collapse. The Trotskyists in these years fought for a plan and collectivisation within the scope of Russia’s powers and for the United Front in Germany.</p>
<p>After 1927, no one in Russia could preach Trotskyism openly. But those who followed the doctrines were organised in groups abroad known as the Left Opposition. After the German defeat, the Left Opposition declared the necessity of building a Fourth International. Readers of <em>Controversy</em> are aware how the Soviet bureaucracy not only joined the League of Nations, but after the Franco-Soviet Pact, invented the Popular Front, began to support capitalist rearmament in France, and today supports any section of the bourgeoisie which expresses the slightest opposition to Fascism. The Trotskyists have foretold and bitterly fought such betrayals. They will continue to do so. But this abandonment of the class struggle at last taught a little sense to many who had remained woodenly impervious to the long years of propaganda.</p>
<p>In every country groups and parties began to take position to the left of the Communist Parties. This was not difficult because the Cornmunist Parties were as far to the right as the bourgeoisie would let them go. But the I.L.P. in England, the P.O.U.M. in Spain, the Socialist Left in France were all variously hostile to Stalinism. They now opposed the Third International, but would not declare for a Fourth.</p>
<p>Inside the Soviet Union the bureaucracy, going unceasingly to the right, was striking down everything on the left and destroying the political gains of the Revolution by constantly increasing the privileges of the ruling caste. The Stakhanovite movement was a drastic speed-up and the high salaries paid to a section of the workers detached them from the mass and gave support to the overpaid bureaucrats. The dissatisfaction in the masses (how it was denied!) forced itself continually into the Party, which had to be kept docile by ceaseless purging. Some 300,000 were purged in 1935. It is against this menace from within and without that we must see the trials which have done so much to bring Trotskyism to the foreground.</p>
<p>Let it be understood that no declared Trotskyists in Russia are free. There are perhaps 20,000 of them in prison. The Bureau for the Fourth International has lost contact with them for three years. But they knew about the Fourth International, and their hostility to Stalinism and their revolutionary temper can be judged from the fact that Stalin has never dared to bring any of them to trial. All the Trotskyists tried – Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Piatakov – are men who have been admitted supporters of Stalin for years. Some, like Radek and Piatakov, have served him faithfully. But Stalin, though ignorant, is the reverse of stupid. He is a singularly cunning man. When these men say that Lenin’s policy was always to build Socialism in a single country, that Socialism is built in Russia, that the Popular Front is Leninist policy, that Stalin is a great Marxist, they know that they are lying, and Stalin knows that too. Stalin’s clique, Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovitch, etc., have not, and never had, any principles to lose and will say or do anything. But the old Trotskyists are chiefly Jews, internationalists, men who know Europe and the European languages, know the standards of life in Western Europe, and while they see what has been done in Russia they are under no illusions as to the disastrous influence Stalinism has had on the whole movement. Difficulties internal were accumulating, war loomed on the horizon, the Spanish Revolution made the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and the policy of the International living issues.</p>
<p>In any crisis – and the wholesale executions of the past year prove how imminent was the crisis – any of the old Trotskyists, though not in any way connected with Trotsky, could prove a rallying centre for an opposition. The recent mass purge of the Youth for “immorality” shows that there was great hostility to Stalin’s regime there also. Stalin therefore determined to remove the best-known men of the old left, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Smirnov, overwhelm them with disgrace, link them to the Fourth International nd discredit the growing Trotskyism abroad. </p>
<p>People’s memories are short indeed. The Menshevik Trial of 1931 “proved” by “confessions” that Leon Blum, Vandervelde, the British Labour Party had all been organising wrecking in the Soviet Union as a preliminary to a war of intervention. These dishonest and clumsy stupidities are typical of Stalin.</p>
<p>Had the trial gone off well, Stalin would have had all he needed. Once he had wrung confessions out of a few Trotskyists, the crimes of Trotskyism would be established and anyone that had ever been called a Trotskyist could be dismissed, imprisoned and dealt with under the general charge of Trotskyism.</p>
<p>The trouble was that this trial was a disastrous failure inside and outside Russia. When Stalin sent round to the Party information about the spread of Trotskyism, preparing them for the trial, the Party was bewildered by this crude lie. “The facts have shown that our comrades look on these signals and warnings with apathy.” So says Stalin himself on p. 7 of the F.S.U. pamphlet, <em>Sweep Away Obstacles. The Letter of an Old Bolshevik </em>tells us that Stalin prepared the trial secretly with the help of Yezhov behind the back of Yagoda, and that even all the members of the Politbureau did not know. The Radek-Piatakov trial followed early in 1937, but the way this contradicted Zinoviev and Kamenev, the attempt to create a new centre and new crimes, shows that the organisers had not contemplated the second when they organised the first. This trial was more effective. The petty-bourgeois read Radek’s masterpiece of fiction and, shaking his stupid head, said “Yes, this is true,” and thereby solved a political problem. But in the Party in the Soviet Union something was wrong. The Resolution passed on February 27th was issued only on March 6th; Stalin’s speech was also held up for weeks. When they appeared they contained a ferocious attack on Trotskyism and the party-bureaucracy, tyranny, breaking of party regulations, appointments from above, etc. Now Stalin and the others knew that these things were going on. They had been going on for years. But that astute manoeuvrer, sensing danger, was putting himself at the head of the mass dissatisfaction, and was turning on the bureaucracy, calling as many as possible Trotskyists, wreckers, etc. But this time it wasn’t so easy. Ordjonikidze had “died.” Yagoda was arrested. No one was too high to be safe. It seems pretty certain that the biggest bureaucrats and a solid part of the army determined to remove Stalin in sheer self-defence. History gave us an exact parallel in July, 1794, when the whole<em> </em>Convention, Jacobins and Right Wing, shouted down Robespierre and delivered him to the guillotine. On the day after, they continued their internal struggle, but for the moment all felt that the first task was to remove the sinister dictator with whom no man was safe. Stalin struck before his enemies could get at him; since when he has launched a widespread attack. Men are being tried for poisoning sheep and oppressing peasants, while the peasants sit in the court and applaud, and bless Stalin; others are being kicked out of managers’ jobs and workers appointed in their place. Stalin is now the man of the people. And whenever possible he calls these men Trotskyists. But it must be understood that there is no reason to believe that a single one of these bureaucrats has anything to do with the Opposition in Russia. Their policy would probably have been a cleansing of the apparatus in their own favour, and a loosening of the tyranny. Tukhachevskv may have favoured a Russo-German alliance. But all this has nothing to do with Trotskyism, which in Stalinist language merely means against Stalin.</p>
<p>But Stalin is now in serious danger. As always the revolution begins from above. Men arc refusing posts. They are afraid. The bureaucrats nearly faced each other openly. The moment they enter into open conflict the masses will join, for they will he invited by each side to support. That, however, is another subject. It is sufficient that the only section with a policy for the masses is<em> </em>the Trotskyists, and that both wings of the upper bureaucracy will be opposed to them, as Liberals and Conservatives are opposed to the Socialist revolution. The solution of that conflict, however, is bound up with the European revolution.</p>
<p>We see a parallel situation on the international field. All who are for the Socialist revolution are marked down by the Stalinists for destruction. “We are not Trotskyists” the P.O.U.M. and the I.L.P. continually do cry. Much good may it do them. The Stalinists will have nothing to the left of them, and Maxton, Brockway and Marceau Pivert can look out for the fate of Nin. It seems that Trotsky has a bad temper, which prevents people joining the Bureau for the Fourth International. Peddling piffle. Only the masses can build a Fourth International. But leaders must help them by showing the way. The Stalinist bureaucracy and the Third International are now a gangrenous tumour in the working-class movement. They must be cut out of it. There is only one thing now – the struggle for the Fourth International.</p>
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C.L.R. James 1937
Trotskyism
Source: Controversy, Vol. 2, No. 1, October 1937.
Transcribed: by Christian Hogsbjerg for Marxists.org 2007.
Lenin, who was neither God nor Stalin, made a serious error when for twelve years he opposed Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution. He thought that the Russian Revolution would liberate Russian capitalism, put the Russian bourgeoisie in power. In his Two Tactics he says so about a dozen times. On p. 37, for instance: “Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution. What does this mean? It means that the democratic changes in the political regime and the social and economic changes which have become necessary for Russia do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois domination; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, properly clear the ground for a wide and rapid European and not Asiatic development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class.” On p. 38 he says: “The bourgeois revolution expresses the needs of capitalist development, and not only does it not destroy the foundations of capitalism, but on the contrary, it widens and deepens them.”
Trotsky, as we know, opposed this, and thus originated Trotskyism. He said that the proletariat would have to make the bourgeois revolution, but that it would have to hold the power and go on to the dictatorship of he proletariat. There was going to be no development of bourgeois democracy, no development of capitalism in revolutionary Russia. The time for that had passed. Backward Russia would begin the Socialist revolution and be saved from the consequences of its own backwardness by the Socialist revolution in Europe.
What saved Lenin from the grievous consequences of such a false prognosis was his clear conception of the role of the classes. The bourgeois would come into power but it was the proletariat which would put them there, and he fought for a proletarian organisation that would do the work of the bourgeoisie over the heads of the bourgeoisie and in spite of them.
It was this intransigence, this hostility to the bourgeoisie, though fighting for a bourgeois revolution, that kept the Bolshevik Party implacably hostile to the liberal bourgeoisie. Trotsky could never build a party – fundamentally because the Bolshevik Pasty, though preparing for the bourgeois revolution, was, under Lenin’s firm guidance, essentially a party, in organisation and outlook, ready for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks believed, too, in the coming revolution as bourgeois. But they thought that the bourgeois should lead it. For this they were opposed by both Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky, therefore, outside both groups, summed up his position thus. The counter-revolutionary nature of Menshevism, i.e., its idea of the bourgeoisie in the lead, will show itself before the revolution. But the counter-revolutionary nature of Bolshevism, i.e., its idea of a democratic republic, will show itself after the revolution. Both Lenin and Trotsky agreed that the counter-revolution in Russia would be strong enough to destroy the revolution if the European revolution did not come to the assistance of the Russians.
In 1917, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin and the rest in the face of the Provisional Government stuck to the old formula. But the Bolshevik Party had been so trained to the independent class action of the proletariat that it was comparatively easy for Lenin to switch it on to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky joined the Party and accepted Lenin’s ideas of party organisation. But in a preface to his book, 1905, published by the Communist International in 1921, he pointed out the previous falseness of the Bolshevik analysis and the correctness of his own theory. No one questioned it. But the European revolution failed to take place, and bureaucratic tendencies in the Soviet regime increased. Stalin being the centre of these.
The defeat of the German Revolution in 1923; broke the hopes of the proletarian vanguard, the only support of the Left Opposition, as the Trotskyists were then called, and thus enabled Stalin, with Zinoviev and Kamenev, to make himself master of the Soviet Party apparatus and the Government. The bureaucracy, all-powerful in a backward country, supported Stalin. To attempt in an article of this length to tell everything would succeed in telling nothing. It is sufficient to say that between 1923 and 1927 the Trotskyists advocated (a) a Five Year Plan of industrialisation, (b) the political restriction of the kulak and gradual collectivisation, beginning with the poor peasantry, (c) a break with the British General Council after the General Strike in England of 1926 and the dissolution of the Ang1o-Russian Committee, (d) the independence of the Communist Party of China in the revolution of 1925-1927 and the repudiation of Chiang-Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang as the leaders of the Chinese Revolution, (e) Party democracy as the only means of finding and carrying out correct politics. Stalin, backed by the bureaucracy, fought them successfully on each point, with disastrous results for Russia and the world revolution. His method was to purge the Party of opposition elements and through the bureaucracy fill it with persons devoted to Stalinism. Before the 15th Party Conference the Opposition was expelled.
By the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928 the Kulaks had grown strong enough to threaten the Soviet State. The policy of the International was a glaring failure. Stalin turned and struck at his Right-wing allies. Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, whom he had used against the Left; and embarked on the Five Year Plan.
In 1924 he had introduced a theory whereby it was possible to build Socialism in Russia without the aid of the European revolution. This, he said, was Leninism. Now he attempted to put it into practice. Peasants were collectivised en mass. European capitalism was to be surpassed in ten years. The International was forced to adopt the theory of Social Fascism: Social Democracy, not Fascism, was the chief enemy. Great successes were won inside Russia, but the scope of the plan led to needless chaos in industry and the destruction of vast quantities of agricultural produce. The German working-class movement was encouraged to let Hitler come into power as he would soon collapse. The Trotskyists in these years fought for a plan and collectivisation within the scope of Russia’s powers and for the United Front in Germany.
After 1927, no one in Russia could preach Trotskyism openly. But those who followed the doctrines were organised in groups abroad known as the Left Opposition. After the German defeat, the Left Opposition declared the necessity of building a Fourth International. Readers of Controversy are aware how the Soviet bureaucracy not only joined the League of Nations, but after the Franco-Soviet Pact, invented the Popular Front, began to support capitalist rearmament in France, and today supports any section of the bourgeoisie which expresses the slightest opposition to Fascism. The Trotskyists have foretold and bitterly fought such betrayals. They will continue to do so. But this abandonment of the class struggle at last taught a little sense to many who had remained woodenly impervious to the long years of propaganda.
In every country groups and parties began to take position to the left of the Communist Parties. This was not difficult because the Cornmunist Parties were as far to the right as the bourgeoisie would let them go. But the I.L.P. in England, the P.O.U.M. in Spain, the Socialist Left in France were all variously hostile to Stalinism. They now opposed the Third International, but would not declare for a Fourth.
Inside the Soviet Union the bureaucracy, going unceasingly to the right, was striking down everything on the left and destroying the political gains of the Revolution by constantly increasing the privileges of the ruling caste. The Stakhanovite movement was a drastic speed-up and the high salaries paid to a section of the workers detached them from the mass and gave support to the overpaid bureaucrats. The dissatisfaction in the masses (how it was denied!) forced itself continually into the Party, which had to be kept docile by ceaseless purging. Some 300,000 were purged in 1935. It is against this menace from within and without that we must see the trials which have done so much to bring Trotskyism to the foreground.
Let it be understood that no declared Trotskyists in Russia are free. There are perhaps 20,000 of them in prison. The Bureau for the Fourth International has lost contact with them for three years. But they knew about the Fourth International, and their hostility to Stalinism and their revolutionary temper can be judged from the fact that Stalin has never dared to bring any of them to trial. All the Trotskyists tried – Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Piatakov – are men who have been admitted supporters of Stalin for years. Some, like Radek and Piatakov, have served him faithfully. But Stalin, though ignorant, is the reverse of stupid. He is a singularly cunning man. When these men say that Lenin’s policy was always to build Socialism in a single country, that Socialism is built in Russia, that the Popular Front is Leninist policy, that Stalin is a great Marxist, they know that they are lying, and Stalin knows that too. Stalin’s clique, Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovitch, etc., have not, and never had, any principles to lose and will say or do anything. But the old Trotskyists are chiefly Jews, internationalists, men who know Europe and the European languages, know the standards of life in Western Europe, and while they see what has been done in Russia they are under no illusions as to the disastrous influence Stalinism has had on the whole movement. Difficulties internal were accumulating, war loomed on the horizon, the Spanish Revolution made the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and the policy of the International living issues.
In any crisis – and the wholesale executions of the past year prove how imminent was the crisis – any of the old Trotskyists, though not in any way connected with Trotsky, could prove a rallying centre for an opposition. The recent mass purge of the Youth for “immorality” shows that there was great hostility to Stalin’s regime there also. Stalin therefore determined to remove the best-known men of the old left, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Smirnov, overwhelm them with disgrace, link them to the Fourth International nd discredit the growing Trotskyism abroad.
People’s memories are short indeed. The Menshevik Trial of 1931 “proved” by “confessions” that Leon Blum, Vandervelde, the British Labour Party had all been organising wrecking in the Soviet Union as a preliminary to a war of intervention. These dishonest and clumsy stupidities are typical of Stalin.
Had the trial gone off well, Stalin would have had all he needed. Once he had wrung confessions out of a few Trotskyists, the crimes of Trotskyism would be established and anyone that had ever been called a Trotskyist could be dismissed, imprisoned and dealt with under the general charge of Trotskyism.
The trouble was that this trial was a disastrous failure inside and outside Russia. When Stalin sent round to the Party information about the spread of Trotskyism, preparing them for the trial, the Party was bewildered by this crude lie. “The facts have shown that our comrades look on these signals and warnings with apathy.” So says Stalin himself on p. 7 of the F.S.U. pamphlet, Sweep Away Obstacles. The Letter of an Old Bolshevik tells us that Stalin prepared the trial secretly with the help of Yezhov behind the back of Yagoda, and that even all the members of the Politbureau did not know. The Radek-Piatakov trial followed early in 1937, but the way this contradicted Zinoviev and Kamenev, the attempt to create a new centre and new crimes, shows that the organisers had not contemplated the second when they organised the first. This trial was more effective. The petty-bourgeois read Radek’s masterpiece of fiction and, shaking his stupid head, said “Yes, this is true,” and thereby solved a political problem. But in the Party in the Soviet Union something was wrong. The Resolution passed on February 27th was issued only on March 6th; Stalin’s speech was also held up for weeks. When they appeared they contained a ferocious attack on Trotskyism and the party-bureaucracy, tyranny, breaking of party regulations, appointments from above, etc. Now Stalin and the others knew that these things were going on. They had been going on for years. But that astute manoeuvrer, sensing danger, was putting himself at the head of the mass dissatisfaction, and was turning on the bureaucracy, calling as many as possible Trotskyists, wreckers, etc. But this time it wasn’t so easy. Ordjonikidze had “died.” Yagoda was arrested. No one was too high to be safe. It seems pretty certain that the biggest bureaucrats and a solid part of the army determined to remove Stalin in sheer self-defence. History gave us an exact parallel in July, 1794, when the whole Convention, Jacobins and Right Wing, shouted down Robespierre and delivered him to the guillotine. On the day after, they continued their internal struggle, but for the moment all felt that the first task was to remove the sinister dictator with whom no man was safe. Stalin struck before his enemies could get at him; since when he has launched a widespread attack. Men are being tried for poisoning sheep and oppressing peasants, while the peasants sit in the court and applaud, and bless Stalin; others are being kicked out of managers’ jobs and workers appointed in their place. Stalin is now the man of the people. And whenever possible he calls these men Trotskyists. But it must be understood that there is no reason to believe that a single one of these bureaucrats has anything to do with the Opposition in Russia. Their policy would probably have been a cleansing of the apparatus in their own favour, and a loosening of the tyranny. Tukhachevskv may have favoured a Russo-German alliance. But all this has nothing to do with Trotskyism, which in Stalinist language merely means against Stalin.
But Stalin is now in serious danger. As always the revolution begins from above. Men arc refusing posts. They are afraid. The bureaucrats nearly faced each other openly. The moment they enter into open conflict the masses will join, for they will he invited by each side to support. That, however, is another subject. It is sufficient that the only section with a policy for the masses is the Trotskyists, and that both wings of the upper bureaucracy will be opposed to them, as Liberals and Conservatives are opposed to the Socialist revolution. The solution of that conflict, however, is bound up with the European revolution.
We see a parallel situation on the international field. All who are for the Socialist revolution are marked down by the Stalinists for destruction. “We are not Trotskyists” the P.O.U.M. and the I.L.P. continually do cry. Much good may it do them. The Stalinists will have nothing to the left of them, and Maxton, Brockway and Marceau Pivert can look out for the fate of Nin. It seems that Trotsky has a bad temper, which prevents people joining the Bureau for the Fourth International. Peddling piffle. Only the masses can build a Fourth International. But leaders must help them by showing the way. The Stalinist bureaucracy and the Third International are now a gangrenous tumour in the working-class movement. They must be cut out of it. There is only one thing now – the struggle for the Fourth International.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(13 January 1947)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1947/index.htm#la11_02" target="new">Vol. 11 No. 2</a>, 13 January 1947, p. 2.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 130–132.<br>
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <em>MIA</em>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">It is remarkable but not strange that the great leaders of Marxist thought – Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky – all took the keenest interest in the Negro question in the United States. The interest of Marx and Engels centered chiefly on the Civil War. They insisted from the start that the issue at stake was slavery. Trotsky always had a passionate interest in the Negro question, and this increased when he came to live in Mexico. Of the four, the one who seemed most remote from the problem was Lenin. Yet in one of his lesser known writings, he showed his interest in and knowledge of the problem.</p>
<p>The work itself is not that easy to read. It is entitled <em>Capitalism in Agriculture</em> and appeared in the very last volume of his <strong>Selected Works</strong> (in English). The origin of this work is interesting and significant.</p>
<p>Lenin had been carrying on for years a controversy with those who were attacking Marx’s analysis of the influence of capital on agriculture. This was no mere “theoretical” discussion with him – nor, for that matter, with them either. The driving force of the Russian Revolution was the agricultural question. Lenin insisted that the penetration of capital into the Russian countryside was creating a social differentiation among the peasants, disrupting the traditional relations. He particularly emphasized this disruption: the creation of wealthy tenant-farmers and owners on the one hand and, on the other hand, of poor farmers who worked for wages a few days of the week.</p>
<p>Needless to say, in this disruption Lenin saw the growing basis of revolutionary struggle. His opponents of all stripes argued in various forms the specifically Russian thesis that the old communal life of the peasants provided a basis for some special type of Russian socialism. This would avoid the antagonism between capital and labor, which terrified them with its prospect of inevitable revolution.</p>
<p>It is characteristic of the methods of Bolshevism that Lenin gave his opponents no rest. However remote and semi-scientific their theories might be, he dragged their ideas out into the open and exposed their counter-revolutionary implications. In pursuit of these attackers of Marx and enemies of revolution, Lenin embarked on a study of capitalism in American agriculture. He made a close examination and study of the American census of 1910 and wrote his findings in one of the most solid studies of capitalism in agriculture that it is possible to read. In the course of this study, he had occasion to deal with the Negro question.</p>
<p>Lenin separated the South from the rest of the United States, which he further divided into the highly organized individual farming of the New England states, and the farming of the broad acres in the middle West. And in his analysis of Southern farming, he paid special attention to the Negro question.</p>
<p>His analysis can be summarized as follows. The abolition of slavery did not entirely abolish all traces of the old chattel slavery. They remained in the subordination, the degradation, the inhuman conditions of labor of the Negroes. He details the number of tenant farmers, their increasing decay, their poverty and misery; and he laid special emphasis on the fact that this tendency was bound to increase.</p>
<p>Lenin did not write only from analysis of figures and of his reading. As his other writings show, he had observed and studied a very similar phenomenon in Russia. The American slaves had been freed in 1863. The serfs in Russia were emancipated in 1864. But despite the emancipation, many of the old feudal conditions had persisted. In his analysis of conditions in the South among the Negroes, Lenin pointed out that the remains of feudalism in Russia and of chattel slavery in the United States were much the same. He knew the situation of the small tenant and the sharecropper in Russia on which he had repeatedly written in the past. He recognized similar conditions among the Negroes in the United States. As a matter of fact, what is quite revealing is that Lenin, in his writings on the social conditions in Russia, lays heavy emphasis on the personal tyranny exercised by the landlord over the Russian sharecropper. And after analyzing statistically the situation of the Southern Negro, he writes as one who knows. One can imagine the situation of people who live in those economic and social conditions.</p>
<p>It would take too long here, in this column, to point out the highly instructive parallels between the similar results of a certain economic system even in countries as widely different as Czarist Russia and the US. The point is that Lenin, in his unwearying task of educating the Russian proletariat, made analyses and observations of the Negroes in Southern agriculture which are of permanent value to us today, over thirty years afterward.</p>
<p>A great revolution in Russia destroyed that particular agrarian tyranny. In the US the tyranny still continues, though under different conditions. Yet the basic pattern is the same today as it was when Lenin wrote in 1913. We can say categorically that it is impossible to get a real grasp of the social classes in the agricultural South and their development during the past fifty years without a close study of Lenin’s analysis of Southern agriculture, and his brief but pregnant presentation of the Negro question.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro Question
(13 January 1947)
From Labor Action, Vol. 11 No. 2, 13 January 1947, p. 2.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 130–132.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
It is remarkable but not strange that the great leaders of Marxist thought – Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky – all took the keenest interest in the Negro question in the United States. The interest of Marx and Engels centered chiefly on the Civil War. They insisted from the start that the issue at stake was slavery. Trotsky always had a passionate interest in the Negro question, and this increased when he came to live in Mexico. Of the four, the one who seemed most remote from the problem was Lenin. Yet in one of his lesser known writings, he showed his interest in and knowledge of the problem.
The work itself is not that easy to read. It is entitled Capitalism in Agriculture and appeared in the very last volume of his Selected Works (in English). The origin of this work is interesting and significant.
Lenin had been carrying on for years a controversy with those who were attacking Marx’s analysis of the influence of capital on agriculture. This was no mere “theoretical” discussion with him – nor, for that matter, with them either. The driving force of the Russian Revolution was the agricultural question. Lenin insisted that the penetration of capital into the Russian countryside was creating a social differentiation among the peasants, disrupting the traditional relations. He particularly emphasized this disruption: the creation of wealthy tenant-farmers and owners on the one hand and, on the other hand, of poor farmers who worked for wages a few days of the week.
Needless to say, in this disruption Lenin saw the growing basis of revolutionary struggle. His opponents of all stripes argued in various forms the specifically Russian thesis that the old communal life of the peasants provided a basis for some special type of Russian socialism. This would avoid the antagonism between capital and labor, which terrified them with its prospect of inevitable revolution.
It is characteristic of the methods of Bolshevism that Lenin gave his opponents no rest. However remote and semi-scientific their theories might be, he dragged their ideas out into the open and exposed their counter-revolutionary implications. In pursuit of these attackers of Marx and enemies of revolution, Lenin embarked on a study of capitalism in American agriculture. He made a close examination and study of the American census of 1910 and wrote his findings in one of the most solid studies of capitalism in agriculture that it is possible to read. In the course of this study, he had occasion to deal with the Negro question.
Lenin separated the South from the rest of the United States, which he further divided into the highly organized individual farming of the New England states, and the farming of the broad acres in the middle West. And in his analysis of Southern farming, he paid special attention to the Negro question.
His analysis can be summarized as follows. The abolition of slavery did not entirely abolish all traces of the old chattel slavery. They remained in the subordination, the degradation, the inhuman conditions of labor of the Negroes. He details the number of tenant farmers, their increasing decay, their poverty and misery; and he laid special emphasis on the fact that this tendency was bound to increase.
Lenin did not write only from analysis of figures and of his reading. As his other writings show, he had observed and studied a very similar phenomenon in Russia. The American slaves had been freed in 1863. The serfs in Russia were emancipated in 1864. But despite the emancipation, many of the old feudal conditions had persisted. In his analysis of conditions in the South among the Negroes, Lenin pointed out that the remains of feudalism in Russia and of chattel slavery in the United States were much the same. He knew the situation of the small tenant and the sharecropper in Russia on which he had repeatedly written in the past. He recognized similar conditions among the Negroes in the United States. As a matter of fact, what is quite revealing is that Lenin, in his writings on the social conditions in Russia, lays heavy emphasis on the personal tyranny exercised by the landlord over the Russian sharecropper. And after analyzing statistically the situation of the Southern Negro, he writes as one who knows. One can imagine the situation of people who live in those economic and social conditions.
It would take too long here, in this column, to point out the highly instructive parallels between the similar results of a certain economic system even in countries as widely different as Czarist Russia and the US. The point is that Lenin, in his unwearying task of educating the Russian proletariat, made analyses and observations of the Negroes in Southern agriculture which are of permanent value to us today, over thirty years afterward.
A great revolution in Russia destroyed that particular agrarian tyranny. In the US the tyranny still continues, though under different conditions. Yet the basic pattern is the same today as it was when Lenin wrote in 1913. We can say categorically that it is impossible to get a real grasp of the social classes in the agricultural South and their development during the past fifty years without a close study of Lenin’s analysis of Southern agriculture, and his brief but pregnant presentation of the Negro question.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>One-Tenth of the Nation</h1>
<h3>(29 January 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_05" target="new">Vol. IX No. 5</a>, 29 January 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><a href="nation3.htm" target="new">Last week</a> it was Justice Murphy belaboring the Railroad Brotherhoods, for discriminating, against Negroes. Almost, in places, he sounded like a revolutionary.</p>
<p>This week it is Paul V. McNutt.</p>
<p><em>This same McNutt, you remember, did his best to stifle the FEPC about a year ago. Today, however, he is writing a series of articles in <strong>The Chicago Defender</strong>, the Negro weekly.</em></p>
<p>Says McNutt:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Negro Americans, traditionally ‘the last hired, the first fired,’ have been given their greatest job opportunity since the Reconstruction period.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Credit Where It Is Not Due</h4>
<p class="fst">Note that phrase, “have been given.” McNutt wants to say that the Roosevelt government GAVE greater opportunities to Negroes. The truth is that the Negroes FORCED Roosevelt to issue the executive order which resulted in the FEPC.</p>
<p>That executive order came directly from the projected March on Washington sponsored by the March on Washington Committee.</p>
<p>When Roosevelt recognized that the Negroes were serious he summoned A. Philip Randolph, the MOW leader, to Washington. Randolph found himself facing the President, LaGuardia, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Army, Knudsen (then in charge of war production), and Hillman. They were mobilized for one purpose: <em>to get Randolph to call off the march</em>. Randolph capitulated and was given the executive order to take home.</p>
<p>Now today the Roosevelt government behaves as if it were the greatest protector and advocate of Negro rights in the country.</p>
<p>McNutt crows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In 1941, Negro workers made up about three per cent of war labor; by September 1942, the percentage was approximately five per cent, and in January 1943, about 7.4 per cent. Today it is approximately 8.4 per cent.”</p>
<p class="fst">So far so good. Now comes the payoff: <em>“These percentages are a graph of economic democracy in action.”</em></p>
<p>Economic democracy indeed! First of all, the capitalist war machine needed workers <em>for its own capitalist purposes – imperialist war</em>. But despite this Negroes had to hammer at the doors to get in. The CIO can say with pride that it helped. But Negroes and the labor movement should greet McNutt’s smug self-satisfaction with jeers and laughter.</p>
<p>But McNutt is filled with pious sentiments, some of them true. Thus he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The industrial progress the Negro has made can only be guaranteed by an America in which there will be jobs for all Americans who want jobs.”</p>
<p class="fst">True. Absolutely correct.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Today,” he goes on, “seventy per cent of the Negroes in war production are in ... mushroom industries such as shipbuilding, aircraft production, munitions ... When military victory reduces our war production requirements, the Negroes will be among the munitions workers who face job discrimination.”</p>
<p class="fst">Still very true. So what? And then we see what this propagandist is after: “The federal and states governments” and the country’s ablest industrialists and economists are planning a “sixty-million-job America.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Some Self-Praise</h4>
<p class="fst">You remember Roosevelt’s Chicago speech before the election? McNutt indulges in a little rhapsody: “Is this the American dream?” etc., and then goes to town.</p>
<p>He tells us that considerable numbers of Negro veterans and Negro workers have come, looking for jobs, to the United States Employment Service of the War Manpower Commission. This, we need hardly say, is McNutt’s own department.</p>
<p>Hear him boost himself:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We in the USES and the WMC are committed to making job referrals without discrimination as to race, color or creed.”</p>
<p class="fst">Hear him again:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The War Manpower Commission through the USES today in ALL communities, provides ...”</p>
<p class="fst">(He should send a copy of this to Senator Rankin of Mississippi.)</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The employment needs of the Negro worker have been and are today of great concern to the WMC Bureau of Placement.”</p>
<p class="fst">And once more:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Administration’s plans for a ‘sixty-million job America’ are shared by most in the ranks of industry and labor.”</p>
<p class="fst">Then follows a grandiloquent compliment of labor’s attitude to Negroes in which he places the CIO and AFL on much the same level.</p>
<h4>What’s Behind It?</h4>
<p class="fst">Now what is behind all this? Whoever was interested in such things knows that round about election time the Roosevelt Administration had a bad scare about the Negro vote. Even Walter White confessed in public that the political outlook for Negroes was miserable enough – there seemed little to choose between the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party and the hypocrisy of the Republican Party.</p>
<p>Roosevelt finally got the majority of the Negro vote. But for a time it looked as if Willkie, who had courted this vote for four years, might take it with him to the Republican camp if he went there. The Roosevelt politicians are on the alert to correct this weakness.</p>
<p>We can now look for a stream of high-flown sentiments and promises from these glib-tongued gentlemen addressed to the Negro people. <em>Whatever the masses force from them, they will turn round and blandly say: “Look what we did for you.” And just as they have invaded all union conventions and meetings with their lying propaganda, so now one of the highest Roosevelt officials has invaded the Negro press.</em></p>
<p>The Negro reply should be a sample for all readers of <strong>Labor Action</strong>. It should be this:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“We have listened to your promises for seventy years. We shall listen no longer. We shall make our own party – a Labor Party.”</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
(29 January 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 5, 29 January 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Last week it was Justice Murphy belaboring the Railroad Brotherhoods, for discriminating, against Negroes. Almost, in places, he sounded like a revolutionary.
This week it is Paul V. McNutt.
This same McNutt, you remember, did his best to stifle the FEPC about a year ago. Today, however, he is writing a series of articles in The Chicago Defender, the Negro weekly.
Says McNutt:
“Negro Americans, traditionally ‘the last hired, the first fired,’ have been given their greatest job opportunity since the Reconstruction period.”
Credit Where It Is Not Due
Note that phrase, “have been given.” McNutt wants to say that the Roosevelt government GAVE greater opportunities to Negroes. The truth is that the Negroes FORCED Roosevelt to issue the executive order which resulted in the FEPC.
That executive order came directly from the projected March on Washington sponsored by the March on Washington Committee.
When Roosevelt recognized that the Negroes were serious he summoned A. Philip Randolph, the MOW leader, to Washington. Randolph found himself facing the President, LaGuardia, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Army, Knudsen (then in charge of war production), and Hillman. They were mobilized for one purpose: to get Randolph to call off the march. Randolph capitulated and was given the executive order to take home.
Now today the Roosevelt government behaves as if it were the greatest protector and advocate of Negro rights in the country.
McNutt crows:
“In 1941, Negro workers made up about three per cent of war labor; by September 1942, the percentage was approximately five per cent, and in January 1943, about 7.4 per cent. Today it is approximately 8.4 per cent.”
So far so good. Now comes the payoff: “These percentages are a graph of economic democracy in action.”
Economic democracy indeed! First of all, the capitalist war machine needed workers for its own capitalist purposes – imperialist war. But despite this Negroes had to hammer at the doors to get in. The CIO can say with pride that it helped. But Negroes and the labor movement should greet McNutt’s smug self-satisfaction with jeers and laughter.
But McNutt is filled with pious sentiments, some of them true. Thus he says:
“The industrial progress the Negro has made can only be guaranteed by an America in which there will be jobs for all Americans who want jobs.”
True. Absolutely correct.
“Today,” he goes on, “seventy per cent of the Negroes in war production are in ... mushroom industries such as shipbuilding, aircraft production, munitions ... When military victory reduces our war production requirements, the Negroes will be among the munitions workers who face job discrimination.”
Still very true. So what? And then we see what this propagandist is after: “The federal and states governments” and the country’s ablest industrialists and economists are planning a “sixty-million-job America.”
Some Self-Praise
You remember Roosevelt’s Chicago speech before the election? McNutt indulges in a little rhapsody: “Is this the American dream?” etc., and then goes to town.
He tells us that considerable numbers of Negro veterans and Negro workers have come, looking for jobs, to the United States Employment Service of the War Manpower Commission. This, we need hardly say, is McNutt’s own department.
Hear him boost himself:
“We in the USES and the WMC are committed to making job referrals without discrimination as to race, color or creed.”
Hear him again:
“The War Manpower Commission through the USES today in ALL communities, provides ...”
(He should send a copy of this to Senator Rankin of Mississippi.)
“The employment needs of the Negro worker have been and are today of great concern to the WMC Bureau of Placement.”
And once more:
“The Administration’s plans for a ‘sixty-million job America’ are shared by most in the ranks of industry and labor.”
Then follows a grandiloquent compliment of labor’s attitude to Negroes in which he places the CIO and AFL on much the same level.
What’s Behind It?
Now what is behind all this? Whoever was interested in such things knows that round about election time the Roosevelt Administration had a bad scare about the Negro vote. Even Walter White confessed in public that the political outlook for Negroes was miserable enough – there seemed little to choose between the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party and the hypocrisy of the Republican Party.
Roosevelt finally got the majority of the Negro vote. But for a time it looked as if Willkie, who had courted this vote for four years, might take it with him to the Republican camp if he went there. The Roosevelt politicians are on the alert to correct this weakness.
We can now look for a stream of high-flown sentiments and promises from these glib-tongued gentlemen addressed to the Negro people. Whatever the masses force from them, they will turn round and blandly say: “Look what we did for you.” And just as they have invaded all union conventions and meetings with their lying propaganda, so now one of the highest Roosevelt officials has invaded the Negro press.
The Negro reply should be a sample for all readers of Labor Action. It should be this:
“We have listened to your promises for seventy years. We shall listen no longer. We shall make our own party – a Labor Party.”
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>In the American Tradition</h1>
<h4>The Working-Class Movement in Perspective</h4>
<h3>(November 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">Originally published in <strong>The New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni43_11">Vol. IX No. 10</a>, November 1943, pp. 306–309.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Ted Crawford.<br>
Proofread by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>. (July 2015)</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="quoteb">“But I consider this certain: the purely bourgeois basis with no pre-bourgeois swindle behind it, the corresponding colossal energy of the development... will one day bring about a change which will astound the whole world. Once the Americans get started it will be with an energy and violence compared with which we in Europe shall be mere children.” <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p class="fst">Thus on the 30th of March, 1892, Engels wrote from London to a friend in America. Marx and Engels knew that in every country, in whatever continent, the socialist revolution denoted the seizure of power by the working class under circumstances dictated by the law of uneven development and the historical peculiarities of each country. But they were sensitive to the subjective qualities of different sections of the international proletariat. Thus they looked upon the German proletariat as the most theoretical in Europe; the British workers were somewhat slow but once they had gained some advantage, did not let it go lightly, etc. In his last years, Engels always wrote about the American proletariat in such terms as the above. It is therefore important to see what Engels thought, why he thought it, to examine the historical development since his death and to see how far his analysis and expectations have been justified. This, useful at all times, is particularly necessary today because Engels was stirred to write about America at the time when it seemed to him that a national labor party was at last on its way.</p>
<p>Engels based his views on two fundamental facts. The country in 1886 is “<em>rich, vast, expanding.</em>” That is its special economic characteristic. Its special historic characteristic is that its political institutions are “purely <em>bourgeois</em> ... unleavened by feudal remnants....” These combined give to the economy a tremendous power of development and this national characteristic is of necessity imbued in the proletariat. Yet at the same time “in every young country” where the development is of a predominantly material nature, there is a “certain backwardness of thought, a clinging to traditions connected with the foundations of the new nationality....” The “exigencies” of practical labor and the concentrating of capital “have produced a contempt for all theory” and in such a country the people must become conscious of their own social interests by making “blunder upon blunder....” But always he insists that when the workers begin their political development it will be like nothing ever seen before. They will go fast, “faster than anywhere else, even though on a singular road, which seems from the theoretical standpoint, to be almost an insane road.”</p>
<p>It would be perhaps most fruitful to begin with a comparison between the economic and political development of the working class movement in America with the working class movement in Great Britain. For Marx and Engels, England was the model capitalist country and in their day the most fully developed. It is the easier to do so because in his observations on America, Engels constantly referred to earlier parallel and future developments in Britain.<br>
</p>
<h4>The National Tradition</h4>
<p class="fst">The “traditions connected with the foundations of the new nationality” date back to before the American Revolution. But just as the French Revolution is the foundation of the modern French nation and the English Revolution in the seventeenth century is the foundation of modern Britain, just so the modern American nation finds its roots in 1776. This revolution differs sharply from the other two. A hundred and fifty years before, in Britain, the Cromwellian Revolution produced a powerful combination of petty bourgeois and neo-proletarian elements. They raised a program for political democracy which was not realized in Britain until over two hundred years afterward. Though they raised the question of property openly in debate with Cromwell, they were not communists. The real communists, the Levellers and the Diggers, were a small minority to the left of this movement which was so large and well organized that it almost drove Cromwell and his associates into the arms of the monarchy. He had to suppress these formidable revolutionaries by force. Carlyle calls them “<em>sans culottes</em> before their time.” The real <em>sans culottes</em> were the driving force and the mainstay of the French Revolution. From that day to this the French bourgeoisie has lived in terror of revolutionary Paris.</p>
<p>No such conflicts took place in the American Revolution. Whereas the other two nationalities were born out of civil war, the American nation was born in a national struggle against foreign rule. Despite the very real class differences among the American revolutionaries and the struggle against the Loyalists, yet bourgeoisie, farmers, artisans and mechanics were a more or less homogeneous whole against British imperialism. Their ancestors had left European tyranny behind. Now they were clearing it out of the magnificent new country for good. The economic opportunities of this rich and vast new world prevented the extreme sharpening of class relations which characterized the old, but the consequent absence of sharp class political differentiation had powerful subjective reinforcement in the very circumstances under which the American people first felt themselves a nation.</p>
<p>It is this which Engels refers to fifty years ago, and today, despite the unprecedented development during the last twenty-five years, this sense of America being a free country, inherently different from the rest of the world, is still enormously powerful among all sections of the people. It has its drawbacks, but it has its virtues also.</p>
<p>But if, except for Shay’s Rebellion, the American masses did not assert themselves with the vigor and independence of the English petty bourgeoisie and the French <em>sans culottes,</em> they ran far, far ahead of Europe politically in the years immediately following their revolution. By 1825 the battle for manhood suffrage had been won. The vote of the farmers and the masses in the towns exercized an influence upon the ruling class, upon legislative machinery and upon the “money power” which today might seem more illusory than real. For it to be appreciated it should be seen in comparison with conditions in Britain, reputedly the classic country of bourgeois democracy.<br>
</p>
<h4>Politics and the British Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">If 1776 saw the Declaration of Independence of the American commercial bourgeoisie, in the same year appeared <strong>The Wealth of Nations</strong>, the declaration of independence of the <em>British industrial bourgeoisie</em>. Britain entered upon a period of dazzling economic development. Politically, however, the country was a hundred years behind the United States. Feudal remnants had Britain by the throat. G.K. Chesterton has summed up the situation perfectly when he contrasted the Commons with a capital C and the commons with a small c. The English aristocracy ruled in the House of Lords and their sons, brothers and sons-in-law sat in the House of Commons in close alliance with the financial and commercial magnates. Not only the masses of the people but even the rising industrial bourgeoisie were excluded. It took nearly fifty years to break this political stranglehold of the feudal remnants. Britain reached the verge of revolution in 1832 before the aristocracy gave way. Yet the Great Reform Bill of 1832 enfranchised only some 200,000 people. The masses, whose revolutionary agitation and direct action were the main causes of the bill being passed, were entirely excluded. This political advance was so eminently satisfactory to Lord John Russell, who pioneered the bill, that he became known afterward as “Finality John.”</p>
<p>We shall understand America better if we continue with Britain. The masses, disappointed with the results of the Reform Bill, started the Chartist agitation. It lasted from 1839 to 1848 and embraced millions of British workers. Its demands were a curious mixture of political and social aspirations which we shall meet again forty years later in the Knights of Labor in the United States. Politics, however, predominated. The Chartists demanded universal suffrage, equal electoral areas, payment of members of Parliament, no property qualifications, vote by ballot and annual Parliaments. But they aimed also at “social equality.” A worker needed a good house, good clothes and “plenty of good food and drink to make him look and <em>feel</em> happy.” They were not quite sure how they were to achieve all this and wavered between petitions and direct action which on one occasion reached the stage of a half-hearted general strike and on another a planned insurrection.</p>
<p>The movement suddenly collapsed in 1848. In 1846 the Corn Laws, by which the British landlords had kept up the price of corn, were abolished. The British industrialists, on the basis of cheap food, began that economic development by which Britain dominated the world market for forty years. The Chartist movement faded away. In 1851 the workers’ movement took the form of slow and solid craft unionism, which dominated the British labor movement for forty years, the same period of time that Britain dominated the world market. It took the same forty years before Britain achieved manhood suffrage. The workers in the town got the vote only in 1867 and the workers in the country only in 1888.<br>
</p>
<h3>The American “Chartists”</h3>
<p class="fst">In America between 1825 and 1850 industries are at a far lower stage of development than they are in Britain. But we have the beginnings of a labor movement, and the utopian socialism of Fourier and Owen flourishes not only in theory but in practice. Between 1850 and 1860 the growth of industry brings numerous strikes, fought out with the customary vigor of the American working class. But the political development of the country is overshadowed by the necessity of crushing the slave power. Astonishing development! Such is the territorial extent of America that the crushing of the plantation owners is a regional struggle. The industrial bourgeoisie wins its victory in civil conflict so gigantic that it is the first great modern war. Yet it manages this without a single serious clash with the workers. <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> The leader of the bourgeoisie is a national hero who fights “to save the Union” and later to abolish slavery.</p>
<p>Yet the signs of a mass labor movement with political aspirations were ominously clear. This movement, however, was deflected by the richness and the vastness of the country and the absence of feudal relations. In the average European country there would have been no land. If there had been any it would have been owned by some noblemen. The Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up free land to the more dissatisfied and adventurous of the proletariat, diluted the independent political aspirations of the working class. America enters upon a period of industrial development comparable to that of Britain between 1784 and 1848. It took fifty years in Britain to produce Chartism. In America, where the energy of development is so colossal, the movement corresponding to Chartism appeared within less than ten years.</p>
<p>The Knights of Labor was organized in 1869, as a secret society. By 1879 the secrecy was discarded and between 1879 and 1886 it developed in much the same way and on much the same scale that Chartism had developed forty years before. The Knights wished “to secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral and social faculties, all of the benefits, recreations and pleasures of association.” The similarity to the ideas of the Chartists is very striking. Like the Chartists, the Knights aimed at a new social order, but they were not socialist in the European sense. Their main demands were not political because, being Americans, they already had political freedom. But in accordance with their country and their time, they demanded the reserving of public lands for actual settlers, the abolition of the contract system of labor and public works, the eight-hour day, etc. Like the Chartists, the movement aimed at helping all workers in all fields. Suddenly in 1886, the year of the “Great Upheaval,” the Knights of Labor claimed international attention.</p>
<p>Late in 1885 and early in 1886 a huge strike movement, based on their struggle for the eight-hour day, swept over the United States. A number of Labor Parties sprang into being. In November, 1886, candidates of the newly formed Labor Parties were successful in the municipal elections. In New York City, where a united Labor Party had been formed only in July, it put forward Henry George as candidate. The Democrat got 90,000 votes. George came next with 68,000, beating Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican candidate, by 8,000 votes. The Chartists had aimed at more but done much less.</p>
<p>Engels in London greeted the upheaval as the dawn of a new age. On June 3 he writes to America:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Six months ago nobody suspected anything, and now they appear all of a sudden in such organized masses as to strike terror into the whole capitalist class. I only wish Marx could have lived to see it.”</p>
<p class="fst">The old man was sixty-six, but he reacted with the exuberance of someone who had just joined the movement.</p>
<p>In November after the electoral successes he writes again and takes up the question of the National Labor Party.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The first great step of importance for every country entering the movement is always the organization of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first program of the party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils, but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement – no matter in what form, so far as it is only <em>their own</em> movement — in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves. The movement in America is in the same condition as it was with us before 1848....”</p>
<p class="fst">That the movement had attained such electoral successes after only eight months of existence was “absolutely unheard of.”</p>
<p>Engels warned the German émigrés working in the movement not to be doctrinaire.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A million or two of working men’s votes next November for a <em>bona-fide</em> workingmen’s party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinably perfect platform.”</p>
<p class="fst">These ideas Engels repeated formally in his introduction to the American edition of <strong>The Conditions of the Working Class in England</strong>. The passage is worth ample quotation.</p>
<p class="quoteb">In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class in the European sense of the word in America; that, secondly, no class struggle between workmen and capitalists such as tore European society to pieces was possible in the American Republic, and that therefore socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil. And yet at that moment the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal miners and of many other trades and especially in the preparations all over the country for the great eight-hour movement which was to come off and did come off in She May following. That I duly appreciated these symptoms, that I anticipated the working class movement on a national scale, my Appendix shows; but no one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie fire, would shake American society to its foundations.</p>
<p class="quote">The spontaneous and instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with the miserable social conditions, the same and due to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact that they formed the new and distinct class of American society... and with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step toward their deliverance; the formation of the political working-men’s party, on a platform of its own and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal.</p>
<p class="fst">A passage which followed is even more significant. For Engels the working class movement developed in two stages, the mass trade union movement acting on a national scale and the independent labor party, also on a national scale. Usually there is a lengthy period between both of these. But history can develop very rapidly and Engels writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">On the more favored soil of America, where no medieval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society, as evolved in the seventeenth century, the working class passed through these two stages of its development within ten months.</p>
<p class="fst">Engels really thought that the moment had come in America. In November, 1886, he had written that the American bourgeoisie was persecuting the movement so “shamelessly and tyrannically” that it would bring matters rapidly to a decision “and if we in Europe do not hurry up, the Americans will soon be ahead of us.” That was on November 29. Three weeks before, in his preface to the first English translation of <strong>Capital</strong>, he had shown that he was expecting social revolution in Britain. The number of unemployed in Britain was swelling from year to year “and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed, losing patience, will take their own fate into their own hands.”</p>
<p>In both instances, the expectation was not realized. <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> In Britain the British bourgeoisie solved the problem by the export of finance capital, thus ushering in the age of imperialism. In the United States once more the vastness and richness of the country came to the rescue of the bourgeoisie.<br>
</p>
<h3>The Turn of the Century</h3>
<p class="fst">Let us once more take a rapid survey of British development.</p>
<p>It was only three years after Engels’ preface to the English edition of <strong>Capital</strong> that Britain found itself in turmoil. The year 1888 was the year of two famous strikes in Britain: the dock strike and the match girls’ strike. There was none of the violence associated with similar large-scale actions in the United States. The strikes, in fact, evoked great popular sympathy. They were triumphant and they marked the beginning of the organization of the unskilled workers in Britain. Let us note that this took place precisely at the moment when Britain was beginning to lose its almost exclusive domination of the world market and just a few years after the working class in the agricultural areas had got the vote. But the long lag behind the political activity of the American masses was now rapidly overcome. Hitherto the British working class had on the whole supported the liberals. In 1892, however, Keir Hardie, a Scottish miner, and an avowed socialist, founded the first independent labor party. The Trade Union Congress had refused to have anything to do with Hardie at first. Then (as now) there was the usual lamentation that the formation of an independent labor party would weaken the “progressive” vote and so let in the reactionaries. For many years there had been working class members in Parliament elected from predominantly working class constituencies. They had supported the labor-liberal combination almost exclusively. But the work of Marx and Engels and their associates on the First International now bore fruit. By 1899 a joint committee of the Trade Union Congress, the Independent Labor Party and some socialist societies, was organized. The British Labor Party was on its way.</p>
<p>In 1906, out of fifty candidates, twenty-nine were successful. In 1918 there were sixty-one members in Parliament; in 1922, 142 members; in 1923, 191, and the first Labor government took office in 1924.</p>
<p>Even for Britain this development was extraordinary, taking into consideration the long years that the British workers had had to fight in order to gain manhood suffrage toward the end of the century. One reason for the success lay in the strength of the trade union movement which is the base of the Labor Party in Britain. And the strength of the trade union movement lay not only in the cohesiveness of the British people but in the fact that between 1848 and the end of the century Britain became industrialized to a degree far surpassing that of any other great European country. Britain imported food and raw materials and exported manufactured goods. The population was proletarianized until by 1914 Britain was between sixty per cent and seventy per cent “proletarian.” On this basis and the political pressure of a declining economy, the British workers pushed ahead in the representation of their interests by a national Labor Party. <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a></p>
<p>Exactly the opposite is the development in America. After 1886 the Knights of Labor rapidly declined. American labor historians have blamed the failure upon the weakness of the bureaucracy, etc. There is no need to go into these questions here. It is sufficient that immediately after the failure of the Knights, the American Federation of Labor emerged to prominence and took much the same place in the American labor movement that the craft unions in Britain had taken after the Chartist fiasco in 1848.</p>
<p>Engels visited America in 1888. He saw at first-hand the immigrant problem and other subjective difficulties from which the American working class suffered. In 1892 he put his finger on the fundamental weakness behind its slow political development.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Land</em> is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect <em>anything</em> from speculation <em>any more</em> will we have a solid foothold in America.”</p>
<p class="fst">Yet so strong was his belief that the national characteristic would find powerful expression in the American proletariat that it was in that very 1892, after the failure of the Knights was patent, that he penned the confident words which head this article.</p>
<p>History slowly but nevertheless surely is justifying his concept of American development. Between 1880 and 1914 American industry developed with the colossal American energy, and the American proletariat reacted with equal vigor. The Homestead strike in 1892, the Pullman strike of 1894, the anthracite coal miners’ strike in 1902, these were working class actions which astonished the world and, in Engels’ words, struck terror into the hearts of the American bourgeoisie. But whereas in Britain industry overwhelmingly outdistanced agriculture, in the United States, American industry developed not only itself but American agriculture as well. The total population of the United States in 186o was not thirty millions. In 1910 there were more than fifty million people living on farms or in villages dependent upon agriculture. The AFL grew steadily and a Socialist Party appeared toward the end of the century. By 1908, however, the Socialist Party could boast of only one member of Congress. In 1914 the national party of labor was pretty much where it had been after the failure of the Knights of Labor.</p>
<p>Yet the colossal energy of the development was perfectly visible, though Engels was not there to trace it after 1895. The later development of agriculture was thoroughly capitalistic. The disruption which capitalism carries into the countryside and financial swindling raised the wrath of the farmers and they replied with a “Populist” movement which repeatedly rocked the whole political life of the country. Though the rapid penetration of industry into the West prevented the organized extension of trade unions such as characterized countries with a more peaceful development like Britain and Germany, yet even to these unstable conditions, the American working class reacted with an organization unique in the history of organized labor.</p>
<p>In the years just previous to the First World War, the work of the IWW among the textile workers in Massachusetts, in the Western Federation of Miners and among nomadic workers, such as lumbermen and longshoremen, gave them a reputation which spread over the whole world and earned them the ferocious hatred of the American bourgeoisie. Their strikes for “free speech” and the fearless energies with which they threw themselves into all their industrial struggles made them internationally famous. Their songs and slogans have traveled all over the world. This is particularly remarkable because only for a few years in Australia did the movement ever take hold in any other country. It was a characteristic American phenomenon.</p>
<p>The end of the First World War saw the United States pass rapidly through a period of the export of finance-capital. By 1929, however, the world crisis put an end to capitalist expansion on a world scale. Thereupon this most capitalistic of all countries experienced a crisis of a scope and depth far exceeding all other previous crises and greater than that of all the other countries of the world put together. America had now reached the stage that Britain had reached in 1888. The American proletariat, true to the national tradition, replied in kind. History will record that between 1935 and 1948 the American proletariat, in the organization of the CIO, did exactly what Engels fifty years before had prophesied. “Once the Americans get started, it will be with an energy and violence compared with which we in Europe shall be mere children.”</p>
<p>The land boom is now over, the immigrant elements are being kneaded into a whole. The organization of labor and the struggles on the industrial field have given the American worker that class consciousness which has been so absent in his past. The American proletariat now faces the organization of an independent national party of labor. We need have no doubt that when the moment comes it will be true to its traditions.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" nosahde="">
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="note"><a name="n1" href="#f1">1.</a> <strong>Marx-Engels Correspondence</strong>, page 497. The <strong>Correspondence</strong> has a fairly good collection of the letters to America. <strong>Science and Society</strong>, spring and summer 1938, contain letters which are not in the <strong>Correspondence</strong>.</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n2" href="#f2">2.</a> The draft riots lasted only a few days.</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n3" href="#f3">3.</a> It is easy to point out the numerous occasions when Marx and Engels made predictions about revolution which did not come true and which seemed indeed to be wide of the mark. In their early days some of this was due to youthful enthusiasm. Later it was different. Whenever the possibility of revolution appeared, they threw themselves into it, hoping to make the best of the opportunities. In 1891 Bebel asked Engels if he had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. Engels replied: “All I said was we might possibly come to power in 1898 ... An old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed.”</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n4" href="#f4">4.</a> We do not propose here to go into the history of its failures. The history of the Social-Democracy in Europe, its rise and decline, are well known to the readers of <strong>The New International</strong>.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
In the American Tradition
The Working-Class Movement in Perspective
(November 1943)
Originally published in The New International, Vol. IX No. 10, November 1943, pp. 306–309.
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.
Proofread by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA. (July 2015)
“But I consider this certain: the purely bourgeois basis with no pre-bourgeois swindle behind it, the corresponding colossal energy of the development... will one day bring about a change which will astound the whole world. Once the Americans get started it will be with an energy and violence compared with which we in Europe shall be mere children.” [1]
Thus on the 30th of March, 1892, Engels wrote from London to a friend in America. Marx and Engels knew that in every country, in whatever continent, the socialist revolution denoted the seizure of power by the working class under circumstances dictated by the law of uneven development and the historical peculiarities of each country. But they were sensitive to the subjective qualities of different sections of the international proletariat. Thus they looked upon the German proletariat as the most theoretical in Europe; the British workers were somewhat slow but once they had gained some advantage, did not let it go lightly, etc. In his last years, Engels always wrote about the American proletariat in such terms as the above. It is therefore important to see what Engels thought, why he thought it, to examine the historical development since his death and to see how far his analysis and expectations have been justified. This, useful at all times, is particularly necessary today because Engels was stirred to write about America at the time when it seemed to him that a national labor party was at last on its way.
Engels based his views on two fundamental facts. The country in 1886 is “rich, vast, expanding.” That is its special economic characteristic. Its special historic characteristic is that its political institutions are “purely bourgeois ... unleavened by feudal remnants....” These combined give to the economy a tremendous power of development and this national characteristic is of necessity imbued in the proletariat. Yet at the same time “in every young country” where the development is of a predominantly material nature, there is a “certain backwardness of thought, a clinging to traditions connected with the foundations of the new nationality....” The “exigencies” of practical labor and the concentrating of capital “have produced a contempt for all theory” and in such a country the people must become conscious of their own social interests by making “blunder upon blunder....” But always he insists that when the workers begin their political development it will be like nothing ever seen before. They will go fast, “faster than anywhere else, even though on a singular road, which seems from the theoretical standpoint, to be almost an insane road.”
It would be perhaps most fruitful to begin with a comparison between the economic and political development of the working class movement in America with the working class movement in Great Britain. For Marx and Engels, England was the model capitalist country and in their day the most fully developed. It is the easier to do so because in his observations on America, Engels constantly referred to earlier parallel and future developments in Britain.
The National Tradition
The “traditions connected with the foundations of the new nationality” date back to before the American Revolution. But just as the French Revolution is the foundation of the modern French nation and the English Revolution in the seventeenth century is the foundation of modern Britain, just so the modern American nation finds its roots in 1776. This revolution differs sharply from the other two. A hundred and fifty years before, in Britain, the Cromwellian Revolution produced a powerful combination of petty bourgeois and neo-proletarian elements. They raised a program for political democracy which was not realized in Britain until over two hundred years afterward. Though they raised the question of property openly in debate with Cromwell, they were not communists. The real communists, the Levellers and the Diggers, were a small minority to the left of this movement which was so large and well organized that it almost drove Cromwell and his associates into the arms of the monarchy. He had to suppress these formidable revolutionaries by force. Carlyle calls them “sans culottes before their time.” The real sans culottes were the driving force and the mainstay of the French Revolution. From that day to this the French bourgeoisie has lived in terror of revolutionary Paris.
No such conflicts took place in the American Revolution. Whereas the other two nationalities were born out of civil war, the American nation was born in a national struggle against foreign rule. Despite the very real class differences among the American revolutionaries and the struggle against the Loyalists, yet bourgeoisie, farmers, artisans and mechanics were a more or less homogeneous whole against British imperialism. Their ancestors had left European tyranny behind. Now they were clearing it out of the magnificent new country for good. The economic opportunities of this rich and vast new world prevented the extreme sharpening of class relations which characterized the old, but the consequent absence of sharp class political differentiation had powerful subjective reinforcement in the very circumstances under which the American people first felt themselves a nation.
It is this which Engels refers to fifty years ago, and today, despite the unprecedented development during the last twenty-five years, this sense of America being a free country, inherently different from the rest of the world, is still enormously powerful among all sections of the people. It has its drawbacks, but it has its virtues also.
But if, except for Shay’s Rebellion, the American masses did not assert themselves with the vigor and independence of the English petty bourgeoisie and the French sans culottes, they ran far, far ahead of Europe politically in the years immediately following their revolution. By 1825 the battle for manhood suffrage had been won. The vote of the farmers and the masses in the towns exercized an influence upon the ruling class, upon legislative machinery and upon the “money power” which today might seem more illusory than real. For it to be appreciated it should be seen in comparison with conditions in Britain, reputedly the classic country of bourgeois democracy.
Politics and the British Workers
If 1776 saw the Declaration of Independence of the American commercial bourgeoisie, in the same year appeared The Wealth of Nations, the declaration of independence of the British industrial bourgeoisie. Britain entered upon a period of dazzling economic development. Politically, however, the country was a hundred years behind the United States. Feudal remnants had Britain by the throat. G.K. Chesterton has summed up the situation perfectly when he contrasted the Commons with a capital C and the commons with a small c. The English aristocracy ruled in the House of Lords and their sons, brothers and sons-in-law sat in the House of Commons in close alliance with the financial and commercial magnates. Not only the masses of the people but even the rising industrial bourgeoisie were excluded. It took nearly fifty years to break this political stranglehold of the feudal remnants. Britain reached the verge of revolution in 1832 before the aristocracy gave way. Yet the Great Reform Bill of 1832 enfranchised only some 200,000 people. The masses, whose revolutionary agitation and direct action were the main causes of the bill being passed, were entirely excluded. This political advance was so eminently satisfactory to Lord John Russell, who pioneered the bill, that he became known afterward as “Finality John.”
We shall understand America better if we continue with Britain. The masses, disappointed with the results of the Reform Bill, started the Chartist agitation. It lasted from 1839 to 1848 and embraced millions of British workers. Its demands were a curious mixture of political and social aspirations which we shall meet again forty years later in the Knights of Labor in the United States. Politics, however, predominated. The Chartists demanded universal suffrage, equal electoral areas, payment of members of Parliament, no property qualifications, vote by ballot and annual Parliaments. But they aimed also at “social equality.” A worker needed a good house, good clothes and “plenty of good food and drink to make him look and feel happy.” They were not quite sure how they were to achieve all this and wavered between petitions and direct action which on one occasion reached the stage of a half-hearted general strike and on another a planned insurrection.
The movement suddenly collapsed in 1848. In 1846 the Corn Laws, by which the British landlords had kept up the price of corn, were abolished. The British industrialists, on the basis of cheap food, began that economic development by which Britain dominated the world market for forty years. The Chartist movement faded away. In 1851 the workers’ movement took the form of slow and solid craft unionism, which dominated the British labor movement for forty years, the same period of time that Britain dominated the world market. It took the same forty years before Britain achieved manhood suffrage. The workers in the town got the vote only in 1867 and the workers in the country only in 1888.
The American “Chartists”
In America between 1825 and 1850 industries are at a far lower stage of development than they are in Britain. But we have the beginnings of a labor movement, and the utopian socialism of Fourier and Owen flourishes not only in theory but in practice. Between 1850 and 1860 the growth of industry brings numerous strikes, fought out with the customary vigor of the American working class. But the political development of the country is overshadowed by the necessity of crushing the slave power. Astonishing development! Such is the territorial extent of America that the crushing of the plantation owners is a regional struggle. The industrial bourgeoisie wins its victory in civil conflict so gigantic that it is the first great modern war. Yet it manages this without a single serious clash with the workers. [2] The leader of the bourgeoisie is a national hero who fights “to save the Union” and later to abolish slavery.
Yet the signs of a mass labor movement with political aspirations were ominously clear. This movement, however, was deflected by the richness and the vastness of the country and the absence of feudal relations. In the average European country there would have been no land. If there had been any it would have been owned by some noblemen. The Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up free land to the more dissatisfied and adventurous of the proletariat, diluted the independent political aspirations of the working class. America enters upon a period of industrial development comparable to that of Britain between 1784 and 1848. It took fifty years in Britain to produce Chartism. In America, where the energy of development is so colossal, the movement corresponding to Chartism appeared within less than ten years.
The Knights of Labor was organized in 1869, as a secret society. By 1879 the secrecy was discarded and between 1879 and 1886 it developed in much the same way and on much the same scale that Chartism had developed forty years before. The Knights wished “to secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral and social faculties, all of the benefits, recreations and pleasures of association.” The similarity to the ideas of the Chartists is very striking. Like the Chartists, the Knights aimed at a new social order, but they were not socialist in the European sense. Their main demands were not political because, being Americans, they already had political freedom. But in accordance with their country and their time, they demanded the reserving of public lands for actual settlers, the abolition of the contract system of labor and public works, the eight-hour day, etc. Like the Chartists, the movement aimed at helping all workers in all fields. Suddenly in 1886, the year of the “Great Upheaval,” the Knights of Labor claimed international attention.
Late in 1885 and early in 1886 a huge strike movement, based on their struggle for the eight-hour day, swept over the United States. A number of Labor Parties sprang into being. In November, 1886, candidates of the newly formed Labor Parties were successful in the municipal elections. In New York City, where a united Labor Party had been formed only in July, it put forward Henry George as candidate. The Democrat got 90,000 votes. George came next with 68,000, beating Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican candidate, by 8,000 votes. The Chartists had aimed at more but done much less.
Engels in London greeted the upheaval as the dawn of a new age. On June 3 he writes to America:
“Six months ago nobody suspected anything, and now they appear all of a sudden in such organized masses as to strike terror into the whole capitalist class. I only wish Marx could have lived to see it.”
The old man was sixty-six, but he reacted with the exuberance of someone who had just joined the movement.
In November after the electoral successes he writes again and takes up the question of the National Labor Party.
“The first great step of importance for every country entering the movement is always the organization of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first program of the party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils, but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement – no matter in what form, so far as it is only their own movement — in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves. The movement in America is in the same condition as it was with us before 1848....”
That the movement had attained such electoral successes after only eight months of existence was “absolutely unheard of.”
Engels warned the German émigrés working in the movement not to be doctrinaire.
“A million or two of working men’s votes next November for a bona-fide workingmen’s party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinably perfect platform.”
These ideas Engels repeated formally in his introduction to the American edition of The Conditions of the Working Class in England. The passage is worth ample quotation.
In February 1885, American public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there was no working class in the European sense of the word in America; that, secondly, no class struggle between workmen and capitalists such as tore European society to pieces was possible in the American Republic, and that therefore socialism was a thing of foreign importation which could never take root on American soil. And yet at that moment the coming class struggle was casting its gigantic shadow before it in the strikes of the Pennsylvania coal miners and of many other trades and especially in the preparations all over the country for the great eight-hour movement which was to come off and did come off in She May following. That I duly appreciated these symptoms, that I anticipated the working class movement on a national scale, my Appendix shows; but no one could then foresee that in such a short time the movement would burst out with such irresistible force, would spread with the rapidity of a prairie fire, would shake American society to its foundations.
The spontaneous and instinctive movements of these vast masses of working people, over a vast extent of country, the simultaneous outburst of their common discontent with the miserable social conditions, the same and due to the same causes, made them conscious of the fact that they formed the new and distinct class of American society... and with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step toward their deliverance; the formation of the political working-men’s party, on a platform of its own and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal.
A passage which followed is even more significant. For Engels the working class movement developed in two stages, the mass trade union movement acting on a national scale and the independent labor party, also on a national scale. Usually there is a lengthy period between both of these. But history can develop very rapidly and Engels writes:
On the more favored soil of America, where no medieval ruins bar the way, where history begins with the elements of modern bourgeois society, as evolved in the seventeenth century, the working class passed through these two stages of its development within ten months.
Engels really thought that the moment had come in America. In November, 1886, he had written that the American bourgeoisie was persecuting the movement so “shamelessly and tyrannically” that it would bring matters rapidly to a decision “and if we in Europe do not hurry up, the Americans will soon be ahead of us.” That was on November 29. Three weeks before, in his preface to the first English translation of Capital, he had shown that he was expecting social revolution in Britain. The number of unemployed in Britain was swelling from year to year “and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed, losing patience, will take their own fate into their own hands.”
In both instances, the expectation was not realized. [3] In Britain the British bourgeoisie solved the problem by the export of finance capital, thus ushering in the age of imperialism. In the United States once more the vastness and richness of the country came to the rescue of the bourgeoisie.
The Turn of the Century
Let us once more take a rapid survey of British development.
It was only three years after Engels’ preface to the English edition of Capital that Britain found itself in turmoil. The year 1888 was the year of two famous strikes in Britain: the dock strike and the match girls’ strike. There was none of the violence associated with similar large-scale actions in the United States. The strikes, in fact, evoked great popular sympathy. They were triumphant and they marked the beginning of the organization of the unskilled workers in Britain. Let us note that this took place precisely at the moment when Britain was beginning to lose its almost exclusive domination of the world market and just a few years after the working class in the agricultural areas had got the vote. But the long lag behind the political activity of the American masses was now rapidly overcome. Hitherto the British working class had on the whole supported the liberals. In 1892, however, Keir Hardie, a Scottish miner, and an avowed socialist, founded the first independent labor party. The Trade Union Congress had refused to have anything to do with Hardie at first. Then (as now) there was the usual lamentation that the formation of an independent labor party would weaken the “progressive” vote and so let in the reactionaries. For many years there had been working class members in Parliament elected from predominantly working class constituencies. They had supported the labor-liberal combination almost exclusively. But the work of Marx and Engels and their associates on the First International now bore fruit. By 1899 a joint committee of the Trade Union Congress, the Independent Labor Party and some socialist societies, was organized. The British Labor Party was on its way.
In 1906, out of fifty candidates, twenty-nine were successful. In 1918 there were sixty-one members in Parliament; in 1922, 142 members; in 1923, 191, and the first Labor government took office in 1924.
Even for Britain this development was extraordinary, taking into consideration the long years that the British workers had had to fight in order to gain manhood suffrage toward the end of the century. One reason for the success lay in the strength of the trade union movement which is the base of the Labor Party in Britain. And the strength of the trade union movement lay not only in the cohesiveness of the British people but in the fact that between 1848 and the end of the century Britain became industrialized to a degree far surpassing that of any other great European country. Britain imported food and raw materials and exported manufactured goods. The population was proletarianized until by 1914 Britain was between sixty per cent and seventy per cent “proletarian.” On this basis and the political pressure of a declining economy, the British workers pushed ahead in the representation of their interests by a national Labor Party. [4]
Exactly the opposite is the development in America. After 1886 the Knights of Labor rapidly declined. American labor historians have blamed the failure upon the weakness of the bureaucracy, etc. There is no need to go into these questions here. It is sufficient that immediately after the failure of the Knights, the American Federation of Labor emerged to prominence and took much the same place in the American labor movement that the craft unions in Britain had taken after the Chartist fiasco in 1848.
Engels visited America in 1888. He saw at first-hand the immigrant problem and other subjective difficulties from which the American working class suffered. In 1892 he put his finger on the fundamental weakness behind its slow political development.
Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America.”
Yet so strong was his belief that the national characteristic would find powerful expression in the American proletariat that it was in that very 1892, after the failure of the Knights was patent, that he penned the confident words which head this article.
History slowly but nevertheless surely is justifying his concept of American development. Between 1880 and 1914 American industry developed with the colossal American energy, and the American proletariat reacted with equal vigor. The Homestead strike in 1892, the Pullman strike of 1894, the anthracite coal miners’ strike in 1902, these were working class actions which astonished the world and, in Engels’ words, struck terror into the hearts of the American bourgeoisie. But whereas in Britain industry overwhelmingly outdistanced agriculture, in the United States, American industry developed not only itself but American agriculture as well. The total population of the United States in 186o was not thirty millions. In 1910 there were more than fifty million people living on farms or in villages dependent upon agriculture. The AFL grew steadily and a Socialist Party appeared toward the end of the century. By 1908, however, the Socialist Party could boast of only one member of Congress. In 1914 the national party of labor was pretty much where it had been after the failure of the Knights of Labor.
Yet the colossal energy of the development was perfectly visible, though Engels was not there to trace it after 1895. The later development of agriculture was thoroughly capitalistic. The disruption which capitalism carries into the countryside and financial swindling raised the wrath of the farmers and they replied with a “Populist” movement which repeatedly rocked the whole political life of the country. Though the rapid penetration of industry into the West prevented the organized extension of trade unions such as characterized countries with a more peaceful development like Britain and Germany, yet even to these unstable conditions, the American working class reacted with an organization unique in the history of organized labor.
In the years just previous to the First World War, the work of the IWW among the textile workers in Massachusetts, in the Western Federation of Miners and among nomadic workers, such as lumbermen and longshoremen, gave them a reputation which spread over the whole world and earned them the ferocious hatred of the American bourgeoisie. Their strikes for “free speech” and the fearless energies with which they threw themselves into all their industrial struggles made them internationally famous. Their songs and slogans have traveled all over the world. This is particularly remarkable because only for a few years in Australia did the movement ever take hold in any other country. It was a characteristic American phenomenon.
The end of the First World War saw the United States pass rapidly through a period of the export of finance-capital. By 1929, however, the world crisis put an end to capitalist expansion on a world scale. Thereupon this most capitalistic of all countries experienced a crisis of a scope and depth far exceeding all other previous crises and greater than that of all the other countries of the world put together. America had now reached the stage that Britain had reached in 1888. The American proletariat, true to the national tradition, replied in kind. History will record that between 1935 and 1948 the American proletariat, in the organization of the CIO, did exactly what Engels fifty years before had prophesied. “Once the Americans get started, it will be with an energy and violence compared with which we in Europe shall be mere children.”
The land boom is now over, the immigrant elements are being kneaded into a whole. The organization of labor and the struggles on the industrial field have given the American worker that class consciousness which has been so absent in his past. The American proletariat now faces the organization of an independent national party of labor. We need have no doubt that when the moment comes it will be true to its traditions.
Footnotes
1. Marx-Engels Correspondence, page 497. The Correspondence has a fairly good collection of the letters to America. Science and Society, spring and summer 1938, contain letters which are not in the Correspondence.
2. The draft riots lasted only a few days.
3. It is easy to point out the numerous occasions when Marx and Engels made predictions about revolution which did not come true and which seemed indeed to be wide of the mark. In their early days some of this was due to youthful enthusiasm. Later it was different. Whenever the possibility of revolution appeared, they threw themselves into it, hoping to make the best of the opportunities. In 1891 Bebel asked Engels if he had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. Engels replied: “All I said was we might possibly come to power in 1898 ... An old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed.”
4. We do not propose here to go into the history of its failures. The history of the Social-Democracy in Europe, its rise and decline, are well known to the readers of The New International.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1936</p>
<h5>Doctrine and History for the Youth No.1</h5>
<h3>POPULAR FRONTS IN PAST TIMES</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">First Published</span>: in <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/fight/index.htm#f36_02"><strong>Fight</strong></a>,Volume 1. No. 2. December 12th, 1936, p. 16, signed CL Rudder;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed/Marked up</span>: by Ted Crawford/Damon Maxwell.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">The basis of Marxism is the class-struggle. Many in the labour movement agree with that in words, but keep on thinking in political terms instead of looking through these and getting at the class realities that lie below. That is why revolutionary periods are so worthy of study. In them one sees the real interests of classes stripped of all the political drapery of quieter times. If we look at some great revolutionary periods of history we shall see some very clear lessons for us to-day. We shall not begin with the British and French Revolutions. They will be treated in separate studies. Let us take the first great socialist revolution in European history, the French Revolution of 1848. It was a socialist revolution in the sense that it was made by the workers organised in factories by capitalist production. Also they were aiming, though not clearly, at socialism, the conversion of bourgeois private property into socialist property. The revolutionary workers came out into the streets of Paris, overthrew the government and could have had the power if they knew how to. But the masses cannot seize power. They need a revolutionary party. The trouble in France was that there was no revolutionary party and the workers came under the leadership of Louis Blanc, a great believer in democracy, exactly the same type as Citrine, Attlee and Leon Blum. Louis Blanc at once tied the workers to the Liberals and made an attempt to solve the problems of the workers through a democratic parliament. Liberals and workers established a republic. But this only meant changing the political form, and leaving untouched the economic class grievances which are the main driving force of a workers revolution. A dangerous situation developed. The workers were ready for drastic action, but listened to Louis Blanc and his talk of parliamentary democracy.</p>
<p>Let Lenin tell us the inevitable result:</p>
<p class="indentb">“For while in a society with a keen class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, particularly when this struggle is inevitably made more acute by a revolution, there can be no “middle” course, the whole essence of the class position and aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie consists in wanting the impossible, in aspiring towards the impossible, i.e., towards just a “middle course.”<br>
The third determining class force was the proletariat which aspired not towards a “conciliation” with the bourgeoisie but towards a victory over it, towards a fearless development of the revolution onward, and what is more, on an international scale.<br>
This was the objective historical soil from which sprang Cavaignac. The vacillations of the petty bour�geoisie “pushed it aside” from active roles, and the French Cadet, General Cavaignac, taking advantage of the fear of the petty bourgeoisie to entrust itself to the proletariat, decided to disarm the workers, to shoot them down in large numbers.<br>
The revolution was terminated by this historical shoot�ing; the petty bourgeoisie, numerically preponderant, had been and remained the politically impotent tail of the bourgeoisie, and three years later France again saw the restoration of a particularly vile form of caesarist mon�archy.”</p>
<p>The military dictator, the “Fascist” of those days, did not come by accident but arose precisely because of the vacillations of the Government, which was a perfect example of the Popular Front.</p>
<p>Marx and Engels, having studied history closely, drew the conclusion: “the workers must have their own party which knows what it wants and will pull the petty bour�goisie behind them in action, the petty-bourgeois masses, not the politicians.” The workers were anxious for allies, “but,” said Marx, “watch your ally as you would your enemy, march side by side with him but never join with him.” Working on those lines, Lenin formed and led the Bolshevik party. In 1917 when then Russian workers and the peasants who formed the army, upset the Tsarist Government, the Bolshevik party was unorganised and too weak to seize power. The Democrats helped to form the workers’ Soviets and then gave the power to a Liberal Government. Soon these representatives of the workers actually joined this Liberal Government. That was a Popular Front Government if ever there was one; with Liberals and most of the workers’ “democratic” repre�sentatives, all except the revolutionary Bolsheviks. We know how this Kerensky Government failed. People blame Kerensky, but it is absurd to do so. A Government of that kind can never function in a crisis. Democracy is a political form. But in modern revolutionary crises it is property which is at stake. It was at this period that Lenin quoted the example of 1848 and warned that in a period of crisis a government must know its mind and act, or the great property-owners would do what they did in 1848 - take advantage of the confusion and organise a military rebellion. A few months after the thing happened. Kornilov attacked, but the Bolsheviks were on the alert and, being outside of this Popular Front Kerensky Government, mobilised the masses under the banner of the socialist revolution and swept on to victory.</p>
<p>We can see a parallel situation in Spain to-day. In 1931 Workers and Liberals got rid of Alfonso and the Spanish Revolution began. But, once more, in a revolutionary period as the present time, a government of Liberals and Workers cannot function. In the inevitable confusion Franco got his chance. In France, the Radicals (Liberals) and Blum, the Labour leader, cannot function. They have been travelling opposite ways from the time they started and confusion grows daily. The rival claims of the workers and capitalists cannot be settled in the French Parliament, and it is in this uncertainty that the Fascists get their chance. The lessons of a hundred years of history are clear. The workers must unite in a Workers’ Front and take workers’ action under the leader�ship of a revolutionary party. The lower middle classes follow those who take action.</p>
<p class="author">C. L. RUDDER.</p>
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C.L.R. James 1936
Doctrine and History for the Youth No.1
POPULAR FRONTS IN PAST TIMES
First Published: in Fight,Volume 1. No. 2. December 12th, 1936, p. 16, signed CL Rudder;
Transcribed/Marked up: by Ted Crawford/Damon Maxwell.
The basis of Marxism is the class-struggle. Many in the labour movement agree with that in words, but keep on thinking in political terms instead of looking through these and getting at the class realities that lie below. That is why revolutionary periods are so worthy of study. In them one sees the real interests of classes stripped of all the political drapery of quieter times. If we look at some great revolutionary periods of history we shall see some very clear lessons for us to-day. We shall not begin with the British and French Revolutions. They will be treated in separate studies. Let us take the first great socialist revolution in European history, the French Revolution of 1848. It was a socialist revolution in the sense that it was made by the workers organised in factories by capitalist production. Also they were aiming, though not clearly, at socialism, the conversion of bourgeois private property into socialist property. The revolutionary workers came out into the streets of Paris, overthrew the government and could have had the power if they knew how to. But the masses cannot seize power. They need a revolutionary party. The trouble in France was that there was no revolutionary party and the workers came under the leadership of Louis Blanc, a great believer in democracy, exactly the same type as Citrine, Attlee and Leon Blum. Louis Blanc at once tied the workers to the Liberals and made an attempt to solve the problems of the workers through a democratic parliament. Liberals and workers established a republic. But this only meant changing the political form, and leaving untouched the economic class grievances which are the main driving force of a workers revolution. A dangerous situation developed. The workers were ready for drastic action, but listened to Louis Blanc and his talk of parliamentary democracy.
Let Lenin tell us the inevitable result:
“For while in a society with a keen class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, particularly when this struggle is inevitably made more acute by a revolution, there can be no “middle” course, the whole essence of the class position and aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie consists in wanting the impossible, in aspiring towards the impossible, i.e., towards just a “middle course.”
The third determining class force was the proletariat which aspired not towards a “conciliation” with the bourgeoisie but towards a victory over it, towards a fearless development of the revolution onward, and what is more, on an international scale.
This was the objective historical soil from which sprang Cavaignac. The vacillations of the petty bour�geoisie “pushed it aside” from active roles, and the French Cadet, General Cavaignac, taking advantage of the fear of the petty bourgeoisie to entrust itself to the proletariat, decided to disarm the workers, to shoot them down in large numbers.
The revolution was terminated by this historical shoot�ing; the petty bourgeoisie, numerically preponderant, had been and remained the politically impotent tail of the bourgeoisie, and three years later France again saw the restoration of a particularly vile form of caesarist mon�archy.”
The military dictator, the “Fascist” of those days, did not come by accident but arose precisely because of the vacillations of the Government, which was a perfect example of the Popular Front.
Marx and Engels, having studied history closely, drew the conclusion: “the workers must have their own party which knows what it wants and will pull the petty bour�goisie behind them in action, the petty-bourgeois masses, not the politicians.” The workers were anxious for allies, “but,” said Marx, “watch your ally as you would your enemy, march side by side with him but never join with him.” Working on those lines, Lenin formed and led the Bolshevik party. In 1917 when then Russian workers and the peasants who formed the army, upset the Tsarist Government, the Bolshevik party was unorganised and too weak to seize power. The Democrats helped to form the workers’ Soviets and then gave the power to a Liberal Government. Soon these representatives of the workers actually joined this Liberal Government. That was a Popular Front Government if ever there was one; with Liberals and most of the workers’ “democratic” repre�sentatives, all except the revolutionary Bolsheviks. We know how this Kerensky Government failed. People blame Kerensky, but it is absurd to do so. A Government of that kind can never function in a crisis. Democracy is a political form. But in modern revolutionary crises it is property which is at stake. It was at this period that Lenin quoted the example of 1848 and warned that in a period of crisis a government must know its mind and act, or the great property-owners would do what they did in 1848 - take advantage of the confusion and organise a military rebellion. A few months after the thing happened. Kornilov attacked, but the Bolsheviks were on the alert and, being outside of this Popular Front Kerensky Government, mobilised the masses under the banner of the socialist revolution and swept on to victory.
We can see a parallel situation in Spain to-day. In 1931 Workers and Liberals got rid of Alfonso and the Spanish Revolution began. But, once more, in a revolutionary period as the present time, a government of Liberals and Workers cannot function. In the inevitable confusion Franco got his chance. In France, the Radicals (Liberals) and Blum, the Labour leader, cannot function. They have been travelling opposite ways from the time they started and confusion grows daily. The rival claims of the workers and capitalists cannot be settled in the French Parliament, and it is in this uncertainty that the Fascists get their chance. The lessons of a hundred years of history are clear. The workers must unite in a Workers’ Front and take workers’ action under the leader�ship of a revolutionary party. The lower middle classes follow those who take action.
C. L. RUDDER.
C.L.R. James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<table width="60%" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="6" border="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
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<h3>(24 November 1939)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_90" target="new">Vol. III No. 90</a>, 24 November 1939, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Negroes in Steel (Continued)</h3>
<p class="fst">Let us continue with our examination of the Negro in the steel industry, as portrayed by Cayton and Mitchell in their book, <strong>Black Workers and the New Unions</strong>.</p>
<p>The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers for years did practically nothing to organize the Negroes – or for that matter, anybody else. The union officials passed resolutions and talked about accepting Negro workers as well as whites, but they did nothing to bring numbers of Negroes into the union, even after the passage of the National Industrial Relations Act. The union continued its policy of equality in words and segregation in action.</p>
<p>But among the new unions formed after the NRA, there was a new spirit, and officers and members went after Negroes, recognizing that without them it was impossible to win victories against the bosses. Wherever the proportion of Negroes in the plant was large the workers made a determined drive. An interview with a worker in McKeesport, Penna., shows in a few words the role of the Negro in steel:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Negroes must be organized here if the union is to have any show at all; it would be impossible to ignore them completely because of their great numbers, especially since difficulties have been experienced in bringing in the highly skilled American workers.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Outstretched Hand Not Enough</h4>
<p class="fst">But the Negro has behind him three hundred years of deception and exploitation by whites. Many whites make the mistake of thinking that as soon as they go with an outstretched hand to the Negro he will forget everything and accept it. It is not so easy. Many of the white workers found that they had to make a special effort to get Negroes in. One of the most frequent methods adopted was to get Negro speakers to address meetings. And certain lodges elected Negroes to offices in the unions, so as to give practical proof that the equality of which they spoke was more than verbal bait for the Negroes. In Homestead, Penna., the financial secretary of Spirit of 1892 Lodge No. 172 tells of the great success that follows the election of Negroes to office:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“... Then the rest of them came in droves. They are a clannish bunch, passing word of all such developments around among themselves. Each man brings his friends, and the next meeting the friend brings other friends, until enormous numbers of them attend in force.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The two areas where most Negroes filed into the union were Pittsburgh and Birmingham, one in the heart of the industrial district of the Northeast and the other in the backward South. This shows us once more a lesson that we must never forget, that in the last analysis it is economic relations which are decisive in politics.<br>
</p>
<h4>No Racial Question in Profits</h4>
<p class="fst">The economic relation is decisive in politics. The capitalist does not allow race prejudice to interrupt his profits. When union activities became threatening, the owners in one factory tried a novel way of splitting the workers. Previously Negroes were not allowed to work the open hearth or as first helpers, but were kept as second or third helpers. To divide the working class, the company promoted several Negroes to first helpers, the most aristocratic, skilled, and well paid job in the whole mill. This had a double effect. Those Negroes who got the job would have nothing whatever to do with the union. And the other Negroes in the shop felt that at last promotion was open to them and they therefore became much cooler to union organization.</p>
<p>The white workers were now paying for their previous neglect of and discrimination against the Negroes. We shall see more of this in the future. But in any serious competition, on a large scale, between the workers and the bosses, the great majority of Negro workers – 99 percent of them – will find their places beside their white brothers. Economic relations, though not the whole story, are the most important part of the story.</p>
<p>Many of the Negro workers are sympathetic to the union. They know that they will get little from the company, but what they fear is that in the event of a closed shop the white workers might discriminate against them. This has happened in many unions and nothing but the most vigilant honesty and fair play on the part of the white workers can break down this justified distrust. Yet despite these difficulties, the unions were able to attract and to hold Negroes.<br>
</p>
<h4>Equality Begins Among Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">An important part of this work is the election of Negro officers. In nearly every important lodge in the Pittsburgh area this has taken place. First of all the lodges began by electing Negroes to office simply in order to attract other Negroes. Later, as more Negroes came into the union, these voted for additional colored officers. And finally all the workers, white and black, recognized the capabilities of certain among the Negro officials and voted for them without regard for the color of their skin. In Clairton, Penna., for instance, according to an interview,</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“There were more colored than white elected to office. Here in Clairton there are about ten whites to one colored person. When the nomination came off, they nominated whom they wanted. We wanted to put up as many Negroes as we could. We voted by secret ballot. They had a colored man and a white man watching the ballot box. Six colored were nominated and of these, four were elected. Mr. M. was elected corresponding representative, J.E. financial secretary, M.B. trustee, and J.B. another trustee.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">When the Negro sees that he can make his influence felt and can elect some of his race to office, he can more easily turn his back on the bosses. It is in this way that the great battle for equality not only on the economic but on the political and social field will be won.</p>
<p>The Homestead, Penna., lodge, according to one of its officers,</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“... held a couple of bingo games and a dance, all of which Negroes attended in force with their ladies. At the dance, held in the lower section of the city near the Negro district, there were no restrictions. Dancing was mixed racially and sexually, whites with Negro partners. I danced with a Negro girl myself. Negroes enjoyed themselves immensely and there was no kicks from the whites. This lodge will soon have a picnic which will be mixed.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">There are many such successful attempts, despite some failures.</p>
<p>This attempt of the workers to get together, naturally suffers from the tremendous pressure to which they are subjected by the race prejudices of a bourgeois society. But it is here that the battle for racial equality must be fought, and it is here that it can be won. Not in dances in Greenwich Village, or by bourgeois hosts and hostesses who invite intelligent Negroes to their houses for dinner in order to show that they are enlightened and above the vulgar prejudices of capitalist society. Some of these people mean well, some of them do not. But their activities, their parties and lunches are a mere drop in the ocean. They are not important. Black and white workers struggling together for socialism will bring equality, and nothing else will.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(24 November 1939)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 90, 24 November 1939, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Negroes in Steel (Continued)
Let us continue with our examination of the Negro in the steel industry, as portrayed by Cayton and Mitchell in their book, Black Workers and the New Unions.
The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers for years did practically nothing to organize the Negroes – or for that matter, anybody else. The union officials passed resolutions and talked about accepting Negro workers as well as whites, but they did nothing to bring numbers of Negroes into the union, even after the passage of the National Industrial Relations Act. The union continued its policy of equality in words and segregation in action.
But among the new unions formed after the NRA, there was a new spirit, and officers and members went after Negroes, recognizing that without them it was impossible to win victories against the bosses. Wherever the proportion of Negroes in the plant was large the workers made a determined drive. An interview with a worker in McKeesport, Penna., shows in a few words the role of the Negro in steel:
“Negroes must be organized here if the union is to have any show at all; it would be impossible to ignore them completely because of their great numbers, especially since difficulties have been experienced in bringing in the highly skilled American workers.”
Outstretched Hand Not Enough
But the Negro has behind him three hundred years of deception and exploitation by whites. Many whites make the mistake of thinking that as soon as they go with an outstretched hand to the Negro he will forget everything and accept it. It is not so easy. Many of the white workers found that they had to make a special effort to get Negroes in. One of the most frequent methods adopted was to get Negro speakers to address meetings. And certain lodges elected Negroes to offices in the unions, so as to give practical proof that the equality of which they spoke was more than verbal bait for the Negroes. In Homestead, Penna., the financial secretary of Spirit of 1892 Lodge No. 172 tells of the great success that follows the election of Negroes to office:
“... Then the rest of them came in droves. They are a clannish bunch, passing word of all such developments around among themselves. Each man brings his friends, and the next meeting the friend brings other friends, until enormous numbers of them attend in force.”
The two areas where most Negroes filed into the union were Pittsburgh and Birmingham, one in the heart of the industrial district of the Northeast and the other in the backward South. This shows us once more a lesson that we must never forget, that in the last analysis it is economic relations which are decisive in politics.
No Racial Question in Profits
The economic relation is decisive in politics. The capitalist does not allow race prejudice to interrupt his profits. When union activities became threatening, the owners in one factory tried a novel way of splitting the workers. Previously Negroes were not allowed to work the open hearth or as first helpers, but were kept as second or third helpers. To divide the working class, the company promoted several Negroes to first helpers, the most aristocratic, skilled, and well paid job in the whole mill. This had a double effect. Those Negroes who got the job would have nothing whatever to do with the union. And the other Negroes in the shop felt that at last promotion was open to them and they therefore became much cooler to union organization.
The white workers were now paying for their previous neglect of and discrimination against the Negroes. We shall see more of this in the future. But in any serious competition, on a large scale, between the workers and the bosses, the great majority of Negro workers – 99 percent of them – will find their places beside their white brothers. Economic relations, though not the whole story, are the most important part of the story.
Many of the Negro workers are sympathetic to the union. They know that they will get little from the company, but what they fear is that in the event of a closed shop the white workers might discriminate against them. This has happened in many unions and nothing but the most vigilant honesty and fair play on the part of the white workers can break down this justified distrust. Yet despite these difficulties, the unions were able to attract and to hold Negroes.
Equality Begins Among Workers
An important part of this work is the election of Negro officers. In nearly every important lodge in the Pittsburgh area this has taken place. First of all the lodges began by electing Negroes to office simply in order to attract other Negroes. Later, as more Negroes came into the union, these voted for additional colored officers. And finally all the workers, white and black, recognized the capabilities of certain among the Negro officials and voted for them without regard for the color of their skin. In Clairton, Penna., for instance, according to an interview,
“There were more colored than white elected to office. Here in Clairton there are about ten whites to one colored person. When the nomination came off, they nominated whom they wanted. We wanted to put up as many Negroes as we could. We voted by secret ballot. They had a colored man and a white man watching the ballot box. Six colored were nominated and of these, four were elected. Mr. M. was elected corresponding representative, J.E. financial secretary, M.B. trustee, and J.B. another trustee.”
When the Negro sees that he can make his influence felt and can elect some of his race to office, he can more easily turn his back on the bosses. It is in this way that the great battle for equality not only on the economic but on the political and social field will be won.
The Homestead, Penna., lodge, according to one of its officers,
“... held a couple of bingo games and a dance, all of which Negroes attended in force with their ladies. At the dance, held in the lower section of the city near the Negro district, there were no restrictions. Dancing was mixed racially and sexually, whites with Negro partners. I danced with a Negro girl myself. Negroes enjoyed themselves immensely and there was no kicks from the whites. This lodge will soon have a picnic which will be mixed.”
There are many such successful attempts, despite some failures.
This attempt of the workers to get together, naturally suffers from the tremendous pressure to which they are subjected by the race prejudices of a bourgeois society. But it is here that the battle for racial equality must be fought, and it is here that it can be won. Not in dances in Greenwich Village, or by bourgeois hosts and hostesses who invite intelligent Negroes to their houses for dinner in order to show that they are enlightened and above the vulgar prejudices of capitalist society. Some of these people mean well, some of them do not. But their activities, their parties and lunches are a mere drop in the ocean. They are not important. Black and white workers struggling together for socialism will bring equality, and nothing else will.
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<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">C.L.R. James</a></p>
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Trotsky’s Place In History</h1>
<h3>(September 1940)</h3>
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<p class="info"><span class="info">Source</span>: <strong>The New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni40_09">Vol. VI, No. 8 (Whole No. 45)</a>, September 1940, pp. 151–167;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> Damon Maxwell.<br>
<span class="info">Proofread:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> (July 2013).</p>
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<p class="fst">THE bourgeoisie, perforce lacking historical method and suborning all aspects of life to the maintenance of power, has not only confused the proletariat but has confused itself in the estimation of what constitutes greatness in contemporary men. Woodrow Wilson, Poincaré, Stanley Baldwin and similar mediocrities have all been crowned with the laurel, not excluding Nicholas Murray Butler, on the score presumably that he had dined often with the others. So often and so conspicuously have the bourgeois theorists blundered that in the face of a sceptical world they confess bankruptcy; always to their biographies and obituary notices they add a saving clause, that posterity alone can tell.</p>
<p>No such tendentiousness, hesitancy, hit or miss judgments have discredited the estimates of those who use the method of historical materialism. Marx and Engels judged heir contemporaries, Darwin, Proudhon, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon III, Balzac and Dickens, Palmerston, Gladstone, Thiers, Bismarck, Shaw, with incisiveness and precision, and their judgments have stood the test of time. The most famous of all their pronouncements on persons, Engels’ judgment on Marx, “mankind is shorter by a head, and the greatest head of our time at that.” would have seemed presumptuous to many, the usual exaggeration of a friend, collaborator and a Communist fanatic. Today that judgment might be questioned by some but with caution and respect. Marx’s name rings incessantly in the ears of all, capitalists and workers alike. His book, <a href="../../../../marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Capital</strong></a>, is high on the sales-list of popular classics. Stanley Baldwin, the English Prime Minister, on his retirement, indicated what he considered the main characteristics of his period: In the year that I was born two events occurred which were the beginnings of the two forces competing in the world today; the one was Disraeli’s Reform Bill with its doctrine of expanding freedom and the other the publication of <strong>Capital</strong>, with its doctrine of economic determinism. Thus Marx had at last arrived, being recognized as a world force by a Conservative Prime Minister only fifty years after his death. Trotsky is easier to recognize immediately. All men, Marxist or otherwise, will agree that between 1917 and 1923 he played a great role in the history of our times. Before that his life had made no exceptional impression on the general consciousness. During his last decade he was an exile, apparently powerless. During those same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power such as no man in Europe since Napoleon has wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful President who has ever ruled America, and America today is the most powerful nation in the world. Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’ judgment of Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died in 1924, was the greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Theory of the Permanent Revolution</h4>
<p class="fst">Trotsky’s first claim to the attention of mankind is his theory of the permanent revolution, and if he had fallen dead after correcting the last proof over thirty years ago, his place in political thought was safe. Marx and Engels for fifty years had made their profound and brilliant predictions of the future disintegration of capitalist society. Engels in 1887 had predicted the 1914 war, the revolution in Russia first, the revolutions in Europe and crowns rolling with no one to pick them up, the formation of the Third International. In 1889 Plekhanov declared that the coming revolution in Russia would be a revolution of the working class and could be no other. But in 1905 Trotsky, then 26 years old, in an essay of a few thousand words, unfolded the course which history was to follow.</p>
<p>Let us consider the mental climate of that period. Previous to that time, 1905, Europe and America had seen no revolutions of any importance since the Civil War of 1861 and the Commune of 1870. The Civil War was not then recognized for what was, and what Charles Beard has since called it, the Second American Revolution. The Commune, except to the Marxists (and the French bourgeoisie), had seemed an unpleasant episode growing out of the war. In 1905 the spectre of Communism was not haunting Europe. And the bourgeois writers and statesmen of those days, Viscount Bryce, the expert on democracy, Maximilian Herden, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, for whom Socialism would come if you just kept her inching along, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Lloyd George, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Benedetto Croce, Anatole France, Miliukov, the <strong>Manchester Guardian</strong>, the <strong>New York Times</strong>, the London <strong>Times</strong>, the <strong>Corriere del Sierra</strong>, all the finest bourgeois thinkers, and the distinguished organs of bourgeois thought, what a monumental pile of rubbish and nonsense they, reactionaries and progressives, were producing in this very 1905 about the world and its future. They and their successors are a little more sensible today, though to do them justice they lie more. From those bourgeois who took notice of it, the theory met with derision. Miliukov, the Russian savant, gave it a name and thus “Trotskyism” was born.</p>
<p>Despite all the evidence piled up under his eyes, the bourgeois of today cannot accept the theory; tar less the bourgeois of 1905. Capitalism, said this theory, was approaching its end and society was ripe tor the socialist revolution. This view Trotsky held in common apparently, but only apparently, with all Marxists. But, and here he broke sharply with all of them, Lenin included, Russia, the most backward of the great European states, would be the scene of the first socialist revolution. Where all the great European Marxists looked upon the coming Russian Revolution as one which would give Russia a bourgeois republic, Trotsky stated that this was impossible. A revolution in Russia, to be successful, would have to be a socialist revolution. True, Russia, a backward country with a hundred million peasants, was not ready for socialism. Left to itself the Russian Revolution would certainly collapse. But the Russian Revolution would unloose proletarian revolutions in Europe which would come to the assistance of the Russian. It would initiate the era of permanent social revolution until the establishment of worldwide socialism. Either this, or the collapse of capitalist civilization into barbarism.</p>
<p>In analytical power and imaginative audacity the theory is one of the most astounding productions of the modern mind. The bourgeoisie makes a great to-do about de Tocqueville who foresaw that America would one day free itself from England, Goethe, who recognized the significance of Valmy, and of Seward, who foretold “the irrepressible conflict.” How pitiable these are besides the work of Trotsky who foretold the future of a world. Except in the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin there is no comparable piece of political prophecy anywhere. After Marx’s discoveries political thinkers were limited to the use of his method. It has never been better used. As for the bourgeoisie, its writings of 1905 remind us of the days when all the young men were for Racine, so remote are they from the terrible modern reality.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Verdict of the Years</h4>
<p class="fst">What is more important for us than the limitations of the bourgeoisie is the limitations of the Marxists. They wrote and taught the socialist revolution but we know today that in reality Kautsky, for instance, did not believe in any such thing. Trotsky himself relates the deadly politeness of Austro-Marxism when, an exile in Vienna, he ventured to suggest to them the coming collapse of the world they knew. Such was 1905. In the genuinely revolutionary wing of socialism the theory met with fierce opposition. Lenin never ceased to deride it. As late as November 1915 he was slashing at Trotsky “who repeats his original 1905 treaty without stopping to think why life during a whole decade has passed by this beautiful theory ... amusing example ... incorrect ... To what limits Trotsky’s confusion goes ...” Lenin believed that the revolution in Russia would be a democratic revolution, though he as confidently as Trotsky expected that it would unloose the socialist revolution in Europe, without which, he stated over and over again, the Russian democratic revolution would collapse. Trotsky refused to concede an inch. To the Mensheviks who preached that the Russian bourgeoisie would lead the revolution he said that the counter-revolutionary character of their ideas would show itself before the revolution. To the Bolsheviks who taught that the proletariat would destroy Tsarism but install the bourgeoisie in power he said that the counter-revolutionary character of their theory would appear after the revolution. The years have justified him. The Russian Revolution followed his road. After it came the post-war revolutions in Germany, Austria and Hungary, in Turkey and Italy, in Egypt and India, in China, in Spain. The Russian and other proletarian and nationalist revolutions have shaken the structure of capitalism. Two-by-four political thinkers attribute all to “the war.” As if the war fell from the sky and was not itself a product of capitalist disintegration; as if Lenin, long before 1914, had not watched the growing industrialization of India and China and predicted the coming proletarian struggles in those countries. But for these upheavals the socialist revolution in Russia would have been annihilated. True the socialist cause has suffered a succession of defeats. But the struggle is not over. In every chancellery in the world, Stalin’s included, the spectre of Communism, grown to Arabian Nights proportions, sits at every conference. Read the bourgeois press carefully. Always between the lines and sometimes in them snarls the fear that the coming years will see the consummation of the audacious theory put forward by the young Marxist thirty-five years ago.<br>
</p>
<h4>Trotsky’s Creative Power</h4>
<p class="fst">The theory of the permanent revolution was no isolated spurt of inspiration. In abstract creative imagination and range of thought Trotsky excelled Lenin. Today we accept the idea of the single economic plan as an indispensable part of the socialist reorganization of society. Trotsky first put it forward in his little history of the Russian Revolution written during spare moments at Brest-Litovsk. Lenin at first opposed it as he opposed the theory of the permanent revolution. But that most realistic of men, though often wrong, was never wrong for long in the face of reality, and soon he recognized the value of the single economic plan as opportunely as he had accepted the permanent revolution in April 1917.</p>
<p>Besides the theory with which his name will always be associated, the outstanding example of Trotsky’s analytic and creative power was the New Course, the outgrowth and flowering of the single plan proposal. It is characteristic of him that, immersed in his work, he never saw the dangerous growth of bureaucracy until Lenin, with an agonized urgency, pointed it out to him and asked for help. Lenin’s immediate preoccupation was to take the political and practical steps necessary to break up Stalin and his clique. Here Trotsky failed completely – we shall deal with that later – but in the course of a few months he outlined a course of action which is one of the most profound and masterly plans of reconstruction ever laid before the rulers of a state in crisis.</p>
<p>A succession of good harvests was dangerously increasing the weight of the peasantry and capitalism. Unless checked this would lead inevitably to the overwhelming of the proletariat and the Soviet power. The last great turn Lenin had given to the party had been towards the appeasement of the peasantry. But the retreat had gone far enough. It was necessary to embark on a bold plan of industrialization, using part of the wealth accumulated by the rich peasants. Collectivization, in proportion to the strength of the industrialization, should be the aim. Inseparably intertwined with the industrial was the political reorganization. He analyzed the dangers of bureaucracy, its causes and consequences, the relation of the youth to the older party comrades, the role of the masses in maintaining the revolutionary morale and integrity of the party. He called for a systematic education of the peasantry in the aims of the Soviet power. He set the whole against the background of the struggle for world socialism under the leadership of the Communist International. It is one of the classic documents of socialist literature. Socialism in a single country is impossible but Victor Serge, who knew Russia well, has drawn attention to what would have been the result of such a program not only in Russia but among the peasant millions of Central Europe. With Lenin’s authority and the political skill which Trotsky so sadly lacked such a plan would have altered the whole history of Russia and the world. Trotsky fought for it for five years, and it received its final and most perfect expression in the <a href="../../../../trotsky/1927/opposition/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Platform of the Left Opposition</strong></a>. It was only in 1929 that Stalin, having brought Soviet Russia to the brink of disaster, adopted some parts of it and carried them out with the brutality and exaggerations of the Third Period. Today the Russian Five-Year plans, the New Deal (Roosevelt’s New Course), the Goering Four-Year Plan, Petain’s Three-Year Plan, all are the misshapen offspring, conscious and unconscious, of the ideas contained in the New Course. But in the multifarious writings which expound these experiments, nowhere appears a hint of the comprehensive grasp of society as a whole, the political penetration, the breadth and humanity that are contained within the pages of that slender volume which is concerned more with the political approach than the actual economic plan. <a href="../../../../lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm" target="new"><strong>What Is To Be Done</strong></a>, <a href="../../../../lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm" target="new"><strong>The State and Revolution</strong></a>, and <a href="../../../../lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Imperialism</strong></a> are Lenin’s greatest books, all analytical, all, profound as they are, compact of determination for immediate action. Trotsky’s <a href="../../../../trotsky/1931/tpr/rp-index.htm" target="new"><strong>Results and Perspectives</strong></a>, in which is contained the theory of the permanent revolution, and his <a href="../../../../trotsky/1923/newcourse/index.htm" target="new"><strong>New Course</strong></a>, though written in the heat of action, broaden out, the first on an international and the second on a national scale, into the perspectives of the future. Here he was excelled by only two men in history, Marx and Engels, and by them only because they covered so much ground that they had limited the range of all successors.<br>
</p>
<h4>Lenin’s Successor</h4>
<p class="fst">With the death of Lenin, the prime responsibility for Marxist analysis of contemporary events devolved upon Trotsky. He tells us himself that he had learnt from Lenin and the evidence is clear in his work. To his faculty for synthesis, of seeing history from a height, he had by now added a closer coordination between the general line of development and the immediate practical conclusions to be drawn at the different stages, though he never attained Lenin’s superb mastery in this field. How deeply he had absorbed the lessons of the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s method, is visible in his analysis of the Chinese Revolution, not so much in the <a href="../../../../trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Problems</strong></a> as in the essays in <a href="../../../../trotsky/1928/3rd/index.htm" target="new"><strong>The Third International After Lenin</strong></a>. There is, as always, the same wide sweep and comprehensive generalization, but there is also a precision, a definiteness and a certainty in the handling of the specific problems which are absent from the pre-October work. The chief weakness in the presentation of the theory of the permanent revolution, the slurring over of the bourgeois-democratic stage, is brilliantly created.</p>
<p>We do not propose to give here any connected or complete account of Trotsky’s work. Trotsky wrote on all the great issues of the day, turned them inside out, so that students of his writings have cinematic x-rays into the physiology and anatomy of twentieth-century society. But some example of his maturer method must be given in any evaluation of his place in history. The first that springs to mind his analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy. Despite the differences which developed between Trotsky and the Workers Party in the very last year of his life, despite unceasing criticism of his methods and his conclusions from all quarters, the fact remains that over the years, there is simply no analysis of the Soviet Union worth bothering about except his own. It is a lesson in Marxism to read not only Trotsky, but also “educated opinion” on the Soviet Union from 1917 to the present day. The howls of coming disaster at the N.E.P.; the struggle of the Left Opposition – when Trotsky was exiled to Turkey the London <strong>Times</strong> said that Stalin had sent him there to organize a revolt in the Near East; the colossal sneers at the <strong>Platform</strong> and Trotsky’s plans for industrialization, to be followed by bulging eyes and hyperbole at Stalin’s fabricated statistics; Sidney and Beatrice Webb on Russia in 1923 and then in 1933; Louis Fischer and Vincent Sheean; the thousands of “trained observers” who went to Moscow and saw for themselves through Stalin’s spectacles; Barbusse and Remain Rolland; the bourgeois intellectuals on the Moscow Trials – those clumsy, brazen, incredibly impudent falsifications which were exceeded in stupidity only by the comments of the intelligentsia; as one looks back at Trotsky’s writings on the one hand and the rows of dustbins on the other, one realizes what it is to be a Marxist in these days. But there are Marxists and Marxists. In the revolutionary Marxist movement his writings on Russia stand alone, for we are still without (perhaps shall be forever) the work of Rakovsky, Sosnovsky and others persecuted by Stalin. Outside of Russia there is nothing. Many people opposed what Trotsky wrote. They had a brief importance only through opposition to him. This one opposes Trotsky in 1934 on this point, another opposes him in 1936 on that. But a connected body of comprehensive thought in opposition? It does not exist. This, the strongest part of his theoretical work, is, however, so closely intertwined with the struggle for the Fourth International, that it can be treated adequately only in a special article or rather series of articles. It is more convenient and more opportune to illustrate Trotsky’s role after his expulsion from Russia by his analysis of the rise and victory of German Fascism. To read those half-dozen slender volumes today is to wonder how a voice so strong and so clear should have cried in the wilderness.<br>
</p>
<h4>The First Four Congresses on Fascism</h4>
<p class="fst">He did not start from scratch. The first four Congresses of the Comintern, in which he took so preponderant a part, laid the foundation for all future analysis of the economics and politics of our age. <em>The Platform of the Communist International</em> (1919) in its second paragraph repeated the by then familiar thesis of Lenin. “Monopoly supplants free competition. The isolated capitalist is transformed into a member of a capitalist association. Organization replaces wild anarchy.” From the First Congress there is an insistent reiteration of the tendency to complete statification of all aspects of society by the imperialist state. The <a href="../../../../trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/ch01.htm" target="new"><em>Manifesto</em></a> of the Congress laid down the line. “If the absolute subjection of political power to finance-capital has led humanity to the imperialist butchery, this butchery has given finance-capital the chance not only to militarize the state completely, but to militarize itself in such a manner, that it can continue to fulfill its economic functions only by fire and blood.” The military state, what Lenin called “the vast state-capitalist military trust and syndicate” was the ultimate to which capitalism was moving. These states would inevitably seek “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.” It was from there that Lenin and Trotsky began, while all the democrats carolled about parliamentary democracy and the League of Nations. Of German parliamentary democracy, specifically, the Second Congress (1920), said that “it is merely a gap between two dictatorships.” It would be no parliamentary dictatorship. The Second Congress, using its eyes, pointed out that besides the capitalist state, “other counterrevolutionary organizations of a private character formed under its aegis and placed at its disposal, work to put a violent end to strikes, to commit provocations, to bear false witness, to destroy revolutionary organizations, to do away with communist institutions, to massacre and to set afire and take other measures to defend private property and democracy.” The personnel of these bandits consisted of “the sons of the big proprietors, big bourgeois, petty bourgeois who do not know what to do with themselves and, in general, declassed elements ... the twenty thousand officers of the Hohenzollern army.” These counter-revolutionaries would be destroyed only by “the smashing hammer of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This was in 1920. In that year the great masses were following the Communist Party. But by 1921 the revolutionary wave had subsided and in 1921, at the Third Congress, came the theses on the united front. In 1922 Italian fascism took power and at the Fourth Congress, in 1923, a section in the resolution on tactics analysed the danger of Fascism. “Legal methods of constraint no longer are sufficient for the bourgeoisie ... the fascists are not only fighting organizations, mainly counter-revolutionary and armed to the teeth, but they try by means of social demagogy to create for themselves a base among the masses in the peasantry, in the petty bourgeoisie and even in certain parts of the proletariat, utilizing adroitly for their own counter-revolutionary ends the disillusionment provoked by so-called democracy.” It can’t happen here and could only happen there? Lenin and Trotsky knew that barring the socialist revolution it is going to happen everywhere. The Fourth Congress stated that there was a danger of Fascism among other countries beside Italy. In Germany; and “under one form or another fascism is no longer impossible in countries like France and England.” Such was the leadership that the great Bolsheviks gave to the international proletariat. Today one has to listen to solemn and presumptuous idiots who will tell you that Marxism has failed or is lacking in understanding of the modern world. We may pass them by. Lenin stopped work in March 1923. One year afterward, Stalin, having seized the power, informed the world that Social-Democracy and Fascism were twins. One can therefore appreciate the motives of those who, using the name of Marx, complacently ask, “What difference would it have made to Russia if Trotsky had won in the struggle with Stalin?” We shall soon see what difference it would have made to the German proletariat. Behind the sham determination of their determinism, these enemies of Bolshevism conceal a genuine determination to defend bourgeois society.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Menace of Hitler</h4>
<p class="fst">Such was the basic analysis. Therefore when at the September 1930 elections in Germany, Hitler’s vote jumped from 800,000 in 1928 to 6 million, Trotsky, an exile in Turkey, was immediately on the alert. He knew at once what millions are now learning in blood and suffering and death. We do not propose to spend time here on the Stalinist crimes and responsibilities of that period. What we want to recall is the Marxist method in the hands of a great master applied to a social crisis which has since grown so that it dominates the world.</p>
<p>Writing after the September elections, Trotsky indicated the menace which Hitler represented and called upon the Communists to stop their attacks on the Social Democracy as the twin of Fascism and to struggle for the united front. But in the course of the following months Stalin held the Communist Party of Germany to its course and in August 1931 forced it, against its own wishes, to form an alliance with the fascists against the Social Democrats. The Social Democracy, in its turn, preached an abiding faith in one God, democracy, with Bruening as its prophet. Later they would exchange Bruening for Hindenburg. More than any other living being Trotsky saw the whole frightful catastrophe which loomed, and in November 1931 he finished his first great document on Fascism: <a href="../../../../trotsky/germany/1931/311126.htm" target="new"><strong>Germany, the Key to the International Situation</strong></a>. He calls it “hastily sketched reflections.” There was no false modesty here. He merely wrote down what seemed to him the crying obviousness of the situation.</p>
<p>He begins with the Spanish revolution which was then eight months old. How the pseudo-Marxists and the liberal democrats beat the air when Hitler and Mussolini intervened in Spain! Trotsky begins his essay on Germany with Spain where he sees the struggle as likely to be of a more or less protracted character. England also shows the possibility of years of partial ebbs and flows. France occupies a secondary role in world economics, with immense privileges and pretensions in world politics. This contradiction will heap dangers upon dangers and upset the internal stability of France. In America the economic crisis has laid bare frightful social contradictions. At the first sign of a rise in economic depression, the trade union movement will acutely feel the necessity of tearing itself loose from the of the despicable A.F. of L. bureaucracy. (Here is the C.I.O predicted.) American capitalism itself will enter an epoch of monstrous imperialism, uninterrupted growth of armaments, of intervention in the affairs of the entire world, of military conflicts and convulsions. Japan’s adventure in China can lead to revolution in Japan for the Chinese, despite their weakness, will always improvise new armies. This is the background on which stands out in bold relief the situation in Germany. On the solution of the German crisis hangs the fate not only of Germany but of Europe and the entire world. Socialist construction in the USSR, the revolution in Spain, the fate of France and Britain, China and India, the development of the working class movement in America, all this rests “directly and immediately” on who will be victorious in Germany, Fascism or Communism. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> The Communist Party, said Trotsky, must announce the danger, must unite the working class by a struggle for the united front with the social-democratic leaders. It must let the international proletariat and the Red Army know in advance, “Fascism can come into power only after a merciless, annihilatory civil war to the bitter end.” The German Communist Party had at one period over 300,000 members.</p>
<p>It was more than enough. But instead of seeking the united front, Stalin’s minions declared every minute of the day that the Social-Democracy, not Hitler, was the main enemy. They were counseling a retreat. Let Hitler come to power. After will be our turn. They got that from Stalin who did not want to be bothered with any German revolution. It was in response to this that Trotsky uttered a warning which is the most poignant in all the historic literature of our times and day by days tolls louder in our ears.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“14. The coining into power of the German “National Socialists” would mean above all the extermination of the flower of the German proletariat, the disruption of its organizations, the extirpation of its belief in itself and its future. Considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian Fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German National Socialists.</p>
<p class="quote">“Retreat, you say, you who were yesterday the prophets of the “third period”? Leaders and institutions can retreat. Individual persons can hide. But the working class will have no place to retreat to in the face of Fascism, and no place where to hide. If one were really to assume the monstrous and improbable to happen: that the party will actually evade the struggle and thus deliver the proletariat to the mercy of its mortal enemy, this would signify only one thing: the gruesome battles would unfold not before the seizure of power by the Fascists but after it, that is: under conditions ten times more favorable for Fascism than those of today. The struggle of the proletariat, taken unawares, disorientated, disappointed and betrayed by its own leadership, against the Fascist regime would be transformed into a series of frightful, bloody and futile convulsions. Ten proletarian insurrections, ten defeats, one on top of the other could not debilitate and enfeeble the German working class as much as a retreat before Fascism would weaken it at the given moment, when the decision is still impending as to the question of who is to become master in the German household.” (<strong>Germany, the Key to the International Situation</strong>)<br>
</p>
<h4>How To Stop Fascism</h4>
<p class="fst">The Fascists consisted of the petty-bourgeoisie, and the new middle class, artisans, shopkeepers, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. One thousand Fascist votes equalled one thousand Communist votes on the scale of election statistics. But on the scales of revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a thousand times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mothers-in-law. “The great bulk of the Fascists consist of human rubbish.”</p>
<p>Away from the centre of things, dependent upon newspapers days old, and unable to feel the pulse of the masses, as he complained, he followed events as best he could and in the next twelve months produced a succession of articles which were like a series of powerful searchlights in the prevailing darkness. Never for one moment did Trotsky falter on the supposed division between different sections of the bourgeoisie and the possibility of Bruening crushing Hitler or controlling him. He based himself on the crisis of German capitalism which demanded that the bourgeoisie get rid of the workers’ organizations altogether. Capitalism at a certain stage has to “smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the social democracy and the trade unions.” German capitalism had reached that stage. Since 1918 he and Lenin had been awaiting it and only the proletarian revolution could stop it. (Look and learn if you can while there is still time, Messrs. Democrats of 1940, look and learn.) Trotsky wasted no breath in shouting imprecations on Fascist brutality and sadism, or making psycho-analytic researches into Hitler’s ambition. He knew what German capitalist economy imperatively needed in order to survive. It would be overthrown by a socialist revolution or it would smash everything before it. In Germany and out-side Germany, before Hitler and after Hitler, the fools and the wise men, some very exalted statesmen indeed, besides the usual riff-raff of bourgeois intellectuals, speculated on the control that would be exercised over Hitler, on the pressure from the left, the balance of the center, the restraint of the right. Trotsky kicked this out of the way almost without looking at it. “What relationships would develop in the early days between Hitler, Schleicher and the Center leaders, is more important for them than it is for the German people. Politically, all the conceivable combinations with Hitler signify the dissolution of bureaucracy, courts, police and army into Fascism.”</p>
<p>It would take too long to detail how, article by article, he foresaw move after move, and prescribed the course of action necessary to unite the Stalinist and the social-democratic workers in common struggle against the fascist bands. Together these workers had forty per cent of the votes. In actual struggle they were overwhelmingly the strongest section of the country. They controlled transport, production and distribution. The transport workers could paralyze the small Reichswehr. Millions of workers were trained for war by their experiences in 1914–1918.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hitler and The Outside World</h4>
<p class="fst">On the international scale he was as usual at his best. A special conference of the Communist International to place the crisis before the revolutionary workers everywhere; a joint plan for coordination of Soviet and German industry to be worked out by German and Soviet engineers with the participation of the German working class movement; a declaration by Stalin that in view of the repeated expressions of hostility to the USSR by Hitler, the Soviet government would consider Hitler’s accession to power as a threat to its future existence and would mobilize the Red Army on the borders of Poland. Trotsky had done the same thing under similar circumstances in 1923. In 1932, the economic crisis had every country by the throat, none more so than the “new society” of Italian Fascism. A fierce bitterness against the imperialist governments burned in the hearts of millions of workers in every country. The revolution crackled in Spain, ready to blaze, a tremendous revolutionary ferment was shaking India. Never at any time was there less fear of capitalist intervention in a revolutionary Germany. Of the success of a Communist Germany the bourgeoisie had no doubt. Doubt it left to the intellectuals. Lloyd George said, after Hitlers coming to power, that it was just as well, for these Germans would know how to manage their communism.</p>
<p>Trotsky made some mistakes e.g., in <strong>Germany, the Key to the International Situation</strong>, he thought that in the first period of its rule if victorious, German Fascism would be the tool of France. But this – and nearly all his other mistakes – flowed from a constant incapacity to acknowledge perhaps even to himself, the full depravity of Stalinism. He did not think it possible that the Stalinists in Germany would capitulate so completely as they did. Who else thought so? About the social-democratic bureaucrats he had no illusions. He knew and said in advance that their upper layer preferred the victory of Fascism to the socialist revolution. When Wels, Liepart and Co., offered their services to Hitler it was no surprise to him. Knowing the future that awaited Europe he had to sit and watch the catastrophe unroll itself before him.</p>
<p>He wrote rarely on bourgeois foreign policy. Every line in <a href="../../../../trotsky/germany/1932-ger/index.htm" target="new"><strong>What Next?</strong></a> and <a href="../../../../trotsky/germany/1932/320914.htm" target="new"><strong>The Only Road</strong></a>, the two brochures in which were collected the articles which followed <strong>Germany, the Key to the International Situation</strong>, is addressed, like ninety-nine per cent of his writings, to the workers. They could stop Fascism, nobody else could. But some months after Hitler came to power he completed his analysis in a pamphlet. <strong>What Hitler Wants</strong>. Hitler had astonished the world by a most pacific speech, which, following on a bellicose piece of rhodomontade by Von Papen, fell like a soothing lotion on Europe’s troubled ears. Trotsky, with mathematical precision, itemized Hitler’s foreign policy. The inevitability of the new conflict between Germany and France; his immediate aim: to restore the military power of Germany; the use of Italy, “but with the Italian crutch alone German imperialism will not rise to its feet”; the splitting of England from France by the coming German departure from the League of Nations; England to be bribed by Hitler taking upon himself “the protection of European civilization, of the Christian religion, of the British colonies, and other moral and material values, against Bolshevik barbarism ... Hitler is convinced that on the scales of Great Britain the danger of German Fascism to Western Europe weighs less than the danger of the Bolshevik Soviets in the East. This evaluation constitutes the most important key to the whole foreign policy of Hitler”; Hitler would strive to unite the vanquished nations only the more pitilessly to crush them after; and, rearmament being accomplished, should the East be difficult, the explosion might take place along a different direction. “For if it is still possible to discuss to what degree offensive means are distinguished from defensive means, it is already beyond dispute that the military means suitable for the East are equally suitable for the West.” The essay ended with another warning. Europe needs a new organization. But woe betide it if this work falls into the hands of Fascism. The historians of the Twenty-first Century would then have to write that the war of 1914, called the “war for democracy” soon led to the triumph of Fascism which became the instrument of the destruction of Europe’s economic and cultural organizations. He hoped that the old continent still had enough vital strength to open for itself a different historical road. This is the man who three years afterwards was accused by Stalin and Browder of being in alliance with Hitler. And the intellectuals read and shook their heads and said “It is possible.” He made only one serious error. He laughed to scorn the idea of an alliance between Hitler and Stalin and that is a question that demands detailed treatment. Enough for the moment that Trotsky was writing in the summer of 1933 He knew then that Stalin had openly asked for the alliance in March. And Hitler had refused. The Soviet Union of 1933 was not the Soviet Union of 1939.</p>
<p>Idiots and bourgeois scoundrels always emphasize Trotsky’s personal brilliance whereby they seek to disparage Trotsky’s method. The two are inseparable. His natural gifts were trained and developed by Marxism and he could probe these depths of understanding and ascend to these peaks of foresight because he based himself on the Marxian theory of the class struggle and the revolutionary and predominant role of the proletariat in the crisis of bourgeois society. The choice is still yours, Messrs. Democrats, the choice between Fascism and socialism. And if you say that instead you choose democracy, then the lesson of the rise of German fascism is still lost upon you, though you know very detail of German history since 1933 and can point out the absurdities of <strong>Mein Kampf</strong>.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Organizer</h4>
<p class="fst">It is difficult, it is impossible to write about the career and achievements of this extraordinary man without the instant use of superlatives, and yet they are rigidly and soberly applicable. Marx and Engels were the guiding spirits of the First International but their work was largely literary – the exposition of ideas. In that field Lenin and Trotsky continued and developed on foundations which had been well and truly laid. But history prevented Marx and Engels from being men of action on the grand scale. Trotsky, his theoretical writings apart, belongs to that small company of human beings who have been instruments in assisting new worlds to be born. We have no need to retail here the leadership of the revolution which earned him the title of the Man of October, or his organization of the Red Army. What we have to do in order to get an approximate evaluation of his historical significance is to compare his role with that of other great political figures at similar historical rises.</p>
<p>The Russian Revolution is the greatest revolution in history and among the political events which have been decisive in altering the course of human society, come what lay, it takes a high place. As we look back over the history of Western civilization, we can see the high spots, the German Reformation, the Thirty Years War which ruined Germany and laid the basis of modern Europe, the English Revolution, the First American Revolution, the French Revolution, Bolivar’s liberation of Latin America, the American Civil War. There are others, and there is scope for argument, but it is incontestable that each of these marks the beginning of a new epoch in human relations. The dynastic wars of the eighteenth century, even such a war as the Franco-Prussian War, shrink into insignificance as times marches on. It did not extensively matter to the world who conquered India, the British or the French, but it was matter of life and death to Western civilization whether the North conquered the South or vice versa: it is not spleen that makes Hitler foam at the mouth when he speaks of the Northern victory. The success of the Russian Revolution ushered in a period of crisis for Western civilization such as never existed before since the third century of the Roman Empire. And this time not only Western civilization but the fate of the world is at stake. Among the men who played the decisive parts at these historic climaxes Trotsky easily takes his place as one of the foremost.</p>
<p>He is not in the very first rank. Cromwell and Lenin stand towering above all others. Lenin organized the Bolshevik Party, was the strategist of October, and again and again saved the revolution. Cromwell was indispensable, statesman and soldier as well. But Marat was a journalist and agitator of genius and that was all he did; Robespierre as a politician; Danton was a politician but his chief contribution was his tactical leadership of the revolution. Washington was a soldier and much of the politics of the revolution was in other and more capable hands. Lincoln ad the enormous advantage of always being in control of the state-power. He had neither to overthrow nor rebuild. Trotsky on the other hand was second in command of those who planned the greatest overthrow of the existing order recorded in history. During the crucial months the tactical decisions on which depended success or failure were entirely in his hands. War and revolution are the two greatest social crises. At this business of leading a revolution he showed himself a great master, all the more because twelve years before he had correctly disentangled the main motive forces and direction of the revolution: he masters tactics best who has most profoundly mastered strategy. And as if that were not enough he proceeded almost overnight to show himself one of the greatest war ministers in history. Any historical study or analysis of war and armies must of necessity give a high, in some respects a unique place, to Carnot the “organizer of victory.” But Carnot was no politician. He was a trained army officer. Trotsky, previous to the revolution, having done his share of the work done by Rousseau, Voltaire and Mably, then turned to the revolution to do the work of Danton, immediately dropping that to do the work of Carnot, all this on a scale infinitely surpassing the limitations of eighteenth century France, at the helm of a revolution which directly changed the lives of over a hundred and fifty million people and administered a shock to society the echoes of which are still reverberating in its remotest corners. Prickly and poisonous as are such analogies to handle, yet they are indispensable in arriving at any conclusion as to the historical stature of any great actor on the human stage. But by these or any other standards one conclusion emerges. Trotsky was one of the most powerful agents of social dynamics who has lived in this or any other time. <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a><br>
</p>
<h4>The Man of Ideas</h4>
<p class="fst">Here is a list of achievements which can challenge comparison with that of most men in history, without our taking into account the <a href="../../../../trotsky/1930/hrr/index.htm" target="new"><strong>History of the Russian Revolution</strong></a>. There is no need to dilate on his intellectual and physical endowment, his iron self-discipline, his devotion. And yet this superbly gifted theoretician, executive, and leader of men on the grand scale, who achieved so much in the realm of politics, was a very defective politician. We do not refer to the fact that he had built no organization of importance before 1905. There was no room for a second Bolshevik Party in Russia. Lenin might be wrong on the imminence of the socialist revolution in Russia. But his party was the proletarian party and Trotsky, who repudiated the Menshevik doctrine and the Bolshevik practice, was of necessity left in a no man’s land of small dimensions: two Bolshevik parties in any country at the same time is impossible. Nor do we refer to the weakness of the Fourth International to which he devoted his last years. It is possible to differ with Trotsky on some of the organizational conflicts of the Fourth International during the last period, and yet it is easy to recognize for what they are, those who place the responsibility for the smallness of our forces on him and his “methods” and his weaknesses. They are for the most part disgruntled backsliders or people looking for excuses to get out of the movement. But recognition of his genius does not preclude the obvious fact that 1905 found him outside of an organization; 1917 found him again without an effective organization in which to function; in 1923, at the greatest crisis of his career, though he was, after Lenin the most famous and popular leader of Russia in the party, among the proletariat, and among the peasantry, Trotsky found himself pushed out of power as if he were a fourth-rate bureaucrat. It was Trotsky’s reputation with the great masses of the people that Stalin and his friends of the moment feared and systematically destroyed. Actual power Trotsky had none. Second-raters like Zinoviev and Kamenev were rooted, the one in the Leningrad Soviet, the other in the Moscow Soviet. Stalin had to do a deal of digging to get them out. Trotsky was rooted nowhere, not even in the army he had built from the ground up. No sooner was Lenin ill than Trotsky’s power in the party was seen for what it was – a glittering shell. Such failures were not due to superficial characteristics. If they were, a man of his devotion and his will would have conquered them. They were organic and his work is not fully comprehensible without seeing them as an essential part of the man he was and the things he did. The weakness was not all on the debit side.</p>
<p>Let us look at his style, for words were his greatest weapons as a man of action. He expressed himself always amply, completely and with care, writing and re-writing and re-writing. Man of action though he was, the whole of him is contained in his books. The false way in which the chairman of a Soviet district committee approaches the kulak is only a small link in the chain whose largest links are constituted by the attitude of the Red trade unions towards the General Council or of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. towards Chiang Kai-Shek and Purcell.</p>
<p>How magnificent it is. Range and precision, but above all range. These and similar superb generalizations are scattered all over his works. He could bring the whole world situation to bear upon the single point he was discussing. Here is a longer example.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes – in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged. The Stalin regime, rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officers’ corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a variation of Bonapartism – a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history.</p>
<p class="quote">“Caesarism arose upon the basis of a slave society shaken by inward strife. Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the capitalist regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same system, but upon the basis of a workers’ state torn by the antagonism between an organized and armed soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses.</p>
<p class="quote">“As history testifies, Bonapartism gets along admirably with a universal, and even a secret, ballot. The democratic ritual of Bonapartism is the plebiscite. From time to time, the question is presented to the citizens: for or against the leader? And the voter feels the barrel of the revolver between his shoulders. Since the time of Napoleon III, who now seems a provincial dilettante, this technique has received an extraordinary development. The new Soviet constitution which establishes Bonapartism on a plebiscite basis is the veritable crown of the system.</p>
<p class="quote">“In the last analysis. Soviet Bonapartism owes its birth to the belatedness of the world revolution. But in the capitalist countries the same cause gave rise to fascism. We thus arrive at the conclusion, unexpected at first glance, but in reality inevitable, that the crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity. A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet Bonapartism. In turning its back to the international revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy was, from its own point of view, right. It was merely obeying the voice of self-preservation.” (<strong>The Revolution Betrayed</strong>, pp. 277–279)</p>
<p class="fst">One writer alone of modern times had the same range – Spengler. <a id="f3" href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> A horizon separated him from Trotsky in precision. We who know his work may perhaps be a little dulled by familiarity. That page, however, is the summary of two thousand years of history ending in judgments of the two major phenomena in modern society, which are as startling as a picture suddenly flashed on a screen and as precise and incontrovertible as a proof in geometry. Trotsky, man of action, was therefore, above all, an intellectual, a man of theory. Thus he was a man for whom ideas had far more reality than people. Vulgar minds like Louis Fischer say that he had his head in the clouds. There is just a germ of truth in it. But he was never dreaming or admiring himself. He was always conscious of the panorama of history, not as an antiquarian but in its bearing on the problem in hand. He said so. He deplored his weak memory for faces but admitted to his memory for ideas. That sentence in his autobiography tells as much. He has made still more revealing confessions. He says openly that for him power was an inescapable burden. “In prison with a book or a pen in my hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass-meetings of the revolution.” Such a spirit is absolutely foreign to the genuine <em>homo politicus</em>. He even goes so far as to say that he found prison a perfect place for writing: “It was so quiet there, so eventless, so perfect for intellectual work;” it was the one place where he was certain not to be arrested. It is a joke but a joke perfectly in harmony with his general approach to life. In the midst of one of the most difficult periods of the revolution he had on his desk some of the latest books on science and chafed that he could find no time to read them. (Joseph Stalin, we may be sure, was not worried at his ignorance of Einstein’s theory.) After the October Revolution, when Lenin asked him what position he wanted, he had never thought of it because he had always wanted to be a writer. That was his trend of mind. In a different age he would not have been a politician at all. Compare Lenin who never finished The <strong>State and Revolution</strong> because, as he gayly writes in the introduction, it was far more enjoyable to be going through a revolution than to be writing about it. Lenin, it is known, loved conventions, conflicts over resolutions, the wear and tear and hurly-burly of political strife. Trotsky, it is clear, hated them. He would have preferred to be elsewhere, at his desk. His political work was a duty. He saw the moving forces of history and played his part. Conscious that it was a great part, he was glad to be able to give so much in a struggle where gifted men are so few. He could throw his cloak about his shoulder in superb style as when, at a difficult moment in the <strong>History</strong> he remarks: it seems easier at times to have captured Petrograd in 1917 than to write the history of the event. (How his small bright blue eyes would have gleamed just before he said it.) But in this consciousness of himself there was not the slightest meanness nor conceit. His writings against Stalin are evidence. There is rage and indignation at the degradation of the Russian Revolution, but there is not one line, not a comma, of personal bitterness. The confinement irked him but he was as happy at his desk in Coyoacan as he was in the Kremlin. It was true, too true. He loved learning, knowledge, theory for their own sake, whereas Lenin, more learned and more profound than Trotsky, loved them for the sake of the revolution. He could not resist a theoretical disquisition. “What constitutes the essence of a dual power? We must pause upon this question, for an illumination of it has never appeared in historic literature.” Follows a rather lengthy digression in the <strong>History</strong> and, feeling guilty, he is at pains to assure the reader at the end to have patience, it will be worth it. “It may seem as though this theoretical inquiry has led us away from the events of 1917. In reality it leads us right into the heart of them ... Only from a theoretical height is it possible to observe it fully and correctly understand it.” At the tensest moments of revolution and war he way always looking at events from a theoretical height. Stalin, his rival, never ascended to any theoretical height. He was always crawling about down below. And to be successful, politicians must learn to grub.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Man of Feeling</h4>
<p class="fst">That is one key to Trotsky’s character and his work. Another was his attitude to the masses. He had a passionate faith in them and no great work for socialism, theoretical or practical, can be done without it. On one occasion he spoke of them with an unsurpassable dignity and restraint. “Mr. Attorney,” he told Finerty during the sessions of the Dewey Commission, “France and Great Britain are not my allies. They can be the allies of the Soviet state. My allies are the workers of all countries, and the only allies I recognize are the workers of all the other countries. My politics are established not for the purpose of diplomatic conventions, but for the development of the international revolutionary movement of the working-class. I cannot put hopes in the allies of the Soviet Union, in France and England. They can betray one another. They can separate from one another. But I am sure that the workers who understand very well the situation – they will be free and they will win one hundred workers, and the hundred workers a thousand soldiers. They will be victorious at the end of the war. It seems to me very simple, but I believe it is a good idea.” But though he had no illusions about them his general attitude was one of explosive indignation at their oppression and sufferings. “Workers to the shops! Such is the iron-clad egotism of the educated classes, liberals and socialists alike. These people believed that millions of workers and soldiers lifted to the heights of insurrection by the inconquerable pressure of discontent and hope, would after their victory tamely submit to the old conditions of life.” More than once the <strong>History</strong> refers to the freedom from drudgery of the domestic servants. Of many passionate outbursts in the <strong>History</strong> one of the most remarkable is the description of the horny hands and hoarse voices of the Paris workers intruding themselves on the political stage where the silken gentlemen are settling the fate of the nation. His chapters on the revolution in the autobiography are instinct with a hot sympathy for humanity in the mass. It is often a characteristic of the gifted intellectual, and particularly of men who are somewhat aloof from their fellows. It is the chief ingredient in the complex of psychological traits which make the great mass orator. You can feel it in every page of Burke and Demosthenes. But neither of these were great politicians in the small sense of that word. Most young men have it.</p>
<p>Trotsky never lost it. The possessor of it can usually lead men to accomplish the impossible, but a certain tendency to rashness goes with it. With all his self-discipline Trotsky’s feelings could outrun his discretion. To demonstrate by contrast, read Lenin’s writings. There is the same passion but it is controlled. Rage at Mensheviks and petty-bourgeois radicals? Yes. But outbursts of moral indignation, of outraged sympathy are singularly few. But if he was never the orator that Trotsky was, he was never the man to be swept off his feet. He lost his head once only, and that in a personal question.</p>
<p>And finally, quite in keeping with Trotsky’s passion for ideas, his generous indignation at injustice, was his sense of personal rectitude, his idealistic approach to life. All who knew him intimately even when he was one of the rulers of Russia speak of it. Max Eastman and also Souvarine, who, a fierce opponent of Trotsky’s politics, has said of him that there was nothing “mesquin” in his character, not a trace of rascality. It is a noticeable characteristic of many great writers and philosophers, but a fatal weakness in a politician. You can see it in all his writings. Was any other politician of similar eminence capable of saying at a public investigation, “I can say that never in my life did I take the interest take the contrary of the truth. If you will, in plain words, a lie. I believe, in our society, which is very contradictory, that the conventional rules of conduct in family, society, or corporation – everybody from time to time is obliged not to say the truth. I committed it sometimes. I believe the question can be decided only by comparison of the lies I was obliged to give, and the truth. I believe that in the balance my truths are more heavy than the lies. It seems to me so in the more important questions, the decisive questions, in the questions upon which depend the actions of many people, of friends, of their fate – it seems to me that I never committed such crimes.” Trotsky had been through much, but the fundamental honesty of his character, his inner sensitiveness, as he quite unconsciously expresses them here, are very moving, but very revealing also. He was a materialist but none of the great idealist philosophers ever surpassed the conclusion of his address to the Dewey commission. “Esteemed Commissioners! The experience of my life, in which there has been no lack either of successes or of failures, has not only not destroyed my faith in the clear, bright future of mankind, but, on the contrary, has given it an indestructible temper. This faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity, at the age of eighteen I took with me into the workers’ quarters of the provincial Russian town of Nikolaiev – this faith I have preserved fully and completely. It has become more mature, but not less ardent. In the very fact of your Commission’s formation ... in this fact I see a new and truly magnificent reinforcement of the revolutionary optimism which constitutes the fundamental element of my life.” Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, men of deeds, his place is among them. But he was not one of them really. By nature and inclination he would have preferred the company of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Goethe. History was not unkind to him personally. He got his chance before he died and took it with both hands. Men make history and to understand history we must understand men.<br>
</p>
<h4>Lenin and Trotsky</h4>
<p class="fst">With an understanding of Trotsky as that type of person we can now better understand his successes and his failures. After the 1905 revolution, he met Lenin in Finland. They discussed politics and found themselves in general agreement against the Mensheviks on the political issues of the day. Lenin, always suiting the action to the word, taunted Trotsky with refusing to join the Bolsheviks. Trotsky preferred to wander around for twelve years between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He remained untaught by his experience of 1905 when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks divided between them the leadership of the proletariat. Especially after 1905 a man intent on political power, on political influence, which is the first business of any politician, would have joined one or the other of these parties. Trotsky could not. And his reasons were essentially the reasons of a man repelled by Lenin’s toughness and what seemed to him the unscrupulousness of the Bolsheviks. How bitterly he complains! “During the last three to four years of intense party frictions, the life of very many committees has consisted of a series of coups d’état in the spirit of our court revolutions of the eighteenth century. Somewhere way up on top somebody is incarcerating, replacing, choking somebody else, somebody proclaims himself something-and as a result, the top of the committee house is adorned by a flag with the inscription, ‘Orthodoxy, centralism, political struggle’.” He accused the central apparatus itself of starting a new discussion every month, “the apparatus supplies the topic for it, feeds it by false materials, draws its summary, dispenses justice, postpones congress for a year, and is now preparing a congress from among its own apparatus workers previously appointed, who are to authoritate the people on top to continue this work in the future as well.”</p>
<p>Thus 1917 found him in an insignificant organization. But for the Bolshevik Party, created by Lenin, he would have been helpless, and his grasp of the situation and his gifts would have run to waste. Trotsky has stated emphatically that without Lenin there would have been no October Revolution. He was fully capable of leading a revolution alone, but all the evidence points to the fact that without Lenin he would not have been able to handle the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky never minimized the personal weakness which kept him out of the Bolshevik Party till 1917. Lenin mitigated its consequences while he lived. When he died Trotsky paid heavily.</p>
<p>Trotsky rendered inestimable services to Russia but twice his enthusiasm, his love of the idea, nearly wrecked the Russian Revolution. Despite his somewhat ingenuous explanation of Brest-Litovsk in <a href="../../../../trotsky/1930/mylife/index.htm" target="new"><strong>My Life</strong></a>, the fact remains that he made a terrible error in 1918. That Russia would be saved by the international revolution Lenin knew as well as he. Lenin knew as well as he also that the October Revolution had to hold itself free of any stain of imperialist dealing. But Lenin said, “Peace now, for we cannot fight.” Trotsky persisted in chasing a mirage of his own imagination and his obstinacy cost Russia dearly. Had he voted with Lenin earlier the peace would have been signed weeks before. He tries in places to balance Lenin’s mistakes in urging the attack on Poland in 1920 with his own in 1918. The comparison is quite false. Soviet Russia could afford a gamble in 1920. The whole point of 1918 was that the country was on the edge and could not take the slightest chance. In 1920 during the dispute on the Trade Union question, oblivious to the reality, he let his imagination run away with him again. He did not want to militarize labor as the Stalinist liars report, but he wanted to fuse the trade unions with the state administration. His basic argument was that Russia was a workers’ state and therefore the trade unions, as the workers’ organizations, could administer the state. Lenin’s reply was devastating. “Comrade Trotsky says that Russia is a workers’ state. Excuse me, that is an abstraction.” Had Trotsky had his way he would have placed the Soviet state in mortal peril.</p>
<p>Lenin saved Russia from the political consequences of such a blunder. He could not save the party from the organizational consequences. Trotsky had taken up the cause with his usual enthusiasm, single-mindedness and the emotional drive which had swept everything before it in 1905, 1917 and in the formation of the Red Army. For a moment Lenin was in a minority. But Trotsky had to be stopped, and Lenin fell back on Zinoviev, Stalin and others who had long been waiting their chance to discredit Trotsky. The falseness of Trotsky’s position, the recklessness with which he advocated it, Lenin’s political generalship soon put an end to Trotsky’s adventure. But Lenin, though recognizing Trotsky’s invaluable qualities, sought to guard against any more of these volcanic eruptions. There was a reorganization of party functionaries. Krestinsky, Preobrajensky and others of Trotsky’s supporters, able and powerful men, were “distributed.” Less than two years afterwards Lenin fell ill and at the crisis which followed his incapacitation, Trotsky, never concerned with his strength in the party organization, found himself isolated. The whole episode is one of the most instructive in the history of the Bolshevik Party, and in the political biography of Trotsky. He brought it on himself not only in the political error – during the debates Lenin carefully pointed out that they all of them made theoretical errors – but in the way he behaved.<br>
</p>
<h4>Trotsky Without Lenin</h4>
<p class="fst">Finally, in the crisis of 1923, Trotsky conducted himself like a philosopher who had spent his life in a study and had suddenly been asked to take charge of a policy at a party conference. We do not wish here to raise the question of whether this policy by Trotsky or that could have succeeded or had better results than the one he followed. He himself, and, for the immediate political aim, very rightly, always insisted on the economic and social factors at work, minimizing the personal factors. But his political naiveté and the idealism of his character are almost incredible but for his own unsuspecting documentation. Trotsky tells us how, over forty, with his head packed with history and a lifetime of political struggle behind him, he hesitated to make a bid for power because he did not want people to think that he was too anxious to step into Lenin’s shoes. The rest of his strategy is no less amazing. In the hands of Kamenev and Stalin he was a child. Exaggeration? Then characterize these two incidents. Lenin sent him a private letter dealing with an urgent political question in which Stalin and his clique of the moment were intensely interested. Trotsky immediately proposed to show the letter to Kamenev and would have done so but that Lenin stopped him, pointing out that Kamenev would show the letter to Stalin who would inevitably deceive them. All who knew Stalin knew him for what he was. Trotsky knew that Stalin had attempted to poison Lenin’s mind against him. He knew all the intrigues that were going on even before Lenin had the final stroke. Yet read his autobiography. He himself reports not one single action of his own to counter Stalin’s intrigues. Instead he sent the following message to Stalin by Kamenev. “I am against removing Stalin ... But there must be an immediate and radical change. Let (Stalin) not overreach himself. There should be no more intrigues, but honest co-operation.” Never was the leopard more sincerely asked to change his spots.</p>
<p>This is not being wise after the event. Lenin saw to the ultimate end what Stalin stood for. His last writings show it without possibility of argument and it is only within recent years that we have been able to understand their full urgency. Trotsky, warned and warned and warned again, wandered about like a child in a forest of wild beasts. An embittered American anti-Trotskyite <a id="f4" href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> gives meaning to his life by ceaseless attacks on Trotsky as having entered into a pact with Stalin to deceive the Russian people. Undoubtedly owing to the political situation Trotsky, rightly or wrongly, submitted to the suppression of Lenin’s testament, and assisted Stalin to get out of the hole he was in on the National Question. But such compromises, though there can be arguments and differences of opinion about them, are inevitable in the most principled party in the world, and no political party was ever more concerned with principle than the Bolshevik Party in its heroic days. What this critic fails to see is that whatever policy Trotsky was following, whatever tactical compromises he found it necessary to make, he himself, being the man he was, was bound to fail. That he was able to use his magnificent gifts in the way he did was due to the fact that Lenin had created the Bolshevik Party. Who does not understand that does not understand the letter B in Bolshevism.</p>
<p>The last of his blunders which may be conveniently dealt with here was his political position on the Russian invasion of Poland and, particularly, of Finland. As in 1920, pursuing an idea to the end, he repeated his formula: Russia is a workers’ state and therefore it must be defended. Unfortunately for his followers he did not stop there. He condemned the invasion and perhaps for the only time in his long career found himself in an insoluble intellectual contradiction. For if Finland was an outpost of imperialism and Stalin was justified in crushing it then Trotsky’s condemnation of the invasion was a mere gesture to the widespread disapproval and dismay of the workers. But sharp as were the differences between the present Workers’ Party which was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, a split was not necessary on this question alone. Trotsky knew that, but despite his unwillingness he was cunningly maneuvered into a position in which his authority and energy were unscrupulously used for an aim he did not have in mind. When he recognized what was happening, it was too late. To the end he remained what he was, a man incapable of leaving his main work and concentrating his powerful intellect on the tricks and dodges which are inseparable from politics. Unscrupulous men not fit to clean his pen could gain his confidence and get the better of him. Not the least significant was the tragic circumstances of his death. He had been warned against his murderer but this GPU agent earned his favor by an exaggerated devotion to Trotsky’s political position. For six months he discussed politics with the greatest living master of politics and Trotsky never detected a false note, apparently set no trap for him. We can be certain that whoever else might have been deceived by an imposter, Mr. Joseph Stalin would not have been. In the end the idea expressed was more important and interesting to Trotsky than the person expressing it. It was his strength, the cause of some of his greatest triumphs, but it was his weakness, the cause of some of his greatest failures. We must have him as he was. If you agree with this interpretation of his political character, then you will agree that the power of will and self-discipline with which he devoted himself to a type of work for which he so often expressed a personal distaste is, like so much about him, probably unsurpassed by any other figure of similar stature.<br>
</p>
<h4>“From a Theoretical Height”</h4>
<p class="fst">What we are trying to do here is to make an historical evaluation of Trotsky and his work. Nowhere is it so necessary and fruitful as in a consideration of the <strong>History</strong>. The bourgeoisie, particularly, in this age, lives from hand to mouth. Philosophy it has none – Mussolini’s writings on Fascism enjoy a merited obscurity. <strong>Mein Kampf</strong> is no more than the political card-sharping of Machiavelli, adapted to the age of mass production, finance-capital and imperialism. No bourgeois critic can properly evaluate Trotsky’s book. For any kind of historical evaluation you need an end – for example, socialism; a material force – the revolutionary proletariat and the colonial peoples; a political method – Bolshevism. This is ours, it is from there that we begin: others may have their own and are welcome to it. But having nothing the bourgeoisie is at a loss not only with politics but with writing of all kinds. Today the Fascists are making history and the Stalinists with them. Why have they not had anything very important or interesting to say? Molotov’s “Fascism is a question of taste” is at least original. Even that cannot be said of Stalin’s also solitary contribution to recent literature: the brilliant phrase that Russia would not pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire. Against this and similar curiosities set the body of Trotsky’s writings. On the one hand brutality, hypocrisy, lies and cunning, clumsily and coarsely expressed; on the other strength, honesty, high aspiration and a sparkling intelligence, dynamic power, all portrayed through the medium of a style whose miracles we know even in translation. <a id="f5" href="#n5" name="f5">[5]</a> The bourgeois critic will explain it in terms of personal ability. A patent and far-reaching error. The style is the man, and men like Hitler and Trotsky speak for a social order. An age, a class, a political system expresses itself through its great books. The <em>Declaration of Independence</em> and Lincoln’s <em>Gettysburg Address</em> are two of the greatest pieces of writing in any language. Beside them Winston Churchill’s rhetoric is shoddy. Yet Churchill is a greater master of language than either Jefferson or Lincoln and wants to win his war as much as they wanted to win theirs. His weakness lies in his historical circumstances. They had enormous historical confidence. Churchill has none. He is doubtful of the past, fearful of the future. It is historically that we must approach Trotsky’s <strong>History of the Russian Revolution</strong>. We do not only take it as our own and judge it by its own standards. We compare it to other literary and political writings of this and other ages. We make a genuinely historical comparison. We shall find that in the same way as Marx and Engels stand above all who have concerned themselves with the analysis of society, as Lenin and Trotsky rank with the greatest of those who have helped to alter the lives of large masses of human beings, so Trotsky’s <strong>History</strong> is far more than a brilliant history of a great event. It is the greatest history book ever written and one of the most stupendous and significant pieces of literature ever produced in any language.</p>
<p>We do not intend merely to assert. We shall demonstrate. But we must not be short-sighted about these things. These tremendous achievements were the achievements of men, but these men could do the things they did because they represented something – a method, a system of ideas, they could do them because they were the advance guard of something infinitely greater than their individual selves – a new society. At a time when our forces are small we need to maintain the Marxist tradition ready for the day. The best way to maintain it is to understand it and one sure way to understand is through the <strong>History</strong>.</p>
<p>But your pseudo-Marxist will certainly ask: What use is it that Trotsky wrote so well and Hitler and Stalin write so badly? What does it prove? It proves a hundred times over the historic significance of the ideas which Trotsky stood for. Great books do not drop from the sky. Messrs. pessimists are soused to the marrow in the vinegar of bourgeois empiricism and trained from childhood to worship the established fact. That is why to the greatest problem of the present day, the future of Marxism, they come armed with the scientific weapon of primitive man: the philosophy of simple addition. The Marxists have six hundred members here, eighty here and twenty there. And on the other side look at Hitler’s thousands of airplanes and millions of men. Obviously, oh, how obviously, the Fourth International is doomed to failure. Trotsky, looking at Marxism since 1840 and all that it had done, faced the future with confidence and looked upon the ready reckoners as a man looks upon little boys playing at marbles. They do no harm until they try to introduce their infantile accounts into the records and perspectives of mature men. We cannot judge history by its probable effect on our own tender hides. Any hill-billy in the wilds of Arkansas can do that. We must have historical perspective, look a long way back and a certain distance forward. It will not then be difficult to see what the <strong>History of the Russian Revolution</strong> represents. It is the climax of two thousand years of European writing and study of history. It is these and similar things that were in Trotsky’s mind when with his last words he said that he was confident of the victory of the Fourth International.<br>
</p>
<h4>Western Civilization and History</h4>
<p class="fst">First a brief review of the historical hierarchy. Herodotus was the first. And he set himself to tell the history of the war between the Greeks and Persians before the material was forgotten. He was not an Athenian citizen. He was an impressionable intellectual, widely read and widely travelled, who was caught by the romance of history. He wrote down what he gathered and from that day he has been the model and inspiration, whether they know it or not, of countless historians, inside Europe, inside Asia, and inside everywhere else. But we lose sight of what is essential in him if we allow his love of the picturesque to obscure the purpose of his book – the victory of Greece over Persia. It was the defense of civilization against barbarism, the greatest peril that the Greeks had ever faced. He had a great theme, one which every civilized man on the Mediterranean coast could understand and feel. Thirty years after, Thucydides, in his very first paragraph repudiated Herodotus. With singular acerbity for so urbane a man, Thucydides in that paragraph says that before the Peloponnesian War nothing of importance had ever happened. It was as if a modern American historian watching the world situation had called upon the American people to stop reading about Columbus and to study his history of the 1914 war. Man of affairs, politician, soldier, this sober Athenian was sick of all this old tale-telling in the face of the threat to Athens. He wrote a book which to this day is not excelled for gravity, lucidity, proportion and knowledge of politics. He wrote with one aim – the glorification of Athenian democracy. “Our country is governed in the interests of the many instead of the few. That is why it is called a democracy.” How those words have echoed down the years, drowning the sighs and groans of the Athenian slaves! The great Romans, Livy and Tacitus, wrote within a few years of each other. They hated the autocracy and depravity of the Empire, and Livy, in particular, glorified the constitution of the Roman republic and the stern virtues of ancient Rome. He gives one of his best speeches to Cato denouncing a law which allowed freedom of attire to Roman women. As Rome went to pieces without any future, men clung to the past which Livy had idealized by forty years of labor. Rome fell but Latin literature remained and when the Renaissance brought back the study of the classics, all the growing forces of liberalism in Europe nourished themselves on the vivid artistry and republican sentiments of Thucydides, Livy and Plutarch and cursed tyranny in the language of Tacitus. By the end of the nineteenth century Livy had been translated some five hundred times. The Elizabethan age was famous for its translations. Amyot translated Plutarch and North translated Aniyor, giving Shakespeare rich material for plays. To all these people Livy and Plutarch were far more important than Hoinshed and Froissart. The heroes of the French Revolution conceived themselves as heroic Romans of the republican days. So did Babeuf. The finer shades of European history are a closed book without an understanding of what the classics meant to all the educated classes. For generations they learned nothing else at school. The climax came with Gibbon, who gathered together all the learning and classical consciousness of centuries in his justly celebrated book. But a hundred years ago Guizot knew that for the scientific history of Rome you had to look elsewhere than in the <strong>Decline and Fall</strong>. Gibbon’s history was the historical peak of the age of enlightenment. He was a member of that cosmopolitan society of Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Catherine and the French aristocracy which flourished before the French Revolution. Even the Bourbon monarchy enjoyed this culture and Gibbon’s devastating attack on Christianity was characteristic of educated society in his day, not excluding French bishops. Aristocrat though he was, he represented progress. Voltaire was a prolific historian of the same school. Two generations after Gibbon, Michelet wrote of the French Revolution with an erratic passion that made him a French classic. Macaulay made his political reputation in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1832 and his history so dominated bourgeois English thought for a century that it is only since October 1917 that the whig tradition has ceased to reign over all English academic writing. Yet he was so biased that his great history is fittingly called a whig pamphlet in four octavo volumes. Green was less crude, but of the same school. His <strong>Short History of the English People</strong> first made history popular among all classes. All the English prejudices of the last sixty years, their belief in English history as one long struggle for liberty culminating in the British constitution, their conception of themselves as a Germanic people born to freedom, the <em>Magna Carta</em> legend, the Cromwell Protestant legend, all come straight from Green. These histories are some of them good, some of them bad. Green, the most popular, is very bad. But that is not their importance. What they do is to hold not a mirror but a banner up to society. They give society or more often a class an image of itself, not as it was but as it thought it was, or as it would have liked to be. In them is written the history of an age, but not in the sense that they thought they were writing. Gibbon portrays eighteenth century Europe as well as the Roman Empire. These writers were great artists, powerful personalities, preaching a cause, and “they wrote so well because they saw so little.” <a id="f6" href="#n6" name="f6">[6]</a> But all of them represented some powerful progressive idea, and the great classics first, and these and their satellites after, dominated the thought of the bourgeoisie for over four hundred years. Even Gibbon, aristocrat though he was, was an English aristocrat and praised the Roman constitution in which he thought he saw the model of the British. Then suddenly, with Michelet and Macaulay the line comes to a dead stop and is taken up again only with Trotsky. Why? A few dates will help us.</p>
<p>Michelet’s book appeared in 1847–50 and the fiery <strong>History of the French Revolution</strong> was directly inspired by the 1848 revolution, the events leading up to it and his own belief in Communism. Macaulay’s first volume of the <strong>History of England</strong> appeared in 1848. But 1848 was the year when the socialist revolution first appeared. It was the year of the <a href="../../../../marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Communist Manifesto</strong></a>. The spectre began to haunt Europe. Sharp eyes were watching, and the call for liberty vanished from bourgeois historical writing on the grand scale. Mommsen’s <strong>History of the Roman Republic</strong> appeared in 1854, six years after 1848. Not at all accidentally, he was a German. He loved parliamentary democracy but he hated the proletariat, especially after 1848. There was only one refuge for him, Bonapartism, and the climax of his learned work on Rome is his description of Caesar as “the entire, the perfect man.” Bismarck and Napoleon III did their best to emulate if not the perfection at least the entirety of Caesar. Carlyle before 1848 had been so sympathetic to the workers as to win favorable notice from Marx and Engels, but 1848 drove him into the reaction and henceforth he was the advocate of the hero, essentially Mommsen’s entire and perfect man. The domination of the world market enabled Britain to be a little more liberal and Green published in 1874. But six years after Green came Seeley’s <strong>Expansion of the British Empire</strong>, whose idiotic thesis that the British founded their empire in a fit of absence of mind, did not prevent his book from being one of the most widely read of the day. Mahan’s <strong>Influence of Sea Power in History</strong>, though not widely popular, was scarcely less influential. Mommsen, Carlyle, Bismarck, Nietzsche, Seeley, Mahan, all that they had to say of political importance was gathered into one tremendous volume – Spengler’s <strong>Decline of the West</strong>, which was completed in 1917. During the very hours that Spengler was writing finis to bourgeois civilization, Lenin was completing <strong>The State and Revolution</strong> and <strong>Imperialism</strong> in preparation for the Russian Revolution. In face of the grandiose movement of social revolution, the slow accumulation, the dramatic confrontations, statements of position, retreats and advances, battles across a world for the future of society, in the face of all this, how mean and piddling are the smug calculations of our sneering accountants, blind to the historical process as a whole and unable to rise above their own insufficiency!</p>
<p>It is, as Trotsky would say, from this theoretical height that we can see what the <strong>History</strong> has restored to historical writing. To Gibbon, to Macaulay, to Trotsky, liberty meant different things. Trotsky’s conception is the widest. That is not the point at issue now. What matters is that the proletariat at least calls for liberty. The bourgeoisie cannot find one great writer to do so. Marx’s claim that the future of society rests with the proletariat is demonstrated as clearly in historical writing as in economic analysis. This guarantees nothing. To show where the future of any liberty that we may look forward to lies, is no guarantee of its success. But this reactionary and cowardly sentiment, masquerading as realism, draws strength as reaction always does, from ignorance. There is something very concrete to the great historians, propagandists though they were. Not a single broad political step forward in modern European history has ever been taken in the name of tyranny. The exalted sentiment of the popular historians always related to economic expansion and political progress. Even Christianity, the ideological successor to the Roman Empire, spoke in the name of the liberty of the individual, his right to the disposition of his own soul; opposed the Roman State and slavery. The Reformation saw itself as a revolt against papal tyranny. The absolute monarchy was the first political resource of the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords. Its misconceptions of Thucydides, Livy, Plutarch and Tacitus seemed like heaven on earth to the bourgeoisie. No taxation without representation; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; liberty, equality and fraternity; government of the people, by the people and for the people, contained falsities, conscious and unconscious, but they broke monstrous and avowed tyrannies. Workers of the World Unite, aims at doing the same. But for the first time for over five centuries, a political system with a great fanfare of newness and solution to crisis, makes a political virtue out of tyranny, inequality; class, racial and national prejudice; and decries everything that European civilization has striven for, in theory at least, since the Renaissance. During Europe’s worst periods of reaction, the period of the counter-reformation and the Holy Alliance, the most reactionary writers could find something plausible to say in defense of their cause. German imperialism plunders in order to live. Fascism is the decline of the West and its protagonists know it in their souls. Their writings on all subjects except the seizure of power are nothing else but lies and nonsense, cold-blooded deliberate falsification. Not a flower blossoms on their arid heaths. There is no soil in which anything can grow. They are just a thin cover for exhausted bourgeois society. They can have nothing to say. Mommsen and Carlyle said all when the bourgeoisie still could preserve some illusions. If Trotsky’s <strong>History</strong> does not guarantee the inevitability of socialism, <strong>Mein Kampf</strong> guarantees the fraud of Fascism as a solution to the ills of capitalist society.<br>
</p>
<h4>Not Only Art But Science</h4>
<p class="fst">We have carefully avoided hitherto dealing with the scientific aspect of Trotsky’s <strong>History</strong>. It is familiar to all Marxists, and gives the final endorsement to its value as propaganda on the grand scale. For whereas the other historians in the pursuit of their aim shaped their material as an artist shapes his figures Trotsky claimed and irrefutably demonstrated that his history was scientific in that it flowed from the objective facts. He challenged anyone to question his documentation and the challenge has never been taken up. In method and presentation the book is as scientific as the Origin of Species. It may be challenged as Darwin was challenged, but on concrete not on abstract grounds. No herald of liberty and progress ever stood more firmly with both feet on the earth. And yet in pure style, this materialist, as rigid with facts as Scaliger, is exceeded in no sphere by any one of his ancestors, not by Thucydides in proportion and lucidity, nor by Tacitus in invective, nor Gibbon in dignity, nor Michelet in passion, nor by Macaulay, that great bourgeois, in efficiency. There is a profound lesson here not only in history but in aesthetics.</p>
<p>And finally, the book is not only a propagandist tract, the expression of an attitude to society, and a scientific thesis. It is besides, what none of the others is. It is a summons to action. It is not only a banner and a blueprint. It is a roll of drums. Through it breathes not only the spirit of this is what we aimed at, this is the way it was done, but also, this is the way to do it. Every aspect of the struggle is scientifically analyzed and expounded, and the reader is not so much rhetorically exhorted to join up, but as he sees the difficulties and feels the unbounded confidence and unshakeable will which attacks and overcomes them, the knowledge and the power, he becomes part of this wonderful adventure. Resentment at oppression smoulders in hundreds of millions of people all over the world. What they lack is confidence in their own powers. How can we fight and win? The answer is in the <strong>History</strong>. And by and large, the advance guard of this generation have been ready for that answer. In translations, for the author had no country, it has sold thousands upon thousands of copies. On the shelves of many rank and file Social-Democrats it occupies an honored place, and it has penetrated into the homes of numerous Stalinists, the only book by Trotsky since his exile to do so, despite their copious denunciation of all his writings. This is not one of its least triumphs. Had the Third International been a revolutionary organization, this book, with its knowledge, its confidence and its will, would have inspired, directly and indirectly, millions of political leaders all over the world. History has deemed otherwise, but it is another proof of what we know in so many other fields, that it is Stalinism above all which confuses the working class and keeps away from it that knowledge and understanding without which it cannot conquer. The new class is willing to listen. What it requires to know is there. An excrescence stands in the way. Powerful though it is it is still an excrescence. To see the History in perspective is to realize that it is Stalinism which is the accident and that the proletariat and its spokesman are a sequence in the movement of European life and thought as we have known them for five centuries.<br>
</p>
<h4>How a Classic Is Born</h4>
<p class="fst">Now a book could be a propaganda tract on the grand scale, an attempt at a scientific treatise, and a summons to action, could be written by a highly gifted participant in a great event, and yet be merely one of many other books. The memoirs of all who took part in the last war are there to show that these are not sufficient to write a great book. That the <strong>History</strong> is what it is due certainly to Trotsky’s power as a writer. There is no substitute for a great artist. But that for us is the least consideration.</p>
<p>With the <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong> began something entirely new in historical method. Specially to show how the new method should be used, Marx deliberately wrote the <a href="../../../../marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm" target="new"><strong>Eighteenth Brumaire</strong></a>, but afterwards he and Engels wrote specifically on history only as the occasion presented itself, and always to the point and no more. Bernstein and Kautsky wrote historical works which were illuminating but academic. The Marxist method enables you to write a scientific history. But it is not a talisman. Kautsky and Bernstein were bureaucrats, the one a concealed and the other an avowed reactionary. And Marxist method or no Marxist method only passionate conviction can write a great book. Neither Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg wrote history. Men of action must cease being men of action to write history, which demands a certain tranquility. But during all these years, there was accumulated in books, articles and correspondence, a vast amount of thinking on history; isolated sketches, scholarly works, deductions and observations about classes, states, insurrections, mass movements, which formed the Marxist corpus. It was not collected anywhere but the students of Marxism knew it. It was in the background of Lenin’s mind always. He studied the proceedings of Cromwell’s Long Parliament and the proceedings of the Paris Commune during the French Revolution, and thus tested and amplified the principles laid down by Marx. Trotsky followed this example, only whereas Lenin seemed by nature inclined to economic and statistical studies, Trotsky’s natural instincts as we have seen drove him to history and writing. Trotsky also had met and talked with all the great European Marxists of his time. In 1905 came the theory of the permanent revolution, and from that time on, not to mention the earlier years, how the Russian Revolution would develop was the main preoccupation of the Social Democrats in Russia and of European Marxists as a whole. But whereas everyone, according to his gifts and opportunities, contributed and analyzed, no one, not even Lenin, analyzed more deeply than Trotsky. He had his theory to test and to defend and he was above all a man of theory. Thus the structure and movement of the Russian Revolution was the very structure of his mental make-up, the axis around which he lived intellectually and emotionally. Came 1917 and for seven intense months, first outside and then inside Russia, he saw and helped and guided. Thus it is safe to say that no previous writer was ever so much completely master of a great subject as Trotsky was of the Russian Revolution. Politically mankind came of age with the Russian Revolution. Caesar, Cromwell, Marat, Robespierre and other famous men had worked largely by instinct. For the first time in history, a man had foreseen the main lines of a great historical event, and then had himself been instrumental in carrying it through to a successful conclusion. Lenin had to revise his conceptions. Not Trotsky. Any writer, any artist would know the extraordinary power and confidence, the certainty of direction, that would be Trotsky’s when he sat down to write. Such was the background. The interplay of class as a whole and individual artist are fused here as nowhere else that we know in writing. But that is only half the book.</p>
<p>A revolution is the greatest event in the life of all those who experience it. It alters the food that you eat, the way you eat it, the clothes that you wear, even the way of a man with a maid. And never were so many people jerked so far and with such violence as were the people of Russia by the October Revolution. Thus from 1917 onward an unending stream of reminiscence, memoirs, documents, conferences, conversations, contributed unceasingly to the consciousness of the leaders of a historical event who from the beginning were as conscious of their historic selves as no other leaders in history. Politicians, diplomats, aristocrats and merchants wrote, the official historians collected, but worker-Bolsheviks, ordinary workers, ordinary peasants, ordinary soldiers, all poured their contributions in. How often Trotsky must have talked about the revolution to ordinary folks. How glad they were to talk to the man of October! Too much material can swamp. But to Trotsky who since 1905 had the main lines of the map clear, it defined, clarified, enriched, illustrated. Had he remained a ruler of Russia, the book would never have been written. But driven into exile he settled down to it. (He was at his desk at last, with a pen in his hand.)</p>
<p>Into the book went all the historical knowledge and understanding which Marx and Engels had started to accumulate, and which the Marxists had continued, step by step, as the proletariat and peasantry of the whole world moved slowly forward. All that Marx and Engels and Lenin had written and thought about great revolutions in the past and Trotsky’s own discoveries, Lenin’s studies of 1905 and the period in between, 1905 and 1917, all the erudition, conflicts, thoughts of the Russian Social-Democracy, the writings and analyses that followed 1917, of Lenin, of Bucharin, of Rakovsky, and scores of other gifted men, and of all the millions of the Russian people, all this Trotsky gathered together. The artist in him, suppressed for forty years by the needs of the revolution, now opened out, and with the same personal force, discipline and will which always distinguished him, he hammered this mountainous mass of facts and ideas around the theme of the class struggle into one of the most powerful, compact and beautiful pieces of literature that exists in any language, prose or poetry. Milton says that a great book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit. True. But in the <strong>History</strong> is the precious life-blood of many master spirits; and also of the Russian people, of the French proletariat, in 1848 and 1870, of Ironsides and Jacobins and sansculottes, of the abortive German revolution of 1918, of the Chinese and other nationalist revolutions. All, all are there. All had contributed their sufferings, their hopes, the wisdom that was drawn from their experiences. A hundred years of socialist thought and proletarian struggles have gone into the making of that book, the first of its kind. No one will ever be able to write like it again for generations. Historians will write, their wine will be new, but their bottles will be old. It is the first classic of socialist society and it will never be superseded. For there may come a time when <strong>Capital</strong> will be of historic interest only, when <strong>What is to be Done</strong> will be pondered over by students who will seek in vain to recapture the remote circumstances which produced Bolshevism of the imperialist age. But the <strong>History</strong> will remain the bridge between the long line which leads from the Old Testament and Homer, Greek tragedy, Dante and Cervantes, to the books which will be written when, in Marx’s famous phrase, the history of humanity begins.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Voice of the Revolution</h4>
<p class="fst">With the conclusion of the <strong>History</strong> it might have seemed that Trotsky had done enough for one man. And yet, infatuated exaggeration though it may sound, his last phase is the most unprecedented of his wonderful career. He was the most powerful and celebrated exile in history. Napoleon at St. Helena was out of it. Bismarck walked down the gangway and was rowed into oblivion. Napoleon III finished like the last discord of a modern jazz composition. Kaiser Wilhelm added a beard to his moustache. These men ruled tremendous empires for many years and then sank from public affairs like stones. As for the social-democratic rubbish, the Kerenskys, the Chernovs, the Bauers, Caballeros, Negrins and Prietos, what a miserable down-at-heel assortment of discards, old curs with scarcely spirit enough to yelp at the moon – for nobody wants to hear them. All of them, kings and bureaucrats, could find a place to stay. Great organizations, sometimes great states, backed them. Yet all added together they amount to nothing. Trotsky could not rest anywhere. No country wanted him until Mexico added lustre to its history by giving him a home. He was pursued by all the resources of the Soviet state. Despite the devoted solicitude of his supporters he was often in financial straits, for though their devotion was unlimited, their numbers were few. Yet from all these difficulties he emerged as a veritable tribune of the international working class, speaking for the proletarian revolution and for socialism as no private individual ever spoke for any public cause. First was the gigantic conflict with Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy. Never did any state spend so much time, energy and resources, to blacken the reputation and silence the ideas of a single individual. His supporters were systematically murdered. Unprecedented trials were arranged for the purpose of getting rid of internal enemies and utterly discrediting him. Huge political parties all over the world carried out the orders and repeated the slanders of Moscow. Almost single-handed, Trotsky, aided only by a small and devoted band of followers (they did a great historic work), fought Stalinism to a finish and inflicted upon it a resounding defeat. Today the whole world knows that Stalin lied, that Trotsky was no enemy of the Soviet Union, that he stood for the revolution as it was originally conceived, and though they hate him for his unswerving devotion to revolution, yet his sincerity and his loyalty to the cause of socialism are not questioned. He fought for that, not on account of his personal reputation – he was always confident of the judgment of history – but because he knew that in attempting to discredit him, the Stalinists, inside and outside Russia, sought to discredit the ideas for which he stood – the ideas of revolutionary socialism. Periodically the front pages of every newspaper in the world were covered with the records of this great conflict, and Stalin, the ruler of a hundred and seventy millions and Trotsky <em>primus inter pares</em> of a few scattered thousands, met as equals on the arena of world public opinion. It will be said that historical events helped him to win his final victory. What infinite wisdom! As if Trotsky did not know that history was moving in a certain direction, as if all his efforts were not directed towards hastening and clarifying the process.</p>
<p>The Stalinists claimed that he gained all this publicity because he was an enemy of the Soviet Union and the bourgeoisie used him. It is a pitiable self-deception. At the time of the Moscow Trials, the <strong>Manchester Guardian</strong> was advocating an alliance between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Yet it threw open its pages to him, for in the confusion all felt that only one man could help to elucidate the mystery and that man was Trotsky himself. That was the secret of his power. He could clarify the world bourgeoisie, in the confusion in which it finds itself. It learned something from him. He was prepared to speak whenever asked, because he knew the limitations of bourgeois wisdom; through their organs he spoke to the workers about every important event, not only on revolutions on which he was an authority, but on every development in the steady progress to war. Journalists came from all over the world to interview him, certain that people would read eagerly what he said. His books were literary events, simultaneously reviewed everywhere and pondered over.</p>
<p>To attribute it all to his personal brilliance, the vigor and incisiveness of his expression, is an absurdity we have already dealt with earlier. Trotsky represented something – represented it adequately, magnificently, with a power that was all his own, but yet he was only a representative. He represented the proletariat in the period of the decay of capitalism. The proletariat is a mighty force in the modern world. If the radical intellectuals do not know it, the bourgeoisie does. The bourgeoisie listened to Trotsky because whether it recognized this or not he represented the point of view of the world revolution. The bourgeoisie does not accept Marxism. It cannot. But it was obvious to many bourgeois thinkers that on any knotty tangle of international politics he always had something of value to say. Why had Hitler come so easily to power in Germany? What was the significance of Hitler? Why, why the Hitler-Stalin pact? How would the war end? He told them what he thought. They listened to his predictions because these turned out so often to be true. But if they were hazy as to the source of his ideas they had no illusions as to what use he intended to make of them and they carefully excluded him from their shores. When he died, in their news columns and obituary notices they recognized the greatness of the figure that had so dominated a social epoch, in their editorials they vented their spleen against the implacable enemy of their society.</p>
<p>For those who can understand history there is a tremendous significance in this last period of Trotsky’s life. Like some bold reconnoiterer he forced his way into the enemy’s camp, and using every trick, wile and dodge at his command, and giving away practically nothing, he carried on the battle, cleared paths, exposed dangers, charted a course, knowing that though the great armies had fallen behind and were stumbling, they were coming, slowly but inexorably they were coming. And that almost alone he could do so much was a testimony not only to his personal qualities but to the great forces which he represented. How little some of his friends knew it, and how well his enemies! Stalin, aware of the state of his regime and in what a tottering world he lived, did not count Trotsky’s meagre following and then sit back in comfort. He knew that as long as Trotsky lived and could write and speak, the Soviet bureaucracy was in mortal danger. In a conversation just before war broke out. Hitler and the French ambassador discussed the perils of plunging Europe into conflict and agreed that the winner of the second great war might be Trotsky. Winston Churchill hated him with a personal malevolence which seemed to overstep the bounds of reason. These men knew his stature, the power of what he stood for, and were never lulled by the smallness of his forces. If some of our radical intelligentsia will not learn from Marxism, perhaps they will ponder on the view of Trotsky held by Stalin, Hitler and Churchill.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Fourth International</h4>
<p class="fst">And yet his work as spokesman of the revolution was not his main occupation in this period. Not at all. For him that was secondary. What interested him most was getting his ideas directly to the masses through revolutionary organizations. This work is a chapter in itself and is treated elsewhere in this memorial number. It is almost unknown to the general public. All of it is included in the words – the struggle for the Fourth International. We of the Fourth International know what was the quality and quantity of that work; the enormous labor, the knowledge and wisdom, the enthusiasm he put into it. Always he saw history from a great height. Yet a dispute between ten struggling young comrades, five thousand miles away from him, whom he had never seen or heard of until they wrote to him, would occupy his devoted attention for hours and hours at a time. People accuse Trotsky of impatience and domineering. They do not know what they are talking about. He had his opinions and fought for them. In ideological struggles he was a relentless foe. With him theories were not interesting ideas to be played with, as is the detestable habit of the bourgeois intellectuals. They were weapons in the class struggle. But to know and to appreciate his powers and his past, the enormous force of this many-sided and yet perfectly integrated personality, and to see him listening patiently to some inexperienced comrade putting forward his inexperienced ideas, to read letters in which he took up some apparently minor point and elaborated it meeting all possible objections one by one, was to have a great lesson in the difference between the superficial arrogance which often characterizes essentially sensitive men, and the ocean of strength, patience and resiliency which can come from complete devotion to a cause.</p>
<p>That is the secret of his life and achievement – we cannot state it too often – the fact that he was not only gifted above his fellows but that he early abandoned a bankrupt society and embraced a cause which used all that he had and placed no limits on his development. Bourgeois society limits and cramps and distorts. Winston Churchill is a man who in energy and diversity of natural gifts, courage, and spirit, executive capacity and artistic instinct, could not have been anything if at all inferior to Trotsky. Yet look at the result. His whole great British Empire has throttled instead of developing him. It has debarred him from understanding history: he has no historical method. He was at the head of the British navy in the last war and knew everything from the inside, yet his <strong>World Crisis</strong> is commonplace, and full of a windy rhetoric. His recent speeches are far above anything bourgeois democracy has produced in this crisis. He describes with clarity and style. Yet, at the conclusion of one of his best efforts, all he can tell the British people is so to bear themselves that if they lived a thousand years, men shall say this war was their finest hour. It is not a chance phrase. Men in such times as these do not use chance phrases. Perspective he has and can have none, unless, like Hitler, he turns himself definitely and consciously round and tramples upon everything that humanity has aimed at, however unsuccessfully, in thousands of years of painful effort. All the gifts in the world would not have saved Trotsky from a similar fate had he limited himself to bourgeois society. Being determines consciousness. In the struggle for socialism he strides through the world, a titan among men, excelling in every field he touched. An exile half his life, persecuted as no man has been persecuted, he lived the fullest life of any human being hitherto. The field of being which he chose developed his consciousness to a pitch reached by few men. That consciousness he did his best to pass on to us. It is ours to guard, from each according to our abilities. Let us see to it that we do our share. He himself now belongs to history and this is an historical evaluation. But his death is recent enough and each of us is personally indebted to him for too much to exclude a personal note. Motley closed his noble history of the Dutch Republic by saying of William the Silent that for thirty years he was the guiding star of a whole great nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets. Whatever the fate of our movement, whatever its successes or failures, whatever our personal lives may hold, to us who knew him and worked with him, now that he is dead, the world will never be the same again.</p>
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<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> <a href="../../../../trotsky/germany/1931/311126.htm" target="new"><strong>Germany, the Key to the International Situation</strong></a>.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> There is a characteristic and diverting passage in <a href="../../../../trotsky/1930/mylife/index.htm" target="new"><strong>My Life</strong></a> (p. 358) on Trotsky’s estimate of his work as War Commissar. He says that if anyone could be compared with Carnot it is his assistant, Sklyansky. Trotsky knew that the natural comparison was not Sklyansky but himself, and knowing that Carnot’s role in the French Revolution was important but confined, carefully disentangled himself by giving the role to Sklyansky. He need not have worried. But he was always careful of the verdict of history.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n3" href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> And Spengler had it not only in the history of society but in music, art and literature. It Is to be hoped that the fog of mysticism does not obscure for Marxists the colossal learning, capacity for synthesis and insight of Spengler’s book.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n4" href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> George Marlene.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n5" href="#f5" name="n5">5.</a> This does not mean that this writer, for instance, is in complete agreement with everything Trotsky wrote. There are not negligible sections to which he is absolutely opposed. These will be taken up in good time. But the disagreements are family disagreements.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n6" href="#f6" name="n6">6.</a> See the <em>Introduction</em> to the <strong>Black Jacobins</strong> by C.L.R. James.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Trotsky’s Place In History
(September 1940)
Source: The New International, Vol. VI, No. 8 (Whole No. 45), September 1940, pp. 151–167;
Transcribed: Damon Maxwell.
Proofread: Einde O’Callaghan (July 2013).
THE bourgeoisie, perforce lacking historical method and suborning all aspects of life to the maintenance of power, has not only confused the proletariat but has confused itself in the estimation of what constitutes greatness in contemporary men. Woodrow Wilson, Poincaré, Stanley Baldwin and similar mediocrities have all been crowned with the laurel, not excluding Nicholas Murray Butler, on the score presumably that he had dined often with the others. So often and so conspicuously have the bourgeois theorists blundered that in the face of a sceptical world they confess bankruptcy; always to their biographies and obituary notices they add a saving clause, that posterity alone can tell.
No such tendentiousness, hesitancy, hit or miss judgments have discredited the estimates of those who use the method of historical materialism. Marx and Engels judged heir contemporaries, Darwin, Proudhon, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon III, Balzac and Dickens, Palmerston, Gladstone, Thiers, Bismarck, Shaw, with incisiveness and precision, and their judgments have stood the test of time. The most famous of all their pronouncements on persons, Engels’ judgment on Marx, “mankind is shorter by a head, and the greatest head of our time at that.” would have seemed presumptuous to many, the usual exaggeration of a friend, collaborator and a Communist fanatic. Today that judgment might be questioned by some but with caution and respect. Marx’s name rings incessantly in the ears of all, capitalists and workers alike. His book, Capital, is high on the sales-list of popular classics. Stanley Baldwin, the English Prime Minister, on his retirement, indicated what he considered the main characteristics of his period: In the year that I was born two events occurred which were the beginnings of the two forces competing in the world today; the one was Disraeli’s Reform Bill with its doctrine of expanding freedom and the other the publication of Capital, with its doctrine of economic determinism. Thus Marx had at last arrived, being recognized as a world force by a Conservative Prime Minister only fifty years after his death. Trotsky is easier to recognize immediately. All men, Marxist or otherwise, will agree that between 1917 and 1923 he played a great role in the history of our times. Before that his life had made no exceptional impression on the general consciousness. During his last decade he was an exile, apparently powerless. During those same ten years, Stalin, his rival, assumed power such as no man in Europe since Napoleon has wielded. Hitler has shaken the world and bids fair to bestride it like a colossus while he lasts. Roosevelt is the most powerful President who has ever ruled America, and America today is the most powerful nation in the world. Yet the Marxist judgment of Trotsky is as confident as Engels’ judgment of Marx. Before his period of power, during it, and after his fall, Trotsky stood second only to Lenin among contemporary men, and after Lenin died in 1924, was the greatest head of our times. That judgment we leave to history.
The Theory of the Permanent Revolution
Trotsky’s first claim to the attention of mankind is his theory of the permanent revolution, and if he had fallen dead after correcting the last proof over thirty years ago, his place in political thought was safe. Marx and Engels for fifty years had made their profound and brilliant predictions of the future disintegration of capitalist society. Engels in 1887 had predicted the 1914 war, the revolution in Russia first, the revolutions in Europe and crowns rolling with no one to pick them up, the formation of the Third International. In 1889 Plekhanov declared that the coming revolution in Russia would be a revolution of the working class and could be no other. But in 1905 Trotsky, then 26 years old, in an essay of a few thousand words, unfolded the course which history was to follow.
Let us consider the mental climate of that period. Previous to that time, 1905, Europe and America had seen no revolutions of any importance since the Civil War of 1861 and the Commune of 1870. The Civil War was not then recognized for what was, and what Charles Beard has since called it, the Second American Revolution. The Commune, except to the Marxists (and the French bourgeoisie), had seemed an unpleasant episode growing out of the war. In 1905 the spectre of Communism was not haunting Europe. And the bourgeois writers and statesmen of those days, Viscount Bryce, the expert on democracy, Maximilian Herden, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, for whom Socialism would come if you just kept her inching along, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Lloyd George, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Benedetto Croce, Anatole France, Miliukov, the Manchester Guardian, the New York Times, the London Times, the Corriere del Sierra, all the finest bourgeois thinkers, and the distinguished organs of bourgeois thought, what a monumental pile of rubbish and nonsense they, reactionaries and progressives, were producing in this very 1905 about the world and its future. They and their successors are a little more sensible today, though to do them justice they lie more. From those bourgeois who took notice of it, the theory met with derision. Miliukov, the Russian savant, gave it a name and thus “Trotskyism” was born.
Despite all the evidence piled up under his eyes, the bourgeois of today cannot accept the theory; tar less the bourgeois of 1905. Capitalism, said this theory, was approaching its end and society was ripe tor the socialist revolution. This view Trotsky held in common apparently, but only apparently, with all Marxists. But, and here he broke sharply with all of them, Lenin included, Russia, the most backward of the great European states, would be the scene of the first socialist revolution. Where all the great European Marxists looked upon the coming Russian Revolution as one which would give Russia a bourgeois republic, Trotsky stated that this was impossible. A revolution in Russia, to be successful, would have to be a socialist revolution. True, Russia, a backward country with a hundred million peasants, was not ready for socialism. Left to itself the Russian Revolution would certainly collapse. But the Russian Revolution would unloose proletarian revolutions in Europe which would come to the assistance of the Russian. It would initiate the era of permanent social revolution until the establishment of worldwide socialism. Either this, or the collapse of capitalist civilization into barbarism.
In analytical power and imaginative audacity the theory is one of the most astounding productions of the modern mind. The bourgeoisie makes a great to-do about de Tocqueville who foresaw that America would one day free itself from England, Goethe, who recognized the significance of Valmy, and of Seward, who foretold “the irrepressible conflict.” How pitiable these are besides the work of Trotsky who foretold the future of a world. Except in the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin there is no comparable piece of political prophecy anywhere. After Marx’s discoveries political thinkers were limited to the use of his method. It has never been better used. As for the bourgeoisie, its writings of 1905 remind us of the days when all the young men were for Racine, so remote are they from the terrible modern reality.
The Verdict of the Years
What is more important for us than the limitations of the bourgeoisie is the limitations of the Marxists. They wrote and taught the socialist revolution but we know today that in reality Kautsky, for instance, did not believe in any such thing. Trotsky himself relates the deadly politeness of Austro-Marxism when, an exile in Vienna, he ventured to suggest to them the coming collapse of the world they knew. Such was 1905. In the genuinely revolutionary wing of socialism the theory met with fierce opposition. Lenin never ceased to deride it. As late as November 1915 he was slashing at Trotsky “who repeats his original 1905 treaty without stopping to think why life during a whole decade has passed by this beautiful theory ... amusing example ... incorrect ... To what limits Trotsky’s confusion goes ...” Lenin believed that the revolution in Russia would be a democratic revolution, though he as confidently as Trotsky expected that it would unloose the socialist revolution in Europe, without which, he stated over and over again, the Russian democratic revolution would collapse. Trotsky refused to concede an inch. To the Mensheviks who preached that the Russian bourgeoisie would lead the revolution he said that the counter-revolutionary character of their ideas would show itself before the revolution. To the Bolsheviks who taught that the proletariat would destroy Tsarism but install the bourgeoisie in power he said that the counter-revolutionary character of their theory would appear after the revolution. The years have justified him. The Russian Revolution followed his road. After it came the post-war revolutions in Germany, Austria and Hungary, in Turkey and Italy, in Egypt and India, in China, in Spain. The Russian and other proletarian and nationalist revolutions have shaken the structure of capitalism. Two-by-four political thinkers attribute all to “the war.” As if the war fell from the sky and was not itself a product of capitalist disintegration; as if Lenin, long before 1914, had not watched the growing industrialization of India and China and predicted the coming proletarian struggles in those countries. But for these upheavals the socialist revolution in Russia would have been annihilated. True the socialist cause has suffered a succession of defeats. But the struggle is not over. In every chancellery in the world, Stalin’s included, the spectre of Communism, grown to Arabian Nights proportions, sits at every conference. Read the bourgeois press carefully. Always between the lines and sometimes in them snarls the fear that the coming years will see the consummation of the audacious theory put forward by the young Marxist thirty-five years ago.
Trotsky’s Creative Power
The theory of the permanent revolution was no isolated spurt of inspiration. In abstract creative imagination and range of thought Trotsky excelled Lenin. Today we accept the idea of the single economic plan as an indispensable part of the socialist reorganization of society. Trotsky first put it forward in his little history of the Russian Revolution written during spare moments at Brest-Litovsk. Lenin at first opposed it as he opposed the theory of the permanent revolution. But that most realistic of men, though often wrong, was never wrong for long in the face of reality, and soon he recognized the value of the single economic plan as opportunely as he had accepted the permanent revolution in April 1917.
Besides the theory with which his name will always be associated, the outstanding example of Trotsky’s analytic and creative power was the New Course, the outgrowth and flowering of the single plan proposal. It is characteristic of him that, immersed in his work, he never saw the dangerous growth of bureaucracy until Lenin, with an agonized urgency, pointed it out to him and asked for help. Lenin’s immediate preoccupation was to take the political and practical steps necessary to break up Stalin and his clique. Here Trotsky failed completely – we shall deal with that later – but in the course of a few months he outlined a course of action which is one of the most profound and masterly plans of reconstruction ever laid before the rulers of a state in crisis.
A succession of good harvests was dangerously increasing the weight of the peasantry and capitalism. Unless checked this would lead inevitably to the overwhelming of the proletariat and the Soviet power. The last great turn Lenin had given to the party had been towards the appeasement of the peasantry. But the retreat had gone far enough. It was necessary to embark on a bold plan of industrialization, using part of the wealth accumulated by the rich peasants. Collectivization, in proportion to the strength of the industrialization, should be the aim. Inseparably intertwined with the industrial was the political reorganization. He analyzed the dangers of bureaucracy, its causes and consequences, the relation of the youth to the older party comrades, the role of the masses in maintaining the revolutionary morale and integrity of the party. He called for a systematic education of the peasantry in the aims of the Soviet power. He set the whole against the background of the struggle for world socialism under the leadership of the Communist International. It is one of the classic documents of socialist literature. Socialism in a single country is impossible but Victor Serge, who knew Russia well, has drawn attention to what would have been the result of such a program not only in Russia but among the peasant millions of Central Europe. With Lenin’s authority and the political skill which Trotsky so sadly lacked such a plan would have altered the whole history of Russia and the world. Trotsky fought for it for five years, and it received its final and most perfect expression in the Platform of the Left Opposition. It was only in 1929 that Stalin, having brought Soviet Russia to the brink of disaster, adopted some parts of it and carried them out with the brutality and exaggerations of the Third Period. Today the Russian Five-Year plans, the New Deal (Roosevelt’s New Course), the Goering Four-Year Plan, Petain’s Three-Year Plan, all are the misshapen offspring, conscious and unconscious, of the ideas contained in the New Course. But in the multifarious writings which expound these experiments, nowhere appears a hint of the comprehensive grasp of society as a whole, the political penetration, the breadth and humanity that are contained within the pages of that slender volume which is concerned more with the political approach than the actual economic plan. What Is To Be Done, The State and Revolution, and Imperialism are Lenin’s greatest books, all analytical, all, profound as they are, compact of determination for immediate action. Trotsky’s Results and Perspectives, in which is contained the theory of the permanent revolution, and his New Course, though written in the heat of action, broaden out, the first on an international and the second on a national scale, into the perspectives of the future. Here he was excelled by only two men in history, Marx and Engels, and by them only because they covered so much ground that they had limited the range of all successors.
Lenin’s Successor
With the death of Lenin, the prime responsibility for Marxist analysis of contemporary events devolved upon Trotsky. He tells us himself that he had learnt from Lenin and the evidence is clear in his work. To his faculty for synthesis, of seeing history from a height, he had by now added a closer coordination between the general line of development and the immediate practical conclusions to be drawn at the different stages, though he never attained Lenin’s superb mastery in this field. How deeply he had absorbed the lessons of the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s method, is visible in his analysis of the Chinese Revolution, not so much in the Problems as in the essays in The Third International After Lenin. There is, as always, the same wide sweep and comprehensive generalization, but there is also a precision, a definiteness and a certainty in the handling of the specific problems which are absent from the pre-October work. The chief weakness in the presentation of the theory of the permanent revolution, the slurring over of the bourgeois-democratic stage, is brilliantly created.
We do not propose to give here any connected or complete account of Trotsky’s work. Trotsky wrote on all the great issues of the day, turned them inside out, so that students of his writings have cinematic x-rays into the physiology and anatomy of twentieth-century society. But some example of his maturer method must be given in any evaluation of his place in history. The first that springs to mind his analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy. Despite the differences which developed between Trotsky and the Workers Party in the very last year of his life, despite unceasing criticism of his methods and his conclusions from all quarters, the fact remains that over the years, there is simply no analysis of the Soviet Union worth bothering about except his own. It is a lesson in Marxism to read not only Trotsky, but also “educated opinion” on the Soviet Union from 1917 to the present day. The howls of coming disaster at the N.E.P.; the struggle of the Left Opposition – when Trotsky was exiled to Turkey the London Times said that Stalin had sent him there to organize a revolt in the Near East; the colossal sneers at the Platform and Trotsky’s plans for industrialization, to be followed by bulging eyes and hyperbole at Stalin’s fabricated statistics; Sidney and Beatrice Webb on Russia in 1923 and then in 1933; Louis Fischer and Vincent Sheean; the thousands of “trained observers” who went to Moscow and saw for themselves through Stalin’s spectacles; Barbusse and Remain Rolland; the bourgeois intellectuals on the Moscow Trials – those clumsy, brazen, incredibly impudent falsifications which were exceeded in stupidity only by the comments of the intelligentsia; as one looks back at Trotsky’s writings on the one hand and the rows of dustbins on the other, one realizes what it is to be a Marxist in these days. But there are Marxists and Marxists. In the revolutionary Marxist movement his writings on Russia stand alone, for we are still without (perhaps shall be forever) the work of Rakovsky, Sosnovsky and others persecuted by Stalin. Outside of Russia there is nothing. Many people opposed what Trotsky wrote. They had a brief importance only through opposition to him. This one opposes Trotsky in 1934 on this point, another opposes him in 1936 on that. But a connected body of comprehensive thought in opposition? It does not exist. This, the strongest part of his theoretical work, is, however, so closely intertwined with the struggle for the Fourth International, that it can be treated adequately only in a special article or rather series of articles. It is more convenient and more opportune to illustrate Trotsky’s role after his expulsion from Russia by his analysis of the rise and victory of German Fascism. To read those half-dozen slender volumes today is to wonder how a voice so strong and so clear should have cried in the wilderness.
The First Four Congresses on Fascism
He did not start from scratch. The first four Congresses of the Comintern, in which he took so preponderant a part, laid the foundation for all future analysis of the economics and politics of our age. The Platform of the Communist International (1919) in its second paragraph repeated the by then familiar thesis of Lenin. “Monopoly supplants free competition. The isolated capitalist is transformed into a member of a capitalist association. Organization replaces wild anarchy.” From the First Congress there is an insistent reiteration of the tendency to complete statification of all aspects of society by the imperialist state. The Manifesto of the Congress laid down the line. “If the absolute subjection of political power to finance-capital has led humanity to the imperialist butchery, this butchery has given finance-capital the chance not only to militarize the state completely, but to militarize itself in such a manner, that it can continue to fulfill its economic functions only by fire and blood.” The military state, what Lenin called “the vast state-capitalist military trust and syndicate” was the ultimate to which capitalism was moving. These states would inevitably seek “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.” It was from there that Lenin and Trotsky began, while all the democrats carolled about parliamentary democracy and the League of Nations. Of German parliamentary democracy, specifically, the Second Congress (1920), said that “it is merely a gap between two dictatorships.” It would be no parliamentary dictatorship. The Second Congress, using its eyes, pointed out that besides the capitalist state, “other counterrevolutionary organizations of a private character formed under its aegis and placed at its disposal, work to put a violent end to strikes, to commit provocations, to bear false witness, to destroy revolutionary organizations, to do away with communist institutions, to massacre and to set afire and take other measures to defend private property and democracy.” The personnel of these bandits consisted of “the sons of the big proprietors, big bourgeois, petty bourgeois who do not know what to do with themselves and, in general, declassed elements ... the twenty thousand officers of the Hohenzollern army.” These counter-revolutionaries would be destroyed only by “the smashing hammer of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This was in 1920. In that year the great masses were following the Communist Party. But by 1921 the revolutionary wave had subsided and in 1921, at the Third Congress, came the theses on the united front. In 1922 Italian fascism took power and at the Fourth Congress, in 1923, a section in the resolution on tactics analysed the danger of Fascism. “Legal methods of constraint no longer are sufficient for the bourgeoisie ... the fascists are not only fighting organizations, mainly counter-revolutionary and armed to the teeth, but they try by means of social demagogy to create for themselves a base among the masses in the peasantry, in the petty bourgeoisie and even in certain parts of the proletariat, utilizing adroitly for their own counter-revolutionary ends the disillusionment provoked by so-called democracy.” It can’t happen here and could only happen there? Lenin and Trotsky knew that barring the socialist revolution it is going to happen everywhere. The Fourth Congress stated that there was a danger of Fascism among other countries beside Italy. In Germany; and “under one form or another fascism is no longer impossible in countries like France and England.” Such was the leadership that the great Bolsheviks gave to the international proletariat. Today one has to listen to solemn and presumptuous idiots who will tell you that Marxism has failed or is lacking in understanding of the modern world. We may pass them by. Lenin stopped work in March 1923. One year afterward, Stalin, having seized the power, informed the world that Social-Democracy and Fascism were twins. One can therefore appreciate the motives of those who, using the name of Marx, complacently ask, “What difference would it have made to Russia if Trotsky had won in the struggle with Stalin?” We shall soon see what difference it would have made to the German proletariat. Behind the sham determination of their determinism, these enemies of Bolshevism conceal a genuine determination to defend bourgeois society.
The Menace of Hitler
Such was the basic analysis. Therefore when at the September 1930 elections in Germany, Hitler’s vote jumped from 800,000 in 1928 to 6 million, Trotsky, an exile in Turkey, was immediately on the alert. He knew at once what millions are now learning in blood and suffering and death. We do not propose to spend time here on the Stalinist crimes and responsibilities of that period. What we want to recall is the Marxist method in the hands of a great master applied to a social crisis which has since grown so that it dominates the world.
Writing after the September elections, Trotsky indicated the menace which Hitler represented and called upon the Communists to stop their attacks on the Social Democracy as the twin of Fascism and to struggle for the united front. But in the course of the following months Stalin held the Communist Party of Germany to its course and in August 1931 forced it, against its own wishes, to form an alliance with the fascists against the Social Democrats. The Social Democracy, in its turn, preached an abiding faith in one God, democracy, with Bruening as its prophet. Later they would exchange Bruening for Hindenburg. More than any other living being Trotsky saw the whole frightful catastrophe which loomed, and in November 1931 he finished his first great document on Fascism: Germany, the Key to the International Situation. He calls it “hastily sketched reflections.” There was no false modesty here. He merely wrote down what seemed to him the crying obviousness of the situation.
He begins with the Spanish revolution which was then eight months old. How the pseudo-Marxists and the liberal democrats beat the air when Hitler and Mussolini intervened in Spain! Trotsky begins his essay on Germany with Spain where he sees the struggle as likely to be of a more or less protracted character. England also shows the possibility of years of partial ebbs and flows. France occupies a secondary role in world economics, with immense privileges and pretensions in world politics. This contradiction will heap dangers upon dangers and upset the internal stability of France. In America the economic crisis has laid bare frightful social contradictions. At the first sign of a rise in economic depression, the trade union movement will acutely feel the necessity of tearing itself loose from the of the despicable A.F. of L. bureaucracy. (Here is the C.I.O predicted.) American capitalism itself will enter an epoch of monstrous imperialism, uninterrupted growth of armaments, of intervention in the affairs of the entire world, of military conflicts and convulsions. Japan’s adventure in China can lead to revolution in Japan for the Chinese, despite their weakness, will always improvise new armies. This is the background on which stands out in bold relief the situation in Germany. On the solution of the German crisis hangs the fate not only of Germany but of Europe and the entire world. Socialist construction in the USSR, the revolution in Spain, the fate of France and Britain, China and India, the development of the working class movement in America, all this rests “directly and immediately” on who will be victorious in Germany, Fascism or Communism. [1] The Communist Party, said Trotsky, must announce the danger, must unite the working class by a struggle for the united front with the social-democratic leaders. It must let the international proletariat and the Red Army know in advance, “Fascism can come into power only after a merciless, annihilatory civil war to the bitter end.” The German Communist Party had at one period over 300,000 members.
It was more than enough. But instead of seeking the united front, Stalin’s minions declared every minute of the day that the Social-Democracy, not Hitler, was the main enemy. They were counseling a retreat. Let Hitler come to power. After will be our turn. They got that from Stalin who did not want to be bothered with any German revolution. It was in response to this that Trotsky uttered a warning which is the most poignant in all the historic literature of our times and day by days tolls louder in our ears.
“14. The coining into power of the German “National Socialists” would mean above all the extermination of the flower of the German proletariat, the disruption of its organizations, the extirpation of its belief in itself and its future. Considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian Fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German National Socialists.
“Retreat, you say, you who were yesterday the prophets of the “third period”? Leaders and institutions can retreat. Individual persons can hide. But the working class will have no place to retreat to in the face of Fascism, and no place where to hide. If one were really to assume the monstrous and improbable to happen: that the party will actually evade the struggle and thus deliver the proletariat to the mercy of its mortal enemy, this would signify only one thing: the gruesome battles would unfold not before the seizure of power by the Fascists but after it, that is: under conditions ten times more favorable for Fascism than those of today. The struggle of the proletariat, taken unawares, disorientated, disappointed and betrayed by its own leadership, against the Fascist regime would be transformed into a series of frightful, bloody and futile convulsions. Ten proletarian insurrections, ten defeats, one on top of the other could not debilitate and enfeeble the German working class as much as a retreat before Fascism would weaken it at the given moment, when the decision is still impending as to the question of who is to become master in the German household.” (Germany, the Key to the International Situation)
How To Stop Fascism
The Fascists consisted of the petty-bourgeoisie, and the new middle class, artisans, shopkeepers, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. One thousand Fascist votes equalled one thousand Communist votes on the scale of election statistics. But on the scales of revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a thousand times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mothers-in-law. “The great bulk of the Fascists consist of human rubbish.”
Away from the centre of things, dependent upon newspapers days old, and unable to feel the pulse of the masses, as he complained, he followed events as best he could and in the next twelve months produced a succession of articles which were like a series of powerful searchlights in the prevailing darkness. Never for one moment did Trotsky falter on the supposed division between different sections of the bourgeoisie and the possibility of Bruening crushing Hitler or controlling him. He based himself on the crisis of German capitalism which demanded that the bourgeoisie get rid of the workers’ organizations altogether. Capitalism at a certain stage has to “smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the social democracy and the trade unions.” German capitalism had reached that stage. Since 1918 he and Lenin had been awaiting it and only the proletarian revolution could stop it. (Look and learn if you can while there is still time, Messrs. Democrats of 1940, look and learn.) Trotsky wasted no breath in shouting imprecations on Fascist brutality and sadism, or making psycho-analytic researches into Hitler’s ambition. He knew what German capitalist economy imperatively needed in order to survive. It would be overthrown by a socialist revolution or it would smash everything before it. In Germany and out-side Germany, before Hitler and after Hitler, the fools and the wise men, some very exalted statesmen indeed, besides the usual riff-raff of bourgeois intellectuals, speculated on the control that would be exercised over Hitler, on the pressure from the left, the balance of the center, the restraint of the right. Trotsky kicked this out of the way almost without looking at it. “What relationships would develop in the early days between Hitler, Schleicher and the Center leaders, is more important for them than it is for the German people. Politically, all the conceivable combinations with Hitler signify the dissolution of bureaucracy, courts, police and army into Fascism.”
It would take too long to detail how, article by article, he foresaw move after move, and prescribed the course of action necessary to unite the Stalinist and the social-democratic workers in common struggle against the fascist bands. Together these workers had forty per cent of the votes. In actual struggle they were overwhelmingly the strongest section of the country. They controlled transport, production and distribution. The transport workers could paralyze the small Reichswehr. Millions of workers were trained for war by their experiences in 1914–1918.
Hitler and The Outside World
On the international scale he was as usual at his best. A special conference of the Communist International to place the crisis before the revolutionary workers everywhere; a joint plan for coordination of Soviet and German industry to be worked out by German and Soviet engineers with the participation of the German working class movement; a declaration by Stalin that in view of the repeated expressions of hostility to the USSR by Hitler, the Soviet government would consider Hitler’s accession to power as a threat to its future existence and would mobilize the Red Army on the borders of Poland. Trotsky had done the same thing under similar circumstances in 1923. In 1932, the economic crisis had every country by the throat, none more so than the “new society” of Italian Fascism. A fierce bitterness against the imperialist governments burned in the hearts of millions of workers in every country. The revolution crackled in Spain, ready to blaze, a tremendous revolutionary ferment was shaking India. Never at any time was there less fear of capitalist intervention in a revolutionary Germany. Of the success of a Communist Germany the bourgeoisie had no doubt. Doubt it left to the intellectuals. Lloyd George said, after Hitlers coming to power, that it was just as well, for these Germans would know how to manage their communism.
Trotsky made some mistakes e.g., in Germany, the Key to the International Situation, he thought that in the first period of its rule if victorious, German Fascism would be the tool of France. But this – and nearly all his other mistakes – flowed from a constant incapacity to acknowledge perhaps even to himself, the full depravity of Stalinism. He did not think it possible that the Stalinists in Germany would capitulate so completely as they did. Who else thought so? About the social-democratic bureaucrats he had no illusions. He knew and said in advance that their upper layer preferred the victory of Fascism to the socialist revolution. When Wels, Liepart and Co., offered their services to Hitler it was no surprise to him. Knowing the future that awaited Europe he had to sit and watch the catastrophe unroll itself before him.
He wrote rarely on bourgeois foreign policy. Every line in What Next? and The Only Road, the two brochures in which were collected the articles which followed Germany, the Key to the International Situation, is addressed, like ninety-nine per cent of his writings, to the workers. They could stop Fascism, nobody else could. But some months after Hitler came to power he completed his analysis in a pamphlet. What Hitler Wants. Hitler had astonished the world by a most pacific speech, which, following on a bellicose piece of rhodomontade by Von Papen, fell like a soothing lotion on Europe’s troubled ears. Trotsky, with mathematical precision, itemized Hitler’s foreign policy. The inevitability of the new conflict between Germany and France; his immediate aim: to restore the military power of Germany; the use of Italy, “but with the Italian crutch alone German imperialism will not rise to its feet”; the splitting of England from France by the coming German departure from the League of Nations; England to be bribed by Hitler taking upon himself “the protection of European civilization, of the Christian religion, of the British colonies, and other moral and material values, against Bolshevik barbarism ... Hitler is convinced that on the scales of Great Britain the danger of German Fascism to Western Europe weighs less than the danger of the Bolshevik Soviets in the East. This evaluation constitutes the most important key to the whole foreign policy of Hitler”; Hitler would strive to unite the vanquished nations only the more pitilessly to crush them after; and, rearmament being accomplished, should the East be difficult, the explosion might take place along a different direction. “For if it is still possible to discuss to what degree offensive means are distinguished from defensive means, it is already beyond dispute that the military means suitable for the East are equally suitable for the West.” The essay ended with another warning. Europe needs a new organization. But woe betide it if this work falls into the hands of Fascism. The historians of the Twenty-first Century would then have to write that the war of 1914, called the “war for democracy” soon led to the triumph of Fascism which became the instrument of the destruction of Europe’s economic and cultural organizations. He hoped that the old continent still had enough vital strength to open for itself a different historical road. This is the man who three years afterwards was accused by Stalin and Browder of being in alliance with Hitler. And the intellectuals read and shook their heads and said “It is possible.” He made only one serious error. He laughed to scorn the idea of an alliance between Hitler and Stalin and that is a question that demands detailed treatment. Enough for the moment that Trotsky was writing in the summer of 1933 He knew then that Stalin had openly asked for the alliance in March. And Hitler had refused. The Soviet Union of 1933 was not the Soviet Union of 1939.
Idiots and bourgeois scoundrels always emphasize Trotsky’s personal brilliance whereby they seek to disparage Trotsky’s method. The two are inseparable. His natural gifts were trained and developed by Marxism and he could probe these depths of understanding and ascend to these peaks of foresight because he based himself on the Marxian theory of the class struggle and the revolutionary and predominant role of the proletariat in the crisis of bourgeois society. The choice is still yours, Messrs. Democrats, the choice between Fascism and socialism. And if you say that instead you choose democracy, then the lesson of the rise of German fascism is still lost upon you, though you know very detail of German history since 1933 and can point out the absurdities of Mein Kampf.
The Organizer
It is difficult, it is impossible to write about the career and achievements of this extraordinary man without the instant use of superlatives, and yet they are rigidly and soberly applicable. Marx and Engels were the guiding spirits of the First International but their work was largely literary – the exposition of ideas. In that field Lenin and Trotsky continued and developed on foundations which had been well and truly laid. But history prevented Marx and Engels from being men of action on the grand scale. Trotsky, his theoretical writings apart, belongs to that small company of human beings who have been instruments in assisting new worlds to be born. We have no need to retail here the leadership of the revolution which earned him the title of the Man of October, or his organization of the Red Army. What we have to do in order to get an approximate evaluation of his historical significance is to compare his role with that of other great political figures at similar historical rises.
The Russian Revolution is the greatest revolution in history and among the political events which have been decisive in altering the course of human society, come what lay, it takes a high place. As we look back over the history of Western civilization, we can see the high spots, the German Reformation, the Thirty Years War which ruined Germany and laid the basis of modern Europe, the English Revolution, the First American Revolution, the French Revolution, Bolivar’s liberation of Latin America, the American Civil War. There are others, and there is scope for argument, but it is incontestable that each of these marks the beginning of a new epoch in human relations. The dynastic wars of the eighteenth century, even such a war as the Franco-Prussian War, shrink into insignificance as times marches on. It did not extensively matter to the world who conquered India, the British or the French, but it was matter of life and death to Western civilization whether the North conquered the South or vice versa: it is not spleen that makes Hitler foam at the mouth when he speaks of the Northern victory. The success of the Russian Revolution ushered in a period of crisis for Western civilization such as never existed before since the third century of the Roman Empire. And this time not only Western civilization but the fate of the world is at stake. Among the men who played the decisive parts at these historic climaxes Trotsky easily takes his place as one of the foremost.
He is not in the very first rank. Cromwell and Lenin stand towering above all others. Lenin organized the Bolshevik Party, was the strategist of October, and again and again saved the revolution. Cromwell was indispensable, statesman and soldier as well. But Marat was a journalist and agitator of genius and that was all he did; Robespierre as a politician; Danton was a politician but his chief contribution was his tactical leadership of the revolution. Washington was a soldier and much of the politics of the revolution was in other and more capable hands. Lincoln ad the enormous advantage of always being in control of the state-power. He had neither to overthrow nor rebuild. Trotsky on the other hand was second in command of those who planned the greatest overthrow of the existing order recorded in history. During the crucial months the tactical decisions on which depended success or failure were entirely in his hands. War and revolution are the two greatest social crises. At this business of leading a revolution he showed himself a great master, all the more because twelve years before he had correctly disentangled the main motive forces and direction of the revolution: he masters tactics best who has most profoundly mastered strategy. And as if that were not enough he proceeded almost overnight to show himself one of the greatest war ministers in history. Any historical study or analysis of war and armies must of necessity give a high, in some respects a unique place, to Carnot the “organizer of victory.” But Carnot was no politician. He was a trained army officer. Trotsky, previous to the revolution, having done his share of the work done by Rousseau, Voltaire and Mably, then turned to the revolution to do the work of Danton, immediately dropping that to do the work of Carnot, all this on a scale infinitely surpassing the limitations of eighteenth century France, at the helm of a revolution which directly changed the lives of over a hundred and fifty million people and administered a shock to society the echoes of which are still reverberating in its remotest corners. Prickly and poisonous as are such analogies to handle, yet they are indispensable in arriving at any conclusion as to the historical stature of any great actor on the human stage. But by these or any other standards one conclusion emerges. Trotsky was one of the most powerful agents of social dynamics who has lived in this or any other time. [2]
The Man of Ideas
Here is a list of achievements which can challenge comparison with that of most men in history, without our taking into account the History of the Russian Revolution. There is no need to dilate on his intellectual and physical endowment, his iron self-discipline, his devotion. And yet this superbly gifted theoretician, executive, and leader of men on the grand scale, who achieved so much in the realm of politics, was a very defective politician. We do not refer to the fact that he had built no organization of importance before 1905. There was no room for a second Bolshevik Party in Russia. Lenin might be wrong on the imminence of the socialist revolution in Russia. But his party was the proletarian party and Trotsky, who repudiated the Menshevik doctrine and the Bolshevik practice, was of necessity left in a no man’s land of small dimensions: two Bolshevik parties in any country at the same time is impossible. Nor do we refer to the weakness of the Fourth International to which he devoted his last years. It is possible to differ with Trotsky on some of the organizational conflicts of the Fourth International during the last period, and yet it is easy to recognize for what they are, those who place the responsibility for the smallness of our forces on him and his “methods” and his weaknesses. They are for the most part disgruntled backsliders or people looking for excuses to get out of the movement. But recognition of his genius does not preclude the obvious fact that 1905 found him outside of an organization; 1917 found him again without an effective organization in which to function; in 1923, at the greatest crisis of his career, though he was, after Lenin the most famous and popular leader of Russia in the party, among the proletariat, and among the peasantry, Trotsky found himself pushed out of power as if he were a fourth-rate bureaucrat. It was Trotsky’s reputation with the great masses of the people that Stalin and his friends of the moment feared and systematically destroyed. Actual power Trotsky had none. Second-raters like Zinoviev and Kamenev were rooted, the one in the Leningrad Soviet, the other in the Moscow Soviet. Stalin had to do a deal of digging to get them out. Trotsky was rooted nowhere, not even in the army he had built from the ground up. No sooner was Lenin ill than Trotsky’s power in the party was seen for what it was – a glittering shell. Such failures were not due to superficial characteristics. If they were, a man of his devotion and his will would have conquered them. They were organic and his work is not fully comprehensible without seeing them as an essential part of the man he was and the things he did. The weakness was not all on the debit side.
Let us look at his style, for words were his greatest weapons as a man of action. He expressed himself always amply, completely and with care, writing and re-writing and re-writing. Man of action though he was, the whole of him is contained in his books. The false way in which the chairman of a Soviet district committee approaches the kulak is only a small link in the chain whose largest links are constituted by the attitude of the Red trade unions towards the General Council or of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. towards Chiang Kai-Shek and Purcell.
How magnificent it is. Range and precision, but above all range. These and similar superb generalizations are scattered all over his works. He could bring the whole world situation to bear upon the single point he was discussing. Here is a longer example.
“Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes – in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged. The Stalin regime, rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officers’ corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a variation of Bonapartism – a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history.
“Caesarism arose upon the basis of a slave society shaken by inward strife. Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the capitalist regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same system, but upon the basis of a workers’ state torn by the antagonism between an organized and armed soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses.
“As history testifies, Bonapartism gets along admirably with a universal, and even a secret, ballot. The democratic ritual of Bonapartism is the plebiscite. From time to time, the question is presented to the citizens: for or against the leader? And the voter feels the barrel of the revolver between his shoulders. Since the time of Napoleon III, who now seems a provincial dilettante, this technique has received an extraordinary development. The new Soviet constitution which establishes Bonapartism on a plebiscite basis is the veritable crown of the system.
“In the last analysis. Soviet Bonapartism owes its birth to the belatedness of the world revolution. But in the capitalist countries the same cause gave rise to fascism. We thus arrive at the conclusion, unexpected at first glance, but in reality inevitable, that the crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity. A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet Bonapartism. In turning its back to the international revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy was, from its own point of view, right. It was merely obeying the voice of self-preservation.” (The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 277–279)
One writer alone of modern times had the same range – Spengler. [3] A horizon separated him from Trotsky in precision. We who know his work may perhaps be a little dulled by familiarity. That page, however, is the summary of two thousand years of history ending in judgments of the two major phenomena in modern society, which are as startling as a picture suddenly flashed on a screen and as precise and incontrovertible as a proof in geometry. Trotsky, man of action, was therefore, above all, an intellectual, a man of theory. Thus he was a man for whom ideas had far more reality than people. Vulgar minds like Louis Fischer say that he had his head in the clouds. There is just a germ of truth in it. But he was never dreaming or admiring himself. He was always conscious of the panorama of history, not as an antiquarian but in its bearing on the problem in hand. He said so. He deplored his weak memory for faces but admitted to his memory for ideas. That sentence in his autobiography tells as much. He has made still more revealing confessions. He says openly that for him power was an inescapable burden. “In prison with a book or a pen in my hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass-meetings of the revolution.” Such a spirit is absolutely foreign to the genuine homo politicus. He even goes so far as to say that he found prison a perfect place for writing: “It was so quiet there, so eventless, so perfect for intellectual work;” it was the one place where he was certain not to be arrested. It is a joke but a joke perfectly in harmony with his general approach to life. In the midst of one of the most difficult periods of the revolution he had on his desk some of the latest books on science and chafed that he could find no time to read them. (Joseph Stalin, we may be sure, was not worried at his ignorance of Einstein’s theory.) After the October Revolution, when Lenin asked him what position he wanted, he had never thought of it because he had always wanted to be a writer. That was his trend of mind. In a different age he would not have been a politician at all. Compare Lenin who never finished The State and Revolution because, as he gayly writes in the introduction, it was far more enjoyable to be going through a revolution than to be writing about it. Lenin, it is known, loved conventions, conflicts over resolutions, the wear and tear and hurly-burly of political strife. Trotsky, it is clear, hated them. He would have preferred to be elsewhere, at his desk. His political work was a duty. He saw the moving forces of history and played his part. Conscious that it was a great part, he was glad to be able to give so much in a struggle where gifted men are so few. He could throw his cloak about his shoulder in superb style as when, at a difficult moment in the History he remarks: it seems easier at times to have captured Petrograd in 1917 than to write the history of the event. (How his small bright blue eyes would have gleamed just before he said it.) But in this consciousness of himself there was not the slightest meanness nor conceit. His writings against Stalin are evidence. There is rage and indignation at the degradation of the Russian Revolution, but there is not one line, not a comma, of personal bitterness. The confinement irked him but he was as happy at his desk in Coyoacan as he was in the Kremlin. It was true, too true. He loved learning, knowledge, theory for their own sake, whereas Lenin, more learned and more profound than Trotsky, loved them for the sake of the revolution. He could not resist a theoretical disquisition. “What constitutes the essence of a dual power? We must pause upon this question, for an illumination of it has never appeared in historic literature.” Follows a rather lengthy digression in the History and, feeling guilty, he is at pains to assure the reader at the end to have patience, it will be worth it. “It may seem as though this theoretical inquiry has led us away from the events of 1917. In reality it leads us right into the heart of them ... Only from a theoretical height is it possible to observe it fully and correctly understand it.” At the tensest moments of revolution and war he way always looking at events from a theoretical height. Stalin, his rival, never ascended to any theoretical height. He was always crawling about down below. And to be successful, politicians must learn to grub.
The Man of Feeling
That is one key to Trotsky’s character and his work. Another was his attitude to the masses. He had a passionate faith in them and no great work for socialism, theoretical or practical, can be done without it. On one occasion he spoke of them with an unsurpassable dignity and restraint. “Mr. Attorney,” he told Finerty during the sessions of the Dewey Commission, “France and Great Britain are not my allies. They can be the allies of the Soviet state. My allies are the workers of all countries, and the only allies I recognize are the workers of all the other countries. My politics are established not for the purpose of diplomatic conventions, but for the development of the international revolutionary movement of the working-class. I cannot put hopes in the allies of the Soviet Union, in France and England. They can betray one another. They can separate from one another. But I am sure that the workers who understand very well the situation – they will be free and they will win one hundred workers, and the hundred workers a thousand soldiers. They will be victorious at the end of the war. It seems to me very simple, but I believe it is a good idea.” But though he had no illusions about them his general attitude was one of explosive indignation at their oppression and sufferings. “Workers to the shops! Such is the iron-clad egotism of the educated classes, liberals and socialists alike. These people believed that millions of workers and soldiers lifted to the heights of insurrection by the inconquerable pressure of discontent and hope, would after their victory tamely submit to the old conditions of life.” More than once the History refers to the freedom from drudgery of the domestic servants. Of many passionate outbursts in the History one of the most remarkable is the description of the horny hands and hoarse voices of the Paris workers intruding themselves on the political stage where the silken gentlemen are settling the fate of the nation. His chapters on the revolution in the autobiography are instinct with a hot sympathy for humanity in the mass. It is often a characteristic of the gifted intellectual, and particularly of men who are somewhat aloof from their fellows. It is the chief ingredient in the complex of psychological traits which make the great mass orator. You can feel it in every page of Burke and Demosthenes. But neither of these were great politicians in the small sense of that word. Most young men have it.
Trotsky never lost it. The possessor of it can usually lead men to accomplish the impossible, but a certain tendency to rashness goes with it. With all his self-discipline Trotsky’s feelings could outrun his discretion. To demonstrate by contrast, read Lenin’s writings. There is the same passion but it is controlled. Rage at Mensheviks and petty-bourgeois radicals? Yes. But outbursts of moral indignation, of outraged sympathy are singularly few. But if he was never the orator that Trotsky was, he was never the man to be swept off his feet. He lost his head once only, and that in a personal question.
And finally, quite in keeping with Trotsky’s passion for ideas, his generous indignation at injustice, was his sense of personal rectitude, his idealistic approach to life. All who knew him intimately even when he was one of the rulers of Russia speak of it. Max Eastman and also Souvarine, who, a fierce opponent of Trotsky’s politics, has said of him that there was nothing “mesquin” in his character, not a trace of rascality. It is a noticeable characteristic of many great writers and philosophers, but a fatal weakness in a politician. You can see it in all his writings. Was any other politician of similar eminence capable of saying at a public investigation, “I can say that never in my life did I take the interest take the contrary of the truth. If you will, in plain words, a lie. I believe, in our society, which is very contradictory, that the conventional rules of conduct in family, society, or corporation – everybody from time to time is obliged not to say the truth. I committed it sometimes. I believe the question can be decided only by comparison of the lies I was obliged to give, and the truth. I believe that in the balance my truths are more heavy than the lies. It seems to me so in the more important questions, the decisive questions, in the questions upon which depend the actions of many people, of friends, of their fate – it seems to me that I never committed such crimes.” Trotsky had been through much, but the fundamental honesty of his character, his inner sensitiveness, as he quite unconsciously expresses them here, are very moving, but very revealing also. He was a materialist but none of the great idealist philosophers ever surpassed the conclusion of his address to the Dewey commission. “Esteemed Commissioners! The experience of my life, in which there has been no lack either of successes or of failures, has not only not destroyed my faith in the clear, bright future of mankind, but, on the contrary, has given it an indestructible temper. This faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity, at the age of eighteen I took with me into the workers’ quarters of the provincial Russian town of Nikolaiev – this faith I have preserved fully and completely. It has become more mature, but not less ardent. In the very fact of your Commission’s formation ... in this fact I see a new and truly magnificent reinforcement of the revolutionary optimism which constitutes the fundamental element of my life.” Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, men of deeds, his place is among them. But he was not one of them really. By nature and inclination he would have preferred the company of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Goethe. History was not unkind to him personally. He got his chance before he died and took it with both hands. Men make history and to understand history we must understand men.
Lenin and Trotsky
With an understanding of Trotsky as that type of person we can now better understand his successes and his failures. After the 1905 revolution, he met Lenin in Finland. They discussed politics and found themselves in general agreement against the Mensheviks on the political issues of the day. Lenin, always suiting the action to the word, taunted Trotsky with refusing to join the Bolsheviks. Trotsky preferred to wander around for twelve years between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He remained untaught by his experience of 1905 when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks divided between them the leadership of the proletariat. Especially after 1905 a man intent on political power, on political influence, which is the first business of any politician, would have joined one or the other of these parties. Trotsky could not. And his reasons were essentially the reasons of a man repelled by Lenin’s toughness and what seemed to him the unscrupulousness of the Bolsheviks. How bitterly he complains! “During the last three to four years of intense party frictions, the life of very many committees has consisted of a series of coups d’état in the spirit of our court revolutions of the eighteenth century. Somewhere way up on top somebody is incarcerating, replacing, choking somebody else, somebody proclaims himself something-and as a result, the top of the committee house is adorned by a flag with the inscription, ‘Orthodoxy, centralism, political struggle’.” He accused the central apparatus itself of starting a new discussion every month, “the apparatus supplies the topic for it, feeds it by false materials, draws its summary, dispenses justice, postpones congress for a year, and is now preparing a congress from among its own apparatus workers previously appointed, who are to authoritate the people on top to continue this work in the future as well.”
Thus 1917 found him in an insignificant organization. But for the Bolshevik Party, created by Lenin, he would have been helpless, and his grasp of the situation and his gifts would have run to waste. Trotsky has stated emphatically that without Lenin there would have been no October Revolution. He was fully capable of leading a revolution alone, but all the evidence points to the fact that without Lenin he would not have been able to handle the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky never minimized the personal weakness which kept him out of the Bolshevik Party till 1917. Lenin mitigated its consequences while he lived. When he died Trotsky paid heavily.
Trotsky rendered inestimable services to Russia but twice his enthusiasm, his love of the idea, nearly wrecked the Russian Revolution. Despite his somewhat ingenuous explanation of Brest-Litovsk in My Life, the fact remains that he made a terrible error in 1918. That Russia would be saved by the international revolution Lenin knew as well as he. Lenin knew as well as he also that the October Revolution had to hold itself free of any stain of imperialist dealing. But Lenin said, “Peace now, for we cannot fight.” Trotsky persisted in chasing a mirage of his own imagination and his obstinacy cost Russia dearly. Had he voted with Lenin earlier the peace would have been signed weeks before. He tries in places to balance Lenin’s mistakes in urging the attack on Poland in 1920 with his own in 1918. The comparison is quite false. Soviet Russia could afford a gamble in 1920. The whole point of 1918 was that the country was on the edge and could not take the slightest chance. In 1920 during the dispute on the Trade Union question, oblivious to the reality, he let his imagination run away with him again. He did not want to militarize labor as the Stalinist liars report, but he wanted to fuse the trade unions with the state administration. His basic argument was that Russia was a workers’ state and therefore the trade unions, as the workers’ organizations, could administer the state. Lenin’s reply was devastating. “Comrade Trotsky says that Russia is a workers’ state. Excuse me, that is an abstraction.” Had Trotsky had his way he would have placed the Soviet state in mortal peril.
Lenin saved Russia from the political consequences of such a blunder. He could not save the party from the organizational consequences. Trotsky had taken up the cause with his usual enthusiasm, single-mindedness and the emotional drive which had swept everything before it in 1905, 1917 and in the formation of the Red Army. For a moment Lenin was in a minority. But Trotsky had to be stopped, and Lenin fell back on Zinoviev, Stalin and others who had long been waiting their chance to discredit Trotsky. The falseness of Trotsky’s position, the recklessness with which he advocated it, Lenin’s political generalship soon put an end to Trotsky’s adventure. But Lenin, though recognizing Trotsky’s invaluable qualities, sought to guard against any more of these volcanic eruptions. There was a reorganization of party functionaries. Krestinsky, Preobrajensky and others of Trotsky’s supporters, able and powerful men, were “distributed.” Less than two years afterwards Lenin fell ill and at the crisis which followed his incapacitation, Trotsky, never concerned with his strength in the party organization, found himself isolated. The whole episode is one of the most instructive in the history of the Bolshevik Party, and in the political biography of Trotsky. He brought it on himself not only in the political error – during the debates Lenin carefully pointed out that they all of them made theoretical errors – but in the way he behaved.
Trotsky Without Lenin
Finally, in the crisis of 1923, Trotsky conducted himself like a philosopher who had spent his life in a study and had suddenly been asked to take charge of a policy at a party conference. We do not wish here to raise the question of whether this policy by Trotsky or that could have succeeded or had better results than the one he followed. He himself, and, for the immediate political aim, very rightly, always insisted on the economic and social factors at work, minimizing the personal factors. But his political naiveté and the idealism of his character are almost incredible but for his own unsuspecting documentation. Trotsky tells us how, over forty, with his head packed with history and a lifetime of political struggle behind him, he hesitated to make a bid for power because he did not want people to think that he was too anxious to step into Lenin’s shoes. The rest of his strategy is no less amazing. In the hands of Kamenev and Stalin he was a child. Exaggeration? Then characterize these two incidents. Lenin sent him a private letter dealing with an urgent political question in which Stalin and his clique of the moment were intensely interested. Trotsky immediately proposed to show the letter to Kamenev and would have done so but that Lenin stopped him, pointing out that Kamenev would show the letter to Stalin who would inevitably deceive them. All who knew Stalin knew him for what he was. Trotsky knew that Stalin had attempted to poison Lenin’s mind against him. He knew all the intrigues that were going on even before Lenin had the final stroke. Yet read his autobiography. He himself reports not one single action of his own to counter Stalin’s intrigues. Instead he sent the following message to Stalin by Kamenev. “I am against removing Stalin ... But there must be an immediate and radical change. Let (Stalin) not overreach himself. There should be no more intrigues, but honest co-operation.” Never was the leopard more sincerely asked to change his spots.
This is not being wise after the event. Lenin saw to the ultimate end what Stalin stood for. His last writings show it without possibility of argument and it is only within recent years that we have been able to understand their full urgency. Trotsky, warned and warned and warned again, wandered about like a child in a forest of wild beasts. An embittered American anti-Trotskyite [4] gives meaning to his life by ceaseless attacks on Trotsky as having entered into a pact with Stalin to deceive the Russian people. Undoubtedly owing to the political situation Trotsky, rightly or wrongly, submitted to the suppression of Lenin’s testament, and assisted Stalin to get out of the hole he was in on the National Question. But such compromises, though there can be arguments and differences of opinion about them, are inevitable in the most principled party in the world, and no political party was ever more concerned with principle than the Bolshevik Party in its heroic days. What this critic fails to see is that whatever policy Trotsky was following, whatever tactical compromises he found it necessary to make, he himself, being the man he was, was bound to fail. That he was able to use his magnificent gifts in the way he did was due to the fact that Lenin had created the Bolshevik Party. Who does not understand that does not understand the letter B in Bolshevism.
The last of his blunders which may be conveniently dealt with here was his political position on the Russian invasion of Poland and, particularly, of Finland. As in 1920, pursuing an idea to the end, he repeated his formula: Russia is a workers’ state and therefore it must be defended. Unfortunately for his followers he did not stop there. He condemned the invasion and perhaps for the only time in his long career found himself in an insoluble intellectual contradiction. For if Finland was an outpost of imperialism and Stalin was justified in crushing it then Trotsky’s condemnation of the invasion was a mere gesture to the widespread disapproval and dismay of the workers. But sharp as were the differences between the present Workers’ Party which was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, a split was not necessary on this question alone. Trotsky knew that, but despite his unwillingness he was cunningly maneuvered into a position in which his authority and energy were unscrupulously used for an aim he did not have in mind. When he recognized what was happening, it was too late. To the end he remained what he was, a man incapable of leaving his main work and concentrating his powerful intellect on the tricks and dodges which are inseparable from politics. Unscrupulous men not fit to clean his pen could gain his confidence and get the better of him. Not the least significant was the tragic circumstances of his death. He had been warned against his murderer but this GPU agent earned his favor by an exaggerated devotion to Trotsky’s political position. For six months he discussed politics with the greatest living master of politics and Trotsky never detected a false note, apparently set no trap for him. We can be certain that whoever else might have been deceived by an imposter, Mr. Joseph Stalin would not have been. In the end the idea expressed was more important and interesting to Trotsky than the person expressing it. It was his strength, the cause of some of his greatest triumphs, but it was his weakness, the cause of some of his greatest failures. We must have him as he was. If you agree with this interpretation of his political character, then you will agree that the power of will and self-discipline with which he devoted himself to a type of work for which he so often expressed a personal distaste is, like so much about him, probably unsurpassed by any other figure of similar stature.
“From a Theoretical Height”
What we are trying to do here is to make an historical evaluation of Trotsky and his work. Nowhere is it so necessary and fruitful as in a consideration of the History. The bourgeoisie, particularly, in this age, lives from hand to mouth. Philosophy it has none – Mussolini’s writings on Fascism enjoy a merited obscurity. Mein Kampf is no more than the political card-sharping of Machiavelli, adapted to the age of mass production, finance-capital and imperialism. No bourgeois critic can properly evaluate Trotsky’s book. For any kind of historical evaluation you need an end – for example, socialism; a material force – the revolutionary proletariat and the colonial peoples; a political method – Bolshevism. This is ours, it is from there that we begin: others may have their own and are welcome to it. But having nothing the bourgeoisie is at a loss not only with politics but with writing of all kinds. Today the Fascists are making history and the Stalinists with them. Why have they not had anything very important or interesting to say? Molotov’s “Fascism is a question of taste” is at least original. Even that cannot be said of Stalin’s also solitary contribution to recent literature: the brilliant phrase that Russia would not pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire. Against this and similar curiosities set the body of Trotsky’s writings. On the one hand brutality, hypocrisy, lies and cunning, clumsily and coarsely expressed; on the other strength, honesty, high aspiration and a sparkling intelligence, dynamic power, all portrayed through the medium of a style whose miracles we know even in translation. [5] The bourgeois critic will explain it in terms of personal ability. A patent and far-reaching error. The style is the man, and men like Hitler and Trotsky speak for a social order. An age, a class, a political system expresses itself through its great books. The Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are two of the greatest pieces of writing in any language. Beside them Winston Churchill’s rhetoric is shoddy. Yet Churchill is a greater master of language than either Jefferson or Lincoln and wants to win his war as much as they wanted to win theirs. His weakness lies in his historical circumstances. They had enormous historical confidence. Churchill has none. He is doubtful of the past, fearful of the future. It is historically that we must approach Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. We do not only take it as our own and judge it by its own standards. We compare it to other literary and political writings of this and other ages. We make a genuinely historical comparison. We shall find that in the same way as Marx and Engels stand above all who have concerned themselves with the analysis of society, as Lenin and Trotsky rank with the greatest of those who have helped to alter the lives of large masses of human beings, so Trotsky’s History is far more than a brilliant history of a great event. It is the greatest history book ever written and one of the most stupendous and significant pieces of literature ever produced in any language.
We do not intend merely to assert. We shall demonstrate. But we must not be short-sighted about these things. These tremendous achievements were the achievements of men, but these men could do the things they did because they represented something – a method, a system of ideas, they could do them because they were the advance guard of something infinitely greater than their individual selves – a new society. At a time when our forces are small we need to maintain the Marxist tradition ready for the day. The best way to maintain it is to understand it and one sure way to understand is through the History.
But your pseudo-Marxist will certainly ask: What use is it that Trotsky wrote so well and Hitler and Stalin write so badly? What does it prove? It proves a hundred times over the historic significance of the ideas which Trotsky stood for. Great books do not drop from the sky. Messrs. pessimists are soused to the marrow in the vinegar of bourgeois empiricism and trained from childhood to worship the established fact. That is why to the greatest problem of the present day, the future of Marxism, they come armed with the scientific weapon of primitive man: the philosophy of simple addition. The Marxists have six hundred members here, eighty here and twenty there. And on the other side look at Hitler’s thousands of airplanes and millions of men. Obviously, oh, how obviously, the Fourth International is doomed to failure. Trotsky, looking at Marxism since 1840 and all that it had done, faced the future with confidence and looked upon the ready reckoners as a man looks upon little boys playing at marbles. They do no harm until they try to introduce their infantile accounts into the records and perspectives of mature men. We cannot judge history by its probable effect on our own tender hides. Any hill-billy in the wilds of Arkansas can do that. We must have historical perspective, look a long way back and a certain distance forward. It will not then be difficult to see what the History of the Russian Revolution represents. It is the climax of two thousand years of European writing and study of history. It is these and similar things that were in Trotsky’s mind when with his last words he said that he was confident of the victory of the Fourth International.
Western Civilization and History
First a brief review of the historical hierarchy. Herodotus was the first. And he set himself to tell the history of the war between the Greeks and Persians before the material was forgotten. He was not an Athenian citizen. He was an impressionable intellectual, widely read and widely travelled, who was caught by the romance of history. He wrote down what he gathered and from that day he has been the model and inspiration, whether they know it or not, of countless historians, inside Europe, inside Asia, and inside everywhere else. But we lose sight of what is essential in him if we allow his love of the picturesque to obscure the purpose of his book – the victory of Greece over Persia. It was the defense of civilization against barbarism, the greatest peril that the Greeks had ever faced. He had a great theme, one which every civilized man on the Mediterranean coast could understand and feel. Thirty years after, Thucydides, in his very first paragraph repudiated Herodotus. With singular acerbity for so urbane a man, Thucydides in that paragraph says that before the Peloponnesian War nothing of importance had ever happened. It was as if a modern American historian watching the world situation had called upon the American people to stop reading about Columbus and to study his history of the 1914 war. Man of affairs, politician, soldier, this sober Athenian was sick of all this old tale-telling in the face of the threat to Athens. He wrote a book which to this day is not excelled for gravity, lucidity, proportion and knowledge of politics. He wrote with one aim – the glorification of Athenian democracy. “Our country is governed in the interests of the many instead of the few. That is why it is called a democracy.” How those words have echoed down the years, drowning the sighs and groans of the Athenian slaves! The great Romans, Livy and Tacitus, wrote within a few years of each other. They hated the autocracy and depravity of the Empire, and Livy, in particular, glorified the constitution of the Roman republic and the stern virtues of ancient Rome. He gives one of his best speeches to Cato denouncing a law which allowed freedom of attire to Roman women. As Rome went to pieces without any future, men clung to the past which Livy had idealized by forty years of labor. Rome fell but Latin literature remained and when the Renaissance brought back the study of the classics, all the growing forces of liberalism in Europe nourished themselves on the vivid artistry and republican sentiments of Thucydides, Livy and Plutarch and cursed tyranny in the language of Tacitus. By the end of the nineteenth century Livy had been translated some five hundred times. The Elizabethan age was famous for its translations. Amyot translated Plutarch and North translated Aniyor, giving Shakespeare rich material for plays. To all these people Livy and Plutarch were far more important than Hoinshed and Froissart. The heroes of the French Revolution conceived themselves as heroic Romans of the republican days. So did Babeuf. The finer shades of European history are a closed book without an understanding of what the classics meant to all the educated classes. For generations they learned nothing else at school. The climax came with Gibbon, who gathered together all the learning and classical consciousness of centuries in his justly celebrated book. But a hundred years ago Guizot knew that for the scientific history of Rome you had to look elsewhere than in the Decline and Fall. Gibbon’s history was the historical peak of the age of enlightenment. He was a member of that cosmopolitan society of Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Catherine and the French aristocracy which flourished before the French Revolution. Even the Bourbon monarchy enjoyed this culture and Gibbon’s devastating attack on Christianity was characteristic of educated society in his day, not excluding French bishops. Aristocrat though he was, he represented progress. Voltaire was a prolific historian of the same school. Two generations after Gibbon, Michelet wrote of the French Revolution with an erratic passion that made him a French classic. Macaulay made his political reputation in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1832 and his history so dominated bourgeois English thought for a century that it is only since October 1917 that the whig tradition has ceased to reign over all English academic writing. Yet he was so biased that his great history is fittingly called a whig pamphlet in four octavo volumes. Green was less crude, but of the same school. His Short History of the English People first made history popular among all classes. All the English prejudices of the last sixty years, their belief in English history as one long struggle for liberty culminating in the British constitution, their conception of themselves as a Germanic people born to freedom, the Magna Carta legend, the Cromwell Protestant legend, all come straight from Green. These histories are some of them good, some of them bad. Green, the most popular, is very bad. But that is not their importance. What they do is to hold not a mirror but a banner up to society. They give society or more often a class an image of itself, not as it was but as it thought it was, or as it would have liked to be. In them is written the history of an age, but not in the sense that they thought they were writing. Gibbon portrays eighteenth century Europe as well as the Roman Empire. These writers were great artists, powerful personalities, preaching a cause, and “they wrote so well because they saw so little.” [6] But all of them represented some powerful progressive idea, and the great classics first, and these and their satellites after, dominated the thought of the bourgeoisie for over four hundred years. Even Gibbon, aristocrat though he was, was an English aristocrat and praised the Roman constitution in which he thought he saw the model of the British. Then suddenly, with Michelet and Macaulay the line comes to a dead stop and is taken up again only with Trotsky. Why? A few dates will help us.
Michelet’s book appeared in 1847–50 and the fiery History of the French Revolution was directly inspired by the 1848 revolution, the events leading up to it and his own belief in Communism. Macaulay’s first volume of the History of England appeared in 1848. But 1848 was the year when the socialist revolution first appeared. It was the year of the Communist Manifesto. The spectre began to haunt Europe. Sharp eyes were watching, and the call for liberty vanished from bourgeois historical writing on the grand scale. Mommsen’s History of the Roman Republic appeared in 1854, six years after 1848. Not at all accidentally, he was a German. He loved parliamentary democracy but he hated the proletariat, especially after 1848. There was only one refuge for him, Bonapartism, and the climax of his learned work on Rome is his description of Caesar as “the entire, the perfect man.” Bismarck and Napoleon III did their best to emulate if not the perfection at least the entirety of Caesar. Carlyle before 1848 had been so sympathetic to the workers as to win favorable notice from Marx and Engels, but 1848 drove him into the reaction and henceforth he was the advocate of the hero, essentially Mommsen’s entire and perfect man. The domination of the world market enabled Britain to be a little more liberal and Green published in 1874. But six years after Green came Seeley’s Expansion of the British Empire, whose idiotic thesis that the British founded their empire in a fit of absence of mind, did not prevent his book from being one of the most widely read of the day. Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power in History, though not widely popular, was scarcely less influential. Mommsen, Carlyle, Bismarck, Nietzsche, Seeley, Mahan, all that they had to say of political importance was gathered into one tremendous volume – Spengler’s Decline of the West, which was completed in 1917. During the very hours that Spengler was writing finis to bourgeois civilization, Lenin was completing The State and Revolution and Imperialism in preparation for the Russian Revolution. In face of the grandiose movement of social revolution, the slow accumulation, the dramatic confrontations, statements of position, retreats and advances, battles across a world for the future of society, in the face of all this, how mean and piddling are the smug calculations of our sneering accountants, blind to the historical process as a whole and unable to rise above their own insufficiency!
It is, as Trotsky would say, from this theoretical height that we can see what the History has restored to historical writing. To Gibbon, to Macaulay, to Trotsky, liberty meant different things. Trotsky’s conception is the widest. That is not the point at issue now. What matters is that the proletariat at least calls for liberty. The bourgeoisie cannot find one great writer to do so. Marx’s claim that the future of society rests with the proletariat is demonstrated as clearly in historical writing as in economic analysis. This guarantees nothing. To show where the future of any liberty that we may look forward to lies, is no guarantee of its success. But this reactionary and cowardly sentiment, masquerading as realism, draws strength as reaction always does, from ignorance. There is something very concrete to the great historians, propagandists though they were. Not a single broad political step forward in modern European history has ever been taken in the name of tyranny. The exalted sentiment of the popular historians always related to economic expansion and political progress. Even Christianity, the ideological successor to the Roman Empire, spoke in the name of the liberty of the individual, his right to the disposition of his own soul; opposed the Roman State and slavery. The Reformation saw itself as a revolt against papal tyranny. The absolute monarchy was the first political resource of the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords. Its misconceptions of Thucydides, Livy, Plutarch and Tacitus seemed like heaven on earth to the bourgeoisie. No taxation without representation; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; liberty, equality and fraternity; government of the people, by the people and for the people, contained falsities, conscious and unconscious, but they broke monstrous and avowed tyrannies. Workers of the World Unite, aims at doing the same. But for the first time for over five centuries, a political system with a great fanfare of newness and solution to crisis, makes a political virtue out of tyranny, inequality; class, racial and national prejudice; and decries everything that European civilization has striven for, in theory at least, since the Renaissance. During Europe’s worst periods of reaction, the period of the counter-reformation and the Holy Alliance, the most reactionary writers could find something plausible to say in defense of their cause. German imperialism plunders in order to live. Fascism is the decline of the West and its protagonists know it in their souls. Their writings on all subjects except the seizure of power are nothing else but lies and nonsense, cold-blooded deliberate falsification. Not a flower blossoms on their arid heaths. There is no soil in which anything can grow. They are just a thin cover for exhausted bourgeois society. They can have nothing to say. Mommsen and Carlyle said all when the bourgeoisie still could preserve some illusions. If Trotsky’s History does not guarantee the inevitability of socialism, Mein Kampf guarantees the fraud of Fascism as a solution to the ills of capitalist society.
Not Only Art But Science
We have carefully avoided hitherto dealing with the scientific aspect of Trotsky’s History. It is familiar to all Marxists, and gives the final endorsement to its value as propaganda on the grand scale. For whereas the other historians in the pursuit of their aim shaped their material as an artist shapes his figures Trotsky claimed and irrefutably demonstrated that his history was scientific in that it flowed from the objective facts. He challenged anyone to question his documentation and the challenge has never been taken up. In method and presentation the book is as scientific as the Origin of Species. It may be challenged as Darwin was challenged, but on concrete not on abstract grounds. No herald of liberty and progress ever stood more firmly with both feet on the earth. And yet in pure style, this materialist, as rigid with facts as Scaliger, is exceeded in no sphere by any one of his ancestors, not by Thucydides in proportion and lucidity, nor by Tacitus in invective, nor Gibbon in dignity, nor Michelet in passion, nor by Macaulay, that great bourgeois, in efficiency. There is a profound lesson here not only in history but in aesthetics.
And finally, the book is not only a propagandist tract, the expression of an attitude to society, and a scientific thesis. It is besides, what none of the others is. It is a summons to action. It is not only a banner and a blueprint. It is a roll of drums. Through it breathes not only the spirit of this is what we aimed at, this is the way it was done, but also, this is the way to do it. Every aspect of the struggle is scientifically analyzed and expounded, and the reader is not so much rhetorically exhorted to join up, but as he sees the difficulties and feels the unbounded confidence and unshakeable will which attacks and overcomes them, the knowledge and the power, he becomes part of this wonderful adventure. Resentment at oppression smoulders in hundreds of millions of people all over the world. What they lack is confidence in their own powers. How can we fight and win? The answer is in the History. And by and large, the advance guard of this generation have been ready for that answer. In translations, for the author had no country, it has sold thousands upon thousands of copies. On the shelves of many rank and file Social-Democrats it occupies an honored place, and it has penetrated into the homes of numerous Stalinists, the only book by Trotsky since his exile to do so, despite their copious denunciation of all his writings. This is not one of its least triumphs. Had the Third International been a revolutionary organization, this book, with its knowledge, its confidence and its will, would have inspired, directly and indirectly, millions of political leaders all over the world. History has deemed otherwise, but it is another proof of what we know in so many other fields, that it is Stalinism above all which confuses the working class and keeps away from it that knowledge and understanding without which it cannot conquer. The new class is willing to listen. What it requires to know is there. An excrescence stands in the way. Powerful though it is it is still an excrescence. To see the History in perspective is to realize that it is Stalinism which is the accident and that the proletariat and its spokesman are a sequence in the movement of European life and thought as we have known them for five centuries.
How a Classic Is Born
Now a book could be a propaganda tract on the grand scale, an attempt at a scientific treatise, and a summons to action, could be written by a highly gifted participant in a great event, and yet be merely one of many other books. The memoirs of all who took part in the last war are there to show that these are not sufficient to write a great book. That the History is what it is due certainly to Trotsky’s power as a writer. There is no substitute for a great artist. But that for us is the least consideration.
With the Communist Manifesto began something entirely new in historical method. Specially to show how the new method should be used, Marx deliberately wrote the Eighteenth Brumaire, but afterwards he and Engels wrote specifically on history only as the occasion presented itself, and always to the point and no more. Bernstein and Kautsky wrote historical works which were illuminating but academic. The Marxist method enables you to write a scientific history. But it is not a talisman. Kautsky and Bernstein were bureaucrats, the one a concealed and the other an avowed reactionary. And Marxist method or no Marxist method only passionate conviction can write a great book. Neither Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg wrote history. Men of action must cease being men of action to write history, which demands a certain tranquility. But during all these years, there was accumulated in books, articles and correspondence, a vast amount of thinking on history; isolated sketches, scholarly works, deductions and observations about classes, states, insurrections, mass movements, which formed the Marxist corpus. It was not collected anywhere but the students of Marxism knew it. It was in the background of Lenin’s mind always. He studied the proceedings of Cromwell’s Long Parliament and the proceedings of the Paris Commune during the French Revolution, and thus tested and amplified the principles laid down by Marx. Trotsky followed this example, only whereas Lenin seemed by nature inclined to economic and statistical studies, Trotsky’s natural instincts as we have seen drove him to history and writing. Trotsky also had met and talked with all the great European Marxists of his time. In 1905 came the theory of the permanent revolution, and from that time on, not to mention the earlier years, how the Russian Revolution would develop was the main preoccupation of the Social Democrats in Russia and of European Marxists as a whole. But whereas everyone, according to his gifts and opportunities, contributed and analyzed, no one, not even Lenin, analyzed more deeply than Trotsky. He had his theory to test and to defend and he was above all a man of theory. Thus the structure and movement of the Russian Revolution was the very structure of his mental make-up, the axis around which he lived intellectually and emotionally. Came 1917 and for seven intense months, first outside and then inside Russia, he saw and helped and guided. Thus it is safe to say that no previous writer was ever so much completely master of a great subject as Trotsky was of the Russian Revolution. Politically mankind came of age with the Russian Revolution. Caesar, Cromwell, Marat, Robespierre and other famous men had worked largely by instinct. For the first time in history, a man had foreseen the main lines of a great historical event, and then had himself been instrumental in carrying it through to a successful conclusion. Lenin had to revise his conceptions. Not Trotsky. Any writer, any artist would know the extraordinary power and confidence, the certainty of direction, that would be Trotsky’s when he sat down to write. Such was the background. The interplay of class as a whole and individual artist are fused here as nowhere else that we know in writing. But that is only half the book.
A revolution is the greatest event in the life of all those who experience it. It alters the food that you eat, the way you eat it, the clothes that you wear, even the way of a man with a maid. And never were so many people jerked so far and with such violence as were the people of Russia by the October Revolution. Thus from 1917 onward an unending stream of reminiscence, memoirs, documents, conferences, conversations, contributed unceasingly to the consciousness of the leaders of a historical event who from the beginning were as conscious of their historic selves as no other leaders in history. Politicians, diplomats, aristocrats and merchants wrote, the official historians collected, but worker-Bolsheviks, ordinary workers, ordinary peasants, ordinary soldiers, all poured their contributions in. How often Trotsky must have talked about the revolution to ordinary folks. How glad they were to talk to the man of October! Too much material can swamp. But to Trotsky who since 1905 had the main lines of the map clear, it defined, clarified, enriched, illustrated. Had he remained a ruler of Russia, the book would never have been written. But driven into exile he settled down to it. (He was at his desk at last, with a pen in his hand.)
Into the book went all the historical knowledge and understanding which Marx and Engels had started to accumulate, and which the Marxists had continued, step by step, as the proletariat and peasantry of the whole world moved slowly forward. All that Marx and Engels and Lenin had written and thought about great revolutions in the past and Trotsky’s own discoveries, Lenin’s studies of 1905 and the period in between, 1905 and 1917, all the erudition, conflicts, thoughts of the Russian Social-Democracy, the writings and analyses that followed 1917, of Lenin, of Bucharin, of Rakovsky, and scores of other gifted men, and of all the millions of the Russian people, all this Trotsky gathered together. The artist in him, suppressed for forty years by the needs of the revolution, now opened out, and with the same personal force, discipline and will which always distinguished him, he hammered this mountainous mass of facts and ideas around the theme of the class struggle into one of the most powerful, compact and beautiful pieces of literature that exists in any language, prose or poetry. Milton says that a great book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit. True. But in the History is the precious life-blood of many master spirits; and also of the Russian people, of the French proletariat, in 1848 and 1870, of Ironsides and Jacobins and sansculottes, of the abortive German revolution of 1918, of the Chinese and other nationalist revolutions. All, all are there. All had contributed their sufferings, their hopes, the wisdom that was drawn from their experiences. A hundred years of socialist thought and proletarian struggles have gone into the making of that book, the first of its kind. No one will ever be able to write like it again for generations. Historians will write, their wine will be new, but their bottles will be old. It is the first classic of socialist society and it will never be superseded. For there may come a time when Capital will be of historic interest only, when What is to be Done will be pondered over by students who will seek in vain to recapture the remote circumstances which produced Bolshevism of the imperialist age. But the History will remain the bridge between the long line which leads from the Old Testament and Homer, Greek tragedy, Dante and Cervantes, to the books which will be written when, in Marx’s famous phrase, the history of humanity begins.
The Voice of the Revolution
With the conclusion of the History it might have seemed that Trotsky had done enough for one man. And yet, infatuated exaggeration though it may sound, his last phase is the most unprecedented of his wonderful career. He was the most powerful and celebrated exile in history. Napoleon at St. Helena was out of it. Bismarck walked down the gangway and was rowed into oblivion. Napoleon III finished like the last discord of a modern jazz composition. Kaiser Wilhelm added a beard to his moustache. These men ruled tremendous empires for many years and then sank from public affairs like stones. As for the social-democratic rubbish, the Kerenskys, the Chernovs, the Bauers, Caballeros, Negrins and Prietos, what a miserable down-at-heel assortment of discards, old curs with scarcely spirit enough to yelp at the moon – for nobody wants to hear them. All of them, kings and bureaucrats, could find a place to stay. Great organizations, sometimes great states, backed them. Yet all added together they amount to nothing. Trotsky could not rest anywhere. No country wanted him until Mexico added lustre to its history by giving him a home. He was pursued by all the resources of the Soviet state. Despite the devoted solicitude of his supporters he was often in financial straits, for though their devotion was unlimited, their numbers were few. Yet from all these difficulties he emerged as a veritable tribune of the international working class, speaking for the proletarian revolution and for socialism as no private individual ever spoke for any public cause. First was the gigantic conflict with Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy. Never did any state spend so much time, energy and resources, to blacken the reputation and silence the ideas of a single individual. His supporters were systematically murdered. Unprecedented trials were arranged for the purpose of getting rid of internal enemies and utterly discrediting him. Huge political parties all over the world carried out the orders and repeated the slanders of Moscow. Almost single-handed, Trotsky, aided only by a small and devoted band of followers (they did a great historic work), fought Stalinism to a finish and inflicted upon it a resounding defeat. Today the whole world knows that Stalin lied, that Trotsky was no enemy of the Soviet Union, that he stood for the revolution as it was originally conceived, and though they hate him for his unswerving devotion to revolution, yet his sincerity and his loyalty to the cause of socialism are not questioned. He fought for that, not on account of his personal reputation – he was always confident of the judgment of history – but because he knew that in attempting to discredit him, the Stalinists, inside and outside Russia, sought to discredit the ideas for which he stood – the ideas of revolutionary socialism. Periodically the front pages of every newspaper in the world were covered with the records of this great conflict, and Stalin, the ruler of a hundred and seventy millions and Trotsky primus inter pares of a few scattered thousands, met as equals on the arena of world public opinion. It will be said that historical events helped him to win his final victory. What infinite wisdom! As if Trotsky did not know that history was moving in a certain direction, as if all his efforts were not directed towards hastening and clarifying the process.
The Stalinists claimed that he gained all this publicity because he was an enemy of the Soviet Union and the bourgeoisie used him. It is a pitiable self-deception. At the time of the Moscow Trials, the Manchester Guardian was advocating an alliance between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Yet it threw open its pages to him, for in the confusion all felt that only one man could help to elucidate the mystery and that man was Trotsky himself. That was the secret of his power. He could clarify the world bourgeoisie, in the confusion in which it finds itself. It learned something from him. He was prepared to speak whenever asked, because he knew the limitations of bourgeois wisdom; through their organs he spoke to the workers about every important event, not only on revolutions on which he was an authority, but on every development in the steady progress to war. Journalists came from all over the world to interview him, certain that people would read eagerly what he said. His books were literary events, simultaneously reviewed everywhere and pondered over.
To attribute it all to his personal brilliance, the vigor and incisiveness of his expression, is an absurdity we have already dealt with earlier. Trotsky represented something – represented it adequately, magnificently, with a power that was all his own, but yet he was only a representative. He represented the proletariat in the period of the decay of capitalism. The proletariat is a mighty force in the modern world. If the radical intellectuals do not know it, the bourgeoisie does. The bourgeoisie listened to Trotsky because whether it recognized this or not he represented the point of view of the world revolution. The bourgeoisie does not accept Marxism. It cannot. But it was obvious to many bourgeois thinkers that on any knotty tangle of international politics he always had something of value to say. Why had Hitler come so easily to power in Germany? What was the significance of Hitler? Why, why the Hitler-Stalin pact? How would the war end? He told them what he thought. They listened to his predictions because these turned out so often to be true. But if they were hazy as to the source of his ideas they had no illusions as to what use he intended to make of them and they carefully excluded him from their shores. When he died, in their news columns and obituary notices they recognized the greatness of the figure that had so dominated a social epoch, in their editorials they vented their spleen against the implacable enemy of their society.
For those who can understand history there is a tremendous significance in this last period of Trotsky’s life. Like some bold reconnoiterer he forced his way into the enemy’s camp, and using every trick, wile and dodge at his command, and giving away practically nothing, he carried on the battle, cleared paths, exposed dangers, charted a course, knowing that though the great armies had fallen behind and were stumbling, they were coming, slowly but inexorably they were coming. And that almost alone he could do so much was a testimony not only to his personal qualities but to the great forces which he represented. How little some of his friends knew it, and how well his enemies! Stalin, aware of the state of his regime and in what a tottering world he lived, did not count Trotsky’s meagre following and then sit back in comfort. He knew that as long as Trotsky lived and could write and speak, the Soviet bureaucracy was in mortal danger. In a conversation just before war broke out. Hitler and the French ambassador discussed the perils of plunging Europe into conflict and agreed that the winner of the second great war might be Trotsky. Winston Churchill hated him with a personal malevolence which seemed to overstep the bounds of reason. These men knew his stature, the power of what he stood for, and were never lulled by the smallness of his forces. If some of our radical intelligentsia will not learn from Marxism, perhaps they will ponder on the view of Trotsky held by Stalin, Hitler and Churchill.
The Fourth International
And yet his work as spokesman of the revolution was not his main occupation in this period. Not at all. For him that was secondary. What interested him most was getting his ideas directly to the masses through revolutionary organizations. This work is a chapter in itself and is treated elsewhere in this memorial number. It is almost unknown to the general public. All of it is included in the words – the struggle for the Fourth International. We of the Fourth International know what was the quality and quantity of that work; the enormous labor, the knowledge and wisdom, the enthusiasm he put into it. Always he saw history from a great height. Yet a dispute between ten struggling young comrades, five thousand miles away from him, whom he had never seen or heard of until they wrote to him, would occupy his devoted attention for hours and hours at a time. People accuse Trotsky of impatience and domineering. They do not know what they are talking about. He had his opinions and fought for them. In ideological struggles he was a relentless foe. With him theories were not interesting ideas to be played with, as is the detestable habit of the bourgeois intellectuals. They were weapons in the class struggle. But to know and to appreciate his powers and his past, the enormous force of this many-sided and yet perfectly integrated personality, and to see him listening patiently to some inexperienced comrade putting forward his inexperienced ideas, to read letters in which he took up some apparently minor point and elaborated it meeting all possible objections one by one, was to have a great lesson in the difference between the superficial arrogance which often characterizes essentially sensitive men, and the ocean of strength, patience and resiliency which can come from complete devotion to a cause.
That is the secret of his life and achievement – we cannot state it too often – the fact that he was not only gifted above his fellows but that he early abandoned a bankrupt society and embraced a cause which used all that he had and placed no limits on his development. Bourgeois society limits and cramps and distorts. Winston Churchill is a man who in energy and diversity of natural gifts, courage, and spirit, executive capacity and artistic instinct, could not have been anything if at all inferior to Trotsky. Yet look at the result. His whole great British Empire has throttled instead of developing him. It has debarred him from understanding history: he has no historical method. He was at the head of the British navy in the last war and knew everything from the inside, yet his World Crisis is commonplace, and full of a windy rhetoric. His recent speeches are far above anything bourgeois democracy has produced in this crisis. He describes with clarity and style. Yet, at the conclusion of one of his best efforts, all he can tell the British people is so to bear themselves that if they lived a thousand years, men shall say this war was their finest hour. It is not a chance phrase. Men in such times as these do not use chance phrases. Perspective he has and can have none, unless, like Hitler, he turns himself definitely and consciously round and tramples upon everything that humanity has aimed at, however unsuccessfully, in thousands of years of painful effort. All the gifts in the world would not have saved Trotsky from a similar fate had he limited himself to bourgeois society. Being determines consciousness. In the struggle for socialism he strides through the world, a titan among men, excelling in every field he touched. An exile half his life, persecuted as no man has been persecuted, he lived the fullest life of any human being hitherto. The field of being which he chose developed his consciousness to a pitch reached by few men. That consciousness he did his best to pass on to us. It is ours to guard, from each according to our abilities. Let us see to it that we do our share. He himself now belongs to history and this is an historical evaluation. But his death is recent enough and each of us is personally indebted to him for too much to exclude a personal note. Motley closed his noble history of the Dutch Republic by saying of William the Silent that for thirty years he was the guiding star of a whole great nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets. Whatever the fate of our movement, whatever its successes or failures, whatever our personal lives may hold, to us who knew him and worked with him, now that he is dead, the world will never be the same again.
Footnotes
1. Germany, the Key to the International Situation.
2. There is a characteristic and diverting passage in My Life (p. 358) on Trotsky’s estimate of his work as War Commissar. He says that if anyone could be compared with Carnot it is his assistant, Sklyansky. Trotsky knew that the natural comparison was not Sklyansky but himself, and knowing that Carnot’s role in the French Revolution was important but confined, carefully disentangled himself by giving the role to Sklyansky. He need not have worried. But he was always careful of the verdict of history.
3. And Spengler had it not only in the history of society but in music, art and literature. It Is to be hoped that the fog of mysticism does not obscure for Marxists the colossal learning, capacity for synthesis and insight of Spengler’s book.
4. George Marlene.
5. This does not mean that this writer, for instance, is in complete agreement with everything Trotsky wrote. There are not negligible sections to which he is absolutely opposed. These will be taken up in good time. But the disagreements are family disagreements.
6. See the Introduction to the Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>We Must Force the Job Issue by Mass Action</h1>
<h3>(28 July 1931)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>The Negro’s Fight</em>, <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1941/index.htm#la05_25" target="new">Vol. 5 No. 30</a>, 28 July 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The farce of Roosevelt’s executive order has now gone into Act 2. Everybody is playing his part. First of all, the OPM, the Office of Production Management itself. The <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> of July 19 reports that rumors are running all over Washington about Sidney Hillman’s plan to sabotage the Negro struggle. Hillman wants to load down the committee with “subservient labor leaders, stooges of national insignificance, who will smother investigations and stall on remedial measures, thus perpetuating the OPM’s ‘do-nothing’ policy on defense discrimination.” This is the rumor in Washington. We never needed rumors in Washington to know that this is exactly what is going on. It has happened for 74 years, since the Proclamation of Emancipation. Why should it stop suddenly because of an executive order?</p>
<p>Now the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> gets mad. It says “We warn the President and Mr. Hillman that unless a strong, courageous, active committee of American Negroes have confidence is appointed, the high enthusiasm and morale engendered by the President’s order will be destroyed.” Heaven above us! What nonsense is this! The <strong>Courier</strong> actually thinks that it is the President’s order which engendered high enthusiasm and morale. Exactly the opposite ie the truth. The President’s order was designed to kill enthusiasm and morale. It came when it did and how it did for one purpose, to break the march on Washington. The independent action of the Negroes would have raised enthusiasm and morale to the highest pitch.</p>
<p>Any School teacher will tell you that in training children the best way is to encourage them to do things and find out things for themselves. The wrong way is to do it for them or tell them everything. Socialism teaches that the working class is fully able to run society today. It needs, however, confidence in itself. This confidence it must gain in action. If the Negroes had carried through the march successfully, Roosevelt and the OPM would have been on the spot before the Negroes, before the whole <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> nation and before the whole world. That is why Roosevelt called on Eleanor, LaGuardia, Stimson, Knox, Hillman and Knudsen to help him break up the march. He wanted to kill the enthusiasm and morale of the Negroes. He wanted to substitute the old attitude of hanging around and waiting, of long investigations, of committees that talk much and do nothing, of making the Negro people think that the President is their friend, but the committees are slow. He wanted to give the Negroes the good old run-around. And now that Sidney Hillman starts doing exactly what the President intended him to do, the <strong>Courier</strong> rages about the high enthusiasm which the committee will destroy.</p>
<p>Here is an elementary lesson in politics. Roosevelt wants to keep the Negroes quiet. He mobilizes all the force he has at his command to prevent them from marching. Now who can believe Roosevelt and Hillman will appoint a committee which will fight for Negro rights? Can’t the <strong>Courier</strong> understand this? Roosevelt doesn’t want to start any struggle over the Negroes. For one thing, his chief support is in the South. The South does not want federal interference in its enslavement of the Negro. Roosevelt is the last man to start any serious action on behalf of the masses of Negroes. Even in the North and East Roosevelt’s chief aim is to keep the peace between the workers and the capitalists. He wants “order” and high production. You get “order” and high production today in one way only. By making the workers submit to the bosses. That is why Roosevelt broke the strike at North American with federal troops. How can this same Roosevelt be expected to start serious action against the capitalists about employing Negroes? He will take serious action to prevent the Negroes bothering him and the capitalist class. That action he has taken. It is the breaking up of the march, the fraud of the executive order, and now Hillman, Roosevelt’s stooge, is preparing this phony committee.</p>
<p>We want to restore the enthusiasm and the morale. But the <strong>Courier</strong> is looking for them in the wrong place. The place to look is among the Negroes. The way to create it is by independent organization among the Negroes. The slaves did not wait until the Civil War began. For a generation before, they were taking direct action – they were running away, in teh big organized movement of the Underground Railroad. Their independent action forced the issue. That is what we must do today. Force the issue by independent organization. The emancipation of the Negroes will be the act of the Negroes themselves, not of executive orders.</p>
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<h3>Note from MIA</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> In the print version this reads “world”.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
We Must Force the Job Issue by Mass Action
(28 July 1931)
The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 30, 28 July 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The farce of Roosevelt’s executive order has now gone into Act 2. Everybody is playing his part. First of all, the OPM, the Office of Production Management itself. The Pittsburgh Courier of July 19 reports that rumors are running all over Washington about Sidney Hillman’s plan to sabotage the Negro struggle. Hillman wants to load down the committee with “subservient labor leaders, stooges of national insignificance, who will smother investigations and stall on remedial measures, thus perpetuating the OPM’s ‘do-nothing’ policy on defense discrimination.” This is the rumor in Washington. We never needed rumors in Washington to know that this is exactly what is going on. It has happened for 74 years, since the Proclamation of Emancipation. Why should it stop suddenly because of an executive order?
Now the Pittsburgh Courier gets mad. It says “We warn the President and Mr. Hillman that unless a strong, courageous, active committee of American Negroes have confidence is appointed, the high enthusiasm and morale engendered by the President’s order will be destroyed.” Heaven above us! What nonsense is this! The Courier actually thinks that it is the President’s order which engendered high enthusiasm and morale. Exactly the opposite ie the truth. The President’s order was designed to kill enthusiasm and morale. It came when it did and how it did for one purpose, to break the march on Washington. The independent action of the Negroes would have raised enthusiasm and morale to the highest pitch.
Any School teacher will tell you that in training children the best way is to encourage them to do things and find out things for themselves. The wrong way is to do it for them or tell them everything. Socialism teaches that the working class is fully able to run society today. It needs, however, confidence in itself. This confidence it must gain in action. If the Negroes had carried through the march successfully, Roosevelt and the OPM would have been on the spot before the Negroes, before the whole [1] nation and before the whole world. That is why Roosevelt called on Eleanor, LaGuardia, Stimson, Knox, Hillman and Knudsen to help him break up the march. He wanted to kill the enthusiasm and morale of the Negroes. He wanted to substitute the old attitude of hanging around and waiting, of long investigations, of committees that talk much and do nothing, of making the Negro people think that the President is their friend, but the committees are slow. He wanted to give the Negroes the good old run-around. And now that Sidney Hillman starts doing exactly what the President intended him to do, the Courier rages about the high enthusiasm which the committee will destroy.
Here is an elementary lesson in politics. Roosevelt wants to keep the Negroes quiet. He mobilizes all the force he has at his command to prevent them from marching. Now who can believe Roosevelt and Hillman will appoint a committee which will fight for Negro rights? Can’t the Courier understand this? Roosevelt doesn’t want to start any struggle over the Negroes. For one thing, his chief support is in the South. The South does not want federal interference in its enslavement of the Negro. Roosevelt is the last man to start any serious action on behalf of the masses of Negroes. Even in the North and East Roosevelt’s chief aim is to keep the peace between the workers and the capitalists. He wants “order” and high production. You get “order” and high production today in one way only. By making the workers submit to the bosses. That is why Roosevelt broke the strike at North American with federal troops. How can this same Roosevelt be expected to start serious action against the capitalists about employing Negroes? He will take serious action to prevent the Negroes bothering him and the capitalist class. That action he has taken. It is the breaking up of the march, the fraud of the executive order, and now Hillman, Roosevelt’s stooge, is preparing this phony committee.
We want to restore the enthusiasm and the morale. But the Courier is looking for them in the wrong place. The place to look is among the Negroes. The way to create it is by independent organization among the Negroes. The slaves did not wait until the Civil War began. For a generation before, they were taking direct action – they were running away, in teh big organized movement of the Underground Railroad. Their independent action forced the issue. That is what we must do today. Force the issue by independent organization. The emancipation of the Negroes will be the act of the Negroes themselves, not of executive orders.
Note from MIA
1. In the print version this reads “world”.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(20 January 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_03" target="new">Vol. IV No. 3</a>, 20 January 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Two men went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee and
the other a publican. This famous tale of the holy scripture was
reenacted once more in 1932. You remember what happened in the
Gospels. The Pharisee was the man who boasted of what he had done. He
had paid his dues, he fasted so many days a week. He thanked God that
he was a righteous man and not a scoundrel like the damned publican.
But the publican didn’t pretend, he didn’t say he had
done this and that and the other. He said he was a sinner. That’s
all. He begged for mercy, it is true, but that isn’t important
for us.<br>
</p>
<h4>Twentieth-Century Pharisees</h4>
<p class="fst">Look at the New Dealers. These Pharisees have for years been
telling the whole world and Negroes what fine fellows they are. The
Negroes should love them. They are the men for “true”
democracy; they want to build a new world of righteousness and peace,
in which the lion will lie down with the lamb, in which the Southern
plantation-owner will give a square deal to the sharecropper. They
say, “Discriminate against the Negro? Not we. Look how many
Negroes there are in the WPA white-collar jobs and working in relief
bureaus, etc. We thank God,” say the New Dealers, “that
we are not like other men, even as these Republicans.”</p>
<p>Now comes a fine exposure of these righteous rascals. A few days
ago Miles Paige, a Negro Magistrate in Harlem, was named by Mayor
LaGuardia for a seat on the Special Sessions bench at $12,000 a year.
The Negro press as usual hails this as proof of the “great
progress” of Negroes. It is proof of nothing of the kind. No
Negro who knows the history of his race needs any proof of its
capacity to fill any office in this country. Furthermore, Paige’s
appointment does not raise the income of one Negro sharecropper or
one Negro factory worker or one Negro unemployed. And these are the
people with whom we are chiefly concerned. Appointments like this one
of Paige cannot lift the great mass of oppressed Negroes. When the
great masses of Negroes move, they will create opportunities for ten
thousand Paiges. That is not to say that such appointments are not to
be supported not only by Negroes but by the whole labor movement. The
Negroes have a right to posts everywhere. The Socialist Workers
Party, for instance, condemns those who join the bourgeois army. But
as for the right of Negroes to join the army if they want to, and on
equal terms with the whites – that we support.</p>
<h4>Where’s the Catch?</h4>
<p class="fst">But now comes a mystery. Paige was to be seated on Tuesday,
January 2nd, but the ceremony was postponed indefinitely. The
<strong>Amsterdam News</strong> of January 13 gives us some indication why.</p>
<p>LaGuardia is flirting with the New Dealers, with an eye to the
presidential elections. He is typical of them, with his large words
and small concessions. But since the Harlem riots of 1935, La Guardia
has a wholesome respect for Harlem Negroes. And since Lehman defeated
Dewey only by the aid of the Negroes’ vote, all these
progressive fakers are at their wits’ end to keep the Negro
vote. So LaGuardia runs around in Harlem, he has lunch with Bill
Robinson sitting near him, he builds a housing project or two (where
fifty are needed), and he appoints Negroes to posts they have not
held before. First Justice Bolin. And now Paige.</p>
<p>But behold! Roosevelt in Washington lives only by grace of those
Southern landlords, without whom the Democratic Party is nothing.
These fellows are not going to stand for any vice-president or
cabinet minister who is a “nigger-lover.” So Washington
warns LaGuardia. He is leaning too heavily towards the Negro race.
You cannot discriminate in favor of Negroes, you know. One judge
every twenty years or so is enough. If you go on like that you
discredit yourself, and your future with us of the Democratic Party
is gloomy. Hence, says the <strong>Amsterdam News</strong>, Paige’s
appointment still awaits confirmation.<br>
</p>
<h4>Tweedledum and ...</h4>
<p class="fst">So here we are, my friends, the “little flower” of
“democracy” and the New Deal, herald angels of equality
between man and man, conspiring to save their immortal souls and to
placate the viciousness of Southern reactionaries at the expense of
one Negro being made a judge – one Negro, be it noted.</p>
<p>Here and there a Negro may squeeze into an appointment. But
salvation for the race from any of these Republicans or Democrats who
have systematically deceived the Negro people for seventy-five years?
No. The Republicans make no promises. The New Dealers make them but
do not mean it. And that is the only difference between them.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
(20 January 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 3, 20 January 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Two men went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee and
the other a publican. This famous tale of the holy scripture was
reenacted once more in 1932. You remember what happened in the
Gospels. The Pharisee was the man who boasted of what he had done. He
had paid his dues, he fasted so many days a week. He thanked God that
he was a righteous man and not a scoundrel like the damned publican.
But the publican didn’t pretend, he didn’t say he had
done this and that and the other. He said he was a sinner. That’s
all. He begged for mercy, it is true, but that isn’t important
for us.
Twentieth-Century Pharisees
Look at the New Dealers. These Pharisees have for years been
telling the whole world and Negroes what fine fellows they are. The
Negroes should love them. They are the men for “true”
democracy; they want to build a new world of righteousness and peace,
in which the lion will lie down with the lamb, in which the Southern
plantation-owner will give a square deal to the sharecropper. They
say, “Discriminate against the Negro? Not we. Look how many
Negroes there are in the WPA white-collar jobs and working in relief
bureaus, etc. We thank God,” say the New Dealers, “that
we are not like other men, even as these Republicans.”
Now comes a fine exposure of these righteous rascals. A few days
ago Miles Paige, a Negro Magistrate in Harlem, was named by Mayor
LaGuardia for a seat on the Special Sessions bench at $12,000 a year.
The Negro press as usual hails this as proof of the “great
progress” of Negroes. It is proof of nothing of the kind. No
Negro who knows the history of his race needs any proof of its
capacity to fill any office in this country. Furthermore, Paige’s
appointment does not raise the income of one Negro sharecropper or
one Negro factory worker or one Negro unemployed. And these are the
people with whom we are chiefly concerned. Appointments like this one
of Paige cannot lift the great mass of oppressed Negroes. When the
great masses of Negroes move, they will create opportunities for ten
thousand Paiges. That is not to say that such appointments are not to
be supported not only by Negroes but by the whole labor movement. The
Negroes have a right to posts everywhere. The Socialist Workers
Party, for instance, condemns those who join the bourgeois army. But
as for the right of Negroes to join the army if they want to, and on
equal terms with the whites – that we support.
Where’s the Catch?
But now comes a mystery. Paige was to be seated on Tuesday,
January 2nd, but the ceremony was postponed indefinitely. The
Amsterdam News of January 13 gives us some indication why.
LaGuardia is flirting with the New Dealers, with an eye to the
presidential elections. He is typical of them, with his large words
and small concessions. But since the Harlem riots of 1935, La Guardia
has a wholesome respect for Harlem Negroes. And since Lehman defeated
Dewey only by the aid of the Negroes’ vote, all these
progressive fakers are at their wits’ end to keep the Negro
vote. So LaGuardia runs around in Harlem, he has lunch with Bill
Robinson sitting near him, he builds a housing project or two (where
fifty are needed), and he appoints Negroes to posts they have not
held before. First Justice Bolin. And now Paige.
But behold! Roosevelt in Washington lives only by grace of those
Southern landlords, without whom the Democratic Party is nothing.
These fellows are not going to stand for any vice-president or
cabinet minister who is a “nigger-lover.” So Washington
warns LaGuardia. He is leaning too heavily towards the Negro race.
You cannot discriminate in favor of Negroes, you know. One judge
every twenty years or so is enough. If you go on like that you
discredit yourself, and your future with us of the Democratic Party
is gloomy. Hence, says the Amsterdam News, Paige’s
appointment still awaits confirmation.
Tweedledum and ...
So here we are, my friends, the “little flower” of
“democracy” and the New Deal, herald angels of equality
between man and man, conspiring to save their immortal souls and to
placate the viciousness of Southern reactionaries at the expense of
one Negro being made a judge – one Negro, be it noted.
Here and there a Negro may squeeze into an appointment. But
salvation for the race from any of these Republicans or Democrats who
have systematically deceived the Negro people for seventy-five years?
No. The Republicans make no promises. The New Dealers make them but
do not mean it. And that is the only difference between them.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<table width="60%" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="6" border="3" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td><br>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>(5 September 1939)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_65" target="new">Vol. III No. 65</a>, 5 September 1939, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Negroes and the Hitler-Stalin Pact</h3>
<p class="fst">The Stalin-Hitler pact has come as a tremendous shock to the workers everywhere. And to the Negro workers not least. The Stalinists instilled into the masses of the people everywhere within the last five years the hope that Stalin and Russia would lead all peoples in the struggle for democracy, freedom and peace. The Hitler-Stalin agreement has blown all that ballyhoo sky-high. Stalin and the Stalinists are seen today for what they really are. Not internationalists, not concerned with leading the working class in every country against their oppressors, but in reality mere horse-traders with the imperialist nations. Most abominable crime of all, they turn the working class movement today in one direction, tomorrow in another, ready to bargain for the sake of their own skin.</p>
<p>Yet in all the confusion, the Negro people among all others have been quickest to realize the fraud and hypocrisy that is Stalinism. The Negroes remember that all through the Ethiopian struggle, Stalin continued to sell oil to Italy. They know that by no sort of reasoning and by no amount of eloquence from Litvinov at Geneva, could this oil-selling be passed off as support of Ethiopia against aggression. Already Stalin bad shown, to all who wanted to see, that all this talk about the Soviet Union being the leader of the democratic movements against the fascists was a lie and nothing more.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who Oppresses the Negro?</h4>
<p class="fst">Negroes know that the democratic imperialisms, which were supposed to be the leaders in the struggle for democracy, peace and freedom are the greatest oppressors of Negroes in the world. Great Britain controls and squeezes the life out of some sixty-million Negroes in Africa, France grinds the life out of another forty-million. Belgium is engaged in the daily torture of another twelve million. America has lone set an example to the whole of the civilized world for brutal treatment of Negroes, and fascist methods had been rampant in the southern states long before Adolph Hitler or Benito Mussolini were born. Yet Stalin. Browder and Ford summoned Negroes in all parts of the world to join Britain. France, America, and Belgium in the “democratic front”, to fight against fascist aggression. Ford called his book <strong>The Negro and the Democratic Front</strong>. When anyone, white or Negro, pointed out that this, for the Negroes, was suicide, that it was the Negroes’ business to form a united front with all workers and farmers, yellow, brown, and white, to struggle against all the imperialists in all countries and not to take sides, the Stalinists had one word for him – “Trotskyist”.</p>
<p>James Ford had spent many years of his life in the Communist Party, repeating the slogan of “Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War”, and calling upon all the workers to fight against capitalism <em>everywhere</em>, now he suddenly discovered that it was the duty and interest of the Negroes in the democratic countries to support their “own” government.</p>
<p>In January 1938, the <strong>Afro-American</strong> of Baltimore supported the criminal and unwarranted invasion of China by Japan. This was, of course, a very stupid thing to do. But it was an honest stupidity. Many Negroes are bitter against the apparently never-ending domination of the white race. They therefore clutch at the idea of Japan being the leader of the colored races and, as such, driving the whites out of the East. They are wrong. What is wanted in the East is not a strong Japan, that is to say a strong imperialist nation, but a strong China. A free, and independent China will drive out Japanese, British and Americans and be one of the great leaders of oppressed peoples all over the world. This mistake however, of supporting Japan is, as we have said, an honest mistake. But James Ford, in his justified criticism of this mistake went on to say the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“You say that you do not approve of Japan’s alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, the Negro peoples’ worst enemies. You may not approve. But the alliance is an undeniable fact.”</p>
<p class="fst">Now there are 120,000,000 people in Africa today who could tell Ford that Hitler is not their worst enemy for Hitler does not rule over one of them. Their worst enemies are the British, French and Belgians, these democratic imperialists who are sitting on their backs. But James Ford says no word about this. Instead he goes on: “Hitler applauds the lynching of Negroes in America”.</p>
<p>This is undoubtedly very bad of Hitler, but surely that is no reason why the Negroes should join these American democrats who lynch them, to go to fight against Hitler who merely applauds. But Ford, aping his master Browder (who of course is merely the ape of Stalin), gets quite eloquent on the evils of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo military alliance. He says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“And who is so blind to this that he cannot see in the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo military alliance a mortal enemy of the democratic forces of the world?”</p>
<p class="fst">He ends his letter by once more shouting at Hitler.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“My earnest opinion is that we would make a tragic error in giving our support to any member of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo alliance.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Now Stalin, pursuing the interests of himself and his bureaucrats and not caring two damns about white workers, black workers or any sort of workers, except insofar as he could use them for his own policy, signs this pact with Hitler, and by his trade agreement promises to let Hitler have the supplies that are so necessary for Germany, that strengthen Germany enormously, and enable Hitler at once to precipitate a new and most dangerous crisis. Comrade Earl Browder says that this pact Is a pact of peace and that it helps the workers in every country in their fight against fascism. And comrade Ford, as ready to sell out the Negro people as any Democratic or Republican Negro boss, immediately forgets what a crime it was to make an alliance or give support to “any member” of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis and hails this pact as “a great step forward for promoting peace and democratic government”.</p>
<p>This he does in a statement published in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> of Aug. 31, 1939, and submitted to the <strong>Amsterdam News</strong>. In our press, meetings and pamphlets, etc., we submit the monstrous deception that Stalin and the Stalinists have practiced on the international working-class movement to a searching analysis, and in this column we shall analyse specifically the reaction of the Negro people and the Negro press. In the next issue we shall begin a series of articles relating to the Negro and the war. Meanwhile, however, we shall merely ask the Negro people this: Are they to carry on a policy of consistent struggle against all imperialisms, fascist or democratic, in common with the oppressed workers and colonial peoples of all the world, or are they to follow James Ford, Earl Browder and Stalin, jumping like a cat on hot bricks from one side to the other, and being merely the pawn in the hands of the most unscrupulous and shameless hypocrites and betrayers that the working class movement has ever harbored within its bosom? To ask the question is to answer it. Down with the Stalinist lies and contradictions. For a policy of the united front of workers black and white against Ford’s death-traps of a democratic front or a Stalin-Hitler front.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(5 September 1939)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 65, 5 September 1939, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Negroes and the Hitler-Stalin Pact
The Stalin-Hitler pact has come as a tremendous shock to the workers everywhere. And to the Negro workers not least. The Stalinists instilled into the masses of the people everywhere within the last five years the hope that Stalin and Russia would lead all peoples in the struggle for democracy, freedom and peace. The Hitler-Stalin agreement has blown all that ballyhoo sky-high. Stalin and the Stalinists are seen today for what they really are. Not internationalists, not concerned with leading the working class in every country against their oppressors, but in reality mere horse-traders with the imperialist nations. Most abominable crime of all, they turn the working class movement today in one direction, tomorrow in another, ready to bargain for the sake of their own skin.
Yet in all the confusion, the Negro people among all others have been quickest to realize the fraud and hypocrisy that is Stalinism. The Negroes remember that all through the Ethiopian struggle, Stalin continued to sell oil to Italy. They know that by no sort of reasoning and by no amount of eloquence from Litvinov at Geneva, could this oil-selling be passed off as support of Ethiopia against aggression. Already Stalin bad shown, to all who wanted to see, that all this talk about the Soviet Union being the leader of the democratic movements against the fascists was a lie and nothing more.
Who Oppresses the Negro?
Negroes know that the democratic imperialisms, which were supposed to be the leaders in the struggle for democracy, peace and freedom are the greatest oppressors of Negroes in the world. Great Britain controls and squeezes the life out of some sixty-million Negroes in Africa, France grinds the life out of another forty-million. Belgium is engaged in the daily torture of another twelve million. America has lone set an example to the whole of the civilized world for brutal treatment of Negroes, and fascist methods had been rampant in the southern states long before Adolph Hitler or Benito Mussolini were born. Yet Stalin. Browder and Ford summoned Negroes in all parts of the world to join Britain. France, America, and Belgium in the “democratic front”, to fight against fascist aggression. Ford called his book The Negro and the Democratic Front. When anyone, white or Negro, pointed out that this, for the Negroes, was suicide, that it was the Negroes’ business to form a united front with all workers and farmers, yellow, brown, and white, to struggle against all the imperialists in all countries and not to take sides, the Stalinists had one word for him – “Trotskyist”.
James Ford had spent many years of his life in the Communist Party, repeating the slogan of “Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War”, and calling upon all the workers to fight against capitalism everywhere, now he suddenly discovered that it was the duty and interest of the Negroes in the democratic countries to support their “own” government.
In January 1938, the Afro-American of Baltimore supported the criminal and unwarranted invasion of China by Japan. This was, of course, a very stupid thing to do. But it was an honest stupidity. Many Negroes are bitter against the apparently never-ending domination of the white race. They therefore clutch at the idea of Japan being the leader of the colored races and, as such, driving the whites out of the East. They are wrong. What is wanted in the East is not a strong Japan, that is to say a strong imperialist nation, but a strong China. A free, and independent China will drive out Japanese, British and Americans and be one of the great leaders of oppressed peoples all over the world. This mistake however, of supporting Japan is, as we have said, an honest mistake. But James Ford, in his justified criticism of this mistake went on to say the following:
“You say that you do not approve of Japan’s alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, the Negro peoples’ worst enemies. You may not approve. But the alliance is an undeniable fact.”
Now there are 120,000,000 people in Africa today who could tell Ford that Hitler is not their worst enemy for Hitler does not rule over one of them. Their worst enemies are the British, French and Belgians, these democratic imperialists who are sitting on their backs. But James Ford says no word about this. Instead he goes on: “Hitler applauds the lynching of Negroes in America”.
This is undoubtedly very bad of Hitler, but surely that is no reason why the Negroes should join these American democrats who lynch them, to go to fight against Hitler who merely applauds. But Ford, aping his master Browder (who of course is merely the ape of Stalin), gets quite eloquent on the evils of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo military alliance. He says:
“And who is so blind to this that he cannot see in the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo military alliance a mortal enemy of the democratic forces of the world?”
He ends his letter by once more shouting at Hitler.
“My earnest opinion is that we would make a tragic error in giving our support to any member of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo alliance.”
Now Stalin, pursuing the interests of himself and his bureaucrats and not caring two damns about white workers, black workers or any sort of workers, except insofar as he could use them for his own policy, signs this pact with Hitler, and by his trade agreement promises to let Hitler have the supplies that are so necessary for Germany, that strengthen Germany enormously, and enable Hitler at once to precipitate a new and most dangerous crisis. Comrade Earl Browder says that this pact Is a pact of peace and that it helps the workers in every country in their fight against fascism. And comrade Ford, as ready to sell out the Negro people as any Democratic or Republican Negro boss, immediately forgets what a crime it was to make an alliance or give support to “any member” of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis and hails this pact as “a great step forward for promoting peace and democratic government”.
This he does in a statement published in the Daily Worker of Aug. 31, 1939, and submitted to the Amsterdam News. In our press, meetings and pamphlets, etc., we submit the monstrous deception that Stalin and the Stalinists have practiced on the international working-class movement to a searching analysis, and in this column we shall analyse specifically the reaction of the Negro people and the Negro press. In the next issue we shall begin a series of articles relating to the Negro and the war. Meanwhile, however, we shall merely ask the Negro people this: Are they to carry on a policy of consistent struggle against all imperialisms, fascist or democratic, in common with the oppressed workers and colonial peoples of all the world, or are they to follow James Ford, Earl Browder and Stalin, jumping like a cat on hot bricks from one side to the other, and being merely the pawn in the hands of the most unscrupulous and shameless hypocrites and betrayers that the working class movement has ever harbored within its bosom? To ask the question is to answer it. Down with the Stalinist lies and contradictions. For a policy of the united front of workers black and white against Ford’s death-traps of a democratic front or a Stalin-Hitler front.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Gandhi – His Role in Fight for India’s Independence</h1>
<h3>(9 February 1948)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">
</p><hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><span class="info">Source:</span> <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_06" target="new">Vol. XII No. 6</a>, 9 February 1948, p. 2.<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> PDF supplied by the <em>Riazanov Library Project</em>.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/Mark-up:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The assassination of Gandhi was political news of the first importance, for Gandhi had become an international figure. His death has provided the capitalist press with an opportunity to wallow in hypocritical and sentimental outpourings of how extraordinary was the success of this religious personality in the hard brutal world of today. But this is nonsense. Gandhi was above all a political leader and it is this that explains his extraordinary career.</p>
<p>The least important thing about him was his theory of non-violence, his saintliness, his love of his fellow-man, etc. What is interesting to observe is how his political personality and methods fitted like a glove the economic and political reeds of the Indian landlords and capitalists.</p>
<p>These two ruling classes were caught, in a terrible dilemma. To ensure their exploitation of the peasants and workers, the Indian landlords and capitalists depended upon the British government. Yet to free themselves from the clutches of British exploitation, which was ruining India, they had no force except the same millions of downtrodden and oppressed.<br>
</p>
<h4>Political Gift</h4>
<p class="fst">Gandhi opened a way for them. His political gift to the rising Indian bourgeoisie was his dramatization of the plight of India’s hundreds of millions, and his use of these masses against British imperialism, without, at the same time, ever losing strict control over them. Thus he was able to torment and pressure the British and yet prevent a revolutionary outburst.</p>
<p><em>Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that Gandhi was personally sincere (that perpetual preoccupation of little minds). With that out of the way, let us see how Gandhi functioned politically.</em></p>
<p>The organization of the Indian masses by traditional political means was an impossible task. When Gandhi began his work before World War I, the union movement was insignificant. To unite peasants, as peasants, meant uniting them against the landlord. And that Gandhi would not do. His simplicity of life, however, and the way he dramatized it, caught the imagination of the Indian masses. His loin cloth, his spinning wheel, his skillfully timed fasts, his campaigns against the British – these were the means by which he concentrated on himself, and himself alone, the attention and finally the political obedience of scores of millions.</p>
<p>It was this influence over the masses – and not spirituality and fasting – which gave him his enormous power among the hard-boiled, politicos of the Indian National Congress.</p>
<p><em>Gandhi never alienated the Indian capitalists and landlords. Gandhi might talk against industrialization and spin his few yards of cloth. But every boycott he declared against British goods meant increased opportunities for Indian manufacturers. Gandhi, no doubt, sincerely hated industrialism, but he collaborated with it. Here spirituality capitulated to political expediency.</em></p>
<p>Gandhi, being against any revolutionary overturn in India, was compelled to be ultra-cautious in his opposition to British imperialism. When, after World War I, the British betrayed their promise of granting self-government to India, the country rose in revolt, the British regime found itself paralysed. <em>It was none other than Gandhi who came to the rescue.</em> With his doctrine of non-violence he pacified India for Britain. Why? Because the violence he had unloosed threatened not only British rule but the native oppressing classes, as well.</p>
<p>Gandhi’s non-violence is worth a little examination. When tens of millions practiced. “civil disobedience,” it could render the functioning of the British government possible. It was an extraordinarily disruptive weapon, without at the same time, being revolutionary. It was ideally suited, however, for the purposes and needs of Indian capitalism.<br>
</p>
<h4>Force Concessions</h4>
<p class="fst">World War II once again sharply brought out Gandhi’s role. After the Japanese forces overran Burma, with the support of sections of the Burmese people, British power in India hung by a thread. Gandhi attempted to utilize Britain’s desperation to force concessions. Under his leadership, the Congress Party inaugurated a new struggle against the British. And then again, true to form, the Congress leaders proceeded to quell the mass uprisings of 1942, because these threatened to sweep away not only the British but also the domination of the Indian capitalists and landlords.</p>
<p>Thus Congress again had to come to Britain’s rescue and enable the British raj to weather the worst period.</p>
<p>The wholesale disintegration of British imperialism at the end of the war gave the Indian capitalists and landlords their long sought opportunity. The British were forced to arrive at some sort of settlement with the native ruling classes. <em>Gandhi’s influence among Congress leaders began declining as soon as the agreement with the British was consummated. They no longer had as much need of him as before.</em> They began to act increasingly independently of him. They accepted partition against his bitter opposition. Patel is obviously determined to use strong measures against Pakistan. He is jailing Indian labor leaders. His government is as brutal against its working class opponents as were the British.</p>
<p>The death of Gandhi thus marks the end of a period.</p>
<p>Historically, Gandhi will have his due share of the credit for his struggles against British imperialism. He will also have his due share of discredit for having strengthened the native ruling class against the great masses of the people who alone can regenerate India.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Gandhi – His Role in Fight for India’s Independence
(9 February 1948)
Source: The Militant, Vol. XII No. 6, 9 February 1948, p. 2.
Source: PDF supplied by the Riazanov Library Project.
Transcription/Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The assassination of Gandhi was political news of the first importance, for Gandhi had become an international figure. His death has provided the capitalist press with an opportunity to wallow in hypocritical and sentimental outpourings of how extraordinary was the success of this religious personality in the hard brutal world of today. But this is nonsense. Gandhi was above all a political leader and it is this that explains his extraordinary career.
The least important thing about him was his theory of non-violence, his saintliness, his love of his fellow-man, etc. What is interesting to observe is how his political personality and methods fitted like a glove the economic and political reeds of the Indian landlords and capitalists.
These two ruling classes were caught, in a terrible dilemma. To ensure their exploitation of the peasants and workers, the Indian landlords and capitalists depended upon the British government. Yet to free themselves from the clutches of British exploitation, which was ruining India, they had no force except the same millions of downtrodden and oppressed.
Political Gift
Gandhi opened a way for them. His political gift to the rising Indian bourgeoisie was his dramatization of the plight of India’s hundreds of millions, and his use of these masses against British imperialism, without, at the same time, ever losing strict control over them. Thus he was able to torment and pressure the British and yet prevent a revolutionary outburst.
Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that Gandhi was personally sincere (that perpetual preoccupation of little minds). With that out of the way, let us see how Gandhi functioned politically.
The organization of the Indian masses by traditional political means was an impossible task. When Gandhi began his work before World War I, the union movement was insignificant. To unite peasants, as peasants, meant uniting them against the landlord. And that Gandhi would not do. His simplicity of life, however, and the way he dramatized it, caught the imagination of the Indian masses. His loin cloth, his spinning wheel, his skillfully timed fasts, his campaigns against the British – these were the means by which he concentrated on himself, and himself alone, the attention and finally the political obedience of scores of millions.
It was this influence over the masses – and not spirituality and fasting – which gave him his enormous power among the hard-boiled, politicos of the Indian National Congress.
Gandhi never alienated the Indian capitalists and landlords. Gandhi might talk against industrialization and spin his few yards of cloth. But every boycott he declared against British goods meant increased opportunities for Indian manufacturers. Gandhi, no doubt, sincerely hated industrialism, but he collaborated with it. Here spirituality capitulated to political expediency.
Gandhi, being against any revolutionary overturn in India, was compelled to be ultra-cautious in his opposition to British imperialism. When, after World War I, the British betrayed their promise of granting self-government to India, the country rose in revolt, the British regime found itself paralysed. It was none other than Gandhi who came to the rescue. With his doctrine of non-violence he pacified India for Britain. Why? Because the violence he had unloosed threatened not only British rule but the native oppressing classes, as well.
Gandhi’s non-violence is worth a little examination. When tens of millions practiced. “civil disobedience,” it could render the functioning of the British government possible. It was an extraordinarily disruptive weapon, without at the same time, being revolutionary. It was ideally suited, however, for the purposes and needs of Indian capitalism.
Force Concessions
World War II once again sharply brought out Gandhi’s role. After the Japanese forces overran Burma, with the support of sections of the Burmese people, British power in India hung by a thread. Gandhi attempted to utilize Britain’s desperation to force concessions. Under his leadership, the Congress Party inaugurated a new struggle against the British. And then again, true to form, the Congress leaders proceeded to quell the mass uprisings of 1942, because these threatened to sweep away not only the British but also the domination of the Indian capitalists and landlords.
Thus Congress again had to come to Britain’s rescue and enable the British raj to weather the worst period.
The wholesale disintegration of British imperialism at the end of the war gave the Indian capitalists and landlords their long sought opportunity. The British were forced to arrive at some sort of settlement with the native ruling classes. Gandhi’s influence among Congress leaders began declining as soon as the agreement with the British was consummated. They no longer had as much need of him as before. They began to act increasingly independently of him. They accepted partition against his bitter opposition. Patel is obviously determined to use strong measures against Pakistan. He is jailing Indian labor leaders. His government is as brutal against its working class opponents as were the British.
The death of Gandhi thus marks the end of a period.
Historically, Gandhi will have his due share of the credit for his struggles against British imperialism. He will also have his due share of discredit for having strengthened the native ruling class against the great masses of the people who alone can regenerate India.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(17 February 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_07" target="new">Vol. IV No. 7</a>, 17 February 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The United Mine Workers condemned the Scottsboro frame-up as an
attack against the entire Negro race and recommended support of
federal anti-lynching legislation to pave the way for extending the
benefits of democracy to Negro workers.</p>
<p>The United Mine Workers have had if not a perfect – we live
in a capitalist world – a long and honorable history in its
dealings with Negroes. Both white and black workers need to study its
history closely. Just after the failure of the 1919 strike the miners
in the northern fields of West Virginia, making a drive for
unionization, recognized that their only hope was the success of
their brothers in the southern part of the state, who were then under
heavy attack by the coal-owners. They formed an armed group of 8,000
men, of whom 200 were Negroes, and marched upon the southern
counties. The federal government interfered and stopped the march.
But the unity in action, as a class, of these black and white workers
is comparable to the tremendous class solidarity displayed by the
black and white workers in the Chicago race riots of 1919. There were
lynchings and race riots in 1919. But in that period of labor
upheaval the militant workers of both races were getting closer
together, foreshadowing the mass movement into the CIO, the greatest
step forward the Negroes have made in this country since the
abolition of slavery three- quarters of a century ago.<br>
</p>
<h4>Negroes Early Played a Role</h4>
<p class="fst">The UMW, from its beginning in 1890, encouraged Negroes to join.
In northern West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, Negro
miners held offices such as president and secretary, although greatly
outnumbered by whites. Often the solitary Negro member of a local was
president or secretary, this because he could speak and write English
at a time when many of the foreign born could not.</p>
<p>In 1900, in the Flat Top Coal Fields, there were about 18,000
miners, 9,000 white and 9,000 black, all members of the union. In
1920 there were 25,000 Negro members of the UMW, though by 1927 the
number had dropped to 5,000. When Lewis began the drive for the CIO,
the traditions and experience of the UMW in the Negro field were
powerful factors in helping to bring the Negroes in. Today it is
estimated that there are 80,000 Negroes in the UMW. In 1937 George
Schuyler of the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> wrote that in Local 12068
of the United Mine Workers there were only four or five Negroes out
of 68 members and yet all the officers were colored.</p>
<p>After a year and a half of work in the Alabama fields 23,000
miners were organized, about 14,000 of them Negroes. Whites and
Negroes met in mixed meetings. Officers and committees were chosen
equally from both races. The white usually had the more important
places but this was due to the influence of the social system in the
South. It would be easy to show that all has not been perfect in the
relations between the races in the union. But one old Negro miner, a
miner for 33 years, a union member for 25 and secretary of Local
2950, has said that “The United Mine Workers of America has
done more to remove hatred and prejudice in the labor movement and to
restore harmony and good will between man and man than any other
agency in the country.”</p>
<p>At the Columbus convention there were six official bands, one of
which was the Logan County Band, composed of Negro high school boys
and girls from Logan County, West Virginia. Lewis, pursuing his
political maneuvers with Senator Wheeler, included the band among
those who went to meet the Senator at the railway station and
accompanied him to his hotel. Lewis stated that he specially wanted
to honor the band, each member of which was a son or a daughter of a
member of the UMW. Their expenses had been paid by the local unions
in Logan County.</p>
<p>At the convention an important speech was made by William
Dickerson, of Barkly, West Virginia. He asked for support to the
passage of a Federal Mine Inspection bill to prevent such disasters
as took place in Barkley on January 10, when 91 men were lost, 16 of
them Negroes. Dickerson was a member of the rescue squad. Dickerson
is a young man of 25, graduate of West Virginia State College. He
studied business administration but was unable to find any opening.
He went to work in the mines, identified himself with the working
class and was soon elected recording secretary of Local 6420. In this
lodge there are 480 members, of whom 25 only are Negroes.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why There’s Unity in West Va.</h4>
<p class="fst">Now what is the underlying cause of all this? Nothing less than
the geographical construction of West Virginia. Yes, the geographical
construction of West Virginia. Before the Civil War the states of
Virginia and West Virginia were one. Eastern Virginia consisted of
the rich flat plains, on which flourished the cotton plantation
system. In the West, the highlands, the population consisted of small
farmers who had no slaves and were oppressed by the rich Bourbons of
the lowlands.</p>
<p>In 1861 the slave owners naturally went with the South. The
farmers of West Virginia saw their chance, refused to go with them,
organized a separate state, and fought with the North. White men all,
they took sides not according to race but on account of their
economic interests and the social and political ideas which flowed
from them. Since that time the two states have had a steadily
divergent history in regard to their attitude to Negroes. The hard
life, the equalizing conditions of labor in the mines, have forged a
unity, one of the most powerful in the never-ceasing battle against
race prejudice in America.</p>
<p>When the fight for the CIO came, the UMW took the lead and has
accomplished work of outstanding importance in the history of labor
and of Negro labor in particular. Their support of the anti-lynching
bill is a great gesture of solidarity to the Negro people. But it is
more than that. It shows us that, along with our fight for the bill
in Congress we must never lose sight of our main aim, the creation of
such conditions as would enable whites and Negroes to work together
in conditions from which will flow social and political equality.
Those conditions are what we call the socialist society.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
(17 February 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 7, 17 February 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The United Mine Workers condemned the Scottsboro frame-up as an
attack against the entire Negro race and recommended support of
federal anti-lynching legislation to pave the way for extending the
benefits of democracy to Negro workers.
The United Mine Workers have had if not a perfect – we live
in a capitalist world – a long and honorable history in its
dealings with Negroes. Both white and black workers need to study its
history closely. Just after the failure of the 1919 strike the miners
in the northern fields of West Virginia, making a drive for
unionization, recognized that their only hope was the success of
their brothers in the southern part of the state, who were then under
heavy attack by the coal-owners. They formed an armed group of 8,000
men, of whom 200 were Negroes, and marched upon the southern
counties. The federal government interfered and stopped the march.
But the unity in action, as a class, of these black and white workers
is comparable to the tremendous class solidarity displayed by the
black and white workers in the Chicago race riots of 1919. There were
lynchings and race riots in 1919. But in that period of labor
upheaval the militant workers of both races were getting closer
together, foreshadowing the mass movement into the CIO, the greatest
step forward the Negroes have made in this country since the
abolition of slavery three- quarters of a century ago.
Negroes Early Played a Role
The UMW, from its beginning in 1890, encouraged Negroes to join.
In northern West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, Negro
miners held offices such as president and secretary, although greatly
outnumbered by whites. Often the solitary Negro member of a local was
president or secretary, this because he could speak and write English
at a time when many of the foreign born could not.
In 1900, in the Flat Top Coal Fields, there were about 18,000
miners, 9,000 white and 9,000 black, all members of the union. In
1920 there were 25,000 Negro members of the UMW, though by 1927 the
number had dropped to 5,000. When Lewis began the drive for the CIO,
the traditions and experience of the UMW in the Negro field were
powerful factors in helping to bring the Negroes in. Today it is
estimated that there are 80,000 Negroes in the UMW. In 1937 George
Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier wrote that in Local 12068
of the United Mine Workers there were only four or five Negroes out
of 68 members and yet all the officers were colored.
After a year and a half of work in the Alabama fields 23,000
miners were organized, about 14,000 of them Negroes. Whites and
Negroes met in mixed meetings. Officers and committees were chosen
equally from both races. The white usually had the more important
places but this was due to the influence of the social system in the
South. It would be easy to show that all has not been perfect in the
relations between the races in the union. But one old Negro miner, a
miner for 33 years, a union member for 25 and secretary of Local
2950, has said that “The United Mine Workers of America has
done more to remove hatred and prejudice in the labor movement and to
restore harmony and good will between man and man than any other
agency in the country.”
At the Columbus convention there were six official bands, one of
which was the Logan County Band, composed of Negro high school boys
and girls from Logan County, West Virginia. Lewis, pursuing his
political maneuvers with Senator Wheeler, included the band among
those who went to meet the Senator at the railway station and
accompanied him to his hotel. Lewis stated that he specially wanted
to honor the band, each member of which was a son or a daughter of a
member of the UMW. Their expenses had been paid by the local unions
in Logan County.
At the convention an important speech was made by William
Dickerson, of Barkly, West Virginia. He asked for support to the
passage of a Federal Mine Inspection bill to prevent such disasters
as took place in Barkley on January 10, when 91 men were lost, 16 of
them Negroes. Dickerson was a member of the rescue squad. Dickerson
is a young man of 25, graduate of West Virginia State College. He
studied business administration but was unable to find any opening.
He went to work in the mines, identified himself with the working
class and was soon elected recording secretary of Local 6420. In this
lodge there are 480 members, of whom 25 only are Negroes.
Why There’s Unity in West Va.
Now what is the underlying cause of all this? Nothing less than
the geographical construction of West Virginia. Yes, the geographical
construction of West Virginia. Before the Civil War the states of
Virginia and West Virginia were one. Eastern Virginia consisted of
the rich flat plains, on which flourished the cotton plantation
system. In the West, the highlands, the population consisted of small
farmers who had no slaves and were oppressed by the rich Bourbons of
the lowlands.
In 1861 the slave owners naturally went with the South. The
farmers of West Virginia saw their chance, refused to go with them,
organized a separate state, and fought with the North. White men all,
they took sides not according to race but on account of their
economic interests and the social and political ideas which flowed
from them. Since that time the two states have had a steadily
divergent history in regard to their attitude to Negroes. The hard
life, the equalizing conditions of labor in the mines, have forged a
unity, one of the most powerful in the never-ceasing battle against
race prejudice in America.
When the fight for the CIO came, the UMW took the lead and has
accomplished work of outstanding importance in the history of labor
and of Negro labor in particular. Their support of the anti-lynching
bill is a great gesture of solidarity to the Negro people. But it is
more than that. It shows us that, along with our fight for the bill
in Congress we must never lose sight of our main aim, the creation of
such conditions as would enable whites and Negroes to work together
in conditions from which will flow social and political equality.
Those conditions are what we call the socialist society.
Top of the page
Last updated on 16 July 2018
|
./articles/Meyer-J.-(C.L.R.-James)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.james-clr.works.1986.11.revhis-interview | <body>
<p class="title">Interview given by CLR JAMES<br>
to Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom & Anna Grimshaw<br>
on Sunday 8th June & 16th November 1986 in South London.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h3> CLR James and British Trotskyism</h3>
<p class="information"> <strong>Source</strong>: http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/jamesint.htm. ‘Text edited by Ted Crawford, Barry Buitekant & Al Richardson, originally published as a pamphlet by Socialist Platform Ltd in 1987. It has been out of print for some time and consequently we decided to republish it on our web site.’ [October 1997]</p>
<hr size="1" width="88%"><br>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: When you first became connected with the British Labour movement in Lancashire did you start off by going to ILP meetings in Nelson, or did you become active after you came to London? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I was in the Labour Party. I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: So there wasn't a period inside the ILP when you were just an ILP member? You more or less joined the Trotskyists and the ILP at the same time? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I joined the Labour Party in London and there I met Trotskyists who were distributing a pamphlet. The Trotskyists decided to go into the ILP and I went with them. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Which Trotskyists were these - the first that you made contact with in London?
</p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: There was Robinson and Margaret Johns and a man living here, the chairman of the party.... </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Bert Matlow? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: There was Matlow, Robinson and Margaret Johns and one or two others. I joined the movement and read Trotsky's books in French and the pamphlets in English. There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time, I said, “<i>Why haven't we a book in English?</i>” and they said it was about time that they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg. In those days people were moving from the Labour Party to the left, but they did not like the Communist Party, because the Communist Party meant Moscow, and so a movement began to develop and I was part of it. There was Groves, there was Dewar, people who were Marxists but not Communist Party. I told Warburg and he thought there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not CP So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months <sup class="anote"><a href="#1">(1)</a></sup>. Now I was very fortunate, because very close to where I lived was the Communist Party bookshop, so I had plenty of material. In 1935 - 1936 Moscow shifted from the “<i>revolutionary</i>” policy to associating with the bourgeoisie. Now the young people today can't understand that at all, In those days when you met people you thought, “<i>C.L.R. James, is he a Trotskyist, CP, or left or right - wing Labour?</i>”. you were a political person and that mattered. Today it doesn't seem to matter, but in those days it did. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: What sort of group meetings did you go to? Were you active in North London? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I was active in Hampstead. I joined the Hampstead group in N.W.3. and we had meetings almost every evening. In the summer we held meetings along the side of the road. We put up something to stand on and we sold books and spoke. I used to go into Hyde Park and I was a speaker there. I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking. There was always a lot of comic laughter about that with which I was well acquainted. Anyway that is what I used to do. Then I started a paper <sup class="anote"><a href="#2">(2)</a></sup>. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Do you remember when you were in the Marxist Group in the ILP how you managed to recruit people like Arthur Ballard? What do you remember about him? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Ballard was a very tall, handsome, striking looking man who was working as a proletarian in industry but who was destined to be an intellectual. He was an intellectual type - in the way he thought, in the way he behaved and in the way he would eat and so on. He was a worker, and a worker in those days was very important in the Trotskyist movement. So here was this gifted intellectual with a proletarian base. He came with us, and became very friendly with me. We worked together and were very closely related not only as politicians but as friends. Then I had to go to America, and when I came back he had joined something or other. He was not a man sufficiently educated to hold the movement together, and let other people see the way it was going. But when he was with us he was tremendously active. He was a man, in spite of all my associations, that I remember with a great deal of affection and respect. When I came back after a number of years in America, he had gone his way and I don't know what has happened to him now. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AG</span>: The last letter you had from him was sometime in 1976. He had seen you on television. He was at that time in Cornwall or Devon. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: What do you remember about Israel Heiger? Heiger was a gifted scientist. Did you remember him? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: He too went along with us but he wasn't interested in theory. He told me he couldn't go into that, but by and large he was with us, and he was important because every now and again he would come in and say, “<i>Here is some money</i>”, and give us ten pounds. He had a good job and his name was very useful to us, and he was very devoted to the movement, he did not go away from the party. His wife did. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AG</span>: She later married Birney. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: When did Birney go back to Canada? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AG</span>: It was at the end of 1936. He became Canada's Poet Laureate. It was in 1936 when he left England because he wrote to say that he did not remember all that business about Abyssinia and the ILP and that he had gone before that. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I joined the Trotskyist movement and I learned Marxism in the Trotskyist movement. So I raised the Abyssinian question <sup class="anote"><a href="#3">(3)</a></sup> and Fenner Brockway wrote an article in the New Leader in which he supported entirely the position that I and some friends held. Then we went to the conference and we said, “<i>Not the League of Nations but workers' sanctions</i>”. We were revolutionary workers. Then Maxton and McGovern said, “<i>No</i>”. They were for League of Nations' sanctions. To say that you were in favour of workers' sanctions was to support militarism. They were pacifists and not militarists. So they wrecked us on that question. We thought we had something. The party, I think it was at Keighley, had gone into the conference with Brockway who had illusions, but McGovern said, “<i>No, we cannot support that, we are pacifists. You say that you are not for the League of Nations but you are for workers' sanctions. That is for the wokers to decide</i>”. Then it came to the final conference; we had the experience of Keighley and we had the ILP members. When I proposed the motion in the course of the conference it met with tremendous applause from the audience. </p>
<p class="indentb">
Brockway came to me and he said “<i>James I want to talk to you, and you as a man ill understand this</i>”. Brockway said that he supported the line I was taking, and he wrote an article in the paper supporting the line I was taking. He said “<i>We can't pass such a motion at conference condemning James Maxton and the party leadership. If you do that the party will fall apart, because you and I and a few more of us cannot form the party. They are the party and there are a lot of people supporting the party financially who won't join the Labour Party or us, but they want the ILP to go ahead. If you were to condemn the party then....</i>”.He then went on to say that what we can do is to oppose the motion and instead propose it for further discussion on the NEC I said that I wanted to make a statement before I spoke and when the time came for the last motion I asked permission to make a statement. I made the statement and then I moved that we accept the resolution but to include this statement of mine. That was how it was done and that was my first experience of big politics. You will find it in the News Chronicle of those days. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Before the conference took place, you had a successful series of meetings up and down the country, when it looked as if the party was going to support your line. Can You remember any of those meetings, because it appears they made quite an impact? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Yes. I went around. They made some impact, above all in Wales. I was welcomed by the Welsh and wherever I went they said they wanted me to, “<i>Speak purely on the question of the party, so James could you speak? On Saturday sometimes and on Sunday night we have a party meeting at which you will speak on general questions</i>”. So that was understood. The local ILP welcomed me speaking against the party leadership and on Sunday there would be general meetings. So I did this everywhere and in Wales I spoke about the colonial question and the need for West Indian self-government. The Welsh audience said, “<i>We understand. We are in the same position in our relation to the British Government</i>”. I hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about. Next they said, “<i>Well, maybe not exactly. They can't do anything to us but we in Wales understand what it is to fight poverty</i>”. When I went to Ireland it was the same thing. In Ireland they had read about me and sent for me to come because I was speaking against the British Government. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AG</span>: Did you meet Nora Connolly when you went there? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Not only did I meet her, but she came here to speak at our meetings and said she had come here with a counter-view. They sent for me, and I had a tremendous meeting with them because I spoke against the British Government. When I had finished speaking a fellow got up to speak, because I was putting forward the Trotskyist position. I did not go and speak about Trotskyism, I said that I do not come here for that purpose, but for a more general meeting. Then this fellow got up. He was a young fellow, a good looking chap of about thirty, and he denounced me In one of the finest speeches I have ever heard or remembered. “<i>Trotsky was this, Trotskyism was that, you come here disturbing everything</i>”, and so on. So I spoke to him after the meeting and said, “<i>Let us go and have a drink somewhere. I have left politics now</i>”. “<i>I am a member of the Communist Party and you are an enemy!</i>” “<i>So you say that I am a Fascist!</i>” I said. “<i>Oh that's all right</i>”, he said and we parted good friends. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: While you were in Ireland, did you meet Paddy Trench who fought in the POUM battalion? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No. I met Nora Connolly O'Brien. She came to London for the ILP I had invited her. I remember that woman, because in those days the British Trotskyite revolutionaries were no more than left wing Labour. So I went to meet her and invited her to come over here and speak, and she did. Coming from the railway station we crossed the river by Parliament, and she said, “<i>You should have done away with that years ago, it is easy from the river</i>”. So I said “<i>Yes, we are revolutionaries, but bombing the Houses of Parliament is useless</i>”. “<i>You're talking of something that you know nothing about!</i>” She instinctively saw the revolutionary possibilities. From this side of the river you could bomb the Houses of Parliament and get away with it. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Do you remember the first occasion on which you met George Padmore? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: In which I met George Padmore <sup class="anote"><a href="#4">(4)</a></sup>? Sorry you are making a mistake, a serious mistake. Padmore's father was a teacher in 1905 and Padmore would come to Arima to meet his people, his uncle, and he and I would go to the river to bathe together. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: That would be before he went to Berlin? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: That was before we left Trinidad. I knew Padmore in Trinidad. As boys we used to live in Arima and go and bathe in the river there. When we grew up, he was far more of a leftist than I was. I was a historian, whilst George had joined the labour movement in Trinidad before I did. Then he went to America, and I lost him. Then I came to England and joined the labour movement, and became a Trotskyist. Then the news came that George Padmore had been expelled from the United States and had come to England. Everyone was taking about “<i>George Padmore</i>” and there was a meeting and “<i>George Padmore</i>” was my old friend, my schoolboy friend from Trinidad! I hadn't had the faintest idea that “<i>George Padmore</i>”, whom I had written about, spoken about and recommended to everybody was the same. That was a peculiar return. That night when we left the meeting we went to eat and finally parted at four o'clock in the morning, speaking the whole time about the revolutionary movement. Now he was a member of the Communist Party and had been a high official, he had lived in Moscow. I was a Trotskyist, but we remained good friends and when he left the Communist Party we joined together and formed the black movement which I had started <sup class="anote"><a href="#5">(5)</a></sup>. I started the black movement. It was very curious. I started the Trotskyist movement in European terms. Then Padmore came in. He said that he was a Marxist, but what about the colonial question? What about Africa? That movement became an African movement, a Marxist African movement. Padmore did that. He educated me and I carried it on. After he died, people began to think that I had brought Marxism to the African movement. It wasn't so. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Did he ever speak to you about his bad experiences with the Communist International, and do you remember the substance of what he said? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: The substance of what he said was that the Communist Party would hope that something would happen and then they would do something. Padmore said that when he went to Moscow, he had been in Germany and when he was in Germany he had been sent to England. They sent a message to say that they wanted a black man in the Communist International in Moscow, and, as he was the right one, they sent him. He went to Moscow, he had nobody, but they made him into a big political leader. On May Day when Stalin, Molotov and the others would be on the platform reviewing the revolutionaries, they would invite him, and he would be up there with them representing the Caribbean, where they had nobody. Then Lenin died and they all went to pieces. He meant that the Communist Party began to change their line and, after the line had changed, they said that they could no longer be as completely for the revolution. “<i>In the Caribbean, in your country and in America the blacks have democracy, so we are not going to attack them. There are some democratic capitalists.</i>” So I said, “<i>You told them there are 'democratic capitalists' in the Caribbean, 'democratic capitalists' in the United States, and 'democratic capitalists' somewhere else?</i>”. He said, “<i>I come from those countries, and they know me for years as the man who had denounced the 'democratic capitalists!'. How do you expect me to go there and write and say that this is democratic capitalism?</i>” They said to him, “<i>Well George, sometimes you have to change the line</i>”. His answer was, “<i>Well boys, this is one line I can't change</i>”. He broke with them and went to England and we joined together and re-formed the Pan-African movement. That was a movement of strength. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: What do you remember when you sent out the journal <i>International African Opinion</i>? Roughly, what was its circulation and what sort of people were gathered around it? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I remember well the journal International African Opinion. Marcus Garvey's first wife and I founded the thing. Was the date 1937? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Yes. About then. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I am being cautious here, because I haven't got documents. As I remember it, there was nobody concerned about the colonial movement in Western politics. Nevertheless something was happening. Mussolini had attacked Ethiopia and Mrs Garvey and I said that we were openly to oppose that. We felt that there ought to be an opposition, and we published the opposition. It is difficult to be precise, but I remember when at a certain stage we were writing we said, “<i>Why is it only Ethiopia? We are against the whole imperialist domination, African and everywhere else</i>”, and we wrote it in. I remember writing that, as no-one was talking about it, and to my astonishment within thirty years there were forty new African states. I have said that before, I think. That is one of the great experiences of my life. I want to emphasise, I hadn't the faintest idea that would happen and when that happened I was astonished. We went into it and built it up. Others came in and said “<i>You want this international movement, this, that or the other</i>”. When we began we had no idea of going any further. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Did you attempt to get your journal into the colonial world by smuggling it in or other ways? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: We tried all ways. We couldn't get it in normally, because many of those colonial governments, and those that came in afterwards, were quite hostile to us. Others, if not hostile were sympathetic that James was writing books that brought in the colonial people, but were nevertheless Marxist, Trotskyist. We had one or two people who worked on the waterfront. They gave the pamphlets to seamen and people in boats. In that way it went around. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AG</span>: Was it people like Chris Jones? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Chris Jones was a very fine comrade. Chris would get himself into a temper and explode and make a revolution at the back of the hall. But he was able to get the pamphlets and make contact and people would send it around. We got it around, to my astonishment and delight. After all, we were but a few intellectuals in London, and could not have done much. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: George Padmore, whilst he was in Moscow, built up a tremendous range of contacts. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Yes, that is quite right. Padmore was quite a notable. When he split with Moscow, the platform that he had built up, went with Padmore. In other words, as happens quite often in the early stages of the movement, people follow a political personality and somebody whom they can recognise. I have to say also that Padmore and I were leaders of the black movement, though I was outside as a Marxist, Trotskyist. They came and followed James and Padmore, although I was quite sure that there was a large percentage of Padmore and a small percentage of James. They came in because of Padmore. He got on well with them. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Some of those you were working with at the time, became very important later, in the politics of independent Africa. Were you able to influence any of them in a particularly Trotskyist direction, and do you remember any of the discussions you had with them? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No. But I can tell you this. I am very conscious that most of the African leaders of the independence movement, who were in Europe, orientated naturally towards the Marxist movement which said we are for freedom in the colonies. We never had too much power but I wrote one or two pamphlets and books in which it was very clear. Later I was often invited to come and speak on the Marxist movement in Africa. It was in a very small way influenced by the Stalinists. Normally they would have dominated it, but those leaders who had worked in London hadn't become Trotskyists - but we had so educated them that Stalinism didn't do much to them. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Did you attempt to have conferences with them and try to get them to discuss together the idea of a United Africa, or anything like that? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense. That was quite obvious. It was not a practical proposition. East Africa was one way, West Africa another and Central a third way. On the coast there were different tongues, and away from the coast you had entirely different African villages and styles. So whilst in every resolution, or at the end, you spoke of Africa united at every important part, you knew it wasn't being realistic. It was a general vision, and one that would become an ideal. I once spoke, and it was very effective, and said that the unity of Africa was closer, theoretically speaking, than the unity of Europe for this reason, that th African states were not organically settled as were Britain, France, Germany. There were large tribal organisations but they didn't have the barriers between them that the European states had. But the policy shouldn't be put forward when people objected. But that was all. There were one or two fanatics who talked about it, but they were so fanatical. There is one of them that I have in mind, and wouldn't mention his name, although we would talk with him about it. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Do you remember any of the debates in which you managed to get the Stalinists to debate with you at the time of the Moscow trials? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: We had debates in London and I debated with them, and there was not only a debate, but there was one particular moment in which there were a number of people on the platform with Kingsley Martin and the rest of them. I challenged them from the hall and then I stood up. There was a man called Gerry Bradley, Gerry was a great fighter, irrespective of the number of policemen. Gerry was my good friend, he said to me, “<i>James, there will be the two of us ....</i>” and we went into the meeting together. He stood up and said, “<i>Mr Chairman, Comrade James here has been standing up for the past half hour and wants to be able to say a few words....</i>”. The Communist Party did not want to give me the democracy, but they were afraid that Gerry would break up their meeting. Then Gerry turned to me and said, “<i>Mr James, come with me</i>” and led me up to the platform. The audience listened, and I put the case for Trotskyism, and it wrecked their meeting. The famous one was when they held a meeting and I came there at nine o'clock. They were speaking when I came in. They knew what was up and the chairman spoke for ten minutes and said that they had a full discussion of the question and must draw the meeting to a close. I used to go to their meetings and take only two people with me and their meetings would break up, because I had the Stalinist statements in my pocket and I would have a lot of copies and give the chaps copies and say “<i>Now have a read....</i>”. “<i>That is not so, but you yourselves have said that it is impossible for the bourgeoisie ever to meet him</i>”, and they would say, “<i>No, we have not said it</i>”. I would say, “<i>You did say it</i>” and again they would say "<i>No</i>”. So I would say, “<i>Wait a bit</i>” and go and get the pamphlet and show them. I used to do that here. I used to speak in Britain, and made it a habit to wreck the Stalinist meetings. </p>
<p class="indentb">
There was a black man who had joined the CP He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings but in America if you carry on like that they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists. In New York and Massachusetts, the government would not bother with you, but the Stalinists in those days were the enemy. The bourgeoisie didn't bother with us, as we were too small. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Do you remember when you addressed a packed public meeting, when Jock Milligan was in the chair? Do you recall what you said there? It was on the Moscow trials and it was an enormous meeting. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Where was that? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: It was in London. I'm not sure whether it was in the Memorial Hall in Farringdon or the Holborn Hall. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I refer to it in World Revolution? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: No. A friend of mine was in the audience and he remembers Jock Milligan and you getting a bigger audience than anyone could have dreamed of. Everybody was standing at the side of the stage fearful about beginning, so what happened apparently, Jock got hold of a pile of books, put them under his arm and said, “<i>Come on!</i>”. That was the memory that my friend Bert Atkinson had. You wouldn't remember him. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I remember the meeting very well, because there was a tremendous contrast between that meeting and meetings we held on Trotskyism, but on the Moscow Trials a lot of Communist Party members came and listened to what we had to say. It was a crisis for them, but soon afterwards I went to the United States in November 1938. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Could you double back a little, because you have covered a lot of ground. Do you remember when you went to Paris to discuss the question whether you were to stay in the 1.L.P., or form a separate organisation, or join the Labour Party? It was called the “<i>Geneva Conference</i>”, but it was not held in Geneva, but in Paris. Do you remember when you went there? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Yes. I remember, Harber was there. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Harber was there. Do you remember the other English representative? Was it Arthur Ballard? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No it was not Ballard. He was a close personal friend of mine. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Apparently there was another English representative according to the minutes. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I am not sure now who the other delegate was. It could have been Starkey Jackson. I must say that as far as I remember it, I and Harber made a good speech. We were from the British Labour movement and I was aware that another fellow had come from Austria. He had come from the revolutionary movement, but we had not. I felt that very strongly in the conference. I would say a few words and speak, as I could speak in French, but I was aware that what was happening in Britain was nothing. The French themselves were in a bit of trouble. They were being persecuted. Some of the boys came from Germany, and even one or two from Russia. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: At the conference? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Yes, at the conference. They had been in Europe, and they came in secretly at the conference. They didn't have much to say, but I remember them sitting there, and I spoke with them. It took some time, they smiled and said, “<i>Yes</i>”. But I know now that they were saying, “<i>You are nothing but left wing Labour democrats</i>”. Immediately after that conference the war came, and those boys from Belgium were shot. After the war, when we went to Belgium, we found that they had all been shot. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Who was the Belgian delegate who supported you? In the minutes it mentions that you got support from the Belgian delegate, but not from the others. Do you remember who that was? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: He was a working man. He was not an intellectual. He was about 35 to 40, and he was very friendly to us. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Do you remember his name? Was it Vereeken? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No. Vereeken was an old fashioned Trotskyist. If I were to see him again I would remember him. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: You had some differences earlier with the Trotskyist movement around 1936-1937. According to the minutes you used to receive some of the material from Field's group and Weisbord. You had some criticism about Trotsky's theory about the development of European history at that time which is shown in your World Revolution. Can you explain in full the way you were thinking at that time and how you were developing those differences about 1937-38 when you wrote World Revolution? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I will tell you something which will astonish you. When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, “<i>When we read your book <b>World Revolution</b> we said that it won't be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement</i>”. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told “<i>James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go</i>”. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Who was it that said that? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Friends of mine who were party members. They said that when they read that (they had long experience) and they weren't surprised. I broke with the Trotskyist movement practically alone' and said “<i>No!</i>” They said “<i>What about the whole International?</i>” and I said “<i>I don't care!</i>”. In those days I wasn't politically wise. If I had been, I would have waited, but there was nothing wrong, though I said “<i>No!</i>” It is not a wrong view to be against the defence of Russia, but at the same time for Trotsky. I said that if you are against the defence of Russia that Trotsky was advocating you are breaking not with Trotskyism but with the defence of Russia. Freddie Forest <sup class="anote"><a href="#6">(6)</a></sup> and I worked it out, and then I wrote the pamphlet. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Can you tell me what else you remember about the founding conference of the Fourth International? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I can remember that conference for one reason. We were against the Trotskyist position on the defence of the USSR. In the United States in particular, when the Moscow Trials took place there was a movement against the Fourth International, but the Russian question was the reason. I was in the United States, that was my last trip, and I told them, “<i>I have joined you, but I have not joined because I agree with you on the Russian position</i>”. They said, “<i>You cannot have an international which is all united with Trotsky, but opposed to Trotsky on the Russian question. It means you are opposed to Trotskyism</i>”. Freddie Forest and I set out like Christopher Colombus. We had another boy with us who had some money and he supported us with some finance. We hadn't a position, but she said, and we agreed, we were going to find out why it is that the Trotskyist position seemed to be wrong on the Russian question in general. After a year or two we came out with a full position in which we attacked Trotskyism from beginning to end. We started looking for the answer in Capital Volume I and the Communist Manifesto. That pamphlet we published <sup class="anote"><a href="#7">(7)</a></sup>. After, we started to study the question to find out why in the Trotskyist movement we were against on the Russian question but in agreement on other issues. Trotsky died in 1940. I am positive if he had been alive he would have seen what we were talking about. No one mentioned it but they weren't able to argue against it. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: What other actual memories do you have of the founding conference in Paris? Can you remember who was there and what they talked about? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: What I do remember was some Polish comrades who came and took the position that we were advancing. We did not advance it too strongly when we came to Europe and met these comrades. Also for the first time, I believe, some comrades from the United States talked about it. We put forward our position and had it copied into the minutes, but we didn't press the issue. The Polish comrades told us “<i>'We are not going to vote for you, because we did not come here to vote, we came from Poland where there are big problems. The Communist Party there had a split, we split from them and now we have split from the split. So we haven't come here to vote against the conference, but we are sympathetic to you, James. You have the line, although we are not supporting it</i>”, Nevertheless we had a powerful influence on that conference but a year or two afterwards the whole movement threw it away. </p>
<p class="indentb">
Because Trotsky kept on insisting that you had to support the Moscow regime since the Moscow bureaucracy is just a bureaucracy, a labour bureaucracy. When the war came those bureaucracies that supported it would go. He said that this is what happened to Lenin with the Second International when the war came, and the Third emerged. I said, “<i>No, you are wrong, because the bureaucracy that Lenin fought against was a labour bureaucracy, bureaucracy in the labour movement, but in Moscow they are not labour bureaucracy, they are a state power, which the war will build up and make stronger than ever. This will increase their domination over the rest of the workers</i>”. They could not answer me at all. When the war came this is what happened. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: That is another interesting question. From the way I see the evidence you would have had a greater effect in the struggle against imperialism especially during the war and towards the end if you had remained exactly where you were in Britain co-operating with Padmore and organising and training this movement. What did you yourself think about this, when the IS decided to send you to the USA? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I was invited to the United States and I went there at the end of 1938 and started to organise the movement. We began to have something. As the war continued I did not know what to do so I discussed with them. Do you know Freddie Forest? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Yes. Raya Dunayevskaya. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: She had a tremendous influence on me. If it hadn't been for Raya Dunayevskaya I would have come back to Britain, where I had a movement, where I had people, where I had a paper and where was known, because I was writing cricket for the <i>Manchester Guardian</i>. So I thought that I ought to go back to where the boys were speaking against the war. But Raya Dunayevskaya had come to the conclusion that I was the man to remain in the United States, a black man who was automatically the leader of the black movement, but whose education was such that he could be head of the Trotskyist movement as a whole. I was in doubt whether to go or stay. Raya was insistent that I stay, and then I said that I had no money to live on she said, “<i>Don't worry about money</i>”. For months she got money for me. She had friend and was well established, and that is why I stayed in the United States. We finally split in 1955, but as a role in my history, for staying in the United States (and I am glad I did) she did it and that should be said. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: So when you first went to the United States it wasn't considered then to be a permanent thing? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No. I went to the United States, but with the intention of coming back. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: That is very interesting because some of your supporters here who later went into the Revolutionary Workers' League, like Cliff Stanton, Ben Elsbury, Sid Frost - those people, considered that the reason that you had been sent to the United States was because when they invited all the groups to unite In August 1938, because of their different origins, they sent you to the United States to give Harber a free run in the group that was to follow. Some were for entry work and others were for open work. So you say that was not true, but that was what a lot of your followers have been saying in this country. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No. It was not true. They were wanting me to do work. I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation. I used to speak on Trotskyism, but they couldn't hold me because I hadn't followed Trotsky. I had read all the material. I remembered the night I joined the Trotskyist movement there were some people from Oxford and Cambridge who were joining the same night, but they brought some criticism to the official Trotskyists and they couldn't answer. So on the same night I joined I had to speak on behalf of Trotskyism. I went to America and had a great deal to do with the foundation of the movement there. The blacks in America wanted me to form a black movement and I said, “<i>No!</i>”, that I was not going to do that. I was very effective, and the American Government said that I had overstayed my time there and must go. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CC</span>: Is there any truth in the statement that Trotsky and James supported a black state in America <sup class="anote"><a href="#8">(8)</a></sup>? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No! No! No! We discussed in some detail plans to help create and build an independent black organisation in the United States. That we did, but we were thinking of a political grouping that would advocate the cause of the blacks. But this was taken up by people to mean that we wanted to build a little black section of the United States - a black Mississippi! There were people in the United States doing that who were claiming that a part of Mississippi should be a black state, but the Marxist movement had nothing to do with that - absolutely nothing! But our enemies, or one of two of them, took it up when we said, “<i>an independent black organisation</i>”. I am sure that if you read the resolution you will see that it makes clear that it was a political organisation fighting for the position of rights in general and the black people in particular. That was misinterpreted to mean something else, but nobody took It seriously, although we had a lot of trouble with it. Nobody thinks so today? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: I think that is the way some people are interpreting it. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Well, you can tell them that it isn't so, and that it never was so. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AG</span>: Why were the CP pushing the line of an independent black state? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: The CP was pushing it - that seems to be one of the mysteries of the revolutionary movement. One or two people believe that Stalin, who was notoriously backward and ignorant of international politics, thought so, and said so, and the rest followed. So for years they went along with this thing, which struck great blows against Marxism in the United States. It was such an absurdity that all Marxists were discredited by it. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: In the transcript of your discussions with Trotsky in 1939 I notice at one point you mention the groups in Britain. You describe roughly what they are and you mention the Workers' International League and say that they were very active in the work they did. There did not appear to be any come-back from Trotsky. Was he interested at all in what you said, because there is nothing in his replies? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: No. I wouldn't be too concerned about that. People were coming from Britain, from France, from Norway, some from America and other places. I used to wonder how he managed to take it in and hold it in his head and express opinions on complicated matter in far-away countries which he knew nothing about. I stayed about a week. We had a general discussion and then Trotsky and I had a separate discussion that I had asked him for. That has been published. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Do you remember any of the other Trotskyists who were there at the same time, from other countries? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: There were two men from Poland and they listened to the discussion. They sharply disagreed with the attitude we were taking to the Trotskyist movement outside of Western Europe, but they didn't intervene and say so. I have to be careful here, but their attitude, when the thing was explained to them in their language, was because we were introducing the idea of differences that were troubling us into those movements. I think that was the problem, and their concept was, that you don't know the kind of thing it is to have a Trotskyist movement inside a Stalinist party regime. We haven't time to argue all this, and there was one particular case where the Stalinists and Trotskyists formed a United Front, (I think it was in Vietnam) against the dominant party. The idea of a United Front with the Trotskyists elsewhere would have been impossible. At the time I was very much struck by what today I can see more clearly than ever. For us in Western Europe and in France the differences in the labour movement were matters of discussion, pamphlets, meetings. For them over there, there was none of that. It was a question of life and death, what your attitude was to the existing regimes and to the Communist Party. Because if you were at fault with the Communist Party they came to wipe you away. That was the struggle against the authoritarian state. You don't only fight them with words, you had a murderous fight between sections of the new movement. That is what I remember. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: After you had been in the United states for a while the Trotskyist movement there split and you supported, or rather went with, the group led by Max Shachtman, but you had your own particular point of view. What do you remember of the circumstances in which you parted from the group led by Cannon? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: Cannon was an Irishman of a similar type and with the qualities that distinguished the Irish in the Democratic Party. Physically he looked like them, and he had this capacity for two things, propaganda speeches to build up the movement, and intricate organisation. As for the refinements of political policy he wasn't into that. Shachtman was the Jewish Boy, well-educated in urban universities, who did that, but Cannon was a very gifted man. He ran the party, and people were very concerned that they did not oppose him as secretary. There was much conflict inside the party, and then the Moscow split took place. Whereupon the party split and Shachtman went, and I went with Shachtman. The Shachtmanites said at the time, “<i>Look, you are splitting!</i>” but I said, “<i>I am not splitting with you</i>”. They split on the Russian question and I had differences with them, and this is still something on which I fancy that I was right. I said that you don't split a party on the Russian question, because to split is a tremendous thing in our movement. You are cast out, and they say that you are an enemy of the labour movement. This also means that you are opposed to them in a manner in which you do not know yet. Freddie Forest and I stated that that was our position, but in what way we differed from them apart from the Russian question we didn't know. So we decided to go and find out and make that public. We set out to study Marxism to find out
why we split with them on the Russian question and we found we came out with new and different policies. That was quite a theoretical activity and the results were published. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: Can you give us some details on the way you worked on the philosophy part that came out in your Notes on Dialectics, on the method you used to work out some of those ideas? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: There were three of us, two to begin with. Firstly there was Freddie Forest, and later Grace Lee joined us. Grace Lee had her doctorate from the university in philosophy. That means that she was a philosophy graduate, which meant that all the elements of the great philosophers she understood, but that was not all. There was another man, a short Greek-looking fellow, a white man named Johnny Zupern. He was not educated, he was a worker, but that fellow used to read the philosophical documents and not only understand, which many didn't, but he understood them and expounded and developed them in a manner in which some of us, who were philosophically trained, couldn't. He left us completely astounded. So we hired him and Raya, who knew what was done In Russian. Russian was the language native to her. She translated all that Lenin had said on philosophy. Grace Lee had all the Leninist writings, and the Marxist ones in German. I was familiar with all the writings in French. So we formed a rather formidable organisation, and we covered everything on Marxist philosophy. We were not going to say what Marx and Engels might say about philosophy, or Hegel. Everybody used to say that Engels had said this or that about Hegel. I said, “<i>None of that, we are going to find out what Hegel said and deal with it</i>”. We produced work which, to this day, I find invaluable. Many years later a Frenchman wrote, and he didn't write badly, but in my opinion he didn't write particularly well either, and he raised some problems. We are the only ones who had seriously gone into the philosophical analysis in terms of the doctrines of Hegel and German philosophy. Most of the Trotskyists made noises but left it. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: So in fact quite a long period of discussion had gone on before you actually wrote the document. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: I remember talking to Forest and saying, “<i>Well I don't want to say it, but we must go into it</i>”, and she said, “<i>All right, I started it and I will finish it on what Lenin said about Hegel</i>”. This was translated in Europe, and we not only translated but published. We had two translations. Grace Lee translated it from the German, but Freddie Forest translated it from the Russian, and so we had the two translations. I don't want to go into it now, but I was quite impressed. We had an organisation here. Nobody has done these translations, and it later became one of the official documents, but we had done it and I was very much impressed, because I knew what it meant. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: When you went back with the SWP in 1947, how well were you able to work there? Was there friction a lot of the time? What was the sort of set-up between you? Because you did maintain your own independent views. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: We went back in 1947 and left when? </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">AR</span>: 1949 or 1950 as far as I can tell. </p>
<p class="indent-list">
<span class="term">CLR J</span>: They were expecting that we would come in, thinking that the people who were with the Johnson/Forest tendency, having joined their party, not because of me but because we had a clear doctrinal statement would join them, but we went on and trained them in that way. Not one of them left, and Cannon and company were very disappointed, because they said, “<i>They will come in with Johnson and Forest, but as time goes on we will work on them, and eventually they will join the majority</i>”. We lost nobody, and when the time came for us to leave we cleared out. I remember Cannon telling people “<i>What I don't understand is that not one of these people joined our movement</i>”. He also said that, “<i>They don't create any disturbances, they don't keep up an agitation for their policies, they are very good party members. but they won't join</i>”. That meant a great deal. </p>
<p class="indentb">
Now when I had to leave they were not able to go on. This was partly my fault. I tried to keep leading the party from London, but if I had stayed in the United States we would have had an organisation, because they were good people, trained and full of ability, devoted to the movement. When I left, I told them who should be the leader, and that was blunder number one. That was followed by blunders numbers two, three, four and five. Complete blunder! Actually I should have left them alone, but I began by saying Raya should be leader. Raya didn't fight it, although she didn't want to be particularly, but she went along. She couldn't lead, and it fell apart. Even today people will tell you that that was a movement not only for the people who were in it, although they went their different ways. They all became important leaders In the organisations in which they joined. They were trained, and disciplined, and had firm Marxist foundations. One thing I said, that before you join us you will have to do some work and present a piece in writing. You will have to take a piece of Marxist writing, expound it and get it published, even if it has to be published by us, otherwise you cannot become a member of our party. They all did that. </p>
<hr class="end">
<h2>Editorial Note.</h2>
<p class="fst">
‘The interview was one of a substantial collection of interviews with veterans of the Trotskyist movement, assembled for our archives by Al Richardson and Sam Bornstein in the course of researching the history of the movement. <br>
‘Some readers will find many of the names unfamiliar, and we hope to be able to provide more extensive explanatory notes in the future. We did not want to delay the appearance of this document until that was possible however. Readers who want to inquire further into any of the individuals mentioned here will find references to most of them in Bornstein & Richardson's 3 volumes on the history of Trotskyism in Britain.’ [October 1997] </p>
<p class="fst">
The footnotes are insertions by the editors, in consultation with CLRJ, to clarify aspects of this interview. </p>
<p class="fst">
<a name="1"></a><span class="term">1.</span> <i>World Revolution</i> 1937, recently republished by <i>Humanities Press</i>, with a new introduction by Al Richardson</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="2"></a>
<span class="term">2.</span> Fight 1936 - 38</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="3"></a>
<span class="term">3.</span> 1935/6</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="4"></a>
<span class="term">4.</span> Padmore was a party name. His name in Arima was Malcolm Nurse and the fathers of both boys were teachers. Arima is a small town 15 miles from Port of Spain.</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="5"></a>
<span class="term">5.</span> International African Friends of Ethiopia, later it became the International African Service Bureau.</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="6"></a>
<span class="term">6.</span> This was the pseudonym for Raya Dunayevskaya.</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="7"></a>
<span class="term">7.</span> State Capitalism & World Revolution, 1950</p>
<p class="fst"><a name="8"></a>
<span class="term">8.</span> At this point CLRJ was handed the following cutting which he read: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
‘Sir <br>
‘The article by Clive Davis on CLR James (Guardian February 17) contained misleading information on James's meeting with Leon Trotsky In Mexico. <br>
‘The meeting was called to discuss the question of black liberation in the United States. As transcripts of these discussions show there was a large measure of agreement amongst those involved. The participants agreed on the right of United States blacks to self determination, up to and including the right to form their own state if they wished. They also discussed In some detail plans to create and build an independent black organisation in the United States. <br>
‘After these discussions CLR James returned to the US and drafted a resolution on black liberation for the Socialist Workers Party - the US section of the Trotskyist International. The resolution was overwhelmingly accepted by an SWP Congress. <br>
‘Transcripts of these extremely interesting discussions between James, Trotsky and others can be found in the book <i>Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-determination</i> published by Pathfinder Press. </p>
<p class="quoteb">
yours <br>
<i>Ceri Evans,<br>
Pontypridd, <br>
Mid-Glam.</i><br>
Guardian 21st February 1986’. </p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../../index.htm">C L R James Internet Archive</a></p>
</body> |
Interview given by CLR JAMES
to Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom & Anna Grimshaw
on Sunday 8th June & 16th November 1986 in South London.
CLR James and British Trotskyism
Source: http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/jamesint.htm. ‘Text edited by Ted Crawford, Barry Buitekant & Al Richardson, originally published as a pamphlet by Socialist Platform Ltd in 1987. It has been out of print for some time and consequently we decided to republish it on our web site.’ [October 1997]
AR: When you first became connected with the British Labour movement in Lancashire did you start off by going to ILP meetings in Nelson, or did you become active after you came to London?
CLR J: I was in the Labour Party. I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.
AR: So there wasn't a period inside the ILP when you were just an ILP member? You more or less joined the Trotskyists and the ILP at the same time?
CLR J: I joined the Labour Party in London and there I met Trotskyists who were distributing a pamphlet. The Trotskyists decided to go into the ILP and I went with them.
AR: Which Trotskyists were these - the first that you made contact with in London?
CLR J: There was Robinson and Margaret Johns and a man living here, the chairman of the party....
AR: Bert Matlow?
CLR J: There was Matlow, Robinson and Margaret Johns and one or two others. I joined the movement and read Trotsky's books in French and the pamphlets in English. There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time, I said, “Why haven't we a book in English?” and they said it was about time that they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg. In those days people were moving from the Labour Party to the left, but they did not like the Communist Party, because the Communist Party meant Moscow, and so a movement began to develop and I was part of it. There was Groves, there was Dewar, people who were Marxists but not Communist Party. I told Warburg and he thought there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not CP So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months (1). Now I was very fortunate, because very close to where I lived was the Communist Party bookshop, so I had plenty of material. In 1935 - 1936 Moscow shifted from the “revolutionary” policy to associating with the bourgeoisie. Now the young people today can't understand that at all, In those days when you met people you thought, “C.L.R. James, is he a Trotskyist, CP, or left or right - wing Labour?”. you were a political person and that mattered. Today it doesn't seem to matter, but in those days it did.
AR: What sort of group meetings did you go to? Were you active in North London?
CLR J: I was active in Hampstead. I joined the Hampstead group in N.W.3. and we had meetings almost every evening. In the summer we held meetings along the side of the road. We put up something to stand on and we sold books and spoke. I used to go into Hyde Park and I was a speaker there. I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking. There was always a lot of comic laughter about that with which I was well acquainted. Anyway that is what I used to do. Then I started a paper (2).
AR: Do you remember when you were in the Marxist Group in the ILP how you managed to recruit people like Arthur Ballard? What do you remember about him?
CLR J: Ballard was a very tall, handsome, striking looking man who was working as a proletarian in industry but who was destined to be an intellectual. He was an intellectual type - in the way he thought, in the way he behaved and in the way he would eat and so on. He was a worker, and a worker in those days was very important in the Trotskyist movement. So here was this gifted intellectual with a proletarian base. He came with us, and became very friendly with me. We worked together and were very closely related not only as politicians but as friends. Then I had to go to America, and when I came back he had joined something or other. He was not a man sufficiently educated to hold the movement together, and let other people see the way it was going. But when he was with us he was tremendously active. He was a man, in spite of all my associations, that I remember with a great deal of affection and respect. When I came back after a number of years in America, he had gone his way and I don't know what has happened to him now.
AG: The last letter you had from him was sometime in 1976. He had seen you on television. He was at that time in Cornwall or Devon.
AR: What do you remember about Israel Heiger? Heiger was a gifted scientist. Did you remember him?
CLR J: He too went along with us but he wasn't interested in theory. He told me he couldn't go into that, but by and large he was with us, and he was important because every now and again he would come in and say, “Here is some money”, and give us ten pounds. He had a good job and his name was very useful to us, and he was very devoted to the movement, he did not go away from the party. His wife did.
AG: She later married Birney.
AR: When did Birney go back to Canada?
AG: It was at the end of 1936. He became Canada's Poet Laureate. It was in 1936 when he left England because he wrote to say that he did not remember all that business about Abyssinia and the ILP and that he had gone before that.
CLR J: I joined the Trotskyist movement and I learned Marxism in the Trotskyist movement. So I raised the Abyssinian question (3) and Fenner Brockway wrote an article in the New Leader in which he supported entirely the position that I and some friends held. Then we went to the conference and we said, “Not the League of Nations but workers' sanctions”. We were revolutionary workers. Then Maxton and McGovern said, “No”. They were for League of Nations' sanctions. To say that you were in favour of workers' sanctions was to support militarism. They were pacifists and not militarists. So they wrecked us on that question. We thought we had something. The party, I think it was at Keighley, had gone into the conference with Brockway who had illusions, but McGovern said, “No, we cannot support that, we are pacifists. You say that you are not for the League of Nations but you are for workers' sanctions. That is for the wokers to decide”. Then it came to the final conference; we had the experience of Keighley and we had the ILP members. When I proposed the motion in the course of the conference it met with tremendous applause from the audience.
Brockway came to me and he said “James I want to talk to you, and you as a man ill understand this”. Brockway said that he supported the line I was taking, and he wrote an article in the paper supporting the line I was taking. He said “We can't pass such a motion at conference condemning James Maxton and the party leadership. If you do that the party will fall apart, because you and I and a few more of us cannot form the party. They are the party and there are a lot of people supporting the party financially who won't join the Labour Party or us, but they want the ILP to go ahead. If you were to condemn the party then....”.He then went on to say that what we can do is to oppose the motion and instead propose it for further discussion on the NEC I said that I wanted to make a statement before I spoke and when the time came for the last motion I asked permission to make a statement. I made the statement and then I moved that we accept the resolution but to include this statement of mine. That was how it was done and that was my first experience of big politics. You will find it in the News Chronicle of those days.
AR: Before the conference took place, you had a successful series of meetings up and down the country, when it looked as if the party was going to support your line. Can You remember any of those meetings, because it appears they made quite an impact?
CLR J: Yes. I went around. They made some impact, above all in Wales. I was welcomed by the Welsh and wherever I went they said they wanted me to, “Speak purely on the question of the party, so James could you speak? On Saturday sometimes and on Sunday night we have a party meeting at which you will speak on general questions”. So that was understood. The local ILP welcomed me speaking against the party leadership and on Sunday there would be general meetings. So I did this everywhere and in Wales I spoke about the colonial question and the need for West Indian self-government. The Welsh audience said, “We understand. We are in the same position in our relation to the British Government”. I hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about. Next they said, “Well, maybe not exactly. They can't do anything to us but we in Wales understand what it is to fight poverty”. When I went to Ireland it was the same thing. In Ireland they had read about me and sent for me to come because I was speaking against the British Government.
AG: Did you meet Nora Connolly when you went there?
CLR J: Not only did I meet her, but she came here to speak at our meetings and said she had come here with a counter-view. They sent for me, and I had a tremendous meeting with them because I spoke against the British Government. When I had finished speaking a fellow got up to speak, because I was putting forward the Trotskyist position. I did not go and speak about Trotskyism, I said that I do not come here for that purpose, but for a more general meeting. Then this fellow got up. He was a young fellow, a good looking chap of about thirty, and he denounced me In one of the finest speeches I have ever heard or remembered. “Trotsky was this, Trotskyism was that, you come here disturbing everything”, and so on. So I spoke to him after the meeting and said, “Let us go and have a drink somewhere. I have left politics now”. “I am a member of the Communist Party and you are an enemy!” “So you say that I am a Fascist!” I said. “Oh that's all right”, he said and we parted good friends.
AR: While you were in Ireland, did you meet Paddy Trench who fought in the POUM battalion?
CLR J: No. I met Nora Connolly O'Brien. She came to London for the ILP I had invited her. I remember that woman, because in those days the British Trotskyite revolutionaries were no more than left wing Labour. So I went to meet her and invited her to come over here and speak, and she did. Coming from the railway station we crossed the river by Parliament, and she said, “You should have done away with that years ago, it is easy from the river”. So I said “Yes, we are revolutionaries, but bombing the Houses of Parliament is useless”. “You're talking of something that you know nothing about!” She instinctively saw the revolutionary possibilities. From this side of the river you could bomb the Houses of Parliament and get away with it.
AR: Do you remember the first occasion on which you met George Padmore?
CLR J: In which I met George Padmore (4)? Sorry you are making a mistake, a serious mistake. Padmore's father was a teacher in 1905 and Padmore would come to Arima to meet his people, his uncle, and he and I would go to the river to bathe together.
AR: That would be before he went to Berlin?
CLR J: That was before we left Trinidad. I knew Padmore in Trinidad. As boys we used to live in Arima and go and bathe in the river there. When we grew up, he was far more of a leftist than I was. I was a historian, whilst George had joined the labour movement in Trinidad before I did. Then he went to America, and I lost him. Then I came to England and joined the labour movement, and became a Trotskyist. Then the news came that George Padmore had been expelled from the United States and had come to England. Everyone was taking about “George Padmore” and there was a meeting and “George Padmore” was my old friend, my schoolboy friend from Trinidad! I hadn't had the faintest idea that “George Padmore”, whom I had written about, spoken about and recommended to everybody was the same. That was a peculiar return. That night when we left the meeting we went to eat and finally parted at four o'clock in the morning, speaking the whole time about the revolutionary movement. Now he was a member of the Communist Party and had been a high official, he had lived in Moscow. I was a Trotskyist, but we remained good friends and when he left the Communist Party we joined together and formed the black movement which I had started (5). I started the black movement. It was very curious. I started the Trotskyist movement in European terms. Then Padmore came in. He said that he was a Marxist, but what about the colonial question? What about Africa? That movement became an African movement, a Marxist African movement. Padmore did that. He educated me and I carried it on. After he died, people began to think that I had brought Marxism to the African movement. It wasn't so.
AR: Did he ever speak to you about his bad experiences with the Communist International, and do you remember the substance of what he said?
CLR J: The substance of what he said was that the Communist Party would hope that something would happen and then they would do something. Padmore said that when he went to Moscow, he had been in Germany and when he was in Germany he had been sent to England. They sent a message to say that they wanted a black man in the Communist International in Moscow, and, as he was the right one, they sent him. He went to Moscow, he had nobody, but they made him into a big political leader. On May Day when Stalin, Molotov and the others would be on the platform reviewing the revolutionaries, they would invite him, and he would be up there with them representing the Caribbean, where they had nobody. Then Lenin died and they all went to pieces. He meant that the Communist Party began to change their line and, after the line had changed, they said that they could no longer be as completely for the revolution. “In the Caribbean, in your country and in America the blacks have democracy, so we are not going to attack them. There are some democratic capitalists.” So I said, “You told them there are 'democratic capitalists' in the Caribbean, 'democratic capitalists' in the United States, and 'democratic capitalists' somewhere else?”. He said, “I come from those countries, and they know me for years as the man who had denounced the 'democratic capitalists!'. How do you expect me to go there and write and say that this is democratic capitalism?” They said to him, “Well George, sometimes you have to change the line”. His answer was, “Well boys, this is one line I can't change”. He broke with them and went to England and we joined together and re-formed the Pan-African movement. That was a movement of strength.
AR: What do you remember when you sent out the journal International African Opinion? Roughly, what was its circulation and what sort of people were gathered around it?
CLR J: I remember well the journal International African Opinion. Marcus Garvey's first wife and I founded the thing. Was the date 1937?
AR: Yes. About then.
CLR J: I am being cautious here, because I haven't got documents. As I remember it, there was nobody concerned about the colonial movement in Western politics. Nevertheless something was happening. Mussolini had attacked Ethiopia and Mrs Garvey and I said that we were openly to oppose that. We felt that there ought to be an opposition, and we published the opposition. It is difficult to be precise, but I remember when at a certain stage we were writing we said, “Why is it only Ethiopia? We are against the whole imperialist domination, African and everywhere else”, and we wrote it in. I remember writing that, as no-one was talking about it, and to my astonishment within thirty years there were forty new African states. I have said that before, I think. That is one of the great experiences of my life. I want to emphasise, I hadn't the faintest idea that would happen and when that happened I was astonished. We went into it and built it up. Others came in and said “You want this international movement, this, that or the other”. When we began we had no idea of going any further.
AR: Did you attempt to get your journal into the colonial world by smuggling it in or other ways?
CLR J: We tried all ways. We couldn't get it in normally, because many of those colonial governments, and those that came in afterwards, were quite hostile to us. Others, if not hostile were sympathetic that James was writing books that brought in the colonial people, but were nevertheless Marxist, Trotskyist. We had one or two people who worked on the waterfront. They gave the pamphlets to seamen and people in boats. In that way it went around.
AG: Was it people like Chris Jones?
CLR J: Chris Jones was a very fine comrade. Chris would get himself into a temper and explode and make a revolution at the back of the hall. But he was able to get the pamphlets and make contact and people would send it around. We got it around, to my astonishment and delight. After all, we were but a few intellectuals in London, and could not have done much.
AR: George Padmore, whilst he was in Moscow, built up a tremendous range of contacts.
CLR J: Yes, that is quite right. Padmore was quite a notable. When he split with Moscow, the platform that he had built up, went with Padmore. In other words, as happens quite often in the early stages of the movement, people follow a political personality and somebody whom they can recognise. I have to say also that Padmore and I were leaders of the black movement, though I was outside as a Marxist, Trotskyist. They came and followed James and Padmore, although I was quite sure that there was a large percentage of Padmore and a small percentage of James. They came in because of Padmore. He got on well with them.
AR: Some of those you were working with at the time, became very important later, in the politics of independent Africa. Were you able to influence any of them in a particularly Trotskyist direction, and do you remember any of the discussions you had with them?
CLR J: No. But I can tell you this. I am very conscious that most of the African leaders of the independence movement, who were in Europe, orientated naturally towards the Marxist movement which said we are for freedom in the colonies. We never had too much power but I wrote one or two pamphlets and books in which it was very clear. Later I was often invited to come and speak on the Marxist movement in Africa. It was in a very small way influenced by the Stalinists. Normally they would have dominated it, but those leaders who had worked in London hadn't become Trotskyists - but we had so educated them that Stalinism didn't do much to them.
AR: Did you attempt to have conferences with them and try to get them to discuss together the idea of a United Africa, or anything like that?
CLR J: I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense. That was quite obvious. It was not a practical proposition. East Africa was one way, West Africa another and Central a third way. On the coast there were different tongues, and away from the coast you had entirely different African villages and styles. So whilst in every resolution, or at the end, you spoke of Africa united at every important part, you knew it wasn't being realistic. It was a general vision, and one that would become an ideal. I once spoke, and it was very effective, and said that the unity of Africa was closer, theoretically speaking, than the unity of Europe for this reason, that th African states were not organically settled as were Britain, France, Germany. There were large tribal organisations but they didn't have the barriers between them that the European states had. But the policy shouldn't be put forward when people objected. But that was all. There were one or two fanatics who talked about it, but they were so fanatical. There is one of them that I have in mind, and wouldn't mention his name, although we would talk with him about it.
AR: Do you remember any of the debates in which you managed to get the Stalinists to debate with you at the time of the Moscow trials?
CLR J: We had debates in London and I debated with them, and there was not only a debate, but there was one particular moment in which there were a number of people on the platform with Kingsley Martin and the rest of them. I challenged them from the hall and then I stood up. There was a man called Gerry Bradley, Gerry was a great fighter, irrespective of the number of policemen. Gerry was my good friend, he said to me, “James, there will be the two of us ....” and we went into the meeting together. He stood up and said, “Mr Chairman, Comrade James here has been standing up for the past half hour and wants to be able to say a few words....”. The Communist Party did not want to give me the democracy, but they were afraid that Gerry would break up their meeting. Then Gerry turned to me and said, “Mr James, come with me” and led me up to the platform. The audience listened, and I put the case for Trotskyism, and it wrecked their meeting. The famous one was when they held a meeting and I came there at nine o'clock. They were speaking when I came in. They knew what was up and the chairman spoke for ten minutes and said that they had a full discussion of the question and must draw the meeting to a close. I used to go to their meetings and take only two people with me and their meetings would break up, because I had the Stalinist statements in my pocket and I would have a lot of copies and give the chaps copies and say “Now have a read....”. “That is not so, but you yourselves have said that it is impossible for the bourgeoisie ever to meet him”, and they would say, “No, we have not said it”. I would say, “You did say it” and again they would say "No”. So I would say, “Wait a bit” and go and get the pamphlet and show them. I used to do that here. I used to speak in Britain, and made it a habit to wreck the Stalinist meetings.
There was a black man who had joined the CP He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings but in America if you carry on like that they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists. In New York and Massachusetts, the government would not bother with you, but the Stalinists in those days were the enemy. The bourgeoisie didn't bother with us, as we were too small.
AR: Do you remember when you addressed a packed public meeting, when Jock Milligan was in the chair? Do you recall what you said there? It was on the Moscow trials and it was an enormous meeting.
CLR J: Where was that?
AR: It was in London. I'm not sure whether it was in the Memorial Hall in Farringdon or the Holborn Hall.
CLR J: I refer to it in World Revolution?
AR: No. A friend of mine was in the audience and he remembers Jock Milligan and you getting a bigger audience than anyone could have dreamed of. Everybody was standing at the side of the stage fearful about beginning, so what happened apparently, Jock got hold of a pile of books, put them under his arm and said, “Come on!”. That was the memory that my friend Bert Atkinson had. You wouldn't remember him.
CLR J: I remember the meeting very well, because there was a tremendous contrast between that meeting and meetings we held on Trotskyism, but on the Moscow Trials a lot of Communist Party members came and listened to what we had to say. It was a crisis for them, but soon afterwards I went to the United States in November 1938.
AR: Could you double back a little, because you have covered a lot of ground. Do you remember when you went to Paris to discuss the question whether you were to stay in the 1.L.P., or form a separate organisation, or join the Labour Party? It was called the “Geneva Conference”, but it was not held in Geneva, but in Paris. Do you remember when you went there?
CLR J: Yes. I remember, Harber was there.
AR: Harber was there. Do you remember the other English representative? Was it Arthur Ballard?
CLR J: No it was not Ballard. He was a close personal friend of mine.
AR: Apparently there was another English representative according to the minutes.
CLR J: I am not sure now who the other delegate was. It could have been Starkey Jackson. I must say that as far as I remember it, I and Harber made a good speech. We were from the British Labour movement and I was aware that another fellow had come from Austria. He had come from the revolutionary movement, but we had not. I felt that very strongly in the conference. I would say a few words and speak, as I could speak in French, but I was aware that what was happening in Britain was nothing. The French themselves were in a bit of trouble. They were being persecuted. Some of the boys came from Germany, and even one or two from Russia.
AR: At the conference?
CLR J: Yes, at the conference. They had been in Europe, and they came in secretly at the conference. They didn't have much to say, but I remember them sitting there, and I spoke with them. It took some time, they smiled and said, “Yes”. But I know now that they were saying, “You are nothing but left wing Labour democrats”. Immediately after that conference the war came, and those boys from Belgium were shot. After the war, when we went to Belgium, we found that they had all been shot.
AR: Who was the Belgian delegate who supported you? In the minutes it mentions that you got support from the Belgian delegate, but not from the others. Do you remember who that was?
CLR J: He was a working man. He was not an intellectual. He was about 35 to 40, and he was very friendly to us.
AR: Do you remember his name? Was it Vereeken?
CLR J: No. Vereeken was an old fashioned Trotskyist. If I were to see him again I would remember him.
AR: You had some differences earlier with the Trotskyist movement around 1936-1937. According to the minutes you used to receive some of the material from Field's group and Weisbord. You had some criticism about Trotsky's theory about the development of European history at that time which is shown in your World Revolution. Can you explain in full the way you were thinking at that time and how you were developing those differences about 1937-38 when you wrote World Revolution?
CLR J: I will tell you something which will astonish you. When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, “When we read your book World Revolution we said that it won't be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement”. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told “James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go”.
AR: Who was it that said that?
CLR J: Friends of mine who were party members. They said that when they read that (they had long experience) and they weren't surprised. I broke with the Trotskyist movement practically alone' and said “No!” They said “What about the whole International?” and I said “I don't care!”. In those days I wasn't politically wise. If I had been, I would have waited, but there was nothing wrong, though I said “No!” It is not a wrong view to be against the defence of Russia, but at the same time for Trotsky. I said that if you are against the defence of Russia that Trotsky was advocating you are breaking not with Trotskyism but with the defence of Russia. Freddie Forest (6) and I worked it out, and then I wrote the pamphlet.
AR: Can you tell me what else you remember about the founding conference of the Fourth International?
CLR J: I can remember that conference for one reason. We were against the Trotskyist position on the defence of the USSR. In the United States in particular, when the Moscow Trials took place there was a movement against the Fourth International, but the Russian question was the reason. I was in the United States, that was my last trip, and I told them, “I have joined you, but I have not joined because I agree with you on the Russian position”. They said, “You cannot have an international which is all united with Trotsky, but opposed to Trotsky on the Russian question. It means you are opposed to Trotskyism”. Freddie Forest and I set out like Christopher Colombus. We had another boy with us who had some money and he supported us with some finance. We hadn't a position, but she said, and we agreed, we were going to find out why it is that the Trotskyist position seemed to be wrong on the Russian question in general. After a year or two we came out with a full position in which we attacked Trotskyism from beginning to end. We started looking for the answer in Capital Volume I and the Communist Manifesto. That pamphlet we published (7). After, we started to study the question to find out why in the Trotskyist movement we were against on the Russian question but in agreement on other issues. Trotsky died in 1940. I am positive if he had been alive he would have seen what we were talking about. No one mentioned it but they weren't able to argue against it.
AR: What other actual memories do you have of the founding conference in Paris? Can you remember who was there and what they talked about?
CLR J: What I do remember was some Polish comrades who came and took the position that we were advancing. We did not advance it too strongly when we came to Europe and met these comrades. Also for the first time, I believe, some comrades from the United States talked about it. We put forward our position and had it copied into the minutes, but we didn't press the issue. The Polish comrades told us “'We are not going to vote for you, because we did not come here to vote, we came from Poland where there are big problems. The Communist Party there had a split, we split from them and now we have split from the split. So we haven't come here to vote against the conference, but we are sympathetic to you, James. You have the line, although we are not supporting it”, Nevertheless we had a powerful influence on that conference but a year or two afterwards the whole movement threw it away.
Because Trotsky kept on insisting that you had to support the Moscow regime since the Moscow bureaucracy is just a bureaucracy, a labour bureaucracy. When the war came those bureaucracies that supported it would go. He said that this is what happened to Lenin with the Second International when the war came, and the Third emerged. I said, “No, you are wrong, because the bureaucracy that Lenin fought against was a labour bureaucracy, bureaucracy in the labour movement, but in Moscow they are not labour bureaucracy, they are a state power, which the war will build up and make stronger than ever. This will increase their domination over the rest of the workers”. They could not answer me at all. When the war came this is what happened.
AR: That is another interesting question. From the way I see the evidence you would have had a greater effect in the struggle against imperialism especially during the war and towards the end if you had remained exactly where you were in Britain co-operating with Padmore and organising and training this movement. What did you yourself think about this, when the IS decided to send you to the USA?
CLR J: I was invited to the United States and I went there at the end of 1938 and started to organise the movement. We began to have something. As the war continued I did not know what to do so I discussed with them. Do you know Freddie Forest?
AR: Yes. Raya Dunayevskaya.
CLR J: She had a tremendous influence on me. If it hadn't been for Raya Dunayevskaya I would have come back to Britain, where I had a movement, where I had people, where I had a paper and where was known, because I was writing cricket for the Manchester Guardian. So I thought that I ought to go back to where the boys were speaking against the war. But Raya Dunayevskaya had come to the conclusion that I was the man to remain in the United States, a black man who was automatically the leader of the black movement, but whose education was such that he could be head of the Trotskyist movement as a whole. I was in doubt whether to go or stay. Raya was insistent that I stay, and then I said that I had no money to live on she said, “Don't worry about money”. For months she got money for me. She had friend and was well established, and that is why I stayed in the United States. We finally split in 1955, but as a role in my history, for staying in the United States (and I am glad I did) she did it and that should be said.
AR: So when you first went to the United States it wasn't considered then to be a permanent thing?
CLR J: No. I went to the United States, but with the intention of coming back.
AR: That is very interesting because some of your supporters here who later went into the Revolutionary Workers' League, like Cliff Stanton, Ben Elsbury, Sid Frost - those people, considered that the reason that you had been sent to the United States was because when they invited all the groups to unite In August 1938, because of their different origins, they sent you to the United States to give Harber a free run in the group that was to follow. Some were for entry work and others were for open work. So you say that was not true, but that was what a lot of your followers have been saying in this country.
CLR J: No. It was not true. They were wanting me to do work. I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation. I used to speak on Trotskyism, but they couldn't hold me because I hadn't followed Trotsky. I had read all the material. I remembered the night I joined the Trotskyist movement there were some people from Oxford and Cambridge who were joining the same night, but they brought some criticism to the official Trotskyists and they couldn't answer. So on the same night I joined I had to speak on behalf of Trotskyism. I went to America and had a great deal to do with the foundation of the movement there. The blacks in America wanted me to form a black movement and I said, “No!”, that I was not going to do that. I was very effective, and the American Government said that I had overstayed my time there and must go.
CC: Is there any truth in the statement that Trotsky and James supported a black state in America (8)?
CLR J: No! No! No! We discussed in some detail plans to help create and build an independent black organisation in the United States. That we did, but we were thinking of a political grouping that would advocate the cause of the blacks. But this was taken up by people to mean that we wanted to build a little black section of the United States - a black Mississippi! There were people in the United States doing that who were claiming that a part of Mississippi should be a black state, but the Marxist movement had nothing to do with that - absolutely nothing! But our enemies, or one of two of them, took it up when we said, “an independent black organisation”. I am sure that if you read the resolution you will see that it makes clear that it was a political organisation fighting for the position of rights in general and the black people in particular. That was misinterpreted to mean something else, but nobody took It seriously, although we had a lot of trouble with it. Nobody thinks so today?
AR: I think that is the way some people are interpreting it.
CLR J: Well, you can tell them that it isn't so, and that it never was so.
AG: Why were the CP pushing the line of an independent black state?
CLR J: The CP was pushing it - that seems to be one of the mysteries of the revolutionary movement. One or two people believe that Stalin, who was notoriously backward and ignorant of international politics, thought so, and said so, and the rest followed. So for years they went along with this thing, which struck great blows against Marxism in the United States. It was such an absurdity that all Marxists were discredited by it.
AR: In the transcript of your discussions with Trotsky in 1939 I notice at one point you mention the groups in Britain. You describe roughly what they are and you mention the Workers' International League and say that they were very active in the work they did. There did not appear to be any come-back from Trotsky. Was he interested at all in what you said, because there is nothing in his replies?
CLR J: No. I wouldn't be too concerned about that. People were coming from Britain, from France, from Norway, some from America and other places. I used to wonder how he managed to take it in and hold it in his head and express opinions on complicated matter in far-away countries which he knew nothing about. I stayed about a week. We had a general discussion and then Trotsky and I had a separate discussion that I had asked him for. That has been published.
AR: Do you remember any of the other Trotskyists who were there at the same time, from other countries?
CLR J: There were two men from Poland and they listened to the discussion. They sharply disagreed with the attitude we were taking to the Trotskyist movement outside of Western Europe, but they didn't intervene and say so. I have to be careful here, but their attitude, when the thing was explained to them in their language, was because we were introducing the idea of differences that were troubling us into those movements. I think that was the problem, and their concept was, that you don't know the kind of thing it is to have a Trotskyist movement inside a Stalinist party regime. We haven't time to argue all this, and there was one particular case where the Stalinists and Trotskyists formed a United Front, (I think it was in Vietnam) against the dominant party. The idea of a United Front with the Trotskyists elsewhere would have been impossible. At the time I was very much struck by what today I can see more clearly than ever. For us in Western Europe and in France the differences in the labour movement were matters of discussion, pamphlets, meetings. For them over there, there was none of that. It was a question of life and death, what your attitude was to the existing regimes and to the Communist Party. Because if you were at fault with the Communist Party they came to wipe you away. That was the struggle against the authoritarian state. You don't only fight them with words, you had a murderous fight between sections of the new movement. That is what I remember.
AR: After you had been in the United states for a while the Trotskyist movement there split and you supported, or rather went with, the group led by Max Shachtman, but you had your own particular point of view. What do you remember of the circumstances in which you parted from the group led by Cannon?
CLR J: Cannon was an Irishman of a similar type and with the qualities that distinguished the Irish in the Democratic Party. Physically he looked like them, and he had this capacity for two things, propaganda speeches to build up the movement, and intricate organisation. As for the refinements of political policy he wasn't into that. Shachtman was the Jewish Boy, well-educated in urban universities, who did that, but Cannon was a very gifted man. He ran the party, and people were very concerned that they did not oppose him as secretary. There was much conflict inside the party, and then the Moscow split took place. Whereupon the party split and Shachtman went, and I went with Shachtman. The Shachtmanites said at the time, “Look, you are splitting!” but I said, “I am not splitting with you”. They split on the Russian question and I had differences with them, and this is still something on which I fancy that I was right. I said that you don't split a party on the Russian question, because to split is a tremendous thing in our movement. You are cast out, and they say that you are an enemy of the labour movement. This also means that you are opposed to them in a manner in which you do not know yet. Freddie Forest and I stated that that was our position, but in what way we differed from them apart from the Russian question we didn't know. So we decided to go and find out and make that public. We set out to study Marxism to find out
why we split with them on the Russian question and we found we came out with new and different policies. That was quite a theoretical activity and the results were published.
AR: Can you give us some details on the way you worked on the philosophy part that came out in your Notes on Dialectics, on the method you used to work out some of those ideas?
CLR J: There were three of us, two to begin with. Firstly there was Freddie Forest, and later Grace Lee joined us. Grace Lee had her doctorate from the university in philosophy. That means that she was a philosophy graduate, which meant that all the elements of the great philosophers she understood, but that was not all. There was another man, a short Greek-looking fellow, a white man named Johnny Zupern. He was not educated, he was a worker, but that fellow used to read the philosophical documents and not only understand, which many didn't, but he understood them and expounded and developed them in a manner in which some of us, who were philosophically trained, couldn't. He left us completely astounded. So we hired him and Raya, who knew what was done In Russian. Russian was the language native to her. She translated all that Lenin had said on philosophy. Grace Lee had all the Leninist writings, and the Marxist ones in German. I was familiar with all the writings in French. So we formed a rather formidable organisation, and we covered everything on Marxist philosophy. We were not going to say what Marx and Engels might say about philosophy, or Hegel. Everybody used to say that Engels had said this or that about Hegel. I said, “None of that, we are going to find out what Hegel said and deal with it”. We produced work which, to this day, I find invaluable. Many years later a Frenchman wrote, and he didn't write badly, but in my opinion he didn't write particularly well either, and he raised some problems. We are the only ones who had seriously gone into the philosophical analysis in terms of the doctrines of Hegel and German philosophy. Most of the Trotskyists made noises but left it.
AR: So in fact quite a long period of discussion had gone on before you actually wrote the document.
CLR J: I remember talking to Forest and saying, “Well I don't want to say it, but we must go into it”, and she said, “All right, I started it and I will finish it on what Lenin said about Hegel”. This was translated in Europe, and we not only translated but published. We had two translations. Grace Lee translated it from the German, but Freddie Forest translated it from the Russian, and so we had the two translations. I don't want to go into it now, but I was quite impressed. We had an organisation here. Nobody has done these translations, and it later became one of the official documents, but we had done it and I was very much impressed, because I knew what it meant.
AR: When you went back with the SWP in 1947, how well were you able to work there? Was there friction a lot of the time? What was the sort of set-up between you? Because you did maintain your own independent views.
CLR J: We went back in 1947 and left when?
AR: 1949 or 1950 as far as I can tell.
CLR J: They were expecting that we would come in, thinking that the people who were with the Johnson/Forest tendency, having joined their party, not because of me but because we had a clear doctrinal statement would join them, but we went on and trained them in that way. Not one of them left, and Cannon and company were very disappointed, because they said, “They will come in with Johnson and Forest, but as time goes on we will work on them, and eventually they will join the majority”. We lost nobody, and when the time came for us to leave we cleared out. I remember Cannon telling people “What I don't understand is that not one of these people joined our movement”. He also said that, “They don't create any disturbances, they don't keep up an agitation for their policies, they are very good party members. but they won't join”. That meant a great deal.
Now when I had to leave they were not able to go on. This was partly my fault. I tried to keep leading the party from London, but if I had stayed in the United States we would have had an organisation, because they were good people, trained and full of ability, devoted to the movement. When I left, I told them who should be the leader, and that was blunder number one. That was followed by blunders numbers two, three, four and five. Complete blunder! Actually I should have left them alone, but I began by saying Raya should be leader. Raya didn't fight it, although she didn't want to be particularly, but she went along. She couldn't lead, and it fell apart. Even today people will tell you that that was a movement not only for the people who were in it, although they went their different ways. They all became important leaders In the organisations in which they joined. They were trained, and disciplined, and had firm Marxist foundations. One thing I said, that before you join us you will have to do some work and present a piece in writing. You will have to take a piece of Marxist writing, expound it and get it published, even if it has to be published by us, otherwise you cannot become a member of our party. They all did that.
Editorial Note.
‘The interview was one of a substantial collection of interviews with veterans of the Trotskyist movement, assembled for our archives by Al Richardson and Sam Bornstein in the course of researching the history of the movement.
‘Some readers will find many of the names unfamiliar, and we hope to be able to provide more extensive explanatory notes in the future. We did not want to delay the appearance of this document until that was possible however. Readers who want to inquire further into any of the individuals mentioned here will find references to most of them in Bornstein & Richardson's 3 volumes on the history of Trotskyism in Britain.’ [October 1997]
The footnotes are insertions by the editors, in consultation with CLRJ, to clarify aspects of this interview.
1. World Revolution 1937, recently republished by Humanities Press, with a new introduction by Al Richardson
2. Fight 1936 - 38
3. 1935/6
4. Padmore was a party name. His name in Arima was Malcolm Nurse and the fathers of both boys were teachers. Arima is a small town 15 miles from Port of Spain.
5. International African Friends of Ethiopia, later it became the International African Service Bureau.
6. This was the pseudonym for Raya Dunayevskaya.
7. State Capitalism & World Revolution, 1950
8. At this point CLRJ was handed the following cutting which he read:
‘Sir
‘The article by Clive Davis on CLR James (Guardian February 17) contained misleading information on James's meeting with Leon Trotsky In Mexico.
‘The meeting was called to discuss the question of black liberation in the United States. As transcripts of these discussions show there was a large measure of agreement amongst those involved. The participants agreed on the right of United States blacks to self determination, up to and including the right to form their own state if they wished. They also discussed In some detail plans to create and build an independent black organisation in the United States.
‘After these discussions CLR James returned to the US and drafted a resolution on black liberation for the Socialist Workers Party - the US section of the Trotskyist International. The resolution was overwhelmingly accepted by an SWP Congress.
‘Transcripts of these extremely interesting discussions between James, Trotsky and others can be found in the book Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-determination published by Pathfinder Press.
yours
Ceri Evans,
Pontypridd,
Mid-Glam.
Guardian 21st February 1986’.
C L R James Internet Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>The Aftermath of the Elections</h4>
<h1>What Should Be The Future of PAC? – II</h1>
<h3>(November 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_48" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 48</a>, 27 November 1944, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Sidney Hillman and the CIO committee have declared that the PAC will continue. Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. But we were not really very much worried about the official continuation of the PAC. For to us the PAC represents something which Hillman & Co. only express. PAC represents a stage of development of the American working class and the American working class moves inevitably forward to its own independent party of organized labor.</p>
<p>Let us trace the stages as we have seen them during the last fifteen years.<br>
</p>
<h4>Five Stages</h4>
<p class="fst">Stage 1. 1929 – American labor is only moderately unionized. The chief unions are the unions of highly-skilled craft workers. They are unified in the AFL. Politically the workers do not think sharply in terms of class. They support the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Millions of them associate the capitalist prosperity of 1920-28 with the Republican Party and their votes have given that party smashing victories in 1920 and 1928.</p>
<p class="fst">Stage 2 – The crisis of 1929 and the great depression shocked American workers, for the first time, into serious consideration of what the future holds for them as workers. Out steps Roosevelt and promises a New Deal, Make no mistake. <em>The New Deal is primarily an appeal to labor.</em></p>
<p>The great capitalists did not need any New Deal. The old deal of vast profits is good enough for them. No. The workers hear in the appeals and promises of Roosevelt a promise of jobs, security or at least relief <em>for workers</em>. Their support gives the New Deal a tremendous victory at the polls.<br>
</p>
<h4>Rise of the CIO</h4>
<p class="fst">Stage 3 – The workers, however, are most sensitive at the point of production, at the point of struggle over wages and working conditions. The masses of the semi-skilled and unskilled feel the necesity for union organization. We get the tremendous mass upsurge which results in the formation of the CIO. John L. Lewis did fine work for the CIO. But he could only do it because the workers had reached a stage of development which imperatively demanded an extension of the existing union organizations.</p>
<p class="fst">Stage 4 – The workers ignore the anti-Roosevelt press and in 1936 and 1940 overwhelmingly support Roosevelt. But dissatisfaction grows as the inadequacy of the New Deal is borne home to the millions of unemployed. The war, for a time, saves the situation (but only for a time).</p>
<p class="fst">Stage 5 – Roosevelt partially recovers a declining prestige by presenting himself to the workers as the great organizer of victory against fascism. But the working class as a whole is dissatisfied over the Little Steel formula and the no-strike pledge. It has the gravest doubts of what will happen to the United States in the post-war period. This is the soil in which the PAC springs up like a giant mushroom.<br>
</p>
<h4>What the PAC Is</h4>
<p class="fst">An independent Labor Party? The PAC is not that. <em>But it is an independent organization acting as a pressure group on the Democratic Party.</em></p>
<p>Labor still thinks Roosevelt is the leader of what it calls “the progressives” in the country. But note that labor would have felt more satisfied if Vice-President Wallace had been renominated. In other words, it does not trust the President as much as before. Secondly, labor, as labor, fought to ensure the election of the man whom it considered its candidate. But thirdly, labor wanted its own organization so as to be sure that its demands would have organized backing. Hillman said as much at the foundation of the PAC.</p>
<p>Compare the workers today with the workers of 1929. They have learned plenty and have concrete organizational forms to show – the CIO and the PAC. What is the next stage?</p>
<p>The next stage is the recognition by the workers that the problems posed to them by a bankrupt society demand labor’s own independent political organization with its own workers’ program. PAC is not this.</p>
<p>PAC must cut itself clean from the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>The working class will sooner or later reach the stage where it will be unable to live the kind of life which is its due and which the economy can provide. It will be pushed to the final stage – the stage of independent political organization, free of capitalist control with a program for solving the problems which <em>capitalism</em> cannot solve.</p>
<p>That for us is the course of development of the working class in this period. Enough has happened since 1929 to make us confident of the future. But we state categorically that PAC represents a definitive stage of progress and is no accident. Labor may take some other road to political independence than the PAC. But the PAC is what we have now. The aim now must be to free it of capitalist control, to raise its program to the height of the great tasks which face American labor.<br>
</p>
<h4>Tasks of American Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">But to do this as it ought to be done demands that we see American labor for what it is – a class called upon to solve the problems of American society; a class called upon to refashion an economic system which has served its purpose and now can produce only economic crises and imperialist war; a class which in the last fifteen years has shown that it can learn and take action to meet its needs.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Aftermath of the Elections
What Should Be The Future of PAC? – II
(November 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 48, 27 November 1944, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Sidney Hillman and the CIO committee have declared that the PAC will continue. Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. But we were not really very much worried about the official continuation of the PAC. For to us the PAC represents something which Hillman & Co. only express. PAC represents a stage of development of the American working class and the American working class moves inevitably forward to its own independent party of organized labor.
Let us trace the stages as we have seen them during the last fifteen years.
Five Stages
Stage 1. 1929 – American labor is only moderately unionized. The chief unions are the unions of highly-skilled craft workers. They are unified in the AFL. Politically the workers do not think sharply in terms of class. They support the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Millions of them associate the capitalist prosperity of 1920-28 with the Republican Party and their votes have given that party smashing victories in 1920 and 1928.
Stage 2 – The crisis of 1929 and the great depression shocked American workers, for the first time, into serious consideration of what the future holds for them as workers. Out steps Roosevelt and promises a New Deal, Make no mistake. The New Deal is primarily an appeal to labor.
The great capitalists did not need any New Deal. The old deal of vast profits is good enough for them. No. The workers hear in the appeals and promises of Roosevelt a promise of jobs, security or at least relief for workers. Their support gives the New Deal a tremendous victory at the polls.
Rise of the CIO
Stage 3 – The workers, however, are most sensitive at the point of production, at the point of struggle over wages and working conditions. The masses of the semi-skilled and unskilled feel the necesity for union organization. We get the tremendous mass upsurge which results in the formation of the CIO. John L. Lewis did fine work for the CIO. But he could only do it because the workers had reached a stage of development which imperatively demanded an extension of the existing union organizations.
Stage 4 – The workers ignore the anti-Roosevelt press and in 1936 and 1940 overwhelmingly support Roosevelt. But dissatisfaction grows as the inadequacy of the New Deal is borne home to the millions of unemployed. The war, for a time, saves the situation (but only for a time).
Stage 5 – Roosevelt partially recovers a declining prestige by presenting himself to the workers as the great organizer of victory against fascism. But the working class as a whole is dissatisfied over the Little Steel formula and the no-strike pledge. It has the gravest doubts of what will happen to the United States in the post-war period. This is the soil in which the PAC springs up like a giant mushroom.
What the PAC Is
An independent Labor Party? The PAC is not that. But it is an independent organization acting as a pressure group on the Democratic Party.
Labor still thinks Roosevelt is the leader of what it calls “the progressives” in the country. But note that labor would have felt more satisfied if Vice-President Wallace had been renominated. In other words, it does not trust the President as much as before. Secondly, labor, as labor, fought to ensure the election of the man whom it considered its candidate. But thirdly, labor wanted its own organization so as to be sure that its demands would have organized backing. Hillman said as much at the foundation of the PAC.
Compare the workers today with the workers of 1929. They have learned plenty and have concrete organizational forms to show – the CIO and the PAC. What is the next stage?
The next stage is the recognition by the workers that the problems posed to them by a bankrupt society demand labor’s own independent political organization with its own workers’ program. PAC is not this.
PAC must cut itself clean from the Democratic Party.
The working class will sooner or later reach the stage where it will be unable to live the kind of life which is its due and which the economy can provide. It will be pushed to the final stage – the stage of independent political organization, free of capitalist control with a program for solving the problems which capitalism cannot solve.
That for us is the course of development of the working class in this period. Enough has happened since 1929 to make us confident of the future. But we state categorically that PAC represents a definitive stage of progress and is no accident. Labor may take some other road to political independence than the PAC. But the PAC is what we have now. The aim now must be to free it of capitalist control, to raise its program to the height of the great tasks which face American labor.
Tasks of American Labor
But to do this as it ought to be done demands that we see American labor for what it is – a class called upon to solve the problems of American society; a class called upon to refashion an economic system which has served its purpose and now can produce only economic crises and imperialist war; a class which in the last fifteen years has shown that it can learn and take action to meet its needs.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Notes Following the Discussions</h1>
<h3>(June 1939)</h3>
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<p class="info">Originally published in the Socialist Workers Party’s <strong>Internal Bulletin</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1938-45/v01n09-1939-ib.pdf" target="new">No. 9</a>, June 1939, pp. 21–22.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 14–16.<br>
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">In <strong>The New Negro</strong> by Alain Locke there is a reference to the fact that Garvey preached an exclusively black doctrine of race – only Negroes who were black were truly Negroes. This statement is of the first importance.</p>
<p>In America today, there are caste divisions among the blacks themselves and these are based on color. They are most clearly seen in the church. The mulattoes are petty bourgeois members of the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian (orthodox Protestant) churches. The blacks, the poorest, the most oppressed, are members of the Baptist and African Methodist Churches, the great stronghold of the black parsons and to this day the most powerful national organizations created and controlled entirely by Negroes. It was on this stratum that Garvey built his movement; his appeal to the “pure” black shows that. Also, they had just emigrated and were still coming in hundreds of thousands from the South, a proletarian and sub-proletarian mass getting better wages for the first time and rising to the possibilities that even the limited freedom of the North allowed them.</p>
<p>I have personal experience of these people, particularly in an “Ethiopian” movement in New York and in one of the “black” churches which I attended. The “Ethiopians” are fanatically chauvinistic and on the night I spoke to them two white comrades evoked great hostility. But of their revolutionary ardor there was no doubt. A similar passion was also obvious in the church service, and there, the weeping, the shaking of hands, the response to the preacher’s references to oppression, were no doubt a sublimation of revolutionary emotion. The greatest response was made to the passage on oppression and suffering. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>Garvey raised these people to political activity. His movement fell, and today their leader is Father Divine, merely a super-preacher and demagogue combined.</p>
<p>But the great response to (a) Freedom in Africa, (b) Freedom in Ethiopia, (c) Freedom in Heaven, seems to point to the fact that self-determination, i.e. a black state in the South would awaken a response among these masses, as bitterly as it is opposed by all the intellectuals and more literate among the Negroes. This is the tentative conclusion I have come to after carefully considering the course of our discussion and thinking back over the contacts I made with this stratum during my short stay in America. This of course will have to be tested by experience, but another question arises.</p>
<p>If it does prove to be so, the slogan of a “black state” will come badly from the SWP. It will infallibly awaken great suspicion among the Negroes. “They want to get rid of us.” Coming, however, from Negro intellectuals in a Negro movement, if there is the latent response, it will be accepted without difficulty. The SWP can then support it wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>The success of the Garvey movement, of the Divine movement, and the millions of dollars poor Negroes pour annually into the churches out of their almost empty purses, all these are evidence of their fanatical devotion and capacity for self-sacrifice. And the revolutionary energy, the readiness to give all which distinguished the Garvey movement in particular, in return for nothing tangible but the promise of a new society, show that here, in contradistinction to the great movements of organized workers for higher wages, closed shop, etc., we have perhaps the most important manifestation in American capitalist society of one most powerful current in the coming socialist revolution. The party must find a way to these millions and I am more than ever convinced that the way is through a Negro organization, going over the literate and vocal intellectuals and finding the masses whom Garvey found.</p>
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<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> This clergyman offered me his pulpit for a Sunday evening – an audience of 800 people, the poorest of the poor. I could not do so before I left New York, but I asked him to wait until I returned. I shall make a cautious but clear appeal for revolutionary action and particularly raise the question of a black state.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Notes Following the Discussions
(June 1939)
Originally published in the Socialist Workers Party’s Internal Bulletin, No. 9, June 1939, pp. 21–22.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 14–16.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
In The New Negro by Alain Locke there is a reference to the fact that Garvey preached an exclusively black doctrine of race – only Negroes who were black were truly Negroes. This statement is of the first importance.
In America today, there are caste divisions among the blacks themselves and these are based on color. They are most clearly seen in the church. The mulattoes are petty bourgeois members of the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian (orthodox Protestant) churches. The blacks, the poorest, the most oppressed, are members of the Baptist and African Methodist Churches, the great stronghold of the black parsons and to this day the most powerful national organizations created and controlled entirely by Negroes. It was on this stratum that Garvey built his movement; his appeal to the “pure” black shows that. Also, they had just emigrated and were still coming in hundreds of thousands from the South, a proletarian and sub-proletarian mass getting better wages for the first time and rising to the possibilities that even the limited freedom of the North allowed them.
I have personal experience of these people, particularly in an “Ethiopian” movement in New York and in one of the “black” churches which I attended. The “Ethiopians” are fanatically chauvinistic and on the night I spoke to them two white comrades evoked great hostility. But of their revolutionary ardor there was no doubt. A similar passion was also obvious in the church service, and there, the weeping, the shaking of hands, the response to the preacher’s references to oppression, were no doubt a sublimation of revolutionary emotion. The greatest response was made to the passage on oppression and suffering. [1]
Garvey raised these people to political activity. His movement fell, and today their leader is Father Divine, merely a super-preacher and demagogue combined.
But the great response to (a) Freedom in Africa, (b) Freedom in Ethiopia, (c) Freedom in Heaven, seems to point to the fact that self-determination, i.e. a black state in the South would awaken a response among these masses, as bitterly as it is opposed by all the intellectuals and more literate among the Negroes. This is the tentative conclusion I have come to after carefully considering the course of our discussion and thinking back over the contacts I made with this stratum during my short stay in America. This of course will have to be tested by experience, but another question arises.
If it does prove to be so, the slogan of a “black state” will come badly from the SWP. It will infallibly awaken great suspicion among the Negroes. “They want to get rid of us.” Coming, however, from Negro intellectuals in a Negro movement, if there is the latent response, it will be accepted without difficulty. The SWP can then support it wholeheartedly.
The success of the Garvey movement, of the Divine movement, and the millions of dollars poor Negroes pour annually into the churches out of their almost empty purses, all these are evidence of their fanatical devotion and capacity for self-sacrifice. And the revolutionary energy, the readiness to give all which distinguished the Garvey movement in particular, in return for nothing tangible but the promise of a new society, show that here, in contradistinction to the great movements of organized workers for higher wages, closed shop, etc., we have perhaps the most important manifestation in American capitalist society of one most powerful current in the coming socialist revolution. The party must find a way to these millions and I am more than ever convinced that the way is through a Negro organization, going over the literate and vocal intellectuals and finding the masses whom Garvey found.
Footnote
1. This clergyman offered me his pulpit for a Sunday evening – an audience of 800 people, the poorest of the poor. I could not do so before I left New York, but I asked him to wait until I returned. I shall make a cautious but clear appeal for revolutionary action and particularly raise the question of a black state.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Lesson of Germany</h1>
<h3>(May 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info"><span class="info">Source:</span> <strong><em>New International</em></strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni45_05" target="new">Vol. XI No. 4</a>, May 1945, pp. 102–106.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> Ted Crawford.<br>
<span class="info">Proofread:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> (June 2016).</p>
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<h4>Bourgeois Society and Totalitarian Barbarism</h4>
<p class="fst">The ruin of bourgeois society in Germany is so colossal in its scope, so logical in its development, and so embracing in all its ramifications that it forms a characteristic microcosm of bourgeois as a whole at this stage of its decay. We shall attempt here to point out a few of the outstanding features in so far as they enable us to understand our enemies more clearly.</p>
<p>Nazism was not <em>in essence</em> German. It was in essence capitalistic, bourgeois. In as much as it reached its most finished expression in Germany <em>the appearance</em> it presented to the world was German. But it was the representative of capitalism in our day, and not only of German capitalism but of all capitalism. There must not be the slightest hesitation or confusion about this.</p>
<p>After ten years of the Weimar Republic the German bourgeoisie wanted above all things capitalist order in Germany. No advanced nation could continue to live as Germany had lived between 1914 and 1921, in continuous crisis, and as it had begun to live again after the crash of 1929. Naturally the German bourgeois and the Junkers did not <em>want</em> Fascism. I hey preferred to rule themselves without these upstarts. <em>They couldn’t do it.</em> The old bourgeois ideology was exhausted. It could hold the nation together no longer. The bureaucracy, police and arms of the democratic state could no longer be depended upon to maintain order. The Fascists supplied a new ideology and a new coercive force. Behind all the Swastikas, the worship of Odin and of Thor, the outstretched hands and the Heil Hitlers, the persecution of the Jews, and all with which the world is familiar, there must be kept in mind the one central principle of Fascism – the destruction of the organised working-class movement. That was German Fascism. The German bourgeoisie had no choice. To understand this, and to give it its full value, is not to make excuses for the capitalists of Germany. It is in reality to become more fully aware of how necessary it is that bourgeois society be wiped off the face of the earth.</p>
<p>From 1918 to 1933 the German nation was going to pieces. Between the irreconcilable interests of the capitalist class and those of the working class, the economy, the social system and the political life of Germany were not only in decay: gangrene had set in.</p>
<p>The only cure was the knife and the German bourgeoisie applied it. The fascists sought power, power to rule and to bring order into disintegrating Germany. They got it. They did not have to fight a civil war for it. The bourgeoisie and the Junkers gave it to them. The petty bourgeoisie gave them mass support. The Social-Democracy and the Communists capitulated shamefully. Unlike Franco, who inherited a country ruined by civil war, the Nazis got hold of a Germany that was economically more highly developed than it was in 1918. They had every opportunity to show what they could do.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Fascism Has Done to Germany</h4>
<p class="fst">We have now seen. In twelve short years they have reduced what was the greatest nation in Europe to a pitch of misery, poverty, degradation, physical and moral humiliation such as has no parallel in all the centuries of Europe’s troubled history. It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was defeated. What is so striking is that even the basic elements of the power of the German bourgeoisie have been destroyed. The magnificent economy of Germany has been battered to pieces.</p>
<p>Many of the great cities of Germany, with Berlin at their head, are now mountains of rubble, with the culture of centuries buried beneath the ruins. The German army, with the German general staff, one of the proudest achievements of bourgeois Germany and for generations one of the greatest forces of reaction in capitalist Europe, has been beaten, disgraced, humiliated, its traditions dragged in the mud, all its power at the mercy of foreign conquerors.</p>
<p>Anglo-American-Russian propaganda is now trying to create the impression that the German general staff and the traditions of the German army have remained intact. There is no limit to the effrontery of imperialist politicians and their hired hacks. The Junkers and their militarists have reached the lowest depths of degradation. Field Marshals and generals, scions of Junker families famous not only in Germany but the world over, formed organizations in Moscow, broadcast on the radio and published propaganda calling upon the German army and their fellow officers to revolt. These brother officers and brother Junkers denounced the Muscovite Junkers as traitors before the whole German people. Junkers and officers tried to blow up or otherwise destroy their leader and the German general stall. They failed, the leaders were tried and <em>hanged</em>, and these too were denounced before the German people by Hitler and their own Junker brothers. Those who remained surrendered unconditionally and many of them are now in jail. Some are still seeking salvation from Moscow. Others are seeking to play Britain and America against Russia. Defeat, treason, assassination, hanging, contradictory policies, all carried out before the German people, blared at them day and night on the radio, and hurled at them in speeches and in the press – and now we are asked to believe that the traditions of the German general staff remain intact. The German people have other things to think about for the moment than the German general staff and the military traditions of the Junkers. But when they begin to think about these things they will have plenty to think about.</p>
<p>The German bureaucracy was one of the best administrative bodies that bourgeois Europe could show, and ranked with the British Civil Service. In republics like France and the United States the spoils of government are fought for in accordance with the crudest immoralities of the capitalist market. In Britain and Germany, however, where the feudal tradition was blended with the bourgeois, the ruling classes maintained a sense of orderly government, particularly because, in the last analysis, the profits and the power remained all the more certainly in the hands of or at the disposal of the ruling classes. The fraud and the corruption of bourgeois government were kept within decent bounds, all of which redounded to the credit of the ruling classes and enabled them all the more surely to mulct the population as a whole. Even before 1933, the fascists and the bourgeoisie had begun the corruption of the German bureaucracy. By 1945 its venality had become a byword of the German nation and the whole of Europe. Bribery was rampant from top to bottom of the German administration. This too was the work of fascism.</p>
<p>And so, Messrs. Bourgeois, you had your power and your order and above all your destruction of the German working class movement. You had every possible opportunity to show that you could do. Look at the result. You have reduced Germany in the eyes of the world to the lowest level of humanity. The suffering you have imposed upon Europe and the German people, the bestiality and ferocity which your gangsters had to practice and seek to instill into the German youth – all that will fester in the nation until the labor movement opens up for it a new perspective. But your greatest failure is that the very foundations of your own power, those you have destroyed also. All that remains now, in the words of Jodl after he surrendered, is to throw yourself on the generosity of the conquerors. Or, like Bismarck and Von Paulus, to try to sneak back sitting in the baggage-carts of the Russian army. Or, like Admiral Doenitz, to beg to be allowed to govern because otherwise the German people might swing to the right or to the left. The German people cannot swing to the right, Admiral. There is no further to the right to go. The Right did all it wished to do. The result is before us and before the German people too.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Deflation of Nazism</h4>
<p class="fst">But the final, the complete, the never-to-be-forgotten disgrace of ruling class Germany, the most dramatic expression of its inner bankruptcy is that it went down without a word to the German people or to the world. Five years ago the present writer had occasion to write about these people. It was September, 1940. They were at the height of their power. I wrote then:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... For the first time for over five centuries, a political system with a great fanfare of newness and solution to crisis, makes a political virtue out of tyranny, inequality; class, racial and national prejudice; and decries everything that European civilization has striven for, in theory at least, since the Renaissance. During Europe’s worst periods of reaction, the period of the counter-reformation and the holy Alliance, the most reactionary writers could find something plausible to say in defense of their cause. German imperialism plunders in order to live. Fascism is the decline of the West and its protagonists know it in their souls. Their writings on all subjects, except the seizure of power, are nothing else but lies and nonsense, cold-blooded, deliberate falsification. Not a flower blossoms on their arid heaths. There is no soil in which anything in grow. They are just a thin cover for exhausted bourgeois society. They can have nothing to say. Mommsen and Carlyle said all when the bourgeoisie still could preserve some illusions. If Trotsky’s <strong>History</strong> does not guarantee the inevitability of socialism, <strong>Mein Kampf</strong> guarantees the fraud of fascism as a solution to the ill of capitalist society. (<strong>New International</strong>, September 1940, page 163.)</p>
<p class="fst">They were vigorous, able and determined but they were a gang in possession – nothing more. They knew it and the German bourgeoisie knew it too. <em>When the crash came, not one of them had anything to offer as a perspective for the future.</em> All through history, in periods of crisis, political leaders of great parties, revolutionary or reactionary, have been nourished and fortified by some vision. They could try to justify heir work, if even only to themselves and their followers. They could hurl at word of defiance at their captors even when facing the rifle squad. The defeated Old Bolsheviks, as they stood confessing at Stalin’s trials, were everything you like but not contemptible. If we deny all reason, all sense, all (ie, all the historical circumstances, and assume for a moment that they were speaking the truth, even then they were trying to atone, to do what they could to bolster up the remnants of the system to establish which they had given their lives. If, as has been abundantly proved, they were lying, then the lie is covered by the fact that at the very least the lies would help the regime to maintain its credit. But Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Ley, von Ribbentrop, Himmler, they live or die like rats in holes. They kill themselves or are killed, they run into the mountains with their women and their loot. Himmler, to save his own hide, carries out negotiations with the enemy and as good as offers to murder his dearly beloved Feuhrer. Goering gives interviews to the press and complains about how badly his Fuehrer and his enemies in the party treated him.</p>
<p>The Von Papens, and the Von Keitels, who had heiled Hitler with the best, merely shook off fascism as a man shakes off a dirty shirt. It had made a shrewd and at times a diabolically clever appeal to millions of the population but the rulers of Germany never believed in it. Fascism as a political system, its ideals, what it now offered to the German people, some hope to its millions of followers that out of the defeat would one day rise something – not a word, nothing. It said nothing because there was nothing to say. Nothing but shameful, mean, vulgar self-seeking. Isn’t it clear now exactly what fascism was? Never have so cruel, so vicious, so degenerate a set of scoundrels ever ruled any modern country. In all of them added together there was not an ounce of dignity or of genuine faith, not even in themselves. Hitler, who had so many elements of the genuine fanatic, proved in the end to be essentially of the same breed as the rest. There is here a profound lesson in social and political psychology.</p>
<p>It was to these empty men that Von Keitel and Von Kesselring and Von Rundstedt, and Von Jodl, it was to these gangsters that so many of the German aristocracy remained faithful. A substantial section of the German bourgeoisie and the German Junkers went along with fascism to the end. For them that was German civilization, German culture, German society and, of course, German bourgeois society. This was what they had built and supported in order to save Europe from bolshevism, to prevent the working class from ruling.</p>
<p>They were not alone. From one end of Europe to the other, the ruling classes of Europe were in thorough sympathy with Nazism and only fought it when they felt that their own hides were in danger. Petain, Laval and the French bourgeoisie, Franco and the Spanish bourgeoisie, Mussolini and the Italian bourgeoisie, the ruling classes of Hungary, Romania and Austria, from one end of the continent to another, in Britain and in the United States, this monstrous apparition in European society excited amid the great of the earth almost universal admiration, respect, fear and a desire to emulate wherever possible. Had it not been for the economic contradictions which compelled expansion and a threat to other economic interests, Hitler and his band of Dillingers would have been hailed as the restorers of order and the saviors of European society. The danger is that in the jubilation over the defeat and disgrace of these criminals the welcome bourgeois society gave them may be subordinated or lost sight of. The close harmony between fascism and the ruling classes everywhere was not any kind of mistake on either side. In these men bourgeois society recognized its indispensable medium of self-preservation. Their murderous cruelty, their greed, their ruthlessness, their vaunted fanaticism which turned out to be such a hollow mockery, everything about them was needed by bourgeois society, created by bourgeois society, built up by bourgeois society. Capitalism needed this barbarism in the past, needs it today <em>and will need it in the future</em>. It is its only means of salvation. The form will change. The essential savagery of the content will remain.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hitler as a Social Phenomenon</h4>
<p class="fst">We are accustomed to saying loosely that the European bourgeoisie not only welcomed Hitler but helped him to achieve power. That is a half truth. <em>They were the chief architects of his success. They made him from the ground up.</em> His rise appears to be the most spectacular in modern history. Yet a truly historical and realistic view will see him, far from being an Odyssey of individual will and achievement, no important career has been so essentially a social phenomenon. Comparisons with Napoleon are the fruit either of ignorance, stupidity or criminal intention. The young Bonaparte was sent to Italy as any number of voting generals were sent to fight the campaigns of the hard-pressed Republic. The “lightning in the hills” of the Italian campaign revealed to Europe that a military genius of the first magnitude had arisen. This military star displayed diplomatic genius as well. He was a European figure when he began his bid for power. Hitler’s career was the exact opposite. In 1923 he was nobody. Yet one year later he was attempting to capture Bavaria, being aided by the German hero of World War I, Ludendorf. The plotters believed that they had the support of the Bavarian military and governmental authorities and it is reasonable to believe that they had good cause for thinking that they did. His treatment in jail proved that. His hundreds of thousands of storm troopers represented an enormous expense. They were thugs hired by the German bourgeoisie to fight its battles against the working class. In the years 1930–33 the German bureaucracy engineered election after election. Through the system of proportional representation no government could find a sufficient majority to rule and by this means the bureaucracy and its masters hoped to discredit parliamentary government and open the way for authoritarian rule. Despite his immense influence over the petty bourgeoisie, Hitler, by 1932, was on the wane. The German bourgeoisie deliberately maintained Nazism to have some power in reserve against Bolshevism. True, he dominated them afterward. We do not mean for one moment to deny the energy, the inventiveness, the will, the tenacity of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. We do not deny their skilful use of social contradictions. He himself was obviously a born leader of men and an orator the like of whom Europe has not often seen. But from the time he began, the German bourgeoisie, the military caste, the bureaucracy, all built him up and without their active conscious support he would have been nothing.</p>
<p>Napoleon built himself up by sheer achievement and compelled recognition by the French bourgeoisie. The German bourgeoisie recognised this Vienna ex-house painter, ex-artist, ex-bum, ex-soldier from early, picked him out of the gutter and made him what he was. When he finally was pushed into the power in Germany the international bourgeoisie took its turn. The process of Hitler-building was repeated on the international scene.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hitler, Representative Man of Bourgeois Society</h4>
<p class="fst">At no time after the <strong>Eighteenth Brumaire</strong> could the French bourgeoisie have gotten rid of Bonaparte. And the European bourgeoisie was alike impotent before him. Coalitions innumerable of Europe were tried to drive him from power. He broke them one after the other by his own military, diplomatic and administrative skill. He owed nothing to any of Europe’s ruling classes. He spread the tenets and practices of bourgeois society throughout Europe by his skilful use of the revolutionary power developed in France. He was “Robespierre on horseback,” the bourgeois Emperor, carrying war to European feudalism. Hitler was bone of Europe’s bone and flesh of Europe’s flesh. Hitler was bourgeois reaction, doing the work of the bourgeoisie. At any time between 1933 and 1936 and even later he could have been overthrown from the outside. In 1936, when he matched into the Rhineland, his power stood on the edge of a hair. If any army had marched against his troops, they would have had to retreat. Against the advice of his generals. Hitler took the chance He was supremely confident that the British and French bourgeoisie would save him from disaster and his confidence was not misplaced. They helped him out because they wanted his rule in Europe to continue. They helped him to rearm. They gave him diplomatic support. The degradation and humiliation of Germany, the brutalization of German life, all this for them was not only to be endured but to be condoned. It kept the workers in their place. Lloyd George and Lord Lothian, pillars of British liberalism, were political defenders of Hitler. Sir Neville Henderson. British minister to Germany compared his dictatorship to Cromwell’s. As late as 1938 Winston Churchill, supposed arch-enemy of Hitlerism, paid the Fuehrer a distinguished compliment. If Britain lost a war, said Churchill, he hoped that the British would find a Hitler to restore the nation as Hitler had restored Germany.</p>
<p>The examples can be multiplied. These are not accidental or chance utterances. They fit into the whole pattern of the bourgeois attitude toward Hitler. For them. Hitler was the savior of Central Europe. He was not a German phenomenon. He was the representative man of bourgeois society. He was the enemy of their enemy – the working class – and for a time he seemed to be a bulwark against revolutionary Russia. They turned against him only when they could not come to terms with him and <em>when they were assured that Russia was no longer revolutionary</em>. What is called appeasement was no tactic, it was no mistake. It was the bourgeoisie doing all it could so that Hitler should remain in power. Hence Roosevelt’s telegram to him congratulating him on Munich. Imagine then the boundless hypocrisy of Churchill when he told the world a few weeks ago that it would be a pity if the Germans had been driven out of Europe only to he replaced by totalitarian and police rule. Totalitarian and police role were the joint creation of the German bourgeoisie and the European bourgeoisie as a whole. Already all this is being forgotten. Churchill and the Tories are actually going before the British people to claim their suffrage as the successful leaders of the struggle against tyranny. It is not only that they should be indicted for the present ruin. <em>They are at the same game today.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Stalin Takes Hitler’s Place</h4>
<p class="fst">Regimes of all kinds have to seek alliances where they can get them. That is nothing new in history. It is characteristic of our age, however, and the social role of the working class that governments find it necessary either to suppress the working class altogether or to justify their acts with some show of plausibility. Thus when Czarism was drawn into the alliance with France and Britain in the early twentieth century, there began a change in the attitude of the press toward Czarism. From being Nicholas the Hangman, the Czar became the Little Father of all his peoples and remained such until the revolution in 1917. No longer able to lean on the most reactionary regime in Europe, the British and French bourgeoisie assisted the German bourgeoisie in establishing Hitler. As we have seen, this was no mere military entente. It was for more a social alliance, shot through of course with the economic contradictions which finally tore the alliance to pieces. Compelled destroy him, they turned to Stalinist Russia and Stalin. They have turned to Stalinism, first for military reasons, but also because they have been given assurances open and secret that Stalinism is purged of all revolutionary aims. Let us look the historical and concrete content of this. Nazism has collapsed not only without a bang but even without a whimper. Its leaders have simply ducked for cover. The generals have made a few arrogant but futile gestures. The German monarchists have not uttered a word. Of the great bourgeois state that was Germany, there is not one claimant for power. Of course some voices will be raised in time. But the collapse has been complete.</p>
<p>But Germany formed a central bloc in Europe, continuously contending for power in Eastern Europe, first against France and then against Russia. Italy, which added to the confusion in the Balkans, can do so no longer. The bankruptcy of France, the collapse of Germany, the disintegration of Italy, leave Eastern Europe as a congeries of states with bankrupt regimes. Russia is an imperialist power. We shall come to that in time. But the Russian domination of Eastern Europe, though a cause of bitter rivalry, is part of the whole Anglo-American-Russian plan for defending property and privilege and restoring their reactionary concept of order.</p>
<p>Churchill’s lamentations about police government and totalitarian rule in Europe is the most colossal lying and hypocrisy imaginable The British and United Stales governments terribly needed Hitler’s totalitarian and police rule in Europe so long as he kept his expansionism within bounds. Naturally they would have preferred to be able to do that whole job themselves But they could not carve up Europe as they carved up Africa sixty years ago. In the historical circumstances, Hitler, a reasonable Hitler, was a God-send for them. But in much the same way Stalin’s totalitarian police rule is a God-send for them, if Stalin is reasonable. The historical origins are different. Nazi Germany was the counter-revolution disguised as a new order and aiming at the destruction of the organized proletariat. Stalinism is the counter-revolution which for familiar reasons functions from within the proletariat. But while in fundamental conflict with Stalinist Russia, as it was in fundamental conflict with Nazi Germany, Anglo-American imperialism can only maintain its position in Europe against the masses of the people and the march of history by fraternization and the closest cooperation, first with the Nazi regime and now with Stalinism. Despite the differences between Nazism and Stalinism both these totalitarian, police-dominated regimes are now necessities for the maintenance of the shifting and unstable equilibrium which are the conditions for the continued existence of bourgeois society. Note that the quarrel is only over Poland. For the time being Stalinism could be allowed to dominate Eastern Europe as Hitler was allowed to swallow Austria and Czechoslovakia Tomorrow would be another story, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinism and Civilization</h4>
<p class="fst">And what is this regime which leas been substituted for Nazism? Nazism was an enemy to be fought as an enemy of civilization? <em>Before the war</em> the Stalinist political regime committed internal crimes to which the bestialities of Hitlerism against the German people were pale in comparison. Where and when has any modern regime carried out murders, massacres, repression and all kinds of violence against its own population as the Stalinist regime has carried out against the masses of the Russian people? Nothing that Hitler did to the Germans in tune of peace can compare to the murder and transportation of millions upon millions of peasants, done under the guise of “liquidating the kulak.” If Hitler liquidated Roehm, and his companions in arms in 1934, Stalin has liquidated not only some eighty per cent of the old Bolshevik Party, but in 1936–38 carried out an official massacre of hundreds of thousands plus his own highest appointees and officials, an official holocaust for which you will search history in vain to find a faint parallel.</p>
<p>Millions of workers are condemned to forced labor and concentration camps. The totalitarian excesses of the regime had for years exceeded Hitler’s most extreme excesses. All this the bourgeois world knew and commented upon in scathing terms. The bourgeoisie of Britain, France and America could not find words enough to condemn this barbarism and considered Hitler’s “New Order” a highly satisfactory means of ridding the world of the “Bolshevik menace” to civilization. It condoned Hitler’s “expansion” into Austria and into Czechoslovakia. It assisted his adventure in Spain. Only when his seizure of Poland threatened to upset the whole balance of European power did the Nazi crimes overnight assume the aspect of a menace to civilization. While Hitler was in alliance with Stalin, the bourgeois statesmen, with President Roosevelt at their head and the liberals trailing behind, took the propagandist offensive on behalf of civilization in condemnation of these twin barbarisms. With the change in alliances, however, the tune changed. Roosevelt’s voice rang with praise for “our Russian ally” and Churchill called Russia one of the democracies. Hitler continued his depredations over Europe accompanied by the execration of all progressive and right-thinking people. This, we were told, was imperialism naked and unadorned, and was condemned as such. Hitler murdered his enemies in the conquered countries, established puppet regimes, seized their capital and transported it to Germany or when ever it was convenient, and rounded up the population to work in his factories. The bourgeoisie and the liberals excelled themselves in virtuous indignation.</p>
<p>Now, however, Hitler has been defeated. And as his armies retreated Stalin’s conquering armies followed in their wake. They have shot down their political opponents, just as Hitler did. They have established puppet regimes, just as Hitler did. They have seized capital and transported it to Russia – just as Hitler did. They have rounded up thousands upon thousands of workers and sent them to Russia to labor – just as Hitler did. If they have not done it on the same scale it is because the war is now over and the immediate need is not as great. All this is done under the slogans of anti-fascism, defense of democracy, world peace and defense of Russia. The Baltic states were taken in order to defend Moscow better. East Poland was taken to defend the Baltic states. West Poland was taken to defend East Poland. Eastern Germany is invaded by the Lublin government no doubt, among other reasons, in order to defend Western Poland The totalitarian regimes are, as far as possible, installed. The world press is told to get out and to keep out.</p>
<p>When Hitler began the same process the protests of the bourgeoisie were mild and the protests of the liberals were loud. Today we see progress. The protests of the bourgeoisie were for a long time non-existent at Stalin’s imitation of Hitler. They hated it but they couldn’t prevent it. And as for the liberals, many were enthusiastic. But there is a limit. For the bourgeoisie Poland was the limit to Hitler’s peaceful expansion with bourgeois benevolence. It was also the limit to Stalin’s peaceful expansion and bourgeois benevolence. The struggle is on between the rivals for the domination of Europe. Poland is a key-point. Benevolent neutrality ceases. Russia is no longer a democracy. Churchill therefore begins to talk about totalitarian and police rule. The words should turn to dust and ashes in his mouth. Police rule in India, social entente with Hitler until rivalry puts an end to it; and now the same with Stalin. Field Marshal Alexander had to tell Tito, the democratic titan, that he would blow him out of Trieste it he did not go peaceably. First we heard the praises of Mikhailovitch, then we were deafened by the combined excoriation of Mikhailovitch and the praises of Tito. It may not be very long before we are treated to as long, as detailed and as ferocious an attack upon the crimes of Stalinism and its menace to civilization as formerly filled the air about Hitler. Nazism is beaten to the ground, but Stalinism rules in its stead. There are great differences but it is the similarity of these modern tyrannies which have followed one another with such swiftness that is revealed the essence of our society.<br>
</p>
<h4>Socialism or Barbarism</h4>
<p class="fst">That is the world in which we live. These are the men who rule its. This is how they rule and fool the people. A spate of articles, books, pamphlets, lectures, radio comments, films will now descend upon us in increasing magnitude and velocity all directed toward underscoring, illuminating, probing, analyzing the origin, essence and manifestations of the Hitlerite regime in Germany. The bourgeoisie of the democracies will seek to capitalize on its own heroic efforts and sacrifices to rid the world of this monster.</p>
<p>The working class will do well to ponder over these questions, to lay the responsibility where it lies, to see Hitlerism for what it was, a defense of bourgeois society in which all the bourgeoisie participated to the best of its ability. The way it has fawned upon Stalinism and covered up its crimes, the way it is now getting ready to turn upon Stalin if necessary, proves, if further proof were necessary, how self-motivated, how hypocritical are its cries about barbarism and the defense of civilization.</p>
<p>Everywhere it is the same. It sponsors the blood-stained regimes of Franco, of Chiang Kai-shek, of Peron in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil. Terror, murder, blood, persecution, wholesale robbery and innumerable lies – these are the weapons with which bourgeois society maintains itself. So deep-rooted is the decay, so all-pervading, that the democracies are compelled to build up these iniquitous regimes on one day and then set out to destroy them on the other. The workers of the United States in particular must see and learn. The time is coming when the American bourgeoisie will be driven into the same hole that the German bourgeoisie found itself. To escape the power of the workers there is no criminality which it will not embark upon to save its hide. The barbarism which descended upon Germany in 1933 will have its American counterpart because it was not German but capitalistic, capitalism fighting its war of survival. In saving itself from capitalism the American working class will save not only itself but the whole nation.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Lesson of Germany
(May 1945)
Source: New International, Vol. XI No. 4, May 1945, pp. 102–106.
Transcribed: Ted Crawford.
Proofread: Einde O’Callaghan (June 2016).
Bourgeois Society and Totalitarian Barbarism
The ruin of bourgeois society in Germany is so colossal in its scope, so logical in its development, and so embracing in all its ramifications that it forms a characteristic microcosm of bourgeois as a whole at this stage of its decay. We shall attempt here to point out a few of the outstanding features in so far as they enable us to understand our enemies more clearly.
Nazism was not in essence German. It was in essence capitalistic, bourgeois. In as much as it reached its most finished expression in Germany the appearance it presented to the world was German. But it was the representative of capitalism in our day, and not only of German capitalism but of all capitalism. There must not be the slightest hesitation or confusion about this.
After ten years of the Weimar Republic the German bourgeoisie wanted above all things capitalist order in Germany. No advanced nation could continue to live as Germany had lived between 1914 and 1921, in continuous crisis, and as it had begun to live again after the crash of 1929. Naturally the German bourgeois and the Junkers did not want Fascism. I hey preferred to rule themselves without these upstarts. They couldn’t do it. The old bourgeois ideology was exhausted. It could hold the nation together no longer. The bureaucracy, police and arms of the democratic state could no longer be depended upon to maintain order. The Fascists supplied a new ideology and a new coercive force. Behind all the Swastikas, the worship of Odin and of Thor, the outstretched hands and the Heil Hitlers, the persecution of the Jews, and all with which the world is familiar, there must be kept in mind the one central principle of Fascism – the destruction of the organised working-class movement. That was German Fascism. The German bourgeoisie had no choice. To understand this, and to give it its full value, is not to make excuses for the capitalists of Germany. It is in reality to become more fully aware of how necessary it is that bourgeois society be wiped off the face of the earth.
From 1918 to 1933 the German nation was going to pieces. Between the irreconcilable interests of the capitalist class and those of the working class, the economy, the social system and the political life of Germany were not only in decay: gangrene had set in.
The only cure was the knife and the German bourgeoisie applied it. The fascists sought power, power to rule and to bring order into disintegrating Germany. They got it. They did not have to fight a civil war for it. The bourgeoisie and the Junkers gave it to them. The petty bourgeoisie gave them mass support. The Social-Democracy and the Communists capitulated shamefully. Unlike Franco, who inherited a country ruined by civil war, the Nazis got hold of a Germany that was economically more highly developed than it was in 1918. They had every opportunity to show what they could do.
What Fascism Has Done to Germany
We have now seen. In twelve short years they have reduced what was the greatest nation in Europe to a pitch of misery, poverty, degradation, physical and moral humiliation such as has no parallel in all the centuries of Europe’s troubled history. It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was defeated. What is so striking is that even the basic elements of the power of the German bourgeoisie have been destroyed. The magnificent economy of Germany has been battered to pieces.
Many of the great cities of Germany, with Berlin at their head, are now mountains of rubble, with the culture of centuries buried beneath the ruins. The German army, with the German general staff, one of the proudest achievements of bourgeois Germany and for generations one of the greatest forces of reaction in capitalist Europe, has been beaten, disgraced, humiliated, its traditions dragged in the mud, all its power at the mercy of foreign conquerors.
Anglo-American-Russian propaganda is now trying to create the impression that the German general staff and the traditions of the German army have remained intact. There is no limit to the effrontery of imperialist politicians and their hired hacks. The Junkers and their militarists have reached the lowest depths of degradation. Field Marshals and generals, scions of Junker families famous not only in Germany but the world over, formed organizations in Moscow, broadcast on the radio and published propaganda calling upon the German army and their fellow officers to revolt. These brother officers and brother Junkers denounced the Muscovite Junkers as traitors before the whole German people. Junkers and officers tried to blow up or otherwise destroy their leader and the German general stall. They failed, the leaders were tried and hanged, and these too were denounced before the German people by Hitler and their own Junker brothers. Those who remained surrendered unconditionally and many of them are now in jail. Some are still seeking salvation from Moscow. Others are seeking to play Britain and America against Russia. Defeat, treason, assassination, hanging, contradictory policies, all carried out before the German people, blared at them day and night on the radio, and hurled at them in speeches and in the press – and now we are asked to believe that the traditions of the German general staff remain intact. The German people have other things to think about for the moment than the German general staff and the military traditions of the Junkers. But when they begin to think about these things they will have plenty to think about.
The German bureaucracy was one of the best administrative bodies that bourgeois Europe could show, and ranked with the British Civil Service. In republics like France and the United States the spoils of government are fought for in accordance with the crudest immoralities of the capitalist market. In Britain and Germany, however, where the feudal tradition was blended with the bourgeois, the ruling classes maintained a sense of orderly government, particularly because, in the last analysis, the profits and the power remained all the more certainly in the hands of or at the disposal of the ruling classes. The fraud and the corruption of bourgeois government were kept within decent bounds, all of which redounded to the credit of the ruling classes and enabled them all the more surely to mulct the population as a whole. Even before 1933, the fascists and the bourgeoisie had begun the corruption of the German bureaucracy. By 1945 its venality had become a byword of the German nation and the whole of Europe. Bribery was rampant from top to bottom of the German administration. This too was the work of fascism.
And so, Messrs. Bourgeois, you had your power and your order and above all your destruction of the German working class movement. You had every possible opportunity to show that you could do. Look at the result. You have reduced Germany in the eyes of the world to the lowest level of humanity. The suffering you have imposed upon Europe and the German people, the bestiality and ferocity which your gangsters had to practice and seek to instill into the German youth – all that will fester in the nation until the labor movement opens up for it a new perspective. But your greatest failure is that the very foundations of your own power, those you have destroyed also. All that remains now, in the words of Jodl after he surrendered, is to throw yourself on the generosity of the conquerors. Or, like Bismarck and Von Paulus, to try to sneak back sitting in the baggage-carts of the Russian army. Or, like Admiral Doenitz, to beg to be allowed to govern because otherwise the German people might swing to the right or to the left. The German people cannot swing to the right, Admiral. There is no further to the right to go. The Right did all it wished to do. The result is before us and before the German people too.
The Deflation of Nazism
But the final, the complete, the never-to-be-forgotten disgrace of ruling class Germany, the most dramatic expression of its inner bankruptcy is that it went down without a word to the German people or to the world. Five years ago the present writer had occasion to write about these people. It was September, 1940. They were at the height of their power. I wrote then:
“... For the first time for over five centuries, a political system with a great fanfare of newness and solution to crisis, makes a political virtue out of tyranny, inequality; class, racial and national prejudice; and decries everything that European civilization has striven for, in theory at least, since the Renaissance. During Europe’s worst periods of reaction, the period of the counter-reformation and the holy Alliance, the most reactionary writers could find something plausible to say in defense of their cause. German imperialism plunders in order to live. Fascism is the decline of the West and its protagonists know it in their souls. Their writings on all subjects, except the seizure of power, are nothing else but lies and nonsense, cold-blooded, deliberate falsification. Not a flower blossoms on their arid heaths. There is no soil in which anything in grow. They are just a thin cover for exhausted bourgeois society. They can have nothing to say. Mommsen and Carlyle said all when the bourgeoisie still could preserve some illusions. If Trotsky’s History does not guarantee the inevitability of socialism, Mein Kampf guarantees the fraud of fascism as a solution to the ill of capitalist society. (New International, September 1940, page 163.)
They were vigorous, able and determined but they were a gang in possession – nothing more. They knew it and the German bourgeoisie knew it too. When the crash came, not one of them had anything to offer as a perspective for the future. All through history, in periods of crisis, political leaders of great parties, revolutionary or reactionary, have been nourished and fortified by some vision. They could try to justify heir work, if even only to themselves and their followers. They could hurl at word of defiance at their captors even when facing the rifle squad. The defeated Old Bolsheviks, as they stood confessing at Stalin’s trials, were everything you like but not contemptible. If we deny all reason, all sense, all (ie, all the historical circumstances, and assume for a moment that they were speaking the truth, even then they were trying to atone, to do what they could to bolster up the remnants of the system to establish which they had given their lives. If, as has been abundantly proved, they were lying, then the lie is covered by the fact that at the very least the lies would help the regime to maintain its credit. But Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Ley, von Ribbentrop, Himmler, they live or die like rats in holes. They kill themselves or are killed, they run into the mountains with their women and their loot. Himmler, to save his own hide, carries out negotiations with the enemy and as good as offers to murder his dearly beloved Feuhrer. Goering gives interviews to the press and complains about how badly his Fuehrer and his enemies in the party treated him.
The Von Papens, and the Von Keitels, who had heiled Hitler with the best, merely shook off fascism as a man shakes off a dirty shirt. It had made a shrewd and at times a diabolically clever appeal to millions of the population but the rulers of Germany never believed in it. Fascism as a political system, its ideals, what it now offered to the German people, some hope to its millions of followers that out of the defeat would one day rise something – not a word, nothing. It said nothing because there was nothing to say. Nothing but shameful, mean, vulgar self-seeking. Isn’t it clear now exactly what fascism was? Never have so cruel, so vicious, so degenerate a set of scoundrels ever ruled any modern country. In all of them added together there was not an ounce of dignity or of genuine faith, not even in themselves. Hitler, who had so many elements of the genuine fanatic, proved in the end to be essentially of the same breed as the rest. There is here a profound lesson in social and political psychology.
It was to these empty men that Von Keitel and Von Kesselring and Von Rundstedt, and Von Jodl, it was to these gangsters that so many of the German aristocracy remained faithful. A substantial section of the German bourgeoisie and the German Junkers went along with fascism to the end. For them that was German civilization, German culture, German society and, of course, German bourgeois society. This was what they had built and supported in order to save Europe from bolshevism, to prevent the working class from ruling.
They were not alone. From one end of Europe to the other, the ruling classes of Europe were in thorough sympathy with Nazism and only fought it when they felt that their own hides were in danger. Petain, Laval and the French bourgeoisie, Franco and the Spanish bourgeoisie, Mussolini and the Italian bourgeoisie, the ruling classes of Hungary, Romania and Austria, from one end of the continent to another, in Britain and in the United States, this monstrous apparition in European society excited amid the great of the earth almost universal admiration, respect, fear and a desire to emulate wherever possible. Had it not been for the economic contradictions which compelled expansion and a threat to other economic interests, Hitler and his band of Dillingers would have been hailed as the restorers of order and the saviors of European society. The danger is that in the jubilation over the defeat and disgrace of these criminals the welcome bourgeois society gave them may be subordinated or lost sight of. The close harmony between fascism and the ruling classes everywhere was not any kind of mistake on either side. In these men bourgeois society recognized its indispensable medium of self-preservation. Their murderous cruelty, their greed, their ruthlessness, their vaunted fanaticism which turned out to be such a hollow mockery, everything about them was needed by bourgeois society, created by bourgeois society, built up by bourgeois society. Capitalism needed this barbarism in the past, needs it today and will need it in the future. It is its only means of salvation. The form will change. The essential savagery of the content will remain.
Hitler as a Social Phenomenon
We are accustomed to saying loosely that the European bourgeoisie not only welcomed Hitler but helped him to achieve power. That is a half truth. They were the chief architects of his success. They made him from the ground up. His rise appears to be the most spectacular in modern history. Yet a truly historical and realistic view will see him, far from being an Odyssey of individual will and achievement, no important career has been so essentially a social phenomenon. Comparisons with Napoleon are the fruit either of ignorance, stupidity or criminal intention. The young Bonaparte was sent to Italy as any number of voting generals were sent to fight the campaigns of the hard-pressed Republic. The “lightning in the hills” of the Italian campaign revealed to Europe that a military genius of the first magnitude had arisen. This military star displayed diplomatic genius as well. He was a European figure when he began his bid for power. Hitler’s career was the exact opposite. In 1923 he was nobody. Yet one year later he was attempting to capture Bavaria, being aided by the German hero of World War I, Ludendorf. The plotters believed that they had the support of the Bavarian military and governmental authorities and it is reasonable to believe that they had good cause for thinking that they did. His treatment in jail proved that. His hundreds of thousands of storm troopers represented an enormous expense. They were thugs hired by the German bourgeoisie to fight its battles against the working class. In the years 1930–33 the German bureaucracy engineered election after election. Through the system of proportional representation no government could find a sufficient majority to rule and by this means the bureaucracy and its masters hoped to discredit parliamentary government and open the way for authoritarian rule. Despite his immense influence over the petty bourgeoisie, Hitler, by 1932, was on the wane. The German bourgeoisie deliberately maintained Nazism to have some power in reserve against Bolshevism. True, he dominated them afterward. We do not mean for one moment to deny the energy, the inventiveness, the will, the tenacity of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. We do not deny their skilful use of social contradictions. He himself was obviously a born leader of men and an orator the like of whom Europe has not often seen. But from the time he began, the German bourgeoisie, the military caste, the bureaucracy, all built him up and without their active conscious support he would have been nothing.
Napoleon built himself up by sheer achievement and compelled recognition by the French bourgeoisie. The German bourgeoisie recognised this Vienna ex-house painter, ex-artist, ex-bum, ex-soldier from early, picked him out of the gutter and made him what he was. When he finally was pushed into the power in Germany the international bourgeoisie took its turn. The process of Hitler-building was repeated on the international scene.
Hitler, Representative Man of Bourgeois Society
At no time after the Eighteenth Brumaire could the French bourgeoisie have gotten rid of Bonaparte. And the European bourgeoisie was alike impotent before him. Coalitions innumerable of Europe were tried to drive him from power. He broke them one after the other by his own military, diplomatic and administrative skill. He owed nothing to any of Europe’s ruling classes. He spread the tenets and practices of bourgeois society throughout Europe by his skilful use of the revolutionary power developed in France. He was “Robespierre on horseback,” the bourgeois Emperor, carrying war to European feudalism. Hitler was bone of Europe’s bone and flesh of Europe’s flesh. Hitler was bourgeois reaction, doing the work of the bourgeoisie. At any time between 1933 and 1936 and even later he could have been overthrown from the outside. In 1936, when he matched into the Rhineland, his power stood on the edge of a hair. If any army had marched against his troops, they would have had to retreat. Against the advice of his generals. Hitler took the chance He was supremely confident that the British and French bourgeoisie would save him from disaster and his confidence was not misplaced. They helped him out because they wanted his rule in Europe to continue. They helped him to rearm. They gave him diplomatic support. The degradation and humiliation of Germany, the brutalization of German life, all this for them was not only to be endured but to be condoned. It kept the workers in their place. Lloyd George and Lord Lothian, pillars of British liberalism, were political defenders of Hitler. Sir Neville Henderson. British minister to Germany compared his dictatorship to Cromwell’s. As late as 1938 Winston Churchill, supposed arch-enemy of Hitlerism, paid the Fuehrer a distinguished compliment. If Britain lost a war, said Churchill, he hoped that the British would find a Hitler to restore the nation as Hitler had restored Germany.
The examples can be multiplied. These are not accidental or chance utterances. They fit into the whole pattern of the bourgeois attitude toward Hitler. For them. Hitler was the savior of Central Europe. He was not a German phenomenon. He was the representative man of bourgeois society. He was the enemy of their enemy – the working class – and for a time he seemed to be a bulwark against revolutionary Russia. They turned against him only when they could not come to terms with him and when they were assured that Russia was no longer revolutionary. What is called appeasement was no tactic, it was no mistake. It was the bourgeoisie doing all it could so that Hitler should remain in power. Hence Roosevelt’s telegram to him congratulating him on Munich. Imagine then the boundless hypocrisy of Churchill when he told the world a few weeks ago that it would be a pity if the Germans had been driven out of Europe only to he replaced by totalitarian and police rule. Totalitarian and police role were the joint creation of the German bourgeoisie and the European bourgeoisie as a whole. Already all this is being forgotten. Churchill and the Tories are actually going before the British people to claim their suffrage as the successful leaders of the struggle against tyranny. It is not only that they should be indicted for the present ruin. They are at the same game today.
Stalin Takes Hitler’s Place
Regimes of all kinds have to seek alliances where they can get them. That is nothing new in history. It is characteristic of our age, however, and the social role of the working class that governments find it necessary either to suppress the working class altogether or to justify their acts with some show of plausibility. Thus when Czarism was drawn into the alliance with France and Britain in the early twentieth century, there began a change in the attitude of the press toward Czarism. From being Nicholas the Hangman, the Czar became the Little Father of all his peoples and remained such until the revolution in 1917. No longer able to lean on the most reactionary regime in Europe, the British and French bourgeoisie assisted the German bourgeoisie in establishing Hitler. As we have seen, this was no mere military entente. It was for more a social alliance, shot through of course with the economic contradictions which finally tore the alliance to pieces. Compelled destroy him, they turned to Stalinist Russia and Stalin. They have turned to Stalinism, first for military reasons, but also because they have been given assurances open and secret that Stalinism is purged of all revolutionary aims. Let us look the historical and concrete content of this. Nazism has collapsed not only without a bang but even without a whimper. Its leaders have simply ducked for cover. The generals have made a few arrogant but futile gestures. The German monarchists have not uttered a word. Of the great bourgeois state that was Germany, there is not one claimant for power. Of course some voices will be raised in time. But the collapse has been complete.
But Germany formed a central bloc in Europe, continuously contending for power in Eastern Europe, first against France and then against Russia. Italy, which added to the confusion in the Balkans, can do so no longer. The bankruptcy of France, the collapse of Germany, the disintegration of Italy, leave Eastern Europe as a congeries of states with bankrupt regimes. Russia is an imperialist power. We shall come to that in time. But the Russian domination of Eastern Europe, though a cause of bitter rivalry, is part of the whole Anglo-American-Russian plan for defending property and privilege and restoring their reactionary concept of order.
Churchill’s lamentations about police government and totalitarian rule in Europe is the most colossal lying and hypocrisy imaginable The British and United Stales governments terribly needed Hitler’s totalitarian and police rule in Europe so long as he kept his expansionism within bounds. Naturally they would have preferred to be able to do that whole job themselves But they could not carve up Europe as they carved up Africa sixty years ago. In the historical circumstances, Hitler, a reasonable Hitler, was a God-send for them. But in much the same way Stalin’s totalitarian police rule is a God-send for them, if Stalin is reasonable. The historical origins are different. Nazi Germany was the counter-revolution disguised as a new order and aiming at the destruction of the organized proletariat. Stalinism is the counter-revolution which for familiar reasons functions from within the proletariat. But while in fundamental conflict with Stalinist Russia, as it was in fundamental conflict with Nazi Germany, Anglo-American imperialism can only maintain its position in Europe against the masses of the people and the march of history by fraternization and the closest cooperation, first with the Nazi regime and now with Stalinism. Despite the differences between Nazism and Stalinism both these totalitarian, police-dominated regimes are now necessities for the maintenance of the shifting and unstable equilibrium which are the conditions for the continued existence of bourgeois society. Note that the quarrel is only over Poland. For the time being Stalinism could be allowed to dominate Eastern Europe as Hitler was allowed to swallow Austria and Czechoslovakia Tomorrow would be another story, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Stalinism and Civilization
And what is this regime which leas been substituted for Nazism? Nazism was an enemy to be fought as an enemy of civilization? Before the war the Stalinist political regime committed internal crimes to which the bestialities of Hitlerism against the German people were pale in comparison. Where and when has any modern regime carried out murders, massacres, repression and all kinds of violence against its own population as the Stalinist regime has carried out against the masses of the Russian people? Nothing that Hitler did to the Germans in tune of peace can compare to the murder and transportation of millions upon millions of peasants, done under the guise of “liquidating the kulak.” If Hitler liquidated Roehm, and his companions in arms in 1934, Stalin has liquidated not only some eighty per cent of the old Bolshevik Party, but in 1936–38 carried out an official massacre of hundreds of thousands plus his own highest appointees and officials, an official holocaust for which you will search history in vain to find a faint parallel.
Millions of workers are condemned to forced labor and concentration camps. The totalitarian excesses of the regime had for years exceeded Hitler’s most extreme excesses. All this the bourgeois world knew and commented upon in scathing terms. The bourgeoisie of Britain, France and America could not find words enough to condemn this barbarism and considered Hitler’s “New Order” a highly satisfactory means of ridding the world of the “Bolshevik menace” to civilization. It condoned Hitler’s “expansion” into Austria and into Czechoslovakia. It assisted his adventure in Spain. Only when his seizure of Poland threatened to upset the whole balance of European power did the Nazi crimes overnight assume the aspect of a menace to civilization. While Hitler was in alliance with Stalin, the bourgeois statesmen, with President Roosevelt at their head and the liberals trailing behind, took the propagandist offensive on behalf of civilization in condemnation of these twin barbarisms. With the change in alliances, however, the tune changed. Roosevelt’s voice rang with praise for “our Russian ally” and Churchill called Russia one of the democracies. Hitler continued his depredations over Europe accompanied by the execration of all progressive and right-thinking people. This, we were told, was imperialism naked and unadorned, and was condemned as such. Hitler murdered his enemies in the conquered countries, established puppet regimes, seized their capital and transported it to Germany or when ever it was convenient, and rounded up the population to work in his factories. The bourgeoisie and the liberals excelled themselves in virtuous indignation.
Now, however, Hitler has been defeated. And as his armies retreated Stalin’s conquering armies followed in their wake. They have shot down their political opponents, just as Hitler did. They have established puppet regimes, just as Hitler did. They have seized capital and transported it to Russia – just as Hitler did. They have rounded up thousands upon thousands of workers and sent them to Russia to labor – just as Hitler did. If they have not done it on the same scale it is because the war is now over and the immediate need is not as great. All this is done under the slogans of anti-fascism, defense of democracy, world peace and defense of Russia. The Baltic states were taken in order to defend Moscow better. East Poland was taken to defend the Baltic states. West Poland was taken to defend East Poland. Eastern Germany is invaded by the Lublin government no doubt, among other reasons, in order to defend Western Poland The totalitarian regimes are, as far as possible, installed. The world press is told to get out and to keep out.
When Hitler began the same process the protests of the bourgeoisie were mild and the protests of the liberals were loud. Today we see progress. The protests of the bourgeoisie were for a long time non-existent at Stalin’s imitation of Hitler. They hated it but they couldn’t prevent it. And as for the liberals, many were enthusiastic. But there is a limit. For the bourgeoisie Poland was the limit to Hitler’s peaceful expansion with bourgeois benevolence. It was also the limit to Stalin’s peaceful expansion and bourgeois benevolence. The struggle is on between the rivals for the domination of Europe. Poland is a key-point. Benevolent neutrality ceases. Russia is no longer a democracy. Churchill therefore begins to talk about totalitarian and police rule. The words should turn to dust and ashes in his mouth. Police rule in India, social entente with Hitler until rivalry puts an end to it; and now the same with Stalin. Field Marshal Alexander had to tell Tito, the democratic titan, that he would blow him out of Trieste it he did not go peaceably. First we heard the praises of Mikhailovitch, then we were deafened by the combined excoriation of Mikhailovitch and the praises of Tito. It may not be very long before we are treated to as long, as detailed and as ferocious an attack upon the crimes of Stalinism and its menace to civilization as formerly filled the air about Hitler. Nazism is beaten to the ground, but Stalinism rules in its stead. There are great differences but it is the similarity of these modern tyrannies which have followed one another with such swiftness that is revealed the essence of our society.
Socialism or Barbarism
That is the world in which we live. These are the men who rule its. This is how they rule and fool the people. A spate of articles, books, pamphlets, lectures, radio comments, films will now descend upon us in increasing magnitude and velocity all directed toward underscoring, illuminating, probing, analyzing the origin, essence and manifestations of the Hitlerite regime in Germany. The bourgeoisie of the democracies will seek to capitalize on its own heroic efforts and sacrifices to rid the world of this monster.
The working class will do well to ponder over these questions, to lay the responsibility where it lies, to see Hitlerism for what it was, a defense of bourgeois society in which all the bourgeoisie participated to the best of its ability. The way it has fawned upon Stalinism and covered up its crimes, the way it is now getting ready to turn upon Stalin if necessary, proves, if further proof were necessary, how self-motivated, how hypocritical are its cries about barbarism and the defense of civilization.
Everywhere it is the same. It sponsors the blood-stained regimes of Franco, of Chiang Kai-shek, of Peron in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil. Terror, murder, blood, persecution, wholesale robbery and innumerable lies – these are the weapons with which bourgeois society maintains itself. So deep-rooted is the decay, so all-pervading, that the democracies are compelled to build up these iniquitous regimes on one day and then set out to destroy them on the other. The workers of the United States in particular must see and learn. The time is coming when the American bourgeoisie will be driven into the same hole that the German bourgeoisie found itself. To escape the power of the workers there is no criminality which it will not embark upon to save its hide. The barbarism which descended upon Germany in 1933 will have its American counterpart because it was not German but capitalistic, capitalism fighting its war of survival. In saving itself from capitalism the American working class will save not only itself but the whole nation.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
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<td><br>
<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
</td>
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<h3>(6 October 1939)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_76" target="new">Vol. III No. 76</a>, 6 October 1939, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<h3>[The Place of the Negro Is in the Vanguard]</h3>
<p class="fst">The place of the Negro is in the very vanguard of the revolutionary movement for socialism. That is the major theoretical contribution which the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers Party have made towards a clear and precise understanding of the role of the Negro in the solution of the difficulties now facing humanity.</p>
<p>Whereas even the Communist Party in its revolutionary days saw the Negroes essentially as an appendage, however valuable, to the revolutionary movement, we on the other hand, see the Negroes as foremost among those who will struggle against the crimes and barbarities of the capitalist system. The reason for this lies in the very nature of the Negro’s position in capitalist society. The most exploited, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, Negroes are the ones who experience most acutely and most unbearably the overwhelming burdens which capitalism places upon the masses in every country. Negroes haven’t to read in books about the fraud of capitalist democracy. Karl Marx and Lenin have little to teach them about the fact.<br>
</p>
<h4>Prejudices Must Be Overcome</h4>
<p class="fst">This conception of the role of the Negro has hitherto been obscured by the racial prejudices instilled into the different sections of the working class by American capitalism. The revolutionary party therefore is faced with the tremendous difficulty of overcoming this division. Yet difficult as this task is, it is a difficulty of tactics and not of strategy. The important question is not so much that of winning the Negroes for the revolution, but of instilling the Negro masses with the conviction that they can place their trust and confidence in a revolutionary party composed largely of white workers, as is inevitable in American society. That task successfully accomplished, the Fourth International is confident that the large masses of the Negroes will fight against imperialism of all kinds with a bravery and endurance that will be surpassed by no other section of the population.</p>
<p>Such a generalization, of such profound importance for the American revolution, and the world revolution as a whole, is best tested by the reaction of Negroes to great events such as, for instance, the present war. Anyone who has contacts of any kind with Negroes will know that they have been profoundly stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In a series of articles in this column, we shall examine the attitude to the war taken by various groups of Negroes. This attitude is in many respects confused and in some dangerous. What has been most striking, however, is that of all political and social groups in America, they have been the least bamboozled by the thesis that the imperialist war is a war for democracy against fascism. From the harsh experiences of their own lives and their knowledge of the exploitation and indignities endured by their brothers in Africa, they see the realities of the imperialist conflict much more clearly than many other sections of the American workers who are better organized and have more education and experience in the day to day politics of America. What is true of the American Negro is also true of Negroes everywhere.</p>
<p>A general mass sentiment of this kind inevitably produces atone stage or another some political organization, some political expression which points the road by which the confused but revolutionary instincts of great masses can be transformed into effective political reality. Such an organization already exists in the Fourth International and its sections in America, Great Britain, Africa, etc. The Fourth International, in its call for the revolutionary struggle against imperialism, expresses the aspirations and shows the future road for all the workers, white, Negro, Indian, whatever color, whatever race, whatever creed.<br>
</p>
<h4>Int’l African Service Bureau</h4>
<p class="fst">But there are Negroes, not affiliated to the Fourth International, who have arrived at a political position which places them side by side with the Fourth International on the war question. They are conscious that nothing but the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can give any final solution to the permanent burdens, and additional sufferings placed upon Negroes everywhere by the imperialist war. In Great Britain, an organization of Negroes known as the International African Service Bureau, during the last few years has carried on a wide propaganda for African independence and Negro emancipation. This propaganda has not been confined to Great Britain, but has been spread in all parts of the world where Negroes live and suffer. These Negroes have seen that the colonial masses of the East are allies of the Negro and contacts have been made with organizations in India and in Ceylon. The work of the bureau has been assisted by various industrial and political organizations of the British workers, which to a smaller or greater degree, recognize how vital to their own emancipation is the emancipation of the Negro people all over the world. In the crisis over Czechoslovakia, the Bureau issued a call to the Africans and to the British workers, to fight in unity against the imperialist lie of “war for democracy.” And with the approach of this war, the Bureau issued another manifesto, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/v03n76/iasb.htm" target="new"><em>A Warning to the Colonial Peoples</em></a>, which is published in another column. The manifesto calls upon the colonial masses in Africa, in India, in Burma, in Ceylon, to struggle against the war-mongers both fascist and “democratic.” It appeals to the British workers to do the same against the common enemy – imperialism.<br>
</p>
<h4>Struggle Against War Is International</h4>
<p class="fst">This manifesto is of enormous importance, and must be closely studied and assimilated by all the workers in America, Negro and white. The Negroes in particular must realize that it is their duty to follow the lead so clearly and courageously given by a group of their brothers operating in Great Britain, the heart of the British Empire and of world imperialist reaction. Today the struggle against war is international and the Bureau manifesto has appealed not only to Negroes but to all workers, in the colonies and in Europe. It is impossible to have an equivocal position on war. One must be either with the imperialists and for the war, or against the imperialists and against the continuance of their system which inevitably breeds war. The manifesto says clearly and simply: Colonials and white workers, oppose the war.</p>
<p>It is of great significance that this manifesto comes into our hands just at the moment that our series of articles on the <a href="../09/negro-war.html" target="new"><em>Negro and War</em></a> in this column of the <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong> have come to a conclusion. That series will be republished in a few days as a pamphlet of 32 pages under the title of <strong>Why Negroes Should Oppose the War</strong>. Negroes of all shades of political opinion must study this pamphlet carefully, compare it with the manifesto issued by the International African Service Bureau, and realize how the consciousness of oppression and an insight into the mechanism of modern society lead inevitably to the one conclusion: that all the workers, of whatever race, must unite in revolutionary struggle against the imperialist war-mongers, whether fascist or “democratic”. The pamphlet <strong>Why Negroes Should Oppose the War</strong> and the manifesto <em>A Warning to the Colonial Peoples</em> are events of major importance in the political crystallization of the Negro instinct for revolutionary struggle.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(6 October 1939)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 76, 6 October 1939, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
[The Place of the Negro Is in the Vanguard]
The place of the Negro is in the very vanguard of the revolutionary movement for socialism. That is the major theoretical contribution which the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers Party have made towards a clear and precise understanding of the role of the Negro in the solution of the difficulties now facing humanity.
Whereas even the Communist Party in its revolutionary days saw the Negroes essentially as an appendage, however valuable, to the revolutionary movement, we on the other hand, see the Negroes as foremost among those who will struggle against the crimes and barbarities of the capitalist system. The reason for this lies in the very nature of the Negro’s position in capitalist society. The most exploited, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, Negroes are the ones who experience most acutely and most unbearably the overwhelming burdens which capitalism places upon the masses in every country. Negroes haven’t to read in books about the fraud of capitalist democracy. Karl Marx and Lenin have little to teach them about the fact.
Prejudices Must Be Overcome
This conception of the role of the Negro has hitherto been obscured by the racial prejudices instilled into the different sections of the working class by American capitalism. The revolutionary party therefore is faced with the tremendous difficulty of overcoming this division. Yet difficult as this task is, it is a difficulty of tactics and not of strategy. The important question is not so much that of winning the Negroes for the revolution, but of instilling the Negro masses with the conviction that they can place their trust and confidence in a revolutionary party composed largely of white workers, as is inevitable in American society. That task successfully accomplished, the Fourth International is confident that the large masses of the Negroes will fight against imperialism of all kinds with a bravery and endurance that will be surpassed by no other section of the population.
Such a generalization, of such profound importance for the American revolution, and the world revolution as a whole, is best tested by the reaction of Negroes to great events such as, for instance, the present war. Anyone who has contacts of any kind with Negroes will know that they have been profoundly stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In a series of articles in this column, we shall examine the attitude to the war taken by various groups of Negroes. This attitude is in many respects confused and in some dangerous. What has been most striking, however, is that of all political and social groups in America, they have been the least bamboozled by the thesis that the imperialist war is a war for democracy against fascism. From the harsh experiences of their own lives and their knowledge of the exploitation and indignities endured by their brothers in Africa, they see the realities of the imperialist conflict much more clearly than many other sections of the American workers who are better organized and have more education and experience in the day to day politics of America. What is true of the American Negro is also true of Negroes everywhere.
A general mass sentiment of this kind inevitably produces atone stage or another some political organization, some political expression which points the road by which the confused but revolutionary instincts of great masses can be transformed into effective political reality. Such an organization already exists in the Fourth International and its sections in America, Great Britain, Africa, etc. The Fourth International, in its call for the revolutionary struggle against imperialism, expresses the aspirations and shows the future road for all the workers, white, Negro, Indian, whatever color, whatever race, whatever creed.
Int’l African Service Bureau
But there are Negroes, not affiliated to the Fourth International, who have arrived at a political position which places them side by side with the Fourth International on the war question. They are conscious that nothing but the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can give any final solution to the permanent burdens, and additional sufferings placed upon Negroes everywhere by the imperialist war. In Great Britain, an organization of Negroes known as the International African Service Bureau, during the last few years has carried on a wide propaganda for African independence and Negro emancipation. This propaganda has not been confined to Great Britain, but has been spread in all parts of the world where Negroes live and suffer. These Negroes have seen that the colonial masses of the East are allies of the Negro and contacts have been made with organizations in India and in Ceylon. The work of the bureau has been assisted by various industrial and political organizations of the British workers, which to a smaller or greater degree, recognize how vital to their own emancipation is the emancipation of the Negro people all over the world. In the crisis over Czechoslovakia, the Bureau issued a call to the Africans and to the British workers, to fight in unity against the imperialist lie of “war for democracy.” And with the approach of this war, the Bureau issued another manifesto, A Warning to the Colonial Peoples, which is published in another column. The manifesto calls upon the colonial masses in Africa, in India, in Burma, in Ceylon, to struggle against the war-mongers both fascist and “democratic.” It appeals to the British workers to do the same against the common enemy – imperialism.
Struggle Against War Is International
This manifesto is of enormous importance, and must be closely studied and assimilated by all the workers in America, Negro and white. The Negroes in particular must realize that it is their duty to follow the lead so clearly and courageously given by a group of their brothers operating in Great Britain, the heart of the British Empire and of world imperialist reaction. Today the struggle against war is international and the Bureau manifesto has appealed not only to Negroes but to all workers, in the colonies and in Europe. It is impossible to have an equivocal position on war. One must be either with the imperialists and for the war, or against the imperialists and against the continuance of their system which inevitably breeds war. The manifesto says clearly and simply: Colonials and white workers, oppose the war.
It is of great significance that this manifesto comes into our hands just at the moment that our series of articles on the Negro and War in this column of the Socialist Appeal have come to a conclusion. That series will be republished in a few days as a pamphlet of 32 pages under the title of Why Negroes Should Oppose the War. Negroes of all shades of political opinion must study this pamphlet carefully, compare it with the manifesto issued by the International African Service Bureau, and realize how the consciousness of oppression and an insight into the mechanism of modern society lead inevitably to the one conclusion: that all the workers, of whatever race, must unite in revolutionary struggle against the imperialist war-mongers, whether fascist or “democratic”. The pamphlet Why Negroes Should Oppose the War and the manifesto A Warning to the Colonial Peoples are events of major importance in the political crystallization of the Negro instinct for revolutionary struggle.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>One-Tenth of the Nation</h1>
<h3>(18 November 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_46" target="new">Vol. 10 No. 46</a>, 18 November 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Republicans have won great victories in the Congress. They control both the Senate and the House. OK. The Democratic control is gone. The Republican control begins.</p>
<p><em>And now I want to ask every Negro voter: What does this mean to you, as a Negro? Not a single thing. Not one single thing! The Democrats controlled the Congress. Did they do anything about the anti-lynching bill? No. Did they pass a permanent FEPC bill? No. Did they even protest violently against the wave of terror sweeping the South against Negroes? No.</em></p>
<p>Every Negro knows that. But not a Negro anywhere believes that the Republican majority will mean a change.<br>
</p>
<h4>Same Odd Story</h4>
<p class="fst">Now what I want to know is this. How long will the Negroes continue to accept this? How many times is it necessary to repeat that the Democratic Party AND the Republican Party are one and the same in bluffing the Negroes and ignoring their rights and their grievances. That is proved beyond possibility of refutation.</p>
<p>Must the Negroes then bow their heads and forget the things that they and they alone suffer from? Absolutely not.</p>
<p>Let us suppose that there were twenty members of the House of Representatives and five Senators who were neither Republicans nor Democrats. They could not pass bills. But they could do at least one thing. They could see to it that not only the grievances of the Negroes were placed before Congress for all the world to hear. They could use their places in the legislature mercilessly to expose the tricks, the deceptions, the doubletalk by which both Democrats and Republicans unite to defeat elementary justice for Negroes. Over and over again it has seen proved that a small body of united, determined men can expose, disorganize and wreck the tricks of a body of legislators many times their size.</p>
<p><em>Where can the Negroes find them? They cannot find them in the Democratic Party. They cannot find them in the Republican Party. Then a new party is necessary.</em></p>
<p>There are fifteen million Negroes in the country. There are nearly or perhaps already two million Negroes in the organized labor movement. What prevents the Negroes from calling upon labor to form a new party?<br>
</p>
<h4>Has Happened Before</h4>
<p class="fst">There is nothing new in this. <em>Frederick Douglas was one of the founders of the Republican Party.</em> He didn’t wait. He didn’t think that it was a Negro’s business always to wait until something was formed and then join it. He saw that there was nothing to be got from the Whig Party and the Democratic Party of those days. The Abolition Movement under Garrison and Wendell Phillips not only refused to support the two existing parties but would not undertake any political action at all. Douglass denounced both Whig and Democratic Parties, broke with the Abolition Movement and organized propaganda and agitation of his own. He collaborated with politicians who tried for years to form a political party which would rid the nation of slavery.</p>
<p>These men for years were only a small band in Congress. But they spoke out loud. One of them, Sumner, used to attack the Southerners so fiercely that a Southern member of the Senate actually beat him up in the Senate itself. After many years of work the Republican Party was formed and led the nation to victory over the slave-power. It is a useful thing to remember that when Douglass and his friends were laying the foundations of what afterward became the Republican Party, Lincoln was opposed to them.</p>
<p>Douglass was only one of a few far-sighted people in those days. Today things are changed. Millions of organized workers are sick to death of BOTH parties. The Negroes inside and outside the labor movement can do what Douglass did. They can take the lead. Then can call upon the labor movement to do what only the labor movement can do – form the Labor Party.</p>
<p><em>A Labor Party will in all probability propose to nationalize the basic industries. But it is precisely the owners of the basic industries who help to keep the Negroes where they are. Thus what is likely to be the fundamental plank of a Labor Party is also a basic necessity for any genuine Negro emancipation.</em></p>
<p>Why then should the Negroes wait? Why shouldn’t they advocate a Labor Party, participate in the formation of its program, themselves lay down the program of struggle for Negro emancipation as a part of the Labor Party program?<br>
</p>
<h4>Effect of Labor Party</h4>
<p class="fst">But, some say, to form such a party means the defeat of the Democratic Party. So what then? The Republican Party was in its day a revolutionary party. Douglass and the other founders were besieged with arguments that a new party would split the progressive vote. So it did. It split the vote in one election and triumphantly elected Lincoln as President in the next.</p>
<p><em>But even if today a genuine labor candidate were elected in half a dozen constituencies, the effect would be electrical.</em></p>
<p>Labor would have its own voice in the legislature and a new stage would have opened. The Negroes have every reason to join the agitation for a Labor Party and be the most ardent, advocates of a powerful, revolutionary program for it.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
(18 November 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 46, 18 November 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The Republicans have won great victories in the Congress. They control both the Senate and the House. OK. The Democratic control is gone. The Republican control begins.
And now I want to ask every Negro voter: What does this mean to you, as a Negro? Not a single thing. Not one single thing! The Democrats controlled the Congress. Did they do anything about the anti-lynching bill? No. Did they pass a permanent FEPC bill? No. Did they even protest violently against the wave of terror sweeping the South against Negroes? No.
Every Negro knows that. But not a Negro anywhere believes that the Republican majority will mean a change.
Same Odd Story
Now what I want to know is this. How long will the Negroes continue to accept this? How many times is it necessary to repeat that the Democratic Party AND the Republican Party are one and the same in bluffing the Negroes and ignoring their rights and their grievances. That is proved beyond possibility of refutation.
Must the Negroes then bow their heads and forget the things that they and they alone suffer from? Absolutely not.
Let us suppose that there were twenty members of the House of Representatives and five Senators who were neither Republicans nor Democrats. They could not pass bills. But they could do at least one thing. They could see to it that not only the grievances of the Negroes were placed before Congress for all the world to hear. They could use their places in the legislature mercilessly to expose the tricks, the deceptions, the doubletalk by which both Democrats and Republicans unite to defeat elementary justice for Negroes. Over and over again it has seen proved that a small body of united, determined men can expose, disorganize and wreck the tricks of a body of legislators many times their size.
Where can the Negroes find them? They cannot find them in the Democratic Party. They cannot find them in the Republican Party. Then a new party is necessary.
There are fifteen million Negroes in the country. There are nearly or perhaps already two million Negroes in the organized labor movement. What prevents the Negroes from calling upon labor to form a new party?
Has Happened Before
There is nothing new in this. Frederick Douglas was one of the founders of the Republican Party. He didn’t wait. He didn’t think that it was a Negro’s business always to wait until something was formed and then join it. He saw that there was nothing to be got from the Whig Party and the Democratic Party of those days. The Abolition Movement under Garrison and Wendell Phillips not only refused to support the two existing parties but would not undertake any political action at all. Douglass denounced both Whig and Democratic Parties, broke with the Abolition Movement and organized propaganda and agitation of his own. He collaborated with politicians who tried for years to form a political party which would rid the nation of slavery.
These men for years were only a small band in Congress. But they spoke out loud. One of them, Sumner, used to attack the Southerners so fiercely that a Southern member of the Senate actually beat him up in the Senate itself. After many years of work the Republican Party was formed and led the nation to victory over the slave-power. It is a useful thing to remember that when Douglass and his friends were laying the foundations of what afterward became the Republican Party, Lincoln was opposed to them.
Douglass was only one of a few far-sighted people in those days. Today things are changed. Millions of organized workers are sick to death of BOTH parties. The Negroes inside and outside the labor movement can do what Douglass did. They can take the lead. Then can call upon the labor movement to do what only the labor movement can do – form the Labor Party.
A Labor Party will in all probability propose to nationalize the basic industries. But it is precisely the owners of the basic industries who help to keep the Negroes where they are. Thus what is likely to be the fundamental plank of a Labor Party is also a basic necessity for any genuine Negro emancipation.
Why then should the Negroes wait? Why shouldn’t they advocate a Labor Party, participate in the formation of its program, themselves lay down the program of struggle for Negro emancipation as a part of the Labor Party program?
Effect of Labor Party
But, some say, to form such a party means the defeat of the Democratic Party. So what then? The Republican Party was in its day a revolutionary party. Douglass and the other founders were besieged with arguments that a new party would split the progressive vote. So it did. It split the vote in one election and triumphantly elected Lincoln as President in the next.
But even if today a genuine labor candidate were elected in half a dozen constituencies, the effect would be electrical.
Labor would have its own voice in the legislature and a new stage would have opened. The Negroes have every reason to join the agitation for a Labor Party and be the most ardent, advocates of a powerful, revolutionary program for it.
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<p class="title">CLR James 1945</p>
<h1>
The British Vote for Socialism</h1>
<h3>The Rise of British Labor</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <i>New International</i>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni45_09">Volume XI No.6</a>,
September 1945, pp. 170-175, C L R James under the name of J.R.Johnson;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed and Marked up</span>: by Damon Maxwell. September, 2008. </p>
<hr class="end">
<p>Few, if any, elections in modern times have had the significance and opened out perspectives on a scale comparable with the recent British election. Its evaluation can proceed along three main lines. The first is the meaning of it in relation to Britain itself. The second is its repercussions in Europe and the world. The third is its influence on the political development of the American working class movement. These three can be separated only for purposes of convenience. If, for example, at the coming French elections in October, it were made clear that the British victory had stimulated the French electorate toward a repudiation of de Gaulle similar to the repudiation of Churchill, then the repercussion back on Britain would be tremendous. For the time being, however, we shall confine ourselves to the first – the significance of the election as a purely British phenomenon.</p>
<p>There is only one fundamental question which has to be decided. Is the election merely an unmistakable sign of a desire for “social progress,” or a desire for social reconstruction of Britain, in a word, for socialism? The American bourgeoisie has been at pains in its press to explain that what the British workers in reality want is higher wages, greater social security, no unemployment, a vast housing program, in general, improvement on the admittedly unsatisfactory conditions which prevailed before the war; be it understood also that the workers expect some reward also for the sacrifices endured during the war. Despite the warning notes uttered by some correspondents from abroad and a few commentators here, the emphasis has been upon the mild program of nationalization put forward by the Labor Party and upon the well known, alas, only too well known, sobriety and conservatism of the British labor leaders. American capitalism also, according to this theory, has played its own progressive part in this education of the British working class. American soldiers held forth to British workers on apartments with central heating and frigidaires and the high standard of living which had been granted to American labor by American capitalism. This stimulated the British working class to demand the same and therefore to vote Labor in overwhelming majority.</p>
<p>All these ideas are just so much whistling in the dark. As far as the great masses of the British people are concerned, their vote is a repudiation of British capitalist society in Britain and a mandate to the British Labor Party to institute socialism. The people who think or would like to think what the American bourgeoisie is teaching in its press are the British labor leaders. But we draw a sharp distinction between the masses of the British people as a whole and the labor and trade union bureaucracy, a distinction as sharp as that which Lenin in his time and Trotsky from the days of <em>Whither England?</em> to his death used to draw. The first purpose of this article is to make this clear, not by speculation into the psychology of the British working class, but by a review of the development of the British Labor Party and its relation to economic and social changes in Britain and in the world at large. It is sufficient to say that our approach is based on that conception of British development expressed consistently by Trotsky and nowhere so sharply as in his <em>History of the Russian Revolution</em>. There he writes: “Only a blind man could fail to see that Great Britain is headed for gigantic revolutionary earthquake shocks, in which the last fragments of her conservatism, her world domination, her present state machine, will go down without a trace. Macdonald is preparing these shocks no less successfully than did Nicholas II in his time, and no less blindly. So here, too, as we see, is no poor illustration of the problem of the role of the ‘free’ personality in history.”</p>
<p>That was over a dozen years ago. Since then the British people have lived through tumultuous years. They are not blind men. Their vote is a declaration that they are not blind. </p>
<h5>British Labor and the World Market</h5>
<p>Marx and Engels knew the British working class very well. As far back as the Civil War in the United States, Marx, watching the reaction of the British people as a whole to this world-shaking event, paid a great tribute to what he called the “incontestable excellence” of the British working masses. This, he said, was the greatest strength of Britain. Over the years which followed, he and Engels agreed that, owing to the superior position of Britain on the world market, the English working class had become the most bourgeoisified working class in Europe. And this was likely to continue until Britain had lost its privileged position on the world market. In his preface to the English translation of Capital, published in 1886, Engels showed that for him a new stage had arrived in the development of the British proletariat. He said that the number of unemployed kept swelling from year to year and “we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed, losing patience, will take their fate into their own hands.”</p>
<p>What saved Britain and not only Britain but the advanced countries of Europe, was the development of imperialism. But imperialist super-profits could only keep a small portion of the working class enchained, and toward the end of the century a series of individual movements sprang up in Great Britain which in 1900 culminated in the formation of the British Labor Party. The formation of the British Labor Party coincided with the recognition by a substantial section of the British bourgeoisie that Britain was fast losing its domination of the world market. The statesman whose name is forever associated with this recognition was Joseph Chamberlain, father of Neville. At one time mayor of Birmingham and one of the most dynamic and far-seeing politicians of his day. Chamberlain claimed that Britain’s policy of free trade was leading the country to catastrophe. Reversing the traditional policy of a century, he became a protectionist and when asked by the British Prime Minister what position he wanted in the Cabinet, he chose the theretofore unimportant post of Colonial Secretary. From 1900 to the present day, the history of Britain can be summarized as follows: Consistent decline of the British economy upon the world market, increasing convulsions in Britain, uninterrupted growth of the Labor Party as a socialist party, preaching that the only salvation for Britain’s difficulties was the “social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” Who does not understand this cannot understand the British election. This is no question of a sudden clutching at a panacea by the British people, or a psychological change in the minds of the electorate or a violent revulsion against the war. As is characteristic of Britain, the idea of socialism is permeated with constitutional illusions. But the vote for socialism is the culmination of a process which can be easily traced.</p>
<h5>“To Dish the Socialists”</h5>
<p>The first stage is the Liberal-Labor government of Asquith. Between 1906 and 1914, Lloyd George carried out a series of measures aimed at increasing social security in Great Britain. This was done for the specific and avowed purpose of preventing the growth of socialism. The power of the House of Lords was broken by the Asquith-Lloyd George administration in the constitutional crisis of 1911. The attack on the Lords was supported not only by the workers but by petty bourgeois liberal ideologists and sections of the bourgeoisie which saw in the continuance of the House of Lords, with its traditional powers, the surest way to encourage the growth and sharpen the attack of the socialists.</p>
<p>Just as in World War II, the National Government which ran World War I found it necessary to include Labor members in its personnel. In 1918, immediately after the victory, Lloyd George engineered an election in order to capitalize on his personal prestige. The Labor Party polled two million votes, a higher vote than it had ever had before. Lloyd George promised to make Britain “a fit country for heroes to live in.” Before long every music hall in the country resounded to the witticism that post-war Britain was a country in which only heroes could live.</p>
<p>In the election of 1923 the British people gave to the Labor Party the greatest number of seats among the three contending parties. The Liberal Party and the Conservatives together held a majority over the Labor Party which, however, formed a government with their consent. This government introduced not one single socialist measure. It had preached socialism for twenty-three years. In the campaign the Tories, then as now, had made it clear to the British people that as far as they, the property owners, were concerned, the Labor Party was a socialist party. Victory for the Labor Party, the Tories explained to the British electors, meant the substitution of a socialist society for a capitalist society in Britain. They called the labor leaders red revolutionaries, which, of course, the labor : leaders vigorously denied. Their denial was not without some justification. The British people or the masses who support s the Labor Party were and are not Marxists.</p>
<p>But the debate in Britain among the working class and those classes closest to it has for years now not been as to whether socialism is workable or not; the debate has been as to whether it is to be achieved by constitutional or revolutionary means. On that question, the overwhelming majority of British opinion, deeply suffused as it is with democratic tradition and British empiricism, has more or less expressed itself as follows: We shall adopt the parliamentary procedure and if afterward the Tories should attempt to prevent the carrying out of the will of the people, the Labor Government would be in a position to use the machinery of government, the army and the police against the self-exposed enemies of democracy.</p>
<h5>The Socialists Dish Themselves</h5>
<p>After a few short months of government in 1924 the Labor Government was thrown out of power and was defeated in the election which followed. The reasons for its defeat were two-fold: it had shown itself conspicuously unable to make any radical change in the increasing dislocation of the British economy. It had thereby alienated those middle class elements which had come tentatively toward it through disgust with the Tory Party. On the other hand, the Zinoviev letter, skillfully used by the Tories, created a stampede toward the Conservative Party as the bulwark of British stability against red revolution.</p>
<p>The five years which followed were years critical in the history of the development of political crystallization in Britain. Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, faced with
Britain’s declining position on the world market, brought Britain back to the gold standard. What Britain needed was a reorganization of its economy. This was beyond the Tory Party and Churchill’s step fell heavily on the working class. One of its results was the general strike in 1926 and the growing hostility among the British people to the Tory Government and the perpetual crisis of Britain. That is why, in 1929, after five years of the famous capitalist prosperity, the British people gave to the Labor Party a still greater number of seats than in 1924. The Labor Party had excused itself for its failure in 1923 on the score that it was unable to introduce any socialistic measure because it did not have an absolute majority. Millions tried to give it that majority in 1929.</p>
<p>A few words are here in place as to the stratification of British voting. In 1929, the Labor Government received eight million votes on its program of socialism. Socialism by constitutional means to be sure, but socialism nevertheless. Britain was suffering from unemployment and the Labor program as explained to the masses of the people attributed the unemployment to capitalist society and private ownership. The basis of the vote was the working class. By this time, almost to a man, those millions of the population engaged in direct production and transport were voting the Labor ticket. They would not think of voting anything else but Labor, and it is the foundation of their creed that capitalist society is the root and origin of all their social ills. They do not necessarily take this very seriously at all times. But in Sunday schools, in Labor classes, in Labor rallies, at regular Labor Party meetings, in their trade unions, at election time, the Labor Party has brought them up on the idea that capitalist private property must be superseded by socialist abolition of private property. Britain, however, is almost seventy per cent proletarianized and many millions of this proletariat is in distributive and service trades. In 1921 this number was seven million, as com-pared to the ten million of the population engaged in direct productive industry. Many of these consider themselves workers, but of the seven millions, four millions were classified in s 1921 under commerce, finance and personal service. Britain is a country with a numerous traditional aristocracy and a strong rentier class. A substantial number of the population lives, directly or indirectly, by attending to the needs of these parasites, thereby becoming themselves parasitic. In 1924, the salaried workers were nearly three million as opposed to fifteen million actual wage earners. This is a very high proportion. These people for years voted liberal or stuck to their patrons, the Conservatives. Since 1918, however, with the increasing strength and confidence of the Labor Party this vote has been shifting towards the Labor Party. The significance of the 1929 vote was that more and more of them were looking towards labor.</p>
<p>The failure of the Labor Party in 1929 was even worse than in 1924. Unemployment went from one million in 1929 to nearly three million in 1931. Those who believe that it is the mildness of the program of the British Labor Party which has attracted the British voter should ponder upon the following statement by the greatest British parliamentarian of the last forty years and one who has repeatedly showed his understanding of the British people and their political situation.</p>
<p class="quote">Millions consequently threw in their lot with a new party. To them this party was the party of the last hope. It is now rapidly becoming the party of lost hope. Speakers and agents of all parties returning from the last by-election in a great industrial constituency had the same tale to tell. It was one of the gloom and despair which had fallen on this working class district owing to the failure of the government they had helped at the last general election to put into power to bring any amelioration into their conditions and; prospects. If Labor fails this time, confidence in parliamentary institutions will for a period disappear in myriads of loyal British homes and hearts.</p>
<p>The writer is David Lloyd George. This is testimony, if any were needed, of what the British people expected of the British Labor Party in 1929 and their reactions to its failure. As a climax to two years of failure came the disastrous split of 1931. </p>
<h5>The Crisis of 1931</h5>
<p>The circumstances of that split are not at all personal or accidental. In reality they mark a stage in the development of the bankruptcy of the Labor Party leaders. At the same time, the way in which the masses took the blow and recovered from it, testifies to the “uncontestable excellence” of the British working people.</p>
<p>In 1931, the world economic crisis and Churchill’s restoration of Britain to the gold standard in 1924 on the basis of the declining British economy had superimposed a financial crisis upon the prevailing economic depression. It is argued that the crisis was a result of the manipulation of British financial magnates with assistance from Wall Street, a manipulation aimed at discrediting the Labor Government. The mere fact, however, that such a development was possible, shows the critical situation to which the country had been reduced. Maliciously stimulated by the bourgeois press, a feeling of near panic spread over Britain. With their record of failure behind them, facing disaster, and conscious that they had no program to solve capitalist chaos, the Labor leaders sought to save face by a display of their socialistic program. They fell back on the perpetual alibi – only socialism can save the country but we had no absolute majority. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister, was quite aware of the temper of the country and the miserable record of his own Conservative Party between 1924 and 1929. He, therefore, prevailed upon Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister of the Labor Government and Philip Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to join with him in a national government. He also invited some of the leaders of the Liberal Party to join this government. The significance of this was not fully appreciated at the time, and in fact could not have been. The astute Englishman, astute in his petty party politics, was one of the first in Europe to recognize that pure and simple conservatism was bankrupt in Europe. He hid monopoly-capitalist politics behind the smoke-screen of national unity, the practice which was carried to its highest pitch by Adolf Hitler afterwards and imitated in varying degrees by every government of Europe.</p>
<p>How would the country react to it? <em>The Manchester Guardian</em>, for instance, a great leader of liberal opinion in Britain, hesitated up to the last moment before it finally decided not to support the National Government. The real blow to the Labor Party, however, was given by Philip Snowden, one of its founders, and admittedly its intellectual leader. Snowden went , onto the radio a few days before the critical election and let out a blast <em>against</em> the very socialist <em>program</em> which he more than any other politician in England had helped to create. The country, said Snowden, was in serious crisis. It faced, the possibilities of inflation and loss of the savings of the poor. At this time, said Snowden, the Labor Party comes forward with a program of socialization of the means of production, distribution, etc., as a solution to the crisis. This, he declared, was the straight road to catastrophe. </p>
<p>The British people were thunderstruck. The petty bourgeoisie streamed away from the Labor Party. Who, in the name of heaven, could vote for a party whose leaders had asked for power as the party of the last hope, and had now not only abandoned its organization but had repudiated its program. It this was not the time for socialism, when would be the time? But far-seeing conservative observers noted two ominous signs. The “national” election destroyed the Liberal Party as an effective political force. And, more important, the actual working class vote stood steady as a rock. Macdonald and Snowden had demoralized the petty-bourgeoisie. They took with them into the national caucus only leaders. Labor was unshaken and would henceforth be the only alternative to conservatism. The Labor Party returned to Parliament after 1 the election with less than forty seats.</p>
<h5>The Historical Dialectic</h5>
<p>History moves according to certain laws. These laws are f to be elucidated from the living specific concrete development. There the logical movement which they indicate is repeated in a higher spiral, modified or accentuated by the changing historical conditions. This is magnificently demonstrated by British policies between 1901 and 1945. As we look back at Britain between 1900 and 1931, the pattern is startlingly clear. The declining British economy gives rise to the political organization of labor which gradually assumes a commanding position in national politics. But Britain is still wealthy enough to make concessions. The Liberal Party makes them up to 1914 but in no way severely halts the growth of labor’s political organization. World War I is a catastrophe for Britain’s position on the world market. Between 1918 and 1931, the Liberal Party is gradually extinguished. More and more the Labor Party assumes the position of the alternative party with labor as its basis and attracting to it the restless petty-bourgeoisie under the whip of bankrupt British capitalism. The masses of the people push political labor towards the power. Socialist in name only, the labor leaders are incapable of solving capitalist crisis by capitalist methods. In 1931 their bankruptcy takes organizational form. The most distinguished of them abandon the party and join the bourgeoisie. The petty-bourgeoisie which has been coming more or less steadily towards labor abandons it in dismay and rallies behind the Conservatives. Labor stood firm because it had to and some of the labor leaders (apart from the trade unionists) remained. But a man like Herbert Morrison, for instance, moved heaven and earth to be included in Baldwin’s National Government. Only when the door was slammed in his face did he turn back to labor and “socialism.” This was the movement of classes and their political representatives. We shall now see the same essential pattern repeated on a higher plane, but within the changing circumstances of the developing world crisis.</p>
<p>The labor movement recovered from the 1931 crisis with astonishing rapidity. But whereas hitherto the struggle between capital and labor had been carried on almost exclusively on the national field, it was now widened to extend to every tentacle of the British Empire, i.e., to the four corners of the earth. Organized labor could not work out a foreign policy of its own and although it made heroic efforts to do so, found that its weakness here continually disrupted its renovated power on the home front. This pattern is repeated to a climax in 1935 and once more again in 1940. The victory over Germany in 1945 releases labor from this dilemma and clears the way for a victory long delayed and for that very reason all the more devastating. </p>
<h5>Foreign Policy Intervenes</h5>
<p>It used to be a commonplace in Britain that elections are never decided on foreign policy. From 1931, however, the depths of the British crisis was shown precisely by the repeated crisis in foreign policy and the impossibility of separating it from home policy. In 1931 came the crisis over the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. In a League of Nations session that attracted the attention of the whole world, Sir John Simon, then British Foreign Secretary, made a speech giving the British point of view. At its conclusion Matsuoka, the Japanese delegate stated that Sir John Simon had said in a few words what he had been trying for days to tell the League. A roar of protest arose in Britain. The British Labor Party, meeting in congress at Hastings in 1932, passed an almost unanimous resolution that British labor would never support British imperialism in another imperialist war. On the day after the conference, the British Labor leaders outvied themselves in explaining that the resolution did not mean what it said. Perhaps the resolution and the labor leaders did not. As far as they understood the resolution, the British workers most certainly did as would be abundantly proved before long. Even before the National Government had been formed, the series of Round Table Conferences on India had begun, and in them much of the Indian question was laid bare before the British people to their shame and confusion. Gandhi was warmly welcomed in Lancashire of all places.</p>
<p>The National Government decided on a protectionist policy at last and this was trumpeted forth and sealed at the Ottawa Conference in 1932. It brought no relief and only precipitated a series of colonial revolts, protesting at the rising prices for manufactured goods and the lowered prices for raw materials which Ottawa imposed on the colonial peoples. The risings received a hitherto unexampled publicity in the British press. In 1933 came another much trumpeted panacea – The World Economic Conference. It collapsed dramatically within a few days of its opening session. Meanwhile, the wrath of the British people at Tory helplessness before the crisis grew There was a sense of social crisis in the atmosphere. Hitler’s accession to power gave Sir Oswald Mosley his chance
Lord Rothermere of the <em>Daily Mail</em> placed his paper, with nearly two million circulation, at the disposal of Fascist Mosley, and for months the <em>Daily Mail</em> was a Fascist organ. In the middle of 1934, the June purge in Germany broke the alliance between Mosley and the <em>Daily Mail</em>. It was this period of disillusionment with British capitalism which preceded a wave of sympathy for Stalinist Russia and the skillfully propagandized “successes” of the Five Year Plan. The British worker remained invincibly opposed to the British Communist Party, but the Stalinist “planned economy,” as the antithesis of capitalism with its unemployment and distressed areas, made great headway among British workers. Under cover of Russian popularity and Russian endorsement of the League of Nations, the British Labor leaders, still keeping up a great show of hostility to imperialism, revoked the Hastings position, and adopted the doctrine of collective security. But the miners, 700,000 strong, reaffirmed the original stand. Baldwin took the opportunity to deliver a blast at the whole concept of collective security. The November municipal elections of 1934 showed how far the Labor Party had recovered the confidence of the country. Labor won sweeping victories and as far back as 1934, constituencies which had been Tory for fifty years, went Labor. Everything seemed set for a great victory at the coming parliamentary elections. What smashed Labor’s chances was foreign policy – this time the Ethiopian crisis.</p>
<p>As war with Mussolini grew imminent the British workers reacted strongly. Lord Robert Cecil, a League of Nations t maniac, instituted a private poll. <em>It gathered over eleven million votes for collective security and over six million for an armed League of Nations</em>. Thus the British workers expressed their distrust of British Tory foreign policy. Baldwin was pursuing an anti-League policy. But British indignation ultimately broke Sir Samuel Hoare who had replaced Sir John Simon as Foreign Secretary and nearly broke Anthony Eden who replaced him. The Labor Party leadership found itself in an impossible dilemma. It had, in traditional Second International fashion, opposed all credits for the war budget. Yet in an official resolution it shouted war at Mussolini <em>even before Baldwin did so</em>. With remarkable skill and promptitude, Baldwin went on the radio and endorsed the League of Nations and collective security wholeheartedly. The election was a war election if ever there was one. The Labor Party added well over a hundred seats to its miserable thirty. But the British electorate (with the British and Italian fleets facing each other in the Mediterranean) and listening to two major political parties saying much the same thing, gave Baldwin the support he asked for. People do not choose the eve of a war to start a social experiment. The decisive middle classes hesitated and chose Baldwin. It was openly stated in the Commons that Labor had lost the election by its apparently inept resolution, declaring war on Mussolini. It was not the Labor Party leadership which was
inept but the short-sighted commentators. In essence the Labor leadership had done in the international crisis of 1935 precisely what it had done in the national crisis of 1931. It had betrayed its incapacity to produce a policy of t its own and it had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>The climax came with the Hoare-Laval pact which followed closely upon the election. It was a typical imperialist instrument for the division of Ethiopia and it was initialed by Anthony Eden. It fell like a skyful of cold water on the deceived and cheated British electorate. It was not for this they had voted. Labor had been impotent to produce an alternative and thus the masses had lost both at home and abroad. From that moment the National Government was distrusted in its foreign policy as much as it was hated for its home policy. </p>
<h5>Economic Bankruptcy and the Cliveden Set</h5>
<p>The years 1936 to 1940 were the years in which the British petty bourgeoisie came to the conclusions which the war crystallized and concentrated explosively. In that period there was not one single measure taken by the National Government to give anyone the belief that it could solve the economic decline of Britain which was so long patent to the British people. Roosevelt in the United States initiated a New Deal and Blum in France headed the short-lived experiment of the Popular Front. British Toryism did nothing for there was nothing that it could do. In foreign policy, however, it demonstrated to the full its hostility to democracy and its readiness to collaborate with Hitler and Mussolini. The British people knew in their bones that the National Government had pursued its own narrow class interests in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East and thus precipitated the war of 1939. This is not wisdom after the event. The Labor leaders for three solid years inside and outside Parliament kept up a ceaseless agitation against Chamberlain on just those grounds. The lesson, easy enough to read in life, was dinned home by these politicians from the safe refuge of opposition. Thus both on home policy and foreign policy the bankruptcy and treachery of the British ruling class was revealed. “The Cliveden Set” was in reality not a set but <em>the capitalist class</em> of Britain, which almost in its entirety supported Chamberlain until the break-down of his policy opened the abyss before their feet. Once more as the election due in 1940 approached the British working class and its allies were baffled and torn by the approach of war. This time no election took place at all. But the internal tension was far greater than in 1935. The British workers and the population as a whole were deeply hostile to the war and far more distrustful of Chamberlain in the crisis of 1939 than they had been of Baldwin in 1935. But the switch from Chamberlain to Churchill and the terror inspired by the early German victories enabled the Labor leaders to repeat their usual performance – join up with the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>There is no need to recapitulate the social consequences of the war. The fatal error would be to see it as anything else but a continuation and concentration of the tendencies which we have traced since 1918. The war has made final that recognition of Britain’s decline which has steadily grown among the British people since 1918. It has made final that recognition of the hopelessness of capitalism which has steadily grown among the British people since 1918. It has made final that recognition of the ineradicable treachery of the British ruling class which has steadily grown among the British people since 1931. Britain can no longer go on in the old way. Capitalism is bankrupt. The Labor Party claims that it is a socialist party, the party of a new society. The petty bourgeoisie and the rural constituencies have made up their minds, or rather have had their minds made up for them. The Labor Party claimed that it could not act in 1923 because it did not have an absolute majority. Again in 1929 it did not have an absolute majority. In 1934 it was getting ready to do better than in 1929 but the war scare of 1935 frightened these fluctuating classes away. The war in 1940 and the acceptance of the coalition by official Labor robbed them of the opportunity of expressing themselves. Now in the first chance they have got, in their quiet, parliamentary, unspectacular, sober, but infinitely determined British way, they have spoken their verdict. They have voted for a socialist society. In their eyes the essence of the change is the nationalization of the means of production, destruction of the power of the capitalists and the landlords, an economy planned for the use of the people and not taking its anarchic way for the profit of the few.</p>
<h5>The Perspectives of the Labor Leadership</h5>
<p>It is impossible here even to examine the outlines of the dreadful economic and international political situation in which Britain finds itself today. It was necessary first of all to clear out of the way the motivated illusions which the American bourgeoisie has been trying to instill into the American workers. Some of these scoundrels have even tried to attribute Churchill’s defeat to his stupid political campaign. Churchill’s campaign was in fact the most striking demonstration of the helplessness of the British bourgeoisie. He had no program because he could have none. It would be interesting to see one written by his critics. Churchill said that socialism was the issue. He knows Britain too well to have thought that after 1924 and 1929 the issue of socialism could be camouflaged. Neither could Churchill attack the idea of a planned economy per se. His whole war administration would have been a refutation of the argument that private enterprise was the only feasible method of reconstructing the country. What he did do was strictly in character with our times. He took the position that socialism meant a British Gestapo. In other words, <em>he could only agitate against Attlee’s “socialist” economic proposals by building a bogey of their political consequences. Exactly the same type of argument is being used in Europe and in the United States against socialism</em>. It is a long, long way from 1918, when the very idea of socialism as a type of economy was denounced by the bourgeoisie as ridiculous and Utopian. But it is precisely here also that the fatal weakness of the Labor leaders is already revealed. Their campaign was the quintessence of ineptitude. <em>They</em> had a program. They could have put it forward like the confident builders of a new society. Instead, every statement, modest as it was, had a qualification. The same petty bourgeoisie whom they were trying not to “alienate,” the farmers, reputedly so conservative, were the very ones whom the election shows were only waiting for the chance to give Labor an unmistakable mandate. And what is Attlee’s program, as announced in the King’s speech? Labor will nationalize the coal industry. This measure, it you please, was recommended by an all-party government commission over twenty years ago. They will also nationalize the Bank of England, which already functions as a semi-public body. They will repeal the Trades Disputes Act, i.e., they will repeal what is a stiff version of the American Hatch Act. The election program promised to “nationalize” electric and gas utilities. But now that they are in power they propose only to “co-ordinate” them. They are the same people of 1924 and 1929. In his first speech to the Commons, Attlee told the people: “Before the war there was much that was in our view wrong in the economic and social conditions in this country.” So that is it. In “our view” much “was wrong.” Also, “We must set ourselves resolutely to the task of increasing our exports.” The reorganization of the economy, as an indispensable instrument – the mobilization of the people who supported him, this cannot even enter the vision of this petty clerk of the bourgeoisie. Today the Labor leaders can do what they want with Britain. If they were to tell the people what is required, call upon them to sacrifice, yes, to sacrifice themselves to build a new Britain as they sacrificed themselves to save the old, the British people would perform prodigies of reconstruction which would put their great war effort to shame. The bourgeoisie is today powerless. The army, a non-professional army, overwhelmingly supported Labor and if, in response to a genuine socialization, any reactionary elements showed opposition, Attlee can be certain of the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers. But no! He will “resolutely” increase exports. Circumstances may lead these opportunists to sporadic adventures, but isn’t it clear that they are, in essence, as helpless before the creaking structure of British capitalism as the Tory leaders have shown themselves to be during the last quarter of a century? All questions of policy are subordinate to the fact that only a social revolution can save Britain from catastrophe and the Labor leaders are not revolutionary. It in Trotsky’s opinion Macdonald prepared the catastrophes which awaited the country, on the high plane to which he had been pushed, Attlee will prepare them still more and still faster. Today history is in no waiting mood.</p>
<p>Is the British working class revolutionary? No serious Marxist can ask that question. Their historical development has not ceased with the election. The bankrupt British economy, the helplessness of the bourgeoisie have led the workers step by step to a situation where they have won over the middle classes and placed the Labor leaders in a situation where they have no bourgeois political party to run to, where they cannot blame anything upon the absence of a majority. The election is the climax of one period and therefore the beginning of a new. If Attlee and his colleagues meant business the first thing they would do would be to mobilize the creative energies and aspirations of the British people as a bulwark for a revolutionary program. But that they will not do. The revolutionary manifestations of the British workers and their allies will therefore come from some other sources-the whip of the counter-revolution, seeking to gain outside of Parliament the power that it has lost inside. The response of the British people will be tremendous. Let no one have any fear of that. Or disillusionment with the Labor government will open up a new period of clarification and a struggle for new ways and means to achieve the goals they have pursued since 1918. On our British comrades of the Fourth International, who have acquitted themselves so manfully during the war, falls the heavy burden and the proud privilege of being the spearhead of the revolutionary reorientation. To look back and learn the lessons of the past years, which reached their climax in the election, can be the source of an inexhaustible confidence and energy in teaching the British workers and learning from them the revolutionary demands of the new period.</p>
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CLR James 1945
The British Vote for Socialism
The Rise of British Labor
Source: New International, Volume XI No.6,
September 1945, pp. 170-175, C L R James under the name of J.R.Johnson;
Transcribed and Marked up: by Damon Maxwell. September, 2008.
Few, if any, elections in modern times have had the significance and opened out perspectives on a scale comparable with the recent British election. Its evaluation can proceed along three main lines. The first is the meaning of it in relation to Britain itself. The second is its repercussions in Europe and the world. The third is its influence on the political development of the American working class movement. These three can be separated only for purposes of convenience. If, for example, at the coming French elections in October, it were made clear that the British victory had stimulated the French electorate toward a repudiation of de Gaulle similar to the repudiation of Churchill, then the repercussion back on Britain would be tremendous. For the time being, however, we shall confine ourselves to the first – the significance of the election as a purely British phenomenon.
There is only one fundamental question which has to be decided. Is the election merely an unmistakable sign of a desire for “social progress,” or a desire for social reconstruction of Britain, in a word, for socialism? The American bourgeoisie has been at pains in its press to explain that what the British workers in reality want is higher wages, greater social security, no unemployment, a vast housing program, in general, improvement on the admittedly unsatisfactory conditions which prevailed before the war; be it understood also that the workers expect some reward also for the sacrifices endured during the war. Despite the warning notes uttered by some correspondents from abroad and a few commentators here, the emphasis has been upon the mild program of nationalization put forward by the Labor Party and upon the well known, alas, only too well known, sobriety and conservatism of the British labor leaders. American capitalism also, according to this theory, has played its own progressive part in this education of the British working class. American soldiers held forth to British workers on apartments with central heating and frigidaires and the high standard of living which had been granted to American labor by American capitalism. This stimulated the British working class to demand the same and therefore to vote Labor in overwhelming majority.
All these ideas are just so much whistling in the dark. As far as the great masses of the British people are concerned, their vote is a repudiation of British capitalist society in Britain and a mandate to the British Labor Party to institute socialism. The people who think or would like to think what the American bourgeoisie is teaching in its press are the British labor leaders. But we draw a sharp distinction between the masses of the British people as a whole and the labor and trade union bureaucracy, a distinction as sharp as that which Lenin in his time and Trotsky from the days of Whither England? to his death used to draw. The first purpose of this article is to make this clear, not by speculation into the psychology of the British working class, but by a review of the development of the British Labor Party and its relation to economic and social changes in Britain and in the world at large. It is sufficient to say that our approach is based on that conception of British development expressed consistently by Trotsky and nowhere so sharply as in his History of the Russian Revolution. There he writes: “Only a blind man could fail to see that Great Britain is headed for gigantic revolutionary earthquake shocks, in which the last fragments of her conservatism, her world domination, her present state machine, will go down without a trace. Macdonald is preparing these shocks no less successfully than did Nicholas II in his time, and no less blindly. So here, too, as we see, is no poor illustration of the problem of the role of the ‘free’ personality in history.”
That was over a dozen years ago. Since then the British people have lived through tumultuous years. They are not blind men. Their vote is a declaration that they are not blind.
British Labor and the World Market
Marx and Engels knew the British working class very well. As far back as the Civil War in the United States, Marx, watching the reaction of the British people as a whole to this world-shaking event, paid a great tribute to what he called the “incontestable excellence” of the British working masses. This, he said, was the greatest strength of Britain. Over the years which followed, he and Engels agreed that, owing to the superior position of Britain on the world market, the English working class had become the most bourgeoisified working class in Europe. And this was likely to continue until Britain had lost its privileged position on the world market. In his preface to the English translation of Capital, published in 1886, Engels showed that for him a new stage had arrived in the development of the British proletariat. He said that the number of unemployed kept swelling from year to year and “we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed, losing patience, will take their fate into their own hands.”
What saved Britain and not only Britain but the advanced countries of Europe, was the development of imperialism. But imperialist super-profits could only keep a small portion of the working class enchained, and toward the end of the century a series of individual movements sprang up in Great Britain which in 1900 culminated in the formation of the British Labor Party. The formation of the British Labor Party coincided with the recognition by a substantial section of the British bourgeoisie that Britain was fast losing its domination of the world market. The statesman whose name is forever associated with this recognition was Joseph Chamberlain, father of Neville. At one time mayor of Birmingham and one of the most dynamic and far-seeing politicians of his day. Chamberlain claimed that Britain’s policy of free trade was leading the country to catastrophe. Reversing the traditional policy of a century, he became a protectionist and when asked by the British Prime Minister what position he wanted in the Cabinet, he chose the theretofore unimportant post of Colonial Secretary. From 1900 to the present day, the history of Britain can be summarized as follows: Consistent decline of the British economy upon the world market, increasing convulsions in Britain, uninterrupted growth of the Labor Party as a socialist party, preaching that the only salvation for Britain’s difficulties was the “social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” Who does not understand this cannot understand the British election. This is no question of a sudden clutching at a panacea by the British people, or a psychological change in the minds of the electorate or a violent revulsion against the war. As is characteristic of Britain, the idea of socialism is permeated with constitutional illusions. But the vote for socialism is the culmination of a process which can be easily traced.
“To Dish the Socialists”
The first stage is the Liberal-Labor government of Asquith. Between 1906 and 1914, Lloyd George carried out a series of measures aimed at increasing social security in Great Britain. This was done for the specific and avowed purpose of preventing the growth of socialism. The power of the House of Lords was broken by the Asquith-Lloyd George administration in the constitutional crisis of 1911. The attack on the Lords was supported not only by the workers but by petty bourgeois liberal ideologists and sections of the bourgeoisie which saw in the continuance of the House of Lords, with its traditional powers, the surest way to encourage the growth and sharpen the attack of the socialists.
Just as in World War II, the National Government which ran World War I found it necessary to include Labor members in its personnel. In 1918, immediately after the victory, Lloyd George engineered an election in order to capitalize on his personal prestige. The Labor Party polled two million votes, a higher vote than it had ever had before. Lloyd George promised to make Britain “a fit country for heroes to live in.” Before long every music hall in the country resounded to the witticism that post-war Britain was a country in which only heroes could live.
In the election of 1923 the British people gave to the Labor Party the greatest number of seats among the three contending parties. The Liberal Party and the Conservatives together held a majority over the Labor Party which, however, formed a government with their consent. This government introduced not one single socialist measure. It had preached socialism for twenty-three years. In the campaign the Tories, then as now, had made it clear to the British people that as far as they, the property owners, were concerned, the Labor Party was a socialist party. Victory for the Labor Party, the Tories explained to the British electors, meant the substitution of a socialist society for a capitalist society in Britain. They called the labor leaders red revolutionaries, which, of course, the labor : leaders vigorously denied. Their denial was not without some justification. The British people or the masses who support s the Labor Party were and are not Marxists.
But the debate in Britain among the working class and those classes closest to it has for years now not been as to whether socialism is workable or not; the debate has been as to whether it is to be achieved by constitutional or revolutionary means. On that question, the overwhelming majority of British opinion, deeply suffused as it is with democratic tradition and British empiricism, has more or less expressed itself as follows: We shall adopt the parliamentary procedure and if afterward the Tories should attempt to prevent the carrying out of the will of the people, the Labor Government would be in a position to use the machinery of government, the army and the police against the self-exposed enemies of democracy.
The Socialists Dish Themselves
After a few short months of government in 1924 the Labor Government was thrown out of power and was defeated in the election which followed. The reasons for its defeat were two-fold: it had shown itself conspicuously unable to make any radical change in the increasing dislocation of the British economy. It had thereby alienated those middle class elements which had come tentatively toward it through disgust with the Tory Party. On the other hand, the Zinoviev letter, skillfully used by the Tories, created a stampede toward the Conservative Party as the bulwark of British stability against red revolution.
The five years which followed were years critical in the history of the development of political crystallization in Britain. Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, faced with
Britain’s declining position on the world market, brought Britain back to the gold standard. What Britain needed was a reorganization of its economy. This was beyond the Tory Party and Churchill’s step fell heavily on the working class. One of its results was the general strike in 1926 and the growing hostility among the British people to the Tory Government and the perpetual crisis of Britain. That is why, in 1929, after five years of the famous capitalist prosperity, the British people gave to the Labor Party a still greater number of seats than in 1924. The Labor Party had excused itself for its failure in 1923 on the score that it was unable to introduce any socialistic measure because it did not have an absolute majority. Millions tried to give it that majority in 1929.
A few words are here in place as to the stratification of British voting. In 1929, the Labor Government received eight million votes on its program of socialism. Socialism by constitutional means to be sure, but socialism nevertheless. Britain was suffering from unemployment and the Labor program as explained to the masses of the people attributed the unemployment to capitalist society and private ownership. The basis of the vote was the working class. By this time, almost to a man, those millions of the population engaged in direct production and transport were voting the Labor ticket. They would not think of voting anything else but Labor, and it is the foundation of their creed that capitalist society is the root and origin of all their social ills. They do not necessarily take this very seriously at all times. But in Sunday schools, in Labor classes, in Labor rallies, at regular Labor Party meetings, in their trade unions, at election time, the Labor Party has brought them up on the idea that capitalist private property must be superseded by socialist abolition of private property. Britain, however, is almost seventy per cent proletarianized and many millions of this proletariat is in distributive and service trades. In 1921 this number was seven million, as com-pared to the ten million of the population engaged in direct productive industry. Many of these consider themselves workers, but of the seven millions, four millions were classified in s 1921 under commerce, finance and personal service. Britain is a country with a numerous traditional aristocracy and a strong rentier class. A substantial number of the population lives, directly or indirectly, by attending to the needs of these parasites, thereby becoming themselves parasitic. In 1924, the salaried workers were nearly three million as opposed to fifteen million actual wage earners. This is a very high proportion. These people for years voted liberal or stuck to their patrons, the Conservatives. Since 1918, however, with the increasing strength and confidence of the Labor Party this vote has been shifting towards the Labor Party. The significance of the 1929 vote was that more and more of them were looking towards labor.
The failure of the Labor Party in 1929 was even worse than in 1924. Unemployment went from one million in 1929 to nearly three million in 1931. Those who believe that it is the mildness of the program of the British Labor Party which has attracted the British voter should ponder upon the following statement by the greatest British parliamentarian of the last forty years and one who has repeatedly showed his understanding of the British people and their political situation.
Millions consequently threw in their lot with a new party. To them this party was the party of the last hope. It is now rapidly becoming the party of lost hope. Speakers and agents of all parties returning from the last by-election in a great industrial constituency had the same tale to tell. It was one of the gloom and despair which had fallen on this working class district owing to the failure of the government they had helped at the last general election to put into power to bring any amelioration into their conditions and; prospects. If Labor fails this time, confidence in parliamentary institutions will for a period disappear in myriads of loyal British homes and hearts.
The writer is David Lloyd George. This is testimony, if any were needed, of what the British people expected of the British Labor Party in 1929 and their reactions to its failure. As a climax to two years of failure came the disastrous split of 1931.
The Crisis of 1931
The circumstances of that split are not at all personal or accidental. In reality they mark a stage in the development of the bankruptcy of the Labor Party leaders. At the same time, the way in which the masses took the blow and recovered from it, testifies to the “uncontestable excellence” of the British working people.
In 1931, the world economic crisis and Churchill’s restoration of Britain to the gold standard in 1924 on the basis of the declining British economy had superimposed a financial crisis upon the prevailing economic depression. It is argued that the crisis was a result of the manipulation of British financial magnates with assistance from Wall Street, a manipulation aimed at discrediting the Labor Government. The mere fact, however, that such a development was possible, shows the critical situation to which the country had been reduced. Maliciously stimulated by the bourgeois press, a feeling of near panic spread over Britain. With their record of failure behind them, facing disaster, and conscious that they had no program to solve capitalist chaos, the Labor leaders sought to save face by a display of their socialistic program. They fell back on the perpetual alibi – only socialism can save the country but we had no absolute majority. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister, was quite aware of the temper of the country and the miserable record of his own Conservative Party between 1924 and 1929. He, therefore, prevailed upon Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister of the Labor Government and Philip Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to join with him in a national government. He also invited some of the leaders of the Liberal Party to join this government. The significance of this was not fully appreciated at the time, and in fact could not have been. The astute Englishman, astute in his petty party politics, was one of the first in Europe to recognize that pure and simple conservatism was bankrupt in Europe. He hid monopoly-capitalist politics behind the smoke-screen of national unity, the practice which was carried to its highest pitch by Adolf Hitler afterwards and imitated in varying degrees by every government of Europe.
How would the country react to it? The Manchester Guardian, for instance, a great leader of liberal opinion in Britain, hesitated up to the last moment before it finally decided not to support the National Government. The real blow to the Labor Party, however, was given by Philip Snowden, one of its founders, and admittedly its intellectual leader. Snowden went , onto the radio a few days before the critical election and let out a blast against the very socialist program which he more than any other politician in England had helped to create. The country, said Snowden, was in serious crisis. It faced, the possibilities of inflation and loss of the savings of the poor. At this time, said Snowden, the Labor Party comes forward with a program of socialization of the means of production, distribution, etc., as a solution to the crisis. This, he declared, was the straight road to catastrophe.
The British people were thunderstruck. The petty bourgeoisie streamed away from the Labor Party. Who, in the name of heaven, could vote for a party whose leaders had asked for power as the party of the last hope, and had now not only abandoned its organization but had repudiated its program. It this was not the time for socialism, when would be the time? But far-seeing conservative observers noted two ominous signs. The “national” election destroyed the Liberal Party as an effective political force. And, more important, the actual working class vote stood steady as a rock. Macdonald and Snowden had demoralized the petty-bourgeoisie. They took with them into the national caucus only leaders. Labor was unshaken and would henceforth be the only alternative to conservatism. The Labor Party returned to Parliament after 1 the election with less than forty seats.
The Historical Dialectic
History moves according to certain laws. These laws are f to be elucidated from the living specific concrete development. There the logical movement which they indicate is repeated in a higher spiral, modified or accentuated by the changing historical conditions. This is magnificently demonstrated by British policies between 1901 and 1945. As we look back at Britain between 1900 and 1931, the pattern is startlingly clear. The declining British economy gives rise to the political organization of labor which gradually assumes a commanding position in national politics. But Britain is still wealthy enough to make concessions. The Liberal Party makes them up to 1914 but in no way severely halts the growth of labor’s political organization. World War I is a catastrophe for Britain’s position on the world market. Between 1918 and 1931, the Liberal Party is gradually extinguished. More and more the Labor Party assumes the position of the alternative party with labor as its basis and attracting to it the restless petty-bourgeoisie under the whip of bankrupt British capitalism. The masses of the people push political labor towards the power. Socialist in name only, the labor leaders are incapable of solving capitalist crisis by capitalist methods. In 1931 their bankruptcy takes organizational form. The most distinguished of them abandon the party and join the bourgeoisie. The petty-bourgeoisie which has been coming more or less steadily towards labor abandons it in dismay and rallies behind the Conservatives. Labor stood firm because it had to and some of the labor leaders (apart from the trade unionists) remained. But a man like Herbert Morrison, for instance, moved heaven and earth to be included in Baldwin’s National Government. Only when the door was slammed in his face did he turn back to labor and “socialism.” This was the movement of classes and their political representatives. We shall now see the same essential pattern repeated on a higher plane, but within the changing circumstances of the developing world crisis.
The labor movement recovered from the 1931 crisis with astonishing rapidity. But whereas hitherto the struggle between capital and labor had been carried on almost exclusively on the national field, it was now widened to extend to every tentacle of the British Empire, i.e., to the four corners of the earth. Organized labor could not work out a foreign policy of its own and although it made heroic efforts to do so, found that its weakness here continually disrupted its renovated power on the home front. This pattern is repeated to a climax in 1935 and once more again in 1940. The victory over Germany in 1945 releases labor from this dilemma and clears the way for a victory long delayed and for that very reason all the more devastating.
Foreign Policy Intervenes
It used to be a commonplace in Britain that elections are never decided on foreign policy. From 1931, however, the depths of the British crisis was shown precisely by the repeated crisis in foreign policy and the impossibility of separating it from home policy. In 1931 came the crisis over the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. In a League of Nations session that attracted the attention of the whole world, Sir John Simon, then British Foreign Secretary, made a speech giving the British point of view. At its conclusion Matsuoka, the Japanese delegate stated that Sir John Simon had said in a few words what he had been trying for days to tell the League. A roar of protest arose in Britain. The British Labor Party, meeting in congress at Hastings in 1932, passed an almost unanimous resolution that British labor would never support British imperialism in another imperialist war. On the day after the conference, the British Labor leaders outvied themselves in explaining that the resolution did not mean what it said. Perhaps the resolution and the labor leaders did not. As far as they understood the resolution, the British workers most certainly did as would be abundantly proved before long. Even before the National Government had been formed, the series of Round Table Conferences on India had begun, and in them much of the Indian question was laid bare before the British people to their shame and confusion. Gandhi was warmly welcomed in Lancashire of all places.
The National Government decided on a protectionist policy at last and this was trumpeted forth and sealed at the Ottawa Conference in 1932. It brought no relief and only precipitated a series of colonial revolts, protesting at the rising prices for manufactured goods and the lowered prices for raw materials which Ottawa imposed on the colonial peoples. The risings received a hitherto unexampled publicity in the British press. In 1933 came another much trumpeted panacea – The World Economic Conference. It collapsed dramatically within a few days of its opening session. Meanwhile, the wrath of the British people at Tory helplessness before the crisis grew There was a sense of social crisis in the atmosphere. Hitler’s accession to power gave Sir Oswald Mosley his chance
Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail placed his paper, with nearly two million circulation, at the disposal of Fascist Mosley, and for months the Daily Mail was a Fascist organ. In the middle of 1934, the June purge in Germany broke the alliance between Mosley and the Daily Mail. It was this period of disillusionment with British capitalism which preceded a wave of sympathy for Stalinist Russia and the skillfully propagandized “successes” of the Five Year Plan. The British worker remained invincibly opposed to the British Communist Party, but the Stalinist “planned economy,” as the antithesis of capitalism with its unemployment and distressed areas, made great headway among British workers. Under cover of Russian popularity and Russian endorsement of the League of Nations, the British Labor leaders, still keeping up a great show of hostility to imperialism, revoked the Hastings position, and adopted the doctrine of collective security. But the miners, 700,000 strong, reaffirmed the original stand. Baldwin took the opportunity to deliver a blast at the whole concept of collective security. The November municipal elections of 1934 showed how far the Labor Party had recovered the confidence of the country. Labor won sweeping victories and as far back as 1934, constituencies which had been Tory for fifty years, went Labor. Everything seemed set for a great victory at the coming parliamentary elections. What smashed Labor’s chances was foreign policy – this time the Ethiopian crisis.
As war with Mussolini grew imminent the British workers reacted strongly. Lord Robert Cecil, a League of Nations t maniac, instituted a private poll. It gathered over eleven million votes for collective security and over six million for an armed League of Nations. Thus the British workers expressed their distrust of British Tory foreign policy. Baldwin was pursuing an anti-League policy. But British indignation ultimately broke Sir Samuel Hoare who had replaced Sir John Simon as Foreign Secretary and nearly broke Anthony Eden who replaced him. The Labor Party leadership found itself in an impossible dilemma. It had, in traditional Second International fashion, opposed all credits for the war budget. Yet in an official resolution it shouted war at Mussolini even before Baldwin did so. With remarkable skill and promptitude, Baldwin went on the radio and endorsed the League of Nations and collective security wholeheartedly. The election was a war election if ever there was one. The Labor Party added well over a hundred seats to its miserable thirty. But the British electorate (with the British and Italian fleets facing each other in the Mediterranean) and listening to two major political parties saying much the same thing, gave Baldwin the support he asked for. People do not choose the eve of a war to start a social experiment. The decisive middle classes hesitated and chose Baldwin. It was openly stated in the Commons that Labor had lost the election by its apparently inept resolution, declaring war on Mussolini. It was not the Labor Party leadership which was
inept but the short-sighted commentators. In essence the Labor leadership had done in the international crisis of 1935 precisely what it had done in the national crisis of 1931. It had betrayed its incapacity to produce a policy of t its own and it had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie.
The climax came with the Hoare-Laval pact which followed closely upon the election. It was a typical imperialist instrument for the division of Ethiopia and it was initialed by Anthony Eden. It fell like a skyful of cold water on the deceived and cheated British electorate. It was not for this they had voted. Labor had been impotent to produce an alternative and thus the masses had lost both at home and abroad. From that moment the National Government was distrusted in its foreign policy as much as it was hated for its home policy.
Economic Bankruptcy and the Cliveden Set
The years 1936 to 1940 were the years in which the British petty bourgeoisie came to the conclusions which the war crystallized and concentrated explosively. In that period there was not one single measure taken by the National Government to give anyone the belief that it could solve the economic decline of Britain which was so long patent to the British people. Roosevelt in the United States initiated a New Deal and Blum in France headed the short-lived experiment of the Popular Front. British Toryism did nothing for there was nothing that it could do. In foreign policy, however, it demonstrated to the full its hostility to democracy and its readiness to collaborate with Hitler and Mussolini. The British people knew in their bones that the National Government had pursued its own narrow class interests in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East and thus precipitated the war of 1939. This is not wisdom after the event. The Labor leaders for three solid years inside and outside Parliament kept up a ceaseless agitation against Chamberlain on just those grounds. The lesson, easy enough to read in life, was dinned home by these politicians from the safe refuge of opposition. Thus both on home policy and foreign policy the bankruptcy and treachery of the British ruling class was revealed. “The Cliveden Set” was in reality not a set but the capitalist class of Britain, which almost in its entirety supported Chamberlain until the break-down of his policy opened the abyss before their feet. Once more as the election due in 1940 approached the British working class and its allies were baffled and torn by the approach of war. This time no election took place at all. But the internal tension was far greater than in 1935. The British workers and the population as a whole were deeply hostile to the war and far more distrustful of Chamberlain in the crisis of 1939 than they had been of Baldwin in 1935. But the switch from Chamberlain to Churchill and the terror inspired by the early German victories enabled the Labor leaders to repeat their usual performance – join up with the bourgeoisie.
There is no need to recapitulate the social consequences of the war. The fatal error would be to see it as anything else but a continuation and concentration of the tendencies which we have traced since 1918. The war has made final that recognition of Britain’s decline which has steadily grown among the British people since 1918. It has made final that recognition of the hopelessness of capitalism which has steadily grown among the British people since 1918. It has made final that recognition of the ineradicable treachery of the British ruling class which has steadily grown among the British people since 1931. Britain can no longer go on in the old way. Capitalism is bankrupt. The Labor Party claims that it is a socialist party, the party of a new society. The petty bourgeoisie and the rural constituencies have made up their minds, or rather have had their minds made up for them. The Labor Party claimed that it could not act in 1923 because it did not have an absolute majority. Again in 1929 it did not have an absolute majority. In 1934 it was getting ready to do better than in 1929 but the war scare of 1935 frightened these fluctuating classes away. The war in 1940 and the acceptance of the coalition by official Labor robbed them of the opportunity of expressing themselves. Now in the first chance they have got, in their quiet, parliamentary, unspectacular, sober, but infinitely determined British way, they have spoken their verdict. They have voted for a socialist society. In their eyes the essence of the change is the nationalization of the means of production, destruction of the power of the capitalists and the landlords, an economy planned for the use of the people and not taking its anarchic way for the profit of the few.
The Perspectives of the Labor Leadership
It is impossible here even to examine the outlines of the dreadful economic and international political situation in which Britain finds itself today. It was necessary first of all to clear out of the way the motivated illusions which the American bourgeoisie has been trying to instill into the American workers. Some of these scoundrels have even tried to attribute Churchill’s defeat to his stupid political campaign. Churchill’s campaign was in fact the most striking demonstration of the helplessness of the British bourgeoisie. He had no program because he could have none. It would be interesting to see one written by his critics. Churchill said that socialism was the issue. He knows Britain too well to have thought that after 1924 and 1929 the issue of socialism could be camouflaged. Neither could Churchill attack the idea of a planned economy per se. His whole war administration would have been a refutation of the argument that private enterprise was the only feasible method of reconstructing the country. What he did do was strictly in character with our times. He took the position that socialism meant a British Gestapo. In other words, he could only agitate against Attlee’s “socialist” economic proposals by building a bogey of their political consequences. Exactly the same type of argument is being used in Europe and in the United States against socialism. It is a long, long way from 1918, when the very idea of socialism as a type of economy was denounced by the bourgeoisie as ridiculous and Utopian. But it is precisely here also that the fatal weakness of the Labor leaders is already revealed. Their campaign was the quintessence of ineptitude. They had a program. They could have put it forward like the confident builders of a new society. Instead, every statement, modest as it was, had a qualification. The same petty bourgeoisie whom they were trying not to “alienate,” the farmers, reputedly so conservative, were the very ones whom the election shows were only waiting for the chance to give Labor an unmistakable mandate. And what is Attlee’s program, as announced in the King’s speech? Labor will nationalize the coal industry. This measure, it you please, was recommended by an all-party government commission over twenty years ago. They will also nationalize the Bank of England, which already functions as a semi-public body. They will repeal the Trades Disputes Act, i.e., they will repeal what is a stiff version of the American Hatch Act. The election program promised to “nationalize” electric and gas utilities. But now that they are in power they propose only to “co-ordinate” them. They are the same people of 1924 and 1929. In his first speech to the Commons, Attlee told the people: “Before the war there was much that was in our view wrong in the economic and social conditions in this country.” So that is it. In “our view” much “was wrong.” Also, “We must set ourselves resolutely to the task of increasing our exports.” The reorganization of the economy, as an indispensable instrument – the mobilization of the people who supported him, this cannot even enter the vision of this petty clerk of the bourgeoisie. Today the Labor leaders can do what they want with Britain. If they were to tell the people what is required, call upon them to sacrifice, yes, to sacrifice themselves to build a new Britain as they sacrificed themselves to save the old, the British people would perform prodigies of reconstruction which would put their great war effort to shame. The bourgeoisie is today powerless. The army, a non-professional army, overwhelmingly supported Labor and if, in response to a genuine socialization, any reactionary elements showed opposition, Attlee can be certain of the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers. But no! He will “resolutely” increase exports. Circumstances may lead these opportunists to sporadic adventures, but isn’t it clear that they are, in essence, as helpless before the creaking structure of British capitalism as the Tory leaders have shown themselves to be during the last quarter of a century? All questions of policy are subordinate to the fact that only a social revolution can save Britain from catastrophe and the Labor leaders are not revolutionary. It in Trotsky’s opinion Macdonald prepared the catastrophes which awaited the country, on the high plane to which he had been pushed, Attlee will prepare them still more and still faster. Today history is in no waiting mood.
Is the British working class revolutionary? No serious Marxist can ask that question. Their historical development has not ceased with the election. The bankrupt British economy, the helplessness of the bourgeoisie have led the workers step by step to a situation where they have won over the middle classes and placed the Labor leaders in a situation where they have no bourgeois political party to run to, where they cannot blame anything upon the absence of a majority. The election is the climax of one period and therefore the beginning of a new. If Attlee and his colleagues meant business the first thing they would do would be to mobilize the creative energies and aspirations of the British people as a bulwark for a revolutionary program. But that they will not do. The revolutionary manifestations of the British workers and their allies will therefore come from some other sources-the whip of the counter-revolution, seeking to gain outside of Parliament the power that it has lost inside. The response of the British people will be tremendous. Let no one have any fear of that. Or disillusionment with the Labor government will open up a new period of clarification and a struggle for new ways and means to achieve the goals they have pursued since 1918. On our British comrades of the Fourth International, who have acquitted themselves so manfully during the war, falls the heavy burden and the proud privilege of being the spearhead of the revolutionary reorientation. To look back and learn the lessons of the past years, which reached their climax in the election, can be the source of an inexhaustible confidence and energy in teaching the British workers and learning from them the revolutionary demands of the new period.
C.L.R James Archive
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>Preparing a New League of Nations</h1>
<h3>(October 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_42" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 42</a>, 16 October 1944, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The press has come out in bold headlines announcing that a world peace plan has been agreed upon. Upon examination, however, it turns out that the agreement is still only ninety per cent. It is obvious that if after ninety per cent of agreement you have to go to war over the remaining ten per cent, you do not go to war only to the extent of ten per cent. Even if you agree on ninety-nine per cent and then go to war over one per cent, the war is a one hundred per cent war.</p>
<p>This ninety per cent business comes from a statement by Roosevelt. There were ninety per cent when Russia left the conference. At that time Churchill made a long speech on the war, during which he touched on the question of Poland. He said that it would be most unfortunate if some agreement was not arrived at. Otherwise, the following situation might arise:</p>
<p><em>The British government might find itself supporting one Polish government and the Russian government might find itself supporting another. That, said Churchill, would be very unfortunate. That is a sufficient per cent to cause a war, even if Churchill and Stalin were ninety per cent agreed on Brazil, India, Burma, Canada, and even Latvia, Esthonia and Lithuania. People never fight about what they agree upon. They fight always upon what they disagree about.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Agreement Will Not Prevent War</h4>
<p class="fst">This does not mean that Britain and Russia are going to go to war tomorrow about Poland. But what it does mean is that here before the Second World War is finished and even while the fraternal Allies have the best of all moral reasons for agreement, they have to threaten one another and agree to differ. It is not impossible that some sort of final agreement may be patched up. Churchill, for instance, may have to bow to Russia’s superior strategic position in regard to Poland. But Churchill did not work for the destruction of German domination of the continent for the purpose of substituting Russian domination. Neither did Roosevelt go to the support of British imperialism for any other purpose except to keep European capital divided. Whatever agreement they may come to, the seeds of the Third World War are there for everyone to see. Nobody knows it better than they. And that is why they cannot come to an agreement on the question of voting on the Council. Everyone wants to be in a situation where, as the difficulties sharpen, the voting relations are such that he can put the blame on somebody else. Thus, of course, he will be able to present himself to the workers at home not as the aggressor but as the one who kept to the law and was forced by greedy enemies to take up arms purely in self-defense.</p>
<p><em>That is exactly what all the seven weeks of conference were about. To fool the people with the idea that the Second World War is the last world war. And, further, to arrange matters in such a way that, when war does approach, each one is in a position to say:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“See, workers and farmers, if only the others had stuck to the peace plan, as we arranged at Dumbarton Oaks, there would have been no war. However, inasmuch as war has been forced upon us, you have once more to shed your blood. At any rate, you can be sure that this time, when it does come to an end, we shall arrange a perfect peace plan, which will work, etc., etc.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Preparing for New Struggles</h4>
<p class="fst">Last week I pointed out the preparation for the future that these peace plans were making. America is seeking bases all over the world. Stalin has a military academy where he is preparing boys of the age of eight to be soldiers. General Marshall is preparing America’s peacetime army so that America will not be caught “unprepared” in the future. To these may be added de Gaulle, who is frantically exciting the French people about the necessity of France once more becoming a great power. By this, of course, he means a heavily-armed, imperialist power, and observers of French politics do not hesitate to say so openly. At the same time he hopes by this means to distract the French people from the difficulties which are to be solved at home.</p>
<p>But the very course of the war itself shows exactly how much these gentlemen believe in peace plans. Thus Russia during the past few weeks has been engaged in strategic military operations in Finland, in the Baltic states, in Hungary and in the Balkans. Russia has been busy everywhere, except in front of Warsaw, where she allowed the Germans to massacre the Polish masses. These Polish masses, we may note, were the very ones who objected to Russian domination of Poland.</p>
<p><em>The British, as we know, are very much interested in the imperialist domination of Greece. It is perfectly obvious that it is only a matter of time before Stalin’s army will administer a smashing defeat to the German troops in the Balkans. But Britain cannot wait for this. Oh, no. Churchill is so anxious to deliver the Balkans from German domination that he also must take a part in the defeat of the German armies now stranded in that area.</em></p>
<p>This is the way they settle their problems. This is the way they have always settled them. So that even now, while they still have to finish off Germany, they are busily engaged staking out claims in the only way they can understand – by force of arms.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
Preparing a New League of Nations
(October 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 42, 16 October 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The press has come out in bold headlines announcing that a world peace plan has been agreed upon. Upon examination, however, it turns out that the agreement is still only ninety per cent. It is obvious that if after ninety per cent of agreement you have to go to war over the remaining ten per cent, you do not go to war only to the extent of ten per cent. Even if you agree on ninety-nine per cent and then go to war over one per cent, the war is a one hundred per cent war.
This ninety per cent business comes from a statement by Roosevelt. There were ninety per cent when Russia left the conference. At that time Churchill made a long speech on the war, during which he touched on the question of Poland. He said that it would be most unfortunate if some agreement was not arrived at. Otherwise, the following situation might arise:
The British government might find itself supporting one Polish government and the Russian government might find itself supporting another. That, said Churchill, would be very unfortunate. That is a sufficient per cent to cause a war, even if Churchill and Stalin were ninety per cent agreed on Brazil, India, Burma, Canada, and even Latvia, Esthonia and Lithuania. People never fight about what they agree upon. They fight always upon what they disagree about.
Agreement Will Not Prevent War
This does not mean that Britain and Russia are going to go to war tomorrow about Poland. But what it does mean is that here before the Second World War is finished and even while the fraternal Allies have the best of all moral reasons for agreement, they have to threaten one another and agree to differ. It is not impossible that some sort of final agreement may be patched up. Churchill, for instance, may have to bow to Russia’s superior strategic position in regard to Poland. But Churchill did not work for the destruction of German domination of the continent for the purpose of substituting Russian domination. Neither did Roosevelt go to the support of British imperialism for any other purpose except to keep European capital divided. Whatever agreement they may come to, the seeds of the Third World War are there for everyone to see. Nobody knows it better than they. And that is why they cannot come to an agreement on the question of voting on the Council. Everyone wants to be in a situation where, as the difficulties sharpen, the voting relations are such that he can put the blame on somebody else. Thus, of course, he will be able to present himself to the workers at home not as the aggressor but as the one who kept to the law and was forced by greedy enemies to take up arms purely in self-defense.
That is exactly what all the seven weeks of conference were about. To fool the people with the idea that the Second World War is the last world war. And, further, to arrange matters in such a way that, when war does approach, each one is in a position to say:
“See, workers and farmers, if only the others had stuck to the peace plan, as we arranged at Dumbarton Oaks, there would have been no war. However, inasmuch as war has been forced upon us, you have once more to shed your blood. At any rate, you can be sure that this time, when it does come to an end, we shall arrange a perfect peace plan, which will work, etc., etc.”
Preparing for New Struggles
Last week I pointed out the preparation for the future that these peace plans were making. America is seeking bases all over the world. Stalin has a military academy where he is preparing boys of the age of eight to be soldiers. General Marshall is preparing America’s peacetime army so that America will not be caught “unprepared” in the future. To these may be added de Gaulle, who is frantically exciting the French people about the necessity of France once more becoming a great power. By this, of course, he means a heavily-armed, imperialist power, and observers of French politics do not hesitate to say so openly. At the same time he hopes by this means to distract the French people from the difficulties which are to be solved at home.
But the very course of the war itself shows exactly how much these gentlemen believe in peace plans. Thus Russia during the past few weeks has been engaged in strategic military operations in Finland, in the Baltic states, in Hungary and in the Balkans. Russia has been busy everywhere, except in front of Warsaw, where she allowed the Germans to massacre the Polish masses. These Polish masses, we may note, were the very ones who objected to Russian domination of Poland.
The British, as we know, are very much interested in the imperialist domination of Greece. It is perfectly obvious that it is only a matter of time before Stalin’s army will administer a smashing defeat to the German troops in the Balkans. But Britain cannot wait for this. Oh, no. Churchill is so anxious to deliver the Balkans from German domination that he also must take a part in the defeat of the German armies now stranded in that area.
This is the way they settle their problems. This is the way they have always settled them. So that even now, while they still have to finish off Germany, they are busily engaged staking out claims in the only way they can understand – by force of arms.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>One-Tenth of the Nation</h1>
<h3>(19 August 1946)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_33" target="new">Vol. X No. 33</a>, 19 August 1946, p. 7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The record of violence against Negroes grows every day. It is not accidental. It was not unexpected. It is a part of the social crisis in the United States.</p>
<p>Note please that the violence manifests itself in all parts of the United States – not the South alone.</p>
<ul>
<li>On February 5, in <em>Freeport, Long Island</em>, Policeman Romeika shot down the Ferguson brothers in cold blood.<br>
</li>
<li>There was the official pogrom in <em>Columbia, Tennessee</em>.<br>
</li>
<li><em>Isaac Woodward</em>, the 27-year-old veteran, was blinded in <em>Aiken, South Carolina, by a policeman</em>.<br>
</li>
<li>There have been the lynchings of the two Negro couples in <em>Georgia</em>.<br>
</li>
<li>There was the lynching of the Negro in <em>Mississippi</em>, beaten to death for a crime which it is now known he did not commit.<br>
</li>
<li>There has been the latest outbreak against the Negroes in <em>Athens, Alabama</em>.</li>
</ul>
<p class="fst">These have all been given notice in the capitalist press.</p>
<p>But day after day the brutal mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem by the police continues. There have been protest meetings and a delegation is scheduled to interview Mayor William O’Dwyer and Police Commissioner Wallander.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who Is Responsible?</h4>
<p class="fst">Mass meetings took place all over the country to protest the lynchings – in Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee (where 10,000 workers and their families assembled), Atlanta, New York – to mention a few. From every kind of labor, liberal and church organization, the protests of indignation have been raised.</p>
<p><em>But much, too much, of this protest and honest indignation is misdirected. In fact, the protests of newspapers like the <strong>New York Times</strong> are hypocritical to the last degree. They are hypocritical because they carefully cover up or ignore the outstanding fact that law and order are on the side of the lynchers!</em></p>
<p>To call this hoodlumism is to disguise, to conceal the truth, mislead the public and cover up for the criminals.</p>
<p>A policeman shot the Ferguson brothers. He may be a hoodlum, but when a hoodlum wears a state uniform, the state authorities are responsible for his hoodlumism. After months of agitation, Governor Dewey appointed a commission to inquire whether the case should be reopened. He had been swamped with letters and telegrams from all over the United States and he had to make some gesture. The report which decided that the case should not be reopened has been denounced by the National Lawyers Guild. It is a whitewash.</p>
<p><em>In the Woodward case it was a policeman who blinded the veteran. The War Department was asked to intervene. It has done nothing.</em></p>
<p>In the Columbia, Tenn., case the state police did its full share of the shooting, stealing and furniture-smashing.<br>
</p>
<h4>Lynchers Known</h4>
<p class="fst">As for the Georgia lynching, even the reactionary <strong>World-Telegram</strong> of New York says editorially:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The G-men who showed such skill in rounding up clever, highly trained spies in wartime should not be baffled by a rural murder in which twenty men participated. Surely, with the right amount of determination, they can find clues and evidence to lead to arrests and trial.”</em> (August 12.)</p>
<p class="fst">This is hypocrisy. The Negro press claims that the NAMES OF SOME OF THE GEORGIA LYNCHERS ARE KNOWN. In the Sykestown lynching of some four years ago, Negro papers and <strong>Labor Action</strong> printed the names of the lynchers. Yet the local police and the FBI could not find them. If the FBI put in one-thousandth of the work it put in on the Lindbergh baby case it could find the murderers very quickly. It does not want to, and the <strong>World-Telegram</strong> knows that as well as we do.</p>
<p>Attorney-General Tom Clark made a grandiose announcement that all the resources of his department would be employed to bring the criminals to justice. That is hypocrisy. But he acts like a good servant. He takes his cue from his boss. It was six days, SIX DAYS, before the national indignation forced Truman to utter a protest.</p>
<p><em>But that is not all. The Hester family in Georgia is closely connected with the events which led to the lynchings in Georgia. Two days before the Negro, Malcolm, was jailed and two days before he was lynched, Talmadge of Georgia visited the Hester family. He had a long conference with them. Two days before this conference the Hester family had made an attempt to seize Malcolm and lynch him. (They had been frustrated by a woman who called the sheriff.)</em></p>
<p>If any men are arrested and sentenced, Talmadge will be the next governor of Georgia and can pardon them.<br>
</p>
<h4>Officials Failed to Act</h4>
<p class="fst">It is not white hoodlums who beat up Negroes in Harlem. When, as they sometimes do, whites and Negro boys fight in New York in border areas, that is one thing. Harlem Negroes are complaining of something else, of <em>police</em> brutality.</p>
<p><em>That is the record. Not so much cops on the beat, but Dewey, Governor of New York State; Tom Clark, U.S. Attorney General; Truman, the President; Talmadge of Georgia, all in their various ways are responsible for what is going on. They are responsible because by their actions they encourage violence.</em></p>
<ul>
<li>IF Dewey had intervened the morning after the Freeport murders and personally saw that justice was done, there would not be police brutality as Harlem has experienced during the last few months,<br>
</li>
<li>IF, immediately upon news of the Georgia lynchings, Truman had made a public announcement and called upon the Attorney General to spare no pains to bring the criminals to justice,<br>
</li>
<li>IF the Attorney General had set his best men on the case and rapidly hauled them in,<br>
</li>
<li>IF the <strong>Times</strong> and the others had made it clear that not only the state but all organs of publicity and propaganda were not going to rest until justice had been done,<br>
</li>
<li>IF they had done these things, then they would have been doing their duty to the Negroes and to the nation.</li>
</ul>
<p class="fst"><em>But they do exactly the opposite. They save face. They do not do what they can easily do. Who does NOT do something is by that very fact actually doing something else. In this case it is protecting the lynchers, telling them as plain as day that they can get away with it. If those who make the protests and send delegations do not understand this clearly, then it is time that they did.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
(19 August 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. X No. 33, 19 August 1946, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The record of violence against Negroes grows every day. It is not accidental. It was not unexpected. It is a part of the social crisis in the United States.
Note please that the violence manifests itself in all parts of the United States – not the South alone.
On February 5, in Freeport, Long Island, Policeman Romeika shot down the Ferguson brothers in cold blood.
There was the official pogrom in Columbia, Tennessee.
Isaac Woodward, the 27-year-old veteran, was blinded in Aiken, South Carolina, by a policeman.
There have been the lynchings of the two Negro couples in Georgia.
There was the lynching of the Negro in Mississippi, beaten to death for a crime which it is now known he did not commit.
There has been the latest outbreak against the Negroes in Athens, Alabama.
These have all been given notice in the capitalist press.
But day after day the brutal mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem by the police continues. There have been protest meetings and a delegation is scheduled to interview Mayor William O’Dwyer and Police Commissioner Wallander.
Who Is Responsible?
Mass meetings took place all over the country to protest the lynchings – in Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee (where 10,000 workers and their families assembled), Atlanta, New York – to mention a few. From every kind of labor, liberal and church organization, the protests of indignation have been raised.
But much, too much, of this protest and honest indignation is misdirected. In fact, the protests of newspapers like the New York Times are hypocritical to the last degree. They are hypocritical because they carefully cover up or ignore the outstanding fact that law and order are on the side of the lynchers!
To call this hoodlumism is to disguise, to conceal the truth, mislead the public and cover up for the criminals.
A policeman shot the Ferguson brothers. He may be a hoodlum, but when a hoodlum wears a state uniform, the state authorities are responsible for his hoodlumism. After months of agitation, Governor Dewey appointed a commission to inquire whether the case should be reopened. He had been swamped with letters and telegrams from all over the United States and he had to make some gesture. The report which decided that the case should not be reopened has been denounced by the National Lawyers Guild. It is a whitewash.
In the Woodward case it was a policeman who blinded the veteran. The War Department was asked to intervene. It has done nothing.
In the Columbia, Tenn., case the state police did its full share of the shooting, stealing and furniture-smashing.
Lynchers Known
As for the Georgia lynching, even the reactionary World-Telegram of New York says editorially:
“The G-men who showed such skill in rounding up clever, highly trained spies in wartime should not be baffled by a rural murder in which twenty men participated. Surely, with the right amount of determination, they can find clues and evidence to lead to arrests and trial.” (August 12.)
This is hypocrisy. The Negro press claims that the NAMES OF SOME OF THE GEORGIA LYNCHERS ARE KNOWN. In the Sykestown lynching of some four years ago, Negro papers and Labor Action printed the names of the lynchers. Yet the local police and the FBI could not find them. If the FBI put in one-thousandth of the work it put in on the Lindbergh baby case it could find the murderers very quickly. It does not want to, and the World-Telegram knows that as well as we do.
Attorney-General Tom Clark made a grandiose announcement that all the resources of his department would be employed to bring the criminals to justice. That is hypocrisy. But he acts like a good servant. He takes his cue from his boss. It was six days, SIX DAYS, before the national indignation forced Truman to utter a protest.
But that is not all. The Hester family in Georgia is closely connected with the events which led to the lynchings in Georgia. Two days before the Negro, Malcolm, was jailed and two days before he was lynched, Talmadge of Georgia visited the Hester family. He had a long conference with them. Two days before this conference the Hester family had made an attempt to seize Malcolm and lynch him. (They had been frustrated by a woman who called the sheriff.)
If any men are arrested and sentenced, Talmadge will be the next governor of Georgia and can pardon them.
Officials Failed to Act
It is not white hoodlums who beat up Negroes in Harlem. When, as they sometimes do, whites and Negro boys fight in New York in border areas, that is one thing. Harlem Negroes are complaining of something else, of police brutality.
That is the record. Not so much cops on the beat, but Dewey, Governor of New York State; Tom Clark, U.S. Attorney General; Truman, the President; Talmadge of Georgia, all in their various ways are responsible for what is going on. They are responsible because by their actions they encourage violence.
IF Dewey had intervened the morning after the Freeport murders and personally saw that justice was done, there would not be police brutality as Harlem has experienced during the last few months,
IF, immediately upon news of the Georgia lynchings, Truman had made a public announcement and called upon the Attorney General to spare no pains to bring the criminals to justice,
IF the Attorney General had set his best men on the case and rapidly hauled them in,
IF the Times and the others had made it clear that not only the state but all organs of publicity and propaganda were not going to rest until justice had been done,
IF they had done these things, then they would have been doing their duty to the Negroes and to the nation.
But they do exactly the opposite. They save face. They do not do what they can easily do. Who does NOT do something is by that very fact actually doing something else. In this case it is protecting the lynchers, telling them as plain as day that they can get away with it. If those who make the protests and send delegations do not understand this clearly, then it is time that they did.
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<h2>C.L.R. James </h2>
<h1>Fighting for the Abyssinian Emperor</h1>
<h3>(5 June 1936)</h3>
<hr class="end" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source:</span> <strong>New Leader</strong>, 5 June 1936.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
<span class="info">Marked up:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="end" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Sir,</p>
<p class="fst">May I make my position in regard to fighting for Abyssinia clear?</p>
<p>Early last year I offered myself through the Abyssinian Embassy here to take service under the Emperor, military or otherwise.</p>
<p>My reasons for this were simple. International Socialists in Britain fight British imperialism because obviously it is more convenient to do so than to fight, for instance, German imperialism. But Italian capitalism is the same enemy, only a little further removed.</p>
<p>My hope was to get into the army. It would have given me an opportunity to make contact not only with the masses of the Abyssinians and other Africans, but in the ranks with them I would have had the best possible opportunity of putting across the International Socialist case. I believed also that I could have been useful in helping to organise anti-Fascist propaganda among the Italian troops.<br>
</p>
<h4>Actual Experience</h4>
<p class="fst">And finally, I would have had an invaluable opportunity of gaining actual military experience on the African field where one of the most savage battles between capitalism and its opponents is going to be fought before very many years. As long as the Emperor was fighting imperialism I would have done the best I could. The moment, however, any arrangement had been come to which brought the country within the control of European imperialism a new situation would have arisen, and I would have identified myself with those bands, hundreds of thousands of them, who are still fighting, and for years are going to carry on the fight against imperialistic domination of any kind.</p>
<p>I did not intend to spend the rest of my life in Abyssinia, but, all things considered, I thought, and still think, that two or three years there, given the fact that I am a Negro and am especially interested in the African revolution, was well worth the attempt.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Dr Martin, the Minister, told me that he thought my work with the International Friends of Ethiopia would better serve the struggle against Italy. When, however, that body decided to support League Sanctions and possibly lead British workers to what Marxists knew from the start would be an imperialist war, I broke at once with the society.</p>
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<tbody><tr>
<td width="60%">
<p> </p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="fst">Faithfully yours,<br>
<em>C.L.R. James</em><br>
London</p>
</td>
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</tbody></table>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James
Fighting for the Abyssinian Emperor
(5 June 1936)
Source: New Leader, 5 June 1936.
Transcribed: Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Sir,
May I make my position in regard to fighting for Abyssinia clear?
Early last year I offered myself through the Abyssinian Embassy here to take service under the Emperor, military or otherwise.
My reasons for this were simple. International Socialists in Britain fight British imperialism because obviously it is more convenient to do so than to fight, for instance, German imperialism. But Italian capitalism is the same enemy, only a little further removed.
My hope was to get into the army. It would have given me an opportunity to make contact not only with the masses of the Abyssinians and other Africans, but in the ranks with them I would have had the best possible opportunity of putting across the International Socialist case. I believed also that I could have been useful in helping to organise anti-Fascist propaganda among the Italian troops.
Actual Experience
And finally, I would have had an invaluable opportunity of gaining actual military experience on the African field where one of the most savage battles between capitalism and its opponents is going to be fought before very many years. As long as the Emperor was fighting imperialism I would have done the best I could. The moment, however, any arrangement had been come to which brought the country within the control of European imperialism a new situation would have arisen, and I would have identified myself with those bands, hundreds of thousands of them, who are still fighting, and for years are going to carry on the fight against imperialistic domination of any kind.
I did not intend to spend the rest of my life in Abyssinia, but, all things considered, I thought, and still think, that two or three years there, given the fact that I am a Negro and am especially interested in the African revolution, was well worth the attempt.
Unfortunately, Dr Martin, the Minister, told me that he thought my work with the International Friends of Ethiopia would better serve the struggle against Italy. When, however, that body decided to support League Sanctions and possibly lead British workers to what Marxists knew from the start would be an imperialist war, I broke at once with the society.
Faithfully yours,
C.L.R. James
London
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<h2>J.R. Johnston</h2>
<h1>An Exchange on the Socialist<br>
Attitude to the Bilbo Problem</h1>
<h4>A Reply for the Editors</h4>
<h3>(24 March 1947)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1947/index.htm#la11_12" target="new">Vol. 11 No. 12</a>, 24 March 1947, p. 6.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Comrade Goldman’s <a href="../../../../../history/etol/writers/goldman/1947/03/letter2.htm" target="new">criticism</a> of the editorial on Bilbo in the <strong>Labor Action</strong> of January 13 loses sight of the function of the revolutionary party which is to organize and to educate the working class on the issues of the day. He claims that the editorial did not point out clearly enough the undemocratic character of Bilbo’s election. The editorial states clearly enough: “Suppose Bilbo didn’t have cancer, what would they have done? And if they’re interested in barring Senators who prevent Negroes from voting, we can provide them with a long list of Southern Senators who, if not as personally nauseating as Bilbo, are equally determined to keep the Negro in chains.”</p>
<p><em>But the editorial goes further. Far from neglecting the point, it states: “A democratic procedure would have been first to seat him and then to bring him up on trial for expulsion on the ground that he violated democratic rights of Negroes.”</em></p>
<p>Therefore we cannot agree with Comrade Goldman that the editorial is weak on this particular point. We do not mean to say that it might not have been stated more vigorously but inasmuch as the whole editorial was based upon the refusal of the Republicans to face an exposure of Jim Crow in the South and Bilbo’s participation in it, we fail to see that an excessive emphasis on this particular point would have altered the basic political analysis which the editorial tried, and in our opinion, succeeded in bringing forward.</p>
<p>The editorial, for us, is not at all to be considered as an isolated statement, despite its title of <em>Balance Sheet</em>. There are few political questions of the day before the public on which <strong>Labor Action</strong> has been so consistent, so vigorous and so comprehensive as in its mobilization of working class opinion and action against Bilbo and everything that he stands for. Nor was our propaganda and agitation of a general kind. We aimed in all parts of the paper at the driving of Bilbo out of Congress by the organized action of the working class and the masses of the Negro people.<br>
</p>
<h4>Goldman’s Main Point</h4>
<p class="fst">The main point of Comrade Goldman’s criticism is of the indication of our opposition to the particular means whereby Bilbo was kept out of Congress. Comrade Goldman urges that Senate rules require only a majority to keep Bilbo out of the Senate whereas to expel him after he has been seated required a two-thirds vote. Inasmuch as a two-thirds majority could not be mustered, to ensure his expulsion, therefore we should have joined those wjio supported the Senate in keeping Bilbo from taking his seat.</p>
<p><em>First of all, if Bilbo had taken his seat and then been tried, the resulting exposure of Bilbo and the whole Senate would have been of first class political importance. In our opinion it is a valid contention that this would have transcended the mere keeping of Bilbo from taking his seat. Others besides Bilbo might have lost their seats or have been indelibly smeared. This is precisely what the Republicans wanted to avoid. The exposure that they tried to avoid is the particular exposure that we as revolutionaries should have tried to achieve. From start to finish our main concern is not the punishment of this or that particular political scoundrel of bourgeois society but the revolutionary education of the masses by the exposure of the entire system. And when this exposure can take place by means of mutual recriminations of contending parties on so conspicuous an arena as the legislative councils of the country, then this opportunity is not to be lightly dismissed as Comrade Goldman dismisses it under the heading that we should do nothing which would “practically assure” Bilbo a seat in the Senate.</em></p>
<p>Furthermore, we cannot accept Comrade Goldman’s confidence that under such conditions Bilbo was certain to keep his seat. This seems to us to be placing much too great a reliance upon the mere counting of votes. It seems to us to pay too little to what was undoubtedly the fact, that the Senate had come to the conclusion that in its own defense and its own reputation it was impossible to continue to keep Bilbo in face of the rising wrath of a large proportion of the population.<br>
</p>
<h4>Issue of the Precedent</h4>
<p class="fst">The second point is in regard to the precedent set for barring radicals or Socialists in the future by the same methods which were used in the case of Bilbo. Comrade Goldman says gorrectly that Socialists or radicals would be barred for totally different reasons. Obviously. But that would not alter the fact that they would be barred. And a socialist would be barred precisely to prevent him being able to state <em>in the Senate</em> – the reasons that the bourgeoisie had trumped up to prevent him taking his seat. Goldman seems to think that a statement to the press is sufficient presentation of a defense. We would not place much reliance on a presentation of the defense of a radical or a socialist in the bourgeois press.</p>
<p><em>The editorial was warning the workers of a counter-revolutionary trick of the bourgeoisie well known to our. movement. Whenever public, opinion or its own maneuvers compel the’ bourgeois to take steps against obviously reactionary encroachments on bourgeois democracy, it always does so in a manner that gives it a weapon to strike against its real enemy, the militant working class. The revolutionary movement, therefore, from long experience has learned that while mobilizing, the proletariat to use parliamentary procedures, as far as convenient, against the enemy, never to join in the hue and cry to such an extent as to lose sight of the weapons which, while being forged against a particular individual or organization, may ultimately be used against the proletariat. It is precisely this that the editorial tried to do and in our opinion rightly.</em></p>
<p>We did our share in the organization of the general campaign against Bilbo. But is our special function, ours and ours alone, to warn the working class against the bourgeois method of misusing the steps which public opinion has forced upon it. Against all this Comrade Goldman, while admitting some possible validity, insists that we should have done everything in our power to keep Bilbo from getting a seat in the Senate.<br>
</p>
<h4>Revolutionary Policy</h4>
<p class="fst">We think we can sum up the whole by stating that while we should do everything in our power to keep Bilbo from getting a seat in the Senate, in this as in every other political struggle, we are responsible not only for the immediate but the ultimate aims of the working class and its allies, in this case, the masses of the Negroes.</p>
<p><em>Our whole record shows that we were in the vanguard of the struggle to get Bilbo out of the Senate. But we could, not subordinate our conceptions, and in our opinion, our valid conceptions, of revolutionary policy, to an immediate aim, however urgent and however possible. To do that in our opinion would have been an abdication of our function, which as we have said above, we alone can perform.</em></p>
<p>We are confident that although they might not agree with us, the Negroes and the radicals who follow opr position and activities on the Negro question and particularly on Bilboism Would not for one moment look upon this as anything else but What we intended it to be, a warning not to lose sight of the general interests of the struggle in the heat of a particular goal.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnston
An Exchange on the Socialist
Attitude to the Bilbo Problem
A Reply for the Editors
(24 March 1947)
From Labor Action, Vol. 11 No. 12, 24 March 1947, p. 6.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Comrade Goldman’s criticism of the editorial on Bilbo in the Labor Action of January 13 loses sight of the function of the revolutionary party which is to organize and to educate the working class on the issues of the day. He claims that the editorial did not point out clearly enough the undemocratic character of Bilbo’s election. The editorial states clearly enough: “Suppose Bilbo didn’t have cancer, what would they have done? And if they’re interested in barring Senators who prevent Negroes from voting, we can provide them with a long list of Southern Senators who, if not as personally nauseating as Bilbo, are equally determined to keep the Negro in chains.”
But the editorial goes further. Far from neglecting the point, it states: “A democratic procedure would have been first to seat him and then to bring him up on trial for expulsion on the ground that he violated democratic rights of Negroes.”
Therefore we cannot agree with Comrade Goldman that the editorial is weak on this particular point. We do not mean to say that it might not have been stated more vigorously but inasmuch as the whole editorial was based upon the refusal of the Republicans to face an exposure of Jim Crow in the South and Bilbo’s participation in it, we fail to see that an excessive emphasis on this particular point would have altered the basic political analysis which the editorial tried, and in our opinion, succeeded in bringing forward.
The editorial, for us, is not at all to be considered as an isolated statement, despite its title of Balance Sheet. There are few political questions of the day before the public on which Labor Action has been so consistent, so vigorous and so comprehensive as in its mobilization of working class opinion and action against Bilbo and everything that he stands for. Nor was our propaganda and agitation of a general kind. We aimed in all parts of the paper at the driving of Bilbo out of Congress by the organized action of the working class and the masses of the Negro people.
Goldman’s Main Point
The main point of Comrade Goldman’s criticism is of the indication of our opposition to the particular means whereby Bilbo was kept out of Congress. Comrade Goldman urges that Senate rules require only a majority to keep Bilbo out of the Senate whereas to expel him after he has been seated required a two-thirds vote. Inasmuch as a two-thirds majority could not be mustered, to ensure his expulsion, therefore we should have joined those wjio supported the Senate in keeping Bilbo from taking his seat.
First of all, if Bilbo had taken his seat and then been tried, the resulting exposure of Bilbo and the whole Senate would have been of first class political importance. In our opinion it is a valid contention that this would have transcended the mere keeping of Bilbo from taking his seat. Others besides Bilbo might have lost their seats or have been indelibly smeared. This is precisely what the Republicans wanted to avoid. The exposure that they tried to avoid is the particular exposure that we as revolutionaries should have tried to achieve. From start to finish our main concern is not the punishment of this or that particular political scoundrel of bourgeois society but the revolutionary education of the masses by the exposure of the entire system. And when this exposure can take place by means of mutual recriminations of contending parties on so conspicuous an arena as the legislative councils of the country, then this opportunity is not to be lightly dismissed as Comrade Goldman dismisses it under the heading that we should do nothing which would “practically assure” Bilbo a seat in the Senate.
Furthermore, we cannot accept Comrade Goldman’s confidence that under such conditions Bilbo was certain to keep his seat. This seems to us to be placing much too great a reliance upon the mere counting of votes. It seems to us to pay too little to what was undoubtedly the fact, that the Senate had come to the conclusion that in its own defense and its own reputation it was impossible to continue to keep Bilbo in face of the rising wrath of a large proportion of the population.
Issue of the Precedent
The second point is in regard to the precedent set for barring radicals or Socialists in the future by the same methods which were used in the case of Bilbo. Comrade Goldman says gorrectly that Socialists or radicals would be barred for totally different reasons. Obviously. But that would not alter the fact that they would be barred. And a socialist would be barred precisely to prevent him being able to state in the Senate – the reasons that the bourgeoisie had trumped up to prevent him taking his seat. Goldman seems to think that a statement to the press is sufficient presentation of a defense. We would not place much reliance on a presentation of the defense of a radical or a socialist in the bourgeois press.
The editorial was warning the workers of a counter-revolutionary trick of the bourgeoisie well known to our. movement. Whenever public, opinion or its own maneuvers compel the’ bourgeois to take steps against obviously reactionary encroachments on bourgeois democracy, it always does so in a manner that gives it a weapon to strike against its real enemy, the militant working class. The revolutionary movement, therefore, from long experience has learned that while mobilizing, the proletariat to use parliamentary procedures, as far as convenient, against the enemy, never to join in the hue and cry to such an extent as to lose sight of the weapons which, while being forged against a particular individual or organization, may ultimately be used against the proletariat. It is precisely this that the editorial tried to do and in our opinion rightly.
We did our share in the organization of the general campaign against Bilbo. But is our special function, ours and ours alone, to warn the working class against the bourgeois method of misusing the steps which public opinion has forced upon it. Against all this Comrade Goldman, while admitting some possible validity, insists that we should have done everything in our power to keep Bilbo from getting a seat in the Senate.
Revolutionary Policy
We think we can sum up the whole by stating that while we should do everything in our power to keep Bilbo from getting a seat in the Senate, in this as in every other political struggle, we are responsible not only for the immediate but the ultimate aims of the working class and its allies, in this case, the masses of the Negroes.
Our whole record shows that we were in the vanguard of the struggle to get Bilbo out of the Senate. But we could, not subordinate our conceptions, and in our opinion, our valid conceptions, of revolutionary policy, to an immediate aim, however urgent and however possible. To do that in our opinion would have been an abdication of our function, which as we have said above, we alone can perform.
We are confident that although they might not agree with us, the Negroes and the radicals who follow opr position and activities on the Negro question and particularly on Bilboism Would not for one moment look upon this as anything else but What we intended it to be, a warning not to lose sight of the general interests of the struggle in the heat of a particular goal.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The American People in ‘One World’</h1>
<h4>An Essay in Dialectical Materialism</h4>
<h3>(July 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><span class="info">Source:</span> <strong><em>New International</em></strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni44_07" target="new">Vol. X No. 7</a>, July 1944, pp. 225–230.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> Ted Crawford.<br>
<span class="info">Proofread:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> (December 2015).</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">America has entered upon a new phase of relationship with the rest of the world. Its armies tramp and roll over the most remote corners of the globe; its navies scour the five oceans; every day its airmen blaze new “Santa Fe” trails over African jungles and the China Sea. American military and political leaders lay down the law in Casablanca, London, Chungking and Rome, and partition continents at Cairo and Teheran. Arabs, Hindus and Koreans, seeking the bread of independence, jostle one another along the stone corridors of Constitution Avenue. All the world has been converted and Washington is the modern Mecca. Within the White House, Roosevelt arrogates the right to O.K. rulers of empires as a merchant O.K.’s prospective salesmen. Augustan Rome, the Pope sitting crowned upon the grave thereof, even imperial Britain, seem to have been merely successive anticipations of this monstrous, this incredible concentration of power. The American people are grappling with the change. The sales of Willkie’s <strong>One World</strong>, the greatest publishing success in history, is a political and not a literary phenomenon. Yet the true nature of the new relation remains obscure for the great masses of the people. How could it be otherwise? Day after day, year after year, it has heard American history past and present discussed in the following terms:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is not a coincidence ... that the United States and Russia, under the czars and under the Soviets, have always in vital matters been on the same side; that for more than 100 years Britain and America have in the end always found that against the mortal enemy of either, they would support one another, and that France, which did so much to liberate America, has twice in her mortal peril found us at last beside her.” (Walter Lippmann, <strong>Herald Tribune</strong>, July 8, 1944.)</p>
<p class="fst">We propose to expose the falsity of this interpretation of American history in its international relations. It is not the truth about American history and can be factually exposed. Left unexposed, it affords too fertile a soil for the organized deception of the people as to the true character of America’s foreign relations of today and still more, of tomorrow. We propose, however, to make a preliminary statement of our own principles, first because of the vastness of the subject and the danger of becoming lost in it; secondly, owing to the necessity of constantly counterposing Marxism to the bourgeois <a name="f1" href="#n1">[1]</a> ignorance and superficialty of Lippmann’s method, which in bourgeois society seems as natural as the air we breathe; finally, owing to the reinforcement to this nationalistic empiricism, now being provided by the Stalinists in the name of Marx. This inexhaustible source of corruption celebrated the latest July 4 as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The fact that our country was able to rally from the unclear national policy and the dark days of division of Munichism to play the tremendous part it has in the great anti-Hitler war of liberation is in large measure due to the democratic content which for 168 years, despite many vicissitudes, has continued to characterize our national existence. (<em>How America Got That Way</em>, by F.J. Meyers, <strong>New Masses</strong>, July 4, 1944.)</p>
<p class="fst">What are these but the historical method and the ideas of Lippmann dressed in a pink sweater? This deliberate and criminal falsification has a clear purpose. The political struggle of the proletariat in international relations now becomes a struggle as to whether “our country,” i.e., Roosevelt, will continue to play the role it has played “for 168 years,” i.e., in 1914, support Stalinist Russia. Under this potent but poisonous fertilizer, the advocacy of incentive pay and of the no-strike pledge become the continuation of the great traditions of the Declaration of Independence, not only at home but abroad.</p>
<p>Yet, in reality, the history of the United States, properly understood, is a clarion call to the masses of the people everywhere to raise the concept of the nation to a higher plane inseminating it with the concept of class. Dialectically handled, this history is a weapon to be used by and for the people and not against them.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Method of Investigation</h4>
<p class="fst">Marx has stated that “as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class.” All Marx’s method is contained in that sentence. Not America in general, but the <em>class struggle</em> in America, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Not Britain or France or Germany in general, but the progression from the European middle classes in the eighteenth century to the European proletariat in the nineteenth. The method of dialectical materialism at one stroke clears its skirts from the hereditary stupidities of the bourgeois publicist and the criminal huckstering of his Stalinist hack. We today must bear in mind that logical class movement from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and by projecting it, disentangle from complicated historical phenomena the class relations and international perspectives of the twentieth. It is precisely this logical connection that we wish to establish and precisely this that the Stalinists wish to destroy, because it is this more than anything else that the American people need.</p>
<p class="fst">2. This is no mere academic exercise. We can orient for the future only by comprehension of the present in the light of the past. This apparent truism, with the bourgeoisie mere “common sense” or sententiousness, for the Marxist has an entirely different significance, both logical and historical. Marx taught us that the very categories by which we distinguish the various phases of the social movement are fully developed and therefore fully comprehensible only in the maturity of bourgeois society. Today we can go further. It is in the decay of bourgeois society as it falls to pieces that concepts centuries old shed all social and traditional disguise and stand naked. When Jesse Jones, after Pearl Harbor, heard that stock-piles of rubber had been destroyed by fire in Boston and asked if they had been insured, half the country laughed at him. The fetishism of commodities-stood exposed as an idol of the market place. In every sphere of social knowledge contemporary developments reveal the past in truer perspective and show us our own great contradictions as merely the logical climax of embryonic movements maturing through the centuries.</p>
<p>The history of Bolshevism etches in sharper and clearer perspective the apparent hair-splitting of the early Christians and the Puritans and thus gives historical discrimination to the conflicts of today in the light of tomorrow. Only the October Revolution could extend our knowledge of the British and French revolutions and the three in sequence together constitute a statue of liberty that illuminates the whole contemporary darkness. This extension of American power to the remotest reaches is a dramatic climax to the role this country has played in international relations, lighting up the past of the whole of Western civilization and projecting its present contradictions into their future resolution.</p>
<p>Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation. All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market. We have only to examine carefully the historical development to see concretely posed the revolutionary socialist solution which Marx distilled by logical abstraction. It is necessary to do this so as not to be misled by the apparent ignorance and bewilderment of the great masses of the people. The masses do not learn history, they make it. More accurately, they learn it only when they make it. Even Washington had little conception of what tocsin he was sounding, and Lincoln had less. So, to-day the American proletariat, as it went into the factories to protect the birth of the CIO and now girds itself for the post-war struggle against unemployment, is, unawaredly, preparing international and economic transformations and social realignments on a scale comparable only to the elevation of American capitalism to its position as dominant world power. This for us is the objective movement of history which we attempt, by precept and example, subjectively to clarify and advance. Not forgetting, however, that the subjective movement, whatever its accidental chances, is in its totality the complement of objective necessity and cannot be separated from it.<br>
</p>
<h4>The First Tocsin</h4>
<p class="fst">In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism. Yet the protagonists of the new industrial capitalism, in Britain as well as in France, had been nourished on the famous “triangular trade” of mercantilism – Africa, America and the West Indies After the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the up and coming industrial bourgeoisie began to find itself in conflict with the mercantilist commercial and political domination. Each class sought to solve its difficulties at the expense of the periphery – the thirteen colonies. But in the thirteen colonies the resulting economic and political crisis soon brought on to the political stage the artisans and mechanics of the towns. Says Beard: “They broke out in rioting in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston.... In fact, the agitation, <em>contrary to the intent of the merchants and lawyers</em>, got quite beyond the bounds of law and order.” (Emphasis mine – <em>J.R.J.</em>) Well might Gouverneur Morris remark: “The heads of the mobility grow dangerous to the gentry, and how to keep them down is the question.”</p>
<p>In the border areas the farmers, checked in the first agitation against the British, broke out into furious revolt against the American ruling class. A conservative historian (Miller, <em>Origins of the American Revolution</em>, 1943, page 319) sums up his research thus: “But this Eastern ruling class was at no time disposed to sacrifice any of its privileges in order to bring the Western farmers wholeheartedly into the revolutionary movement. Instead the aristocracy urged Americans to center their attention wholly upon British tyranny and not to seek to apply revolutionary principles to conditions at home.” The “no-strike pledge” and “incentive pay” have a long ancestry.</p>
<p>When the victory was won, the bottom had been torn out of the “triangular trade” and the British industrial bourgeoisie came immediately into its own. The Treaty of Versailles which ratified the independence of America was signed in 1783. One year later, 1784, is the traditional date set as the “beginning” of the industrial revolution in Britain. In a surprisingly few years the trade with America on the new basis rivalled the old mercantilist prosperity to the confutation of the prophets of evil. Not only in the internal affairs of Europe did the loss of America create a revolution. Colonial relations underwent a radical transformation. One year after the loss of America came the first of the great India Bills which marked the beginning of the change from the old-fashioned robbery and plunder of India to the more systematic economic exploitation based on the developing textile industry. Three years after Versailles, Pitt personally asked Wilberforce to undertake the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade. This was accomplished in 1806 and marked the beginning of a new relationship between Great Britain and Africa. Mercantilist Britain, for a century the undying foe of colonial independence, by 1820 had become the champion of the freedom of the Latin-American colonies. Where George III had said of the struggle with the thirteen colonies, “Blows will decide,” Canning, with his eye on British trade in Latin America, declared: “We have called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.”</p>
<p>George Washington might preach isolationism and non-intervention. The revolution had set in motion great class struggles in Europe and given a new direction to international trade and colonial relations. Today we can estimate the relative values of the Declaration of Independence and the essential <em>political</em> document of the time, <strong>Wealth of Nations</strong>. Adam Smith had worked on it for ten years when in appeared in 1776. He wrote that the present system of management, i.e., mercantilism, procured advantage “only to a single order of men,” i.e.. one class. Great Britain (and Europe as well) “derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she has assumed over her colonies.” The problem was how to achieve the death of this system. In the opinion of this bourgeois, to propose that Britain “give up all the authority over her colonies ... would be to propose such a measure as never was and never will be adopted by any nation in the world.” The American revolutionary leaders for years had been in close contract with the radical opposition in Britain. But all these politicians were, like Smith, unable to visualize the radical and complete break. It was the artisans, the mechanics and farmers who started the ball a-rolling and converted Smith’s theories into reality. Thus Washington’s “isolationism” was merely the appearance of things. Their essence was far different. We shall see this difference between the appearance and the essence constantly repeated on an ever more extensive scale until it reaches truly gigantic: proportions in the contradiction between the apparent power of Washington today and the underlying economic and social movement.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Second Tocsin</h4>
<p class="fst">Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change. The cotton-gin not only created the historical patterns of American capitalism. It laid an indelible impress on European development as well. In 1847 Marx, engaged in the congenial task of exposing the misuse of the Hegelian dialectic by Proudhon, took as one of his illustrations, slavery.</p>
<p>Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry It is slavery which has given their value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created the commerce of the world, it is the commerce of the world which is the essential condition of the great industry.... Without slavery North America, the most progressive country, would have been transformed into a patriarchal country. Efface North America from the map of the world and you would have the anarchy, the complete decadence of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have effaced America from the map of nations. (<strong>Poverty of Philosophy</strong>)</p>
<p>By 1847, however, this was the summation of an age which was dying. Its death was to change the social structure of America and signalize the coming of age of a new force in Europe.</p>
<p>Just one year before Marx’s book, the British bourgeoisie won its final victory over the landlords by the abolition of the “corn laws,” which brought the cheap wheat of the New World into Britain and lowered the value of the laborer. The South had calculated all along that the loss of its cotton would inevitably bring intervention by the European powers, particularly Britain. It miscalculated the interest of the industrialists in cheap wheat from the wheat belt, which was one of the most powerful supporters of the North. But the role of cheap wheat was a testimony to the fact that the special claims of the textile industry, always the first to mature in a nascent capitalist development, had already been superseded by the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. The varied and expanded accumulation of capital had brought with it a varied and expanded proletariat. In 1848 this proletariat appeared on the scene in France in the first proletarian revolution. Europe trembled, but in Washington, the White House, the government and the people in the streets rejoiced at the downfall of the monarchy. The ruling classes of Europe therefore hated the political system of America with its seam of aristocracy and monarchy, its emphasis on equality, manhood suffrage and popular government.</p>
<p>But in the United States, by 1848, forces were at work converting the bourgeoisie from the ally to the foe of popular aspirations abroad. In 1850, a desperate attempt was made to compromise the differences between North and South. But the economic conflict was irrepressible. The fugitive slaves and the Abolitionists would not let the question be forgotten for a moment. In 1858 economic crisis shook not only the United States but the whole of the now vastly extended world market. From then on the sequence of international events came thick and fast.</p>
<p>First, between 1857 and 1859, a series of great strikes and class conflicts broke out all over Europe, Britain included. In 1860 came Lincoln’s election. The South expected that the commercial capitalists of the North would as usual capitulate. But independent farmers of the Northwest could not for a moment tolerate the idea of a hostile power holding the mouth of the Mississippi and they were among the chief supporters of Lincoln. But even more important, <em>the victory of the Republican Party was due more than anything else to the support of labor</em>. <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> And labor, though no lover of Negroes, was by 1860 conscious enough of the stake which free labor had in the struggle with slave labor. <em>Thus labor and the independent farmers were the most powerful forces in the North while the general unrest and minor but repeated insurrections among the slaves</em> completed the forces which pushed the unwilling rulers of the North and South to the final settlement by arms. <em>The mechanics, the artisans, the frontiersmen of 1776 and the Negroes</em> <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a> <em>who had fought with Washington had now developed into the powerful force on whom Lincoln had ultimately to depend for political support and military victory</em>.</p>
<p>But political activity, the concrete expression of social consciousness, though sometimes accelerated, sometimes retarded, must keep pace with social development. Even before 1848 the Abolitionists not only led an incomparable agitation in the United States. Garrison and Negroes who had escaped from slavery placed the case of the slaves before vast numbers of European workers. They enrolled supporters by the hundreds of thousands. One Negro alone enrolled 70,000 in Germany.</p>
<p>When war actually began, the European ruling classes were on the alert for an opportunity to intervene. Everything hinged on Britain. The British government was hesitant and hoped for an encouraging signal from the Lancashire cotton operatives, who were in great distress over the cessation of cotton exports from the South. The British textile operatives, however, denounced the intervention plans of the government and what took place in Britain was repeated on a lesser scale all over Europe. The British bourgeoisie was sneering at Lincoln’s repeated declarations that the war was not a war for the abolition of slavery. The European workers shouted across the ocean that it was, and called on Lincoln to say so. Lincoln, with the North in great danger, finally penned the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863. The European proletariat celebrated a great victory. It came just in time. Marx tells us (Schlueter, <strong>Lincoln, Labor and Slavery</strong>, page 187; see also Marx and Engels’ <strong>Correspondence</strong>) that in April, 1863, “a monster meeting. .. prevented Palmerston from declaring war against the United States when he was on the point of doing it.”</p>
<p>In 1861, the Czar, fearful of rebellion from below, had emancipated the serfs. In 1862 had come the rebellion of the Poles. A great international mass meeting took place in London in July, 1863, on behalf of Polish independence. These two events, the American Civil War and the Polish Rebellion, brought to a conclusion the tentative negotiations long in progress and on September 28, 1861, the First International was founded. On November 1 the executive committee adopted the inaugural address by Marx. Nothing so contributed to the final consummation as the Civil War.</p>
<p>At the beginning of that same November, Lincoln was re-elected President. Marx, on the Council of the International, initiated a series of mass meetings in Britain protesting against the hostile attitude of the English ruling class and government to the Union. On the 29th, Marx presented to the Council the address to Lincoln. The International became the terror of the European governments. If in the eighteenth century the American Revolution had initiated the struggle for bourgeois democracy, the Civil War had set on foot the movement which ended its first phase in the Paris Commune – the dictatorship of the proletariat.<br>
</p>
<h4>Oriental Interlude</h4>
<p>It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear. That is why they are so important.</p>
<p>Before we draw together the developing historical tendencies which meet in the colossal power of the United States to-day, we have to note briefly the temporary but symptomatic Far Eastern colonial adventure which spurted during the revolutionary crisis of 1850-1860.</p>
<p>In that critical decade the Northern industrial capitalists, unwilling to challenge seriously the combination of plantation owners and financial and commercial interests, seriously sought an outlet in the Far East. The low tariffs imposed by the mainly agrarian Democratic Party brought European goods into the United States, and already by 1844, American merchants in Canton had extorted a commercial treaty from the Chinese, granting them, among other things, “extra-territoriality.” Ten years later, Daniel Webster, Whig mouthpiece, sent Commodore Perry to open Japan, chiefly as a port of call on the long journey to China. The hapless Japanese had seen what Britain had done and was doing to China and knew, moreover, that British and Russian battleships were waiting to do likewise to Japan. They accepted the “gentle coercion.” American agents seized the Bonin Islands and Formosa. The U.S. was already ankle-deep in the bloody mud of the imperialist scramble. <em>But the class struggle at home checked the adventure</em>. The Southern agrarians had their own idea of imperialism – conquest of land for plantations in Cuba and Mexico. The Pacific islands were far and could not be defended except by heavy expenditure on a navy. The neo-imperialists began a dog-in-the-manger policy which they canonized as the defense of the “territorial integrity” of China.</p>
<p>Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences. By 1850 European industry and European plunder had thrown the subsistence economies of India and China into disorder. In that tumultuous decade the first of the great series of Oriental revolutions burst upon the world. The Taiping rebellion against the Manchu dynasty began in 1850, and it has been described as a mass movement of the propertyless against the corruption, inefficiency and capitulation to Britain of the old Chinese ruling class. By 1856 this revolution was at its height. In 1857 followed what the British call the Indian mutiny but which the Indians call the First War of Independence. <em>The American representatives in China played their part side by side with the British and other imperialists in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion</em>. From that beginning to this day American imperialism has never wavered in its unrelenting hostility to the democratic aspirations of the Oriental peoples. When, in the seventies, radical elements in Japan established a republic in one part of the islands, and again in 1894, when the Japanese Parliament was leading popular hostility against the throne and the bureaucracy, the administration in Washington gave every assistance, military, political and diplomatic, to save the monarchy and the militarists.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Contemporary Grandeur</h4>
<p class="fst">As the industrial bourgeoisie felt the struggle of the proletariat at home, so they became its enemy abroad. At the end of World War I, American food and diplomatic power had to be used to stifle the socialist revolutions in Europe. Today, American capital has had to take upon itself the defense of European capital and the defense of European interests in Africa and the Far East against their incorporation by Germany and the new contender, Japan. Hence its far-flung armies, navies and air force. But this war has brought with it an unprecedented disintegration of capitalist society in Europe and Asia. Never was there such destruction, such misery, such barbarism; never such disillusionment by the masses of the people in every continent with the old order. American imperialism therefore becomes the chief bulwark of the capitalist system as a whole. At the same time, ten years of the New Deal have shown the impossibility of solving the great economic depression. Therefore the United States hopes to restore its own shattered prosperity by substituting its own imperialism for the imperialism of Britain and France, its “allies.” It even prepares to “liberate” India in the interests of the “open door” and the “territorial integrity” of India. The Gandhis and Nehrus, however, seek the protection of this new patron to pacify the masses, satisfy their hatred of Japan and Britain and divert them from social revolution. The United States is the friend and ally of every reactionary government and class in Latin America except in so far as these for the moment assist the Axis.</p>
<p>This, in 1944, is “our country.” The colossal power of American imperialism is the apex of a process – the rise, maturity and decline of the capitalist world market. In the eighteenth century, “our country,” in achieving its own independence, released the great forces of the European bourgeoisie. In the nineteenth, “our country” in the triumph of its industrial bourgeoisie, released the great political potentialities of the European proletariat, the mortal enemy of the European bourgeoisie. Today “our country” can release nothing. Driven by the contradictions of its own capitalistic development and of capitalism as a whole, it is now the enemy of hundreds of millions of the people everywhere. The appearance of liberator of peoples is a necessary disguise for the essential reality of American imperialism, epitome of decadent capitalism, mobilized for the defense of privilege and property against a world crying to be free.</p>
<p>The laws of dialectics are to be traced not in metaphysical abstractions such as 168 years of “our country,” but in economic development and the rise, maturity and decline of different social classes within the expansion and constriction of the capitalist world market. The greatest progressive force in the eighteenth century, the nationalism of “our country,” is, in the twentieth century, the greatest of obstacles to social progress. In accordance with a fundamental dialectical law, the progressive “nationalism” of eighteenth century America is transformed into its opposite, the reactionary “internationalism” of American imperialism. The liberating “isolationism” of Washington is transformed into the rapacious “interventionism” of Roosevelt. The essence underlying each social order is exactly the opposite of its appearance on the surface. The power of Washington as capital of the world rests on no sound foundation. Except to those for whom a logical development of historical forces has ceased, or has never existed, the imperialist American grandeur is the mark of imperialist American doom. Imperial Washington, like imperial Rome, is destined to be cursed and execrated by the embittered millions. The liberating international tradition can and will have a new birth in this nation but, today, in accordance with historical logic, only in the service of the American proletariat, consciously using the great American tradition of the past and its present economic power as the pivot and arsenal of international socialism.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Modern International Society”</h4>
<p class="fst">The stage is set. “There are unmistakable indications that here is rapidly rising a truly popular demand for a cleaning of the Augean stable of modern international society and that it will not admit defeat.” The author of that is no Marxist but a man who for years directed the international policy of American imperialism, Sumner Welles. But history has proved again and again since 1917 that the agrarian revolution on which hangs the salvation of India, of China and of Latin America cannot be achieved without the conscious aid of the working class in each country. In our compact world, successful revolt in any area will sound the tocsin for the center more violently than the American revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century shook metropolitan Europe. And the social crisis in America must bring unto the scene the American proletariat.</p>
<p>Yet it would be a grave error to mistake the twentieth for the nineteenth century and to believe that the American proletariat is dependent upon the tocsin from abroad to engage in relentless class struggles with American capital. Whatever may be the incidental occasion, that struggle is rooted in the inability of American capital to solve the problem of the industrial reserve army of labor. Significant action of any kind by the American proletariat will reverberate in every corner of our “One World.” Every Chinese knows that it is impossible to have great class struggles in China without provoking the intervention of American imperialism. The whole tendency of the modern economy shows that foreign trade will be increasingly a transaction under the aegis of governments. American imperialism cannot escape its entanglement in foreign class struggles even if it would. Revolutionary movement anywhere can release only the international proletariat and the hundreds of millions dependent upon it. And that too is a law of the dialectic, proving the ripeness of the organism for transformational change.</p>
<p>The American proletariat itself may view the tangled skein of world politics with faint interest or even with indifference. To judge the future of contemporary history by these subjective appraisals is to make an irreparable error, to forget that being determines consciousness and not vice versa. In our “One World” the first serious and prolonged struggle on which the American proletariat embarks with its own bourgeoisie will rapidly educate it in the realities of international politics.</p>
<p>This must be the theoretical basis of action. The masses who comprised the Sons of Liberty had little understanding of fact that they were sounding tocsins for the European middle classes. Lincoln, the leader, did not even know that he would have to emancipate the slaves, far less sound the tocsin for the organization of the first Workers’ International. The farmers, mechanics and artisans, the workers and Negro slaves, pursued strictly immediate and concrete aims and made world history.</p>
<p>The premises of international proletarian organization are here. The individual productive unit of early competitive capitalism found its political complement in bourgeois democracy where individual units of the bourgeoisie fought out its collective problems. The maturity of capitalist production drove the proletariat to international organization in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century the size of the productive units had linked the national units of production so closely that imperialist war marked the final decline of capitalism. From the large-scale productive unit came the new political form of the future – the soviet. For the soviets are <em>not</em> merely organs of struggle but the political framework of the new society. To the soviets, instinctive rejection by the masses of the organs of bourgeois democracy, the bourgeoisie responded with the totalitarian state. The most glaring sign of the degeneration of the role of the workers in Stalinist Russia is the destruction of the soviets by the constitution of 1936. Stalinist totalitarianism, the historical result of the first proletarian revolution, its growing collaboration with American imperialism, the mischievous power of its satellites abroad, have disoriented those whose Marxism, based on emotion and superficial reacting, reject the dialectic in history. They work from Stalinist Russia and American imperialism back toward the possibilities of socialism. They see the absence of international organization, the acquiescence and indifference of the workers, the organizational power of the Stalinist corruption inside the working class, and draw the gloomiest prospects for international revolutionary action. Such was never the theory or the practice of Marx. Let us end this theoretical study with one of his most mature and pregnant sayings:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The international activity of the working class does not by any means depend on the existence of the International Workingmen’s Association. This was only the first attempt to create a central organ for that activity; an attempt which from the impulse it gave is an abiding success that was no longer practicable in its first historical form after the fall of the Paris Commune”</p>
<p class="fst">It was in that reasoned faith that Lenin and his band of Bolsheviks worked and created the Third International. We who have seen the determination of the contemporary masses to cleanse the Augean stables of modern international society are not in any way dismayed by the power of Washington or of Moscow. In the contradictions and barbarism of world economy we see the soil from which at whatever remove, and through whatever corruption from without or within, must ultimately arise the Fourth International.</p>
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<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="note"><a name="n1" href="#f1">1.</a> We say bourgeois advisedly. Lippman is intelligent, well informed and conscientious – but bourgeois</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n2" href="#f2">2.</a> The neglect of this fact is one of the strangest features of radical propaganda and agitation in the United States.</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n3" href="#f3">3.</a> They had also joined the British in large numbers, listening to their promises of freedom.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The American People in ‘One World’
An Essay in Dialectical Materialism
(July 1944)
Source: New International, Vol. X No. 7, July 1944, pp. 225–230.
Transcribed: Ted Crawford.
Proofread: Einde O’Callaghan (December 2015).
America has entered upon a new phase of relationship with the rest of the world. Its armies tramp and roll over the most remote corners of the globe; its navies scour the five oceans; every day its airmen blaze new “Santa Fe” trails over African jungles and the China Sea. American military and political leaders lay down the law in Casablanca, London, Chungking and Rome, and partition continents at Cairo and Teheran. Arabs, Hindus and Koreans, seeking the bread of independence, jostle one another along the stone corridors of Constitution Avenue. All the world has been converted and Washington is the modern Mecca. Within the White House, Roosevelt arrogates the right to O.K. rulers of empires as a merchant O.K.’s prospective salesmen. Augustan Rome, the Pope sitting crowned upon the grave thereof, even imperial Britain, seem to have been merely successive anticipations of this monstrous, this incredible concentration of power. The American people are grappling with the change. The sales of Willkie’s One World, the greatest publishing success in history, is a political and not a literary phenomenon. Yet the true nature of the new relation remains obscure for the great masses of the people. How could it be otherwise? Day after day, year after year, it has heard American history past and present discussed in the following terms:
“It is not a coincidence ... that the United States and Russia, under the czars and under the Soviets, have always in vital matters been on the same side; that for more than 100 years Britain and America have in the end always found that against the mortal enemy of either, they would support one another, and that France, which did so much to liberate America, has twice in her mortal peril found us at last beside her.” (Walter Lippmann, Herald Tribune, July 8, 1944.)
We propose to expose the falsity of this interpretation of American history in its international relations. It is not the truth about American history and can be factually exposed. Left unexposed, it affords too fertile a soil for the organized deception of the people as to the true character of America’s foreign relations of today and still more, of tomorrow. We propose, however, to make a preliminary statement of our own principles, first because of the vastness of the subject and the danger of becoming lost in it; secondly, owing to the necessity of constantly counterposing Marxism to the bourgeois [1] ignorance and superficialty of Lippmann’s method, which in bourgeois society seems as natural as the air we breathe; finally, owing to the reinforcement to this nationalistic empiricism, now being provided by the Stalinists in the name of Marx. This inexhaustible source of corruption celebrated the latest July 4 as follows:
The fact that our country was able to rally from the unclear national policy and the dark days of division of Munichism to play the tremendous part it has in the great anti-Hitler war of liberation is in large measure due to the democratic content which for 168 years, despite many vicissitudes, has continued to characterize our national existence. (How America Got That Way, by F.J. Meyers, New Masses, July 4, 1944.)
What are these but the historical method and the ideas of Lippmann dressed in a pink sweater? This deliberate and criminal falsification has a clear purpose. The political struggle of the proletariat in international relations now becomes a struggle as to whether “our country,” i.e., Roosevelt, will continue to play the role it has played “for 168 years,” i.e., in 1914, support Stalinist Russia. Under this potent but poisonous fertilizer, the advocacy of incentive pay and of the no-strike pledge become the continuation of the great traditions of the Declaration of Independence, not only at home but abroad.
Yet, in reality, the history of the United States, properly understood, is a clarion call to the masses of the people everywhere to raise the concept of the nation to a higher plane inseminating it with the concept of class. Dialectically handled, this history is a weapon to be used by and for the people and not against them.
The Method of Investigation
Marx has stated that “as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class.” All Marx’s method is contained in that sentence. Not America in general, but the class struggle in America, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Not Britain or France or Germany in general, but the progression from the European middle classes in the eighteenth century to the European proletariat in the nineteenth. The method of dialectical materialism at one stroke clears its skirts from the hereditary stupidities of the bourgeois publicist and the criminal huckstering of his Stalinist hack. We today must bear in mind that logical class movement from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and by projecting it, disentangle from complicated historical phenomena the class relations and international perspectives of the twentieth. It is precisely this logical connection that we wish to establish and precisely this that the Stalinists wish to destroy, because it is this more than anything else that the American people need.
2. This is no mere academic exercise. We can orient for the future only by comprehension of the present in the light of the past. This apparent truism, with the bourgeoisie mere “common sense” or sententiousness, for the Marxist has an entirely different significance, both logical and historical. Marx taught us that the very categories by which we distinguish the various phases of the social movement are fully developed and therefore fully comprehensible only in the maturity of bourgeois society. Today we can go further. It is in the decay of bourgeois society as it falls to pieces that concepts centuries old shed all social and traditional disguise and stand naked. When Jesse Jones, after Pearl Harbor, heard that stock-piles of rubber had been destroyed by fire in Boston and asked if they had been insured, half the country laughed at him. The fetishism of commodities-stood exposed as an idol of the market place. In every sphere of social knowledge contemporary developments reveal the past in truer perspective and show us our own great contradictions as merely the logical climax of embryonic movements maturing through the centuries.
The history of Bolshevism etches in sharper and clearer perspective the apparent hair-splitting of the early Christians and the Puritans and thus gives historical discrimination to the conflicts of today in the light of tomorrow. Only the October Revolution could extend our knowledge of the British and French revolutions and the three in sequence together constitute a statue of liberty that illuminates the whole contemporary darkness. This extension of American power to the remotest reaches is a dramatic climax to the role this country has played in international relations, lighting up the past of the whole of Western civilization and projecting its present contradictions into their future resolution.
Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation. All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market. We have only to examine carefully the historical development to see concretely posed the revolutionary socialist solution which Marx distilled by logical abstraction. It is necessary to do this so as not to be misled by the apparent ignorance and bewilderment of the great masses of the people. The masses do not learn history, they make it. More accurately, they learn it only when they make it. Even Washington had little conception of what tocsin he was sounding, and Lincoln had less. So, to-day the American proletariat, as it went into the factories to protect the birth of the CIO and now girds itself for the post-war struggle against unemployment, is, unawaredly, preparing international and economic transformations and social realignments on a scale comparable only to the elevation of American capitalism to its position as dominant world power. This for us is the objective movement of history which we attempt, by precept and example, subjectively to clarify and advance. Not forgetting, however, that the subjective movement, whatever its accidental chances, is in its totality the complement of objective necessity and cannot be separated from it.
The First Tocsin
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism. Yet the protagonists of the new industrial capitalism, in Britain as well as in France, had been nourished on the famous “triangular trade” of mercantilism – Africa, America and the West Indies After the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the up and coming industrial bourgeoisie began to find itself in conflict with the mercantilist commercial and political domination. Each class sought to solve its difficulties at the expense of the periphery – the thirteen colonies. But in the thirteen colonies the resulting economic and political crisis soon brought on to the political stage the artisans and mechanics of the towns. Says Beard: “They broke out in rioting in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston.... In fact, the agitation, contrary to the intent of the merchants and lawyers, got quite beyond the bounds of law and order.” (Emphasis mine – J.R.J.) Well might Gouverneur Morris remark: “The heads of the mobility grow dangerous to the gentry, and how to keep them down is the question.”
In the border areas the farmers, checked in the first agitation against the British, broke out into furious revolt against the American ruling class. A conservative historian (Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, 1943, page 319) sums up his research thus: “But this Eastern ruling class was at no time disposed to sacrifice any of its privileges in order to bring the Western farmers wholeheartedly into the revolutionary movement. Instead the aristocracy urged Americans to center their attention wholly upon British tyranny and not to seek to apply revolutionary principles to conditions at home.” The “no-strike pledge” and “incentive pay” have a long ancestry.
When the victory was won, the bottom had been torn out of the “triangular trade” and the British industrial bourgeoisie came immediately into its own. The Treaty of Versailles which ratified the independence of America was signed in 1783. One year later, 1784, is the traditional date set as the “beginning” of the industrial revolution in Britain. In a surprisingly few years the trade with America on the new basis rivalled the old mercantilist prosperity to the confutation of the prophets of evil. Not only in the internal affairs of Europe did the loss of America create a revolution. Colonial relations underwent a radical transformation. One year after the loss of America came the first of the great India Bills which marked the beginning of the change from the old-fashioned robbery and plunder of India to the more systematic economic exploitation based on the developing textile industry. Three years after Versailles, Pitt personally asked Wilberforce to undertake the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade. This was accomplished in 1806 and marked the beginning of a new relationship between Great Britain and Africa. Mercantilist Britain, for a century the undying foe of colonial independence, by 1820 had become the champion of the freedom of the Latin-American colonies. Where George III had said of the struggle with the thirteen colonies, “Blows will decide,” Canning, with his eye on British trade in Latin America, declared: “We have called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.”
George Washington might preach isolationism and non-intervention. The revolution had set in motion great class struggles in Europe and given a new direction to international trade and colonial relations. Today we can estimate the relative values of the Declaration of Independence and the essential political document of the time, Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith had worked on it for ten years when in appeared in 1776. He wrote that the present system of management, i.e., mercantilism, procured advantage “only to a single order of men,” i.e.. one class. Great Britain (and Europe as well) “derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she has assumed over her colonies.” The problem was how to achieve the death of this system. In the opinion of this bourgeois, to propose that Britain “give up all the authority over her colonies ... would be to propose such a measure as never was and never will be adopted by any nation in the world.” The American revolutionary leaders for years had been in close contract with the radical opposition in Britain. But all these politicians were, like Smith, unable to visualize the radical and complete break. It was the artisans, the mechanics and farmers who started the ball a-rolling and converted Smith’s theories into reality. Thus Washington’s “isolationism” was merely the appearance of things. Their essence was far different. We shall see this difference between the appearance and the essence constantly repeated on an ever more extensive scale until it reaches truly gigantic: proportions in the contradiction between the apparent power of Washington today and the underlying economic and social movement.
The Second Tocsin
Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change. The cotton-gin not only created the historical patterns of American capitalism. It laid an indelible impress on European development as well. In 1847 Marx, engaged in the congenial task of exposing the misuse of the Hegelian dialectic by Proudhon, took as one of his illustrations, slavery.
Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry It is slavery which has given their value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created the commerce of the world, it is the commerce of the world which is the essential condition of the great industry.... Without slavery North America, the most progressive country, would have been transformed into a patriarchal country. Efface North America from the map of the world and you would have the anarchy, the complete decadence of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have effaced America from the map of nations. (Poverty of Philosophy)
By 1847, however, this was the summation of an age which was dying. Its death was to change the social structure of America and signalize the coming of age of a new force in Europe.
Just one year before Marx’s book, the British bourgeoisie won its final victory over the landlords by the abolition of the “corn laws,” which brought the cheap wheat of the New World into Britain and lowered the value of the laborer. The South had calculated all along that the loss of its cotton would inevitably bring intervention by the European powers, particularly Britain. It miscalculated the interest of the industrialists in cheap wheat from the wheat belt, which was one of the most powerful supporters of the North. But the role of cheap wheat was a testimony to the fact that the special claims of the textile industry, always the first to mature in a nascent capitalist development, had already been superseded by the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. The varied and expanded accumulation of capital had brought with it a varied and expanded proletariat. In 1848 this proletariat appeared on the scene in France in the first proletarian revolution. Europe trembled, but in Washington, the White House, the government and the people in the streets rejoiced at the downfall of the monarchy. The ruling classes of Europe therefore hated the political system of America with its seam of aristocracy and monarchy, its emphasis on equality, manhood suffrage and popular government.
But in the United States, by 1848, forces were at work converting the bourgeoisie from the ally to the foe of popular aspirations abroad. In 1850, a desperate attempt was made to compromise the differences between North and South. But the economic conflict was irrepressible. The fugitive slaves and the Abolitionists would not let the question be forgotten for a moment. In 1858 economic crisis shook not only the United States but the whole of the now vastly extended world market. From then on the sequence of international events came thick and fast.
First, between 1857 and 1859, a series of great strikes and class conflicts broke out all over Europe, Britain included. In 1860 came Lincoln’s election. The South expected that the commercial capitalists of the North would as usual capitulate. But independent farmers of the Northwest could not for a moment tolerate the idea of a hostile power holding the mouth of the Mississippi and they were among the chief supporters of Lincoln. But even more important, the victory of the Republican Party was due more than anything else to the support of labor. [2] And labor, though no lover of Negroes, was by 1860 conscious enough of the stake which free labor had in the struggle with slave labor. Thus labor and the independent farmers were the most powerful forces in the North while the general unrest and minor but repeated insurrections among the slaves completed the forces which pushed the unwilling rulers of the North and South to the final settlement by arms. The mechanics, the artisans, the frontiersmen of 1776 and the Negroes [3] who had fought with Washington had now developed into the powerful force on whom Lincoln had ultimately to depend for political support and military victory.
But political activity, the concrete expression of social consciousness, though sometimes accelerated, sometimes retarded, must keep pace with social development. Even before 1848 the Abolitionists not only led an incomparable agitation in the United States. Garrison and Negroes who had escaped from slavery placed the case of the slaves before vast numbers of European workers. They enrolled supporters by the hundreds of thousands. One Negro alone enrolled 70,000 in Germany.
When war actually began, the European ruling classes were on the alert for an opportunity to intervene. Everything hinged on Britain. The British government was hesitant and hoped for an encouraging signal from the Lancashire cotton operatives, who were in great distress over the cessation of cotton exports from the South. The British textile operatives, however, denounced the intervention plans of the government and what took place in Britain was repeated on a lesser scale all over Europe. The British bourgeoisie was sneering at Lincoln’s repeated declarations that the war was not a war for the abolition of slavery. The European workers shouted across the ocean that it was, and called on Lincoln to say so. Lincoln, with the North in great danger, finally penned the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863. The European proletariat celebrated a great victory. It came just in time. Marx tells us (Schlueter, Lincoln, Labor and Slavery, page 187; see also Marx and Engels’ Correspondence) that in April, 1863, “a monster meeting. .. prevented Palmerston from declaring war against the United States when he was on the point of doing it.”
In 1861, the Czar, fearful of rebellion from below, had emancipated the serfs. In 1862 had come the rebellion of the Poles. A great international mass meeting took place in London in July, 1863, on behalf of Polish independence. These two events, the American Civil War and the Polish Rebellion, brought to a conclusion the tentative negotiations long in progress and on September 28, 1861, the First International was founded. On November 1 the executive committee adopted the inaugural address by Marx. Nothing so contributed to the final consummation as the Civil War.
At the beginning of that same November, Lincoln was re-elected President. Marx, on the Council of the International, initiated a series of mass meetings in Britain protesting against the hostile attitude of the English ruling class and government to the Union. On the 29th, Marx presented to the Council the address to Lincoln. The International became the terror of the European governments. If in the eighteenth century the American Revolution had initiated the struggle for bourgeois democracy, the Civil War had set on foot the movement which ended its first phase in the Paris Commune – the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Oriental Interlude
It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear. That is why they are so important.
Before we draw together the developing historical tendencies which meet in the colossal power of the United States to-day, we have to note briefly the temporary but symptomatic Far Eastern colonial adventure which spurted during the revolutionary crisis of 1850-1860.
In that critical decade the Northern industrial capitalists, unwilling to challenge seriously the combination of plantation owners and financial and commercial interests, seriously sought an outlet in the Far East. The low tariffs imposed by the mainly agrarian Democratic Party brought European goods into the United States, and already by 1844, American merchants in Canton had extorted a commercial treaty from the Chinese, granting them, among other things, “extra-territoriality.” Ten years later, Daniel Webster, Whig mouthpiece, sent Commodore Perry to open Japan, chiefly as a port of call on the long journey to China. The hapless Japanese had seen what Britain had done and was doing to China and knew, moreover, that British and Russian battleships were waiting to do likewise to Japan. They accepted the “gentle coercion.” American agents seized the Bonin Islands and Formosa. The U.S. was already ankle-deep in the bloody mud of the imperialist scramble. But the class struggle at home checked the adventure. The Southern agrarians had their own idea of imperialism – conquest of land for plantations in Cuba and Mexico. The Pacific islands were far and could not be defended except by heavy expenditure on a navy. The neo-imperialists began a dog-in-the-manger policy which they canonized as the defense of the “territorial integrity” of China.
Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences. By 1850 European industry and European plunder had thrown the subsistence economies of India and China into disorder. In that tumultuous decade the first of the great series of Oriental revolutions burst upon the world. The Taiping rebellion against the Manchu dynasty began in 1850, and it has been described as a mass movement of the propertyless against the corruption, inefficiency and capitulation to Britain of the old Chinese ruling class. By 1856 this revolution was at its height. In 1857 followed what the British call the Indian mutiny but which the Indians call the First War of Independence. The American representatives in China played their part side by side with the British and other imperialists in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion. From that beginning to this day American imperialism has never wavered in its unrelenting hostility to the democratic aspirations of the Oriental peoples. When, in the seventies, radical elements in Japan established a republic in one part of the islands, and again in 1894, when the Japanese Parliament was leading popular hostility against the throne and the bureaucracy, the administration in Washington gave every assistance, military, political and diplomatic, to save the monarchy and the militarists.
The Contemporary Grandeur
As the industrial bourgeoisie felt the struggle of the proletariat at home, so they became its enemy abroad. At the end of World War I, American food and diplomatic power had to be used to stifle the socialist revolutions in Europe. Today, American capital has had to take upon itself the defense of European capital and the defense of European interests in Africa and the Far East against their incorporation by Germany and the new contender, Japan. Hence its far-flung armies, navies and air force. But this war has brought with it an unprecedented disintegration of capitalist society in Europe and Asia. Never was there such destruction, such misery, such barbarism; never such disillusionment by the masses of the people in every continent with the old order. American imperialism therefore becomes the chief bulwark of the capitalist system as a whole. At the same time, ten years of the New Deal have shown the impossibility of solving the great economic depression. Therefore the United States hopes to restore its own shattered prosperity by substituting its own imperialism for the imperialism of Britain and France, its “allies.” It even prepares to “liberate” India in the interests of the “open door” and the “territorial integrity” of India. The Gandhis and Nehrus, however, seek the protection of this new patron to pacify the masses, satisfy their hatred of Japan and Britain and divert them from social revolution. The United States is the friend and ally of every reactionary government and class in Latin America except in so far as these for the moment assist the Axis.
This, in 1944, is “our country.” The colossal power of American imperialism is the apex of a process – the rise, maturity and decline of the capitalist world market. In the eighteenth century, “our country,” in achieving its own independence, released the great forces of the European bourgeoisie. In the nineteenth, “our country” in the triumph of its industrial bourgeoisie, released the great political potentialities of the European proletariat, the mortal enemy of the European bourgeoisie. Today “our country” can release nothing. Driven by the contradictions of its own capitalistic development and of capitalism as a whole, it is now the enemy of hundreds of millions of the people everywhere. The appearance of liberator of peoples is a necessary disguise for the essential reality of American imperialism, epitome of decadent capitalism, mobilized for the defense of privilege and property against a world crying to be free.
The laws of dialectics are to be traced not in metaphysical abstractions such as 168 years of “our country,” but in economic development and the rise, maturity and decline of different social classes within the expansion and constriction of the capitalist world market. The greatest progressive force in the eighteenth century, the nationalism of “our country,” is, in the twentieth century, the greatest of obstacles to social progress. In accordance with a fundamental dialectical law, the progressive “nationalism” of eighteenth century America is transformed into its opposite, the reactionary “internationalism” of American imperialism. The liberating “isolationism” of Washington is transformed into the rapacious “interventionism” of Roosevelt. The essence underlying each social order is exactly the opposite of its appearance on the surface. The power of Washington as capital of the world rests on no sound foundation. Except to those for whom a logical development of historical forces has ceased, or has never existed, the imperialist American grandeur is the mark of imperialist American doom. Imperial Washington, like imperial Rome, is destined to be cursed and execrated by the embittered millions. The liberating international tradition can and will have a new birth in this nation but, today, in accordance with historical logic, only in the service of the American proletariat, consciously using the great American tradition of the past and its present economic power as the pivot and arsenal of international socialism.
“Modern International Society”
The stage is set. “There are unmistakable indications that here is rapidly rising a truly popular demand for a cleaning of the Augean stable of modern international society and that it will not admit defeat.” The author of that is no Marxist but a man who for years directed the international policy of American imperialism, Sumner Welles. But history has proved again and again since 1917 that the agrarian revolution on which hangs the salvation of India, of China and of Latin America cannot be achieved without the conscious aid of the working class in each country. In our compact world, successful revolt in any area will sound the tocsin for the center more violently than the American revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century shook metropolitan Europe. And the social crisis in America must bring unto the scene the American proletariat.
Yet it would be a grave error to mistake the twentieth for the nineteenth century and to believe that the American proletariat is dependent upon the tocsin from abroad to engage in relentless class struggles with American capital. Whatever may be the incidental occasion, that struggle is rooted in the inability of American capital to solve the problem of the industrial reserve army of labor. Significant action of any kind by the American proletariat will reverberate in every corner of our “One World.” Every Chinese knows that it is impossible to have great class struggles in China without provoking the intervention of American imperialism. The whole tendency of the modern economy shows that foreign trade will be increasingly a transaction under the aegis of governments. American imperialism cannot escape its entanglement in foreign class struggles even if it would. Revolutionary movement anywhere can release only the international proletariat and the hundreds of millions dependent upon it. And that too is a law of the dialectic, proving the ripeness of the organism for transformational change.
The American proletariat itself may view the tangled skein of world politics with faint interest or even with indifference. To judge the future of contemporary history by these subjective appraisals is to make an irreparable error, to forget that being determines consciousness and not vice versa. In our “One World” the first serious and prolonged struggle on which the American proletariat embarks with its own bourgeoisie will rapidly educate it in the realities of international politics.
This must be the theoretical basis of action. The masses who comprised the Sons of Liberty had little understanding of fact that they were sounding tocsins for the European middle classes. Lincoln, the leader, did not even know that he would have to emancipate the slaves, far less sound the tocsin for the organization of the first Workers’ International. The farmers, mechanics and artisans, the workers and Negro slaves, pursued strictly immediate and concrete aims and made world history.
The premises of international proletarian organization are here. The individual productive unit of early competitive capitalism found its political complement in bourgeois democracy where individual units of the bourgeoisie fought out its collective problems. The maturity of capitalist production drove the proletariat to international organization in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century the size of the productive units had linked the national units of production so closely that imperialist war marked the final decline of capitalism. From the large-scale productive unit came the new political form of the future – the soviet. For the soviets are not merely organs of struggle but the political framework of the new society. To the soviets, instinctive rejection by the masses of the organs of bourgeois democracy, the bourgeoisie responded with the totalitarian state. The most glaring sign of the degeneration of the role of the workers in Stalinist Russia is the destruction of the soviets by the constitution of 1936. Stalinist totalitarianism, the historical result of the first proletarian revolution, its growing collaboration with American imperialism, the mischievous power of its satellites abroad, have disoriented those whose Marxism, based on emotion and superficial reacting, reject the dialectic in history. They work from Stalinist Russia and American imperialism back toward the possibilities of socialism. They see the absence of international organization, the acquiescence and indifference of the workers, the organizational power of the Stalinist corruption inside the working class, and draw the gloomiest prospects for international revolutionary action. Such was never the theory or the practice of Marx. Let us end this theoretical study with one of his most mature and pregnant sayings:
“The international activity of the working class does not by any means depend on the existence of the International Workingmen’s Association. This was only the first attempt to create a central organ for that activity; an attempt which from the impulse it gave is an abiding success that was no longer practicable in its first historical form after the fall of the Paris Commune”
It was in that reasoned faith that Lenin and his band of Bolsheviks worked and created the Third International. We who have seen the determination of the contemporary masses to cleanse the Augean stables of modern international society are not in any way dismayed by the power of Washington or of Moscow. In the contradictions and barbarism of world economy we see the soil from which at whatever remove, and through whatever corruption from without or within, must ultimately arise the Fourth International.
Notes
1. We say bourgeois advisedly. Lippman is intelligent, well informed and conscientious – but bourgeois
2. The neglect of this fact is one of the strangest features of radical propaganda and agitation in the United States.
3. They had also joined the British in large numbers, listening to their promises of freedom.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1982</p>
<h3>Free For All: The nine year old leader</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Race Today</em>, 14, 3, May-June, 1982;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Christian Hogsbjerg, with thanks to Darcus Howe.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>Free For All. I love that title. Freedom is a very rare thing: it is for example rare in the account of great events. It was only a few years ago that a French historian really got down to it and brought out some of the greatest and most important events in the French Revolution. You may think that that is History, with a capital ‘H’, because it is one of the greatest events and everybody, particularly the professional historians, ought to know something about it. </p>
<p>But enough of that. I have been exercising my freedom to say a few things about history which are not only important in general but relate directly to the riots which took place in Britain during last summer. Darcus Howe is talking to an American about those events. He picks up a paper and reads this. </p>
<p class="indentb">“Listen to this,” he said. “After the uprising in Moss Side [Manchester] last July they appointed a local Manchester barrister called Hytner to enquire into what happened, and how it started. Here’s what he writes: </p>
<p class="indentb">“ ‘At about 10.20 pm a responsible and in our view reliable black citizen was in Moss Lane East, and observed a large number of black youths whom he recognised as having come from a club a mile away. At the same time a horde of white youths came up the road from the direction of Moss Side. He spoke to them and ascertained they were from Withenshawe. The two groups met and joined. There was nothing in the manner of their meeting which in any way reflected a prearranged plan. There was a sudden shout and the mob stormed off in the direction of Moss Side police station. We are given an account by another witness who saw the mob approach the station, led, so it was claimed, by a nine-year old boy with those with Liverpool accents in the van [in the lead].'” </p>
<p>You believe that you have read this and that you understand this: pardon me if I tell you that I don’t think you have. Let me select a passage and draw it to your attention. </p>
<p class="indentb">[He] observed a large number of black youths whom he recognised as having come from a club a mile away. At the same time a horde of white youths came up the road from the direction of Moss Side. He spoke to them and ascertained they were from Withenshawe. The two groups met and joined. There was nothing in the manner of their meeting which in any way reflected a prearranged plan. There was a sudden shout and the mob stormed off in the direction of Moss Side police station. </p>
<p>That my friends is the revolution. There is no highly educated party leading the backward masses. There is no outstanding leader whom the masses follow because of his great achievement in the past. There had been no prearranged plan. They met and joined, they shouted and they stormed off, (note this particularly) in the direction of Moss Side police station. </p>
<p>The great leader? Before I deal with that, let me quote from one of the greatest historians of the 20th century [Georges Lefebvre]. I can quote at once because I made quotations from it in ‘The Black Jacobins’ (edition Allison & Busby, page 338n). </p>
<p class="indentb">“... It is therefore in the popular mentality, in the profound and incurable distrust which was born in the soul of the people, in regard to the aristocracy, beginning in 1789, and in regard to the king , from the time of the flight to Varennes, it is there that we must seek the explanation to what took place. The people and their unknown leaders knew what they wanted. They followed the Girondins and afterwards Robespierre, only to the degree that their advice appeared acceptable. </p>
<p class="indentb">“Who then are these leaders to whom the people listened? We know some. Nevertheless, as in all the decisive days of the revolution, what we most would like to know is forever out of our reach; we would like to have the diary of the most obscure of these popular leaders; we would then be able to grasp, in the act so to speak, how one of these great revolutionary days began; we do not have it.” </p>
<p>So much for these great leaders. This time we know that it was a boy of nine who was leading this particular part of the revolution. I don’t think I have anything more to say here. But for the greater part of my long life, I have been saying and preaching and teaching “the two groups met and joined. There was nothing in the manner of their meeting which in any way reflected a prearranged plan. There was a sudden shout and the mob stormed off in the direction of Moss Side police station.” Work at it please.</p>
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C.L.R. James 1982
Free For All: The nine year old leader
Source: Race Today, 14, 3, May-June, 1982;
Transcribed: by Christian Hogsbjerg, with thanks to Darcus Howe.
Free For All. I love that title. Freedom is a very rare thing: it is for example rare in the account of great events. It was only a few years ago that a French historian really got down to it and brought out some of the greatest and most important events in the French Revolution. You may think that that is History, with a capital ‘H’, because it is one of the greatest events and everybody, particularly the professional historians, ought to know something about it.
But enough of that. I have been exercising my freedom to say a few things about history which are not only important in general but relate directly to the riots which took place in Britain during last summer. Darcus Howe is talking to an American about those events. He picks up a paper and reads this.
“Listen to this,” he said. “After the uprising in Moss Side [Manchester] last July they appointed a local Manchester barrister called Hytner to enquire into what happened, and how it started. Here’s what he writes:
“ ‘At about 10.20 pm a responsible and in our view reliable black citizen was in Moss Lane East, and observed a large number of black youths whom he recognised as having come from a club a mile away. At the same time a horde of white youths came up the road from the direction of Moss Side. He spoke to them and ascertained they were from Withenshawe. The two groups met and joined. There was nothing in the manner of their meeting which in any way reflected a prearranged plan. There was a sudden shout and the mob stormed off in the direction of Moss Side police station. We are given an account by another witness who saw the mob approach the station, led, so it was claimed, by a nine-year old boy with those with Liverpool accents in the van [in the lead].'”
You believe that you have read this and that you understand this: pardon me if I tell you that I don’t think you have. Let me select a passage and draw it to your attention.
[He] observed a large number of black youths whom he recognised as having come from a club a mile away. At the same time a horde of white youths came up the road from the direction of Moss Side. He spoke to them and ascertained they were from Withenshawe. The two groups met and joined. There was nothing in the manner of their meeting which in any way reflected a prearranged plan. There was a sudden shout and the mob stormed off in the direction of Moss Side police station.
That my friends is the revolution. There is no highly educated party leading the backward masses. There is no outstanding leader whom the masses follow because of his great achievement in the past. There had been no prearranged plan. They met and joined, they shouted and they stormed off, (note this particularly) in the direction of Moss Side police station.
The great leader? Before I deal with that, let me quote from one of the greatest historians of the 20th century [Georges Lefebvre]. I can quote at once because I made quotations from it in ‘The Black Jacobins’ (edition Allison & Busby, page 338n).
“... It is therefore in the popular mentality, in the profound and incurable distrust which was born in the soul of the people, in regard to the aristocracy, beginning in 1789, and in regard to the king , from the time of the flight to Varennes, it is there that we must seek the explanation to what took place. The people and their unknown leaders knew what they wanted. They followed the Girondins and afterwards Robespierre, only to the degree that their advice appeared acceptable.
“Who then are these leaders to whom the people listened? We know some. Nevertheless, as in all the decisive days of the revolution, what we most would like to know is forever out of our reach; we would like to have the diary of the most obscure of these popular leaders; we would then be able to grasp, in the act so to speak, how one of these great revolutionary days began; we do not have it.”
So much for these great leaders. This time we know that it was a boy of nine who was leading this particular part of the revolution. I don’t think I have anything more to say here. But for the greater part of my long life, I have been saying and preaching and teaching “the two groups met and joined. There was nothing in the manner of their meeting which in any way reflected a prearranged plan. There was a sudden shout and the mob stormed off in the direction of Moss Side police station.” Work at it please.
CLR James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition —</h4>
<h1>The British Empire’s Little Helpers</h1>
<h3>(June 1944)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_26" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 25</a>, 19 June 1944, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">American labor should get to know something about Emmanuel Shinwell. He is one of the big names in the British Labor Party today. He is not a member of the Churchill coalition government, and frequently attacks it. This gives him a certain popularity. For let no one be deceived. Large sections of the British workers know how bankrupt for labor’s future is a man like Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labor, against whose labor policy there have been so many strikes. The workers have shown their distrust of Herbert Morrison, the labor leader and Home Secretary, by voting him out of the leadership at the last Labor Conference; also by the demonstrations they staged against him when he released Mosley, the ally of Hitler.</p>
<p>Men like Attlee, the titular head of the Labor Party, and Walter Citrine, the general secretary of the Trade Union Congress, were known pretty well for what they were even before the war. Attlee would drop out of the party tomorrow and few would miss him.</p>
<p>But Shinwell not only preached socialism in years gone by but has done his best to constitute some sort of opposition to the all-powerful Churchill government in the House of Commons.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Does He Stand For?</h4>
<p class="fst">What exactly is the policy of Mr. Shinwell today? He has recently exposed himself in a way that should be carefully noted.</p>
<p>Facing the miserable future of British imperialism against Stalinist Russia and American imperialism, Churchill gathered together the dominion premiers just before the invasion, first to fool the people everywhere with the idea of Empire unity and, secondly, to try to build a huge Empire bloc against the steady strangulation at the hands of his dear friends, Stalin and Roosevelt. But the job is a hard one and almost hopeless, because Canada, Australia and New Zealand know that if there are any pickings at all, they will get them in the shelter of the American Eagle and not by following the limping British Lion.</p>
<p>Has Shinwell anything different to propose? Not he. On May Day he writes a featured article in the reactionary <strong>Daily Mail</strong>.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Frankly, I doubt whether we can expect more than provisional conclusions. And I shall be equally frank and say that, I wish with all my heart it could be otherwise.”</p>
<p class="fst">He comes out for Churchill’s policy in the crudest form:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“But give us a British Commonwealth of Nations, with resources capable of almost unbelievable development, with a territory equal to that of the United States and Soviet Russia combined, with a courage and sagacity to promote a real unity of purpose and a spirit tempered in the flames of war, and we can then enter with confidence into economic discussions with other nations, not as a junior partner, but as an equal.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">While British labor is stirring with a tremendous ferment as to exactly how its ideas for a new Britain in a new world will come into shape, Shinwell, the former socialist and present loud oppositionist, is in reality at one with the die-hard defender of imperialist Britain. He endorses all the economic policies which brought two world wars, the great economic depression and fascism, all within twenty-five years. British labor is not going to accept that easily.</p>
<p><em>Yet, is Shinwell “the same” as Churchill? No such thing. There is one fundamental difference. Churchill is a political leader of British imperialism, responsible to the Conservative Party. Shinwell is responsible to the British Labor Party. Despite his “criticism” of the government and the labor leaders in it, he is perfectly aware of the temper of the British workers. Nothing is more striking than the absence bf socialism in the recent pronouncements of many British labor leaders.</em></p>
<p>Today one of the greatest defenders of Britain’s colonial empire is Herbert Morrison. When the shameless injustice of Britain’s policy in India sent a wave of pro-Indian feeling through the British masses, the Labor Party leaders gave support as never before to Churchill, whom in less strenuous times they had denounced as one of the greatest enemies of the Indian rjeople.</p>
<p>It is too dangerous today to play with socialistic fire. It is clear that Shinwell has nothing to offer except the old order. And it is equally certain that the British workers do not want that old order. Shinwell is on a hot spot and that spot is going to get hotter and hotter.<br>
</p>
<h4>Similar Developments Here</h4>
<p class="fst">American labor can learn much from what is taking place in Britain. Precisely because he has no program except Churchill’s capitalistic program, all Shinwell’s militancy turns out to be a fake, and Churchill laughs openly at his opposition. In fact today the British labor leaders seek to protect themselves from the great crises ahead by tying themselves as closely as possible to the policies of the Churchill government.</p>
<p>We witness similar things in the United States. As the workers show their hostility to the strain of the war and the persecutions of the capitalist class, Hillman organizes political action of the workers on a scale never known before, only in order more securely to tie the workers to the Democratic Party. He has to hide himself there. He has no program for America different from Roosevelt’s. Like Shinwell, Hillman sees the rising tide of labor and, like Murray, he is scared to death of it. His remedy is – a fourth term for Roosevelt.<br>
</p>
<h4>Some Variations</h4>
<p class="fst">Yet, just as there is a difference between Churchill and Shinwell, there is also a difference between the position of Shinwell and the position of Hillman. All observers agree that British labor is bursting with anxiety to break the political truce in Britain between the Conservative Party and the Labor Party. British labor wishes to recapture its lost independence in order to work out the problems of the future in its own party, independent and purged of the alliance with the Conservatives.</p>
<p>British labor wants to face its leaders with the question: “Little men, what now?” More than that, at various conferences, the British workers are working out programs and interpreting such programs as the Beveridge Plan in their own way and preparing to use them for their own purposes. The time will come when not only Bevin and Morrison but Shinwell will have to explain their plans. British labor is itching to drag them out from behind the smoke of Churchills cigar and make them speak up for themselves.</p>
<p><em>American labor needs to make similar preparation. The strikes in both countries show the temper of the Workers. The rush to shelter themselves in capitalist parties and capitalist programs shows how sensitive to the workers’ growing impatience are many of the leaders of labor, particularly in America. The thing to do now is to drag them out. Put them on the spot. Bring them to a political convention of labor and face them with a labor program.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Political Action Needed</h4>
<p class="fst">To oppose them by striking, agakist their instructions, and yet at the same time allow them to hide their political bankruptcy in the capitalist parties, is to expose them with one hand and then cover them up with the other. It will be a bad day for Shinwell when he has to face British labor. It will be an equally bad day for Hillman and the rest when they have to face American labor and explain what are their plans for a political party of organized labor. That is the hot spot they seek to avoid. That is the hot spot we must put them on.</p>
<p>Labor will never be able to control its leaders, or even know clearly what they really think, until it pulls them away from capitalist politics.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition —
The British Empire’s Little Helpers
(June 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 25, 19 June 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
American labor should get to know something about Emmanuel Shinwell. He is one of the big names in the British Labor Party today. He is not a member of the Churchill coalition government, and frequently attacks it. This gives him a certain popularity. For let no one be deceived. Large sections of the British workers know how bankrupt for labor’s future is a man like Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labor, against whose labor policy there have been so many strikes. The workers have shown their distrust of Herbert Morrison, the labor leader and Home Secretary, by voting him out of the leadership at the last Labor Conference; also by the demonstrations they staged against him when he released Mosley, the ally of Hitler.
Men like Attlee, the titular head of the Labor Party, and Walter Citrine, the general secretary of the Trade Union Congress, were known pretty well for what they were even before the war. Attlee would drop out of the party tomorrow and few would miss him.
But Shinwell not only preached socialism in years gone by but has done his best to constitute some sort of opposition to the all-powerful Churchill government in the House of Commons.
What Does He Stand For?
What exactly is the policy of Mr. Shinwell today? He has recently exposed himself in a way that should be carefully noted.
Facing the miserable future of British imperialism against Stalinist Russia and American imperialism, Churchill gathered together the dominion premiers just before the invasion, first to fool the people everywhere with the idea of Empire unity and, secondly, to try to build a huge Empire bloc against the steady strangulation at the hands of his dear friends, Stalin and Roosevelt. But the job is a hard one and almost hopeless, because Canada, Australia and New Zealand know that if there are any pickings at all, they will get them in the shelter of the American Eagle and not by following the limping British Lion.
Has Shinwell anything different to propose? Not he. On May Day he writes a featured article in the reactionary Daily Mail.
“Frankly, I doubt whether we can expect more than provisional conclusions. And I shall be equally frank and say that, I wish with all my heart it could be otherwise.”
He comes out for Churchill’s policy in the crudest form:
“But give us a British Commonwealth of Nations, with resources capable of almost unbelievable development, with a territory equal to that of the United States and Soviet Russia combined, with a courage and sagacity to promote a real unity of purpose and a spirit tempered in the flames of war, and we can then enter with confidence into economic discussions with other nations, not as a junior partner, but as an equal.”
While British labor is stirring with a tremendous ferment as to exactly how its ideas for a new Britain in a new world will come into shape, Shinwell, the former socialist and present loud oppositionist, is in reality at one with the die-hard defender of imperialist Britain. He endorses all the economic policies which brought two world wars, the great economic depression and fascism, all within twenty-five years. British labor is not going to accept that easily.
Yet, is Shinwell “the same” as Churchill? No such thing. There is one fundamental difference. Churchill is a political leader of British imperialism, responsible to the Conservative Party. Shinwell is responsible to the British Labor Party. Despite his “criticism” of the government and the labor leaders in it, he is perfectly aware of the temper of the British workers. Nothing is more striking than the absence bf socialism in the recent pronouncements of many British labor leaders.
Today one of the greatest defenders of Britain’s colonial empire is Herbert Morrison. When the shameless injustice of Britain’s policy in India sent a wave of pro-Indian feeling through the British masses, the Labor Party leaders gave support as never before to Churchill, whom in less strenuous times they had denounced as one of the greatest enemies of the Indian rjeople.
It is too dangerous today to play with socialistic fire. It is clear that Shinwell has nothing to offer except the old order. And it is equally certain that the British workers do not want that old order. Shinwell is on a hot spot and that spot is going to get hotter and hotter.
Similar Developments Here
American labor can learn much from what is taking place in Britain. Precisely because he has no program except Churchill’s capitalistic program, all Shinwell’s militancy turns out to be a fake, and Churchill laughs openly at his opposition. In fact today the British labor leaders seek to protect themselves from the great crises ahead by tying themselves as closely as possible to the policies of the Churchill government.
We witness similar things in the United States. As the workers show their hostility to the strain of the war and the persecutions of the capitalist class, Hillman organizes political action of the workers on a scale never known before, only in order more securely to tie the workers to the Democratic Party. He has to hide himself there. He has no program for America different from Roosevelt’s. Like Shinwell, Hillman sees the rising tide of labor and, like Murray, he is scared to death of it. His remedy is – a fourth term for Roosevelt.
Some Variations
Yet, just as there is a difference between Churchill and Shinwell, there is also a difference between the position of Shinwell and the position of Hillman. All observers agree that British labor is bursting with anxiety to break the political truce in Britain between the Conservative Party and the Labor Party. British labor wishes to recapture its lost independence in order to work out the problems of the future in its own party, independent and purged of the alliance with the Conservatives.
British labor wants to face its leaders with the question: “Little men, what now?” More than that, at various conferences, the British workers are working out programs and interpreting such programs as the Beveridge Plan in their own way and preparing to use them for their own purposes. The time will come when not only Bevin and Morrison but Shinwell will have to explain their plans. British labor is itching to drag them out from behind the smoke of Churchills cigar and make them speak up for themselves.
American labor needs to make similar preparation. The strikes in both countries show the temper of the Workers. The rush to shelter themselves in capitalist parties and capitalist programs shows how sensitive to the workers’ growing impatience are many of the leaders of labor, particularly in America. The thing to do now is to drag them out. Put them on the spot. Bring them to a political convention of labor and face them with a labor program.
Political Action Needed
To oppose them by striking, agakist their instructions, and yet at the same time allow them to hide their political bankruptcy in the capitalist parties, is to expose them with one hand and then cover them up with the other. It will be a bad day for Shinwell when he has to face British labor. It will be an equally bad day for Hillman and the rest when they have to face American labor and explain what are their plans for a political party of organized labor. That is the hot spot they seek to avoid. That is the hot spot we must put them on.
Labor will never be able to control its leaders, or even know clearly what they really think, until it pulls them away from capitalist politics.
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<h2 class="western">C.L.R. James & John Fitzpatrick</h2>
<h1>‘You never know when it is going to explode’</h1>
<h3 class="western">(April 1989)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Living Marxism</strong>, April 1989.<br>
Copied from <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/you_never_know_when_its_going_to_explode/14304#.WT5xO-vyt0w">‘You never know when it is going to explode’</a> at <em>Spiked Online</em><br>
With thanks to Ceri Dingle and John Fitzpatrick.<br>
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">For once the publisher’s blurb is no exaggeration: ‘CLR James
is one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable individuals.’
Nobody could argue with that. Born in 1901, James was a leading
literary figure in his native Trinidad well before he came to
Britain. From Nelson, Lancashire, he became cricket correspondent for
the <strong>Manchester Guardian</strong> and other papers. In 1938 he published
<strong>The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution</strong>, a landmark study of slave revolt. He has written
extensively on politics, dialectics, literature and sport. <strong>Beyond
a Boundary</strong>, his remarkable study of what cricket meant to him,
and should mean to us, came out in 1963.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Sensitive portrait</h4>
<p class="fst">He lectured for years in the USA and in Africa, and acted as
<em>eminence grise</em> to such leaders of Pan-Africanism as Ghana’s
Kwame Nkrumah. He was also a relentless political activist, a leading
figure in British Trotskyism in the Thirties in the Marxist Group and
the Independent Labour Party; and in the Forties, a leading figure in
and out of the American Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist
Workers Party. In the Sixties he entered the fray in Trinidad with
his Workers and Farmers Party.</p>
<p>Paul Buhle’s book <strong>CLR James: The Artist as Revolutionary</strong>
is an intellectual, political and cultural biography, a sensitive
portrait by a man who has been an editorial collaborator with James
for years. Himself an historian of American Marxism and former
activist of the New Left, as well as cultural critic, Buhle is
steeped in many of the concerns and the personalities close to his
subject’s heart. If he sometimes makes inflated claims for his
hero, it is not simply out of affection for the man and regard for
his achievements. Buhle sees James as the nearest thing yet to an
ideal reconciliation of the multiple identities of a sundered human
nature, which is the fragmented condition of every man and woman in
late capitalist society. It is an almost mystical theme, seeking
redemption within the individual personality for problems which are
social in nature and origin. It is consistent with the over-emphasis
on ideology and the anti-Leninist bent of Buhle’s earlier work.
Nevertheless, the story of James’ life, and the detail and the
connections which Buhle brings to bear from his own wide learning,
make this a book worth reading.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Holding: how fast?</h4>
<p class="fst">CLR James, not far from 90, is now ensconced in a second-floor
garret in Brixton. Perched above the offices of <strong>Race Today</strong>,
with a view down Railton Road, he sits in an armchair flanked by
shelves of books (a cricket ball is wedged among them). He gets the
first question in: ‘Are you Irish? I thought you might have some
whiskey in your pocket. No whiskey? Irish in name only.’</p>
<p>He is frail, but he talked for over an hour before tiring. Lucid
and serious, but with a spry wit, he often checked after a long
answer, ‘Is that clear? Good’. He was quick to rebuke any hint of
a lazy or patronising question, and careful in all his replies. When
towards the end I asked if he had ever seen anybody bowl as fast and
straight as Michael Holding, he weighed the question up: ‘I
couldn’t compare the pace of bowlers. I have known bowlers who were
as fast as anything when they were playing. I will say this much.
Holding ranks with the greatest fast bowlers there have ever been.
I’m not going to compare him with George John or Statham, but he’s
in that rank. There is no perhaps or maybe about it. He is one of the
great fast bowlers. You want to know more, ask the great batsmen of
the day.’</p>
<p>What did he think of the biography? ‘I thought it was a very
good book, and a hard book to write, a biography. I haven’t killed
anybody, but he made it interesting. A successful piece of work.’
The political climate in which the book has been published is very
different from the times that it describes, when James rubbed
shoulders with Leon Trotsky, and baulked at the latter’s advice to
enter the Labour Party in the Thirties. How would he compare
political work in Britain then and now? ‘In those days independent
revolutionary work was quite an adventure. Today things are more
organised. It’s harder in a way, but you know what you’re doing.
In the Thirties the whole thing was wide open. You were in an open
sea, and you worked hard or you sank. Today, it isn’t so. The
organisations are pretty much set and now you join this or you join that.’</p>
<p>He had been in many organisations, and often in none: did he still
believe in the importance of a revolutionary party? ‘I believe you
must have an organisation, but I don’t believe that means you have
to join something that’s there. Maybe you have to fight against an
organisation to get a clear policy. In the old days an organisation
meant a certain political and philosophical orientation. Today it is
that in theory, but in reality it is a structure. In the old days the
political line and the philosophical basis of it was dominant, not
today.’ So he hadn’t moved away from Leninism? ‘No, I have
always felt that I was a Leninist. I believe Lenin was the greatest
political leader, theoretician and organiser that we have known.’</p>
<p>James took great pains to distinguish Leninism from Trotskyism.
‘Trotskyism and Leninism are not the same. Leninism – you are for
the Leninist revolution; Trotskyism – you are for the Trotskyist
party. Lenin had a philosophical view of the revolution. He was not
on the surface. He was fundamentally opposed to bourgeois society and
unless you are aware that every step that he took had that in mind
you will go wrong with Lenin. Trotsky began to be for the party,
quoting Lenin for the party, but in reality his conception of the
party was different. Trotsky in the end was swept away by his
followers into having, I wouldn’t say a superficial, but a
conception of the party that was not fundamentally connected with the
state of society. Lenin never lost sight of the party and its
relation to the people.’</p>
<p>How would Lenin have dealt with Margaret Thatcher? ‘Lenin would
have said, “She has won three times. Something happens once, that
is an accident. The second time, maybe it is a coincidence. But the
third time, that is an orientation. She has won three times, let me
see why.” He wouldn’t rush into agitation to put up somebody
against her. He would have said, “Bring me all her books and
everything she has said”. He would have analysed them all and he
would have said “She represents this and this today is stronger
than it was, and she sticks to that, and that is why she wins; and
now to defeat her we have to get down to these fundamentals”.’</p>
<p>James is a mine of rare first-hand reflections, not just on
international revolutionaries but on the people who made the history
of the British left – men like Red Clydeside MP James Maxton of the
ILP. ‘Maxton was an orator. He had a fine voice and a rhetorical
manner, and he said all the things that everybody agrees with. Maxton
would get up and say “We are against these enemies. They support
king and country. They support the army. But we are with the people
and the ordinary soldier and the rank and file.” All these
abstractions. Maxton, he was a marvellous man for making the
abstraction revolutionary.’<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">$64,000 question</h4>
<p class="fst">What of the issues for the left in Britain today, like the race
question? ‘I don’t see the race question in Britain as the race
question in the vast colonial areas. The dominant question in Britain
today is this: are you for the Labour Party or are you for the
revolution? And the race question has to fit itself into that. That
is the question in Britain.</p>
<p>‘When black people raise the race question it means to them a
lot more than when the Labour Party votes in favour of their
struggle. For them, that’s something in the paper. It means little.
Only coloured people in Britain really feel race. An Englishman in
Manchester or Salisbury or Dorset voting in favour of the black
struggle, to him that is something abstract.’ <br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">Battling Stalinism</h4>
<p class="fst">What, then, of the colonial world, and the problems which beset
African states like Nkrumah’s Ghana after independence? ‘I
believe that in many an African country there was ultimately no
distinction between the party and the state. At first the development
of a party that had Marxism as its policy was undoubtedly valuable. I
want to make it clear, in many a formerly undeveloped country the
organisation of a party is a tremendous step forward. They leave the
tribe, they leave the religious structure and they make a political
structure. But if that political structure becomes a representation
of the politics of the advanced country, there is a hell of a mess.
That happened in Trinidad and it happened in many colonial
territories because the Communist Party, the Stalinists, picked up
these things and went to the colonial territories and said the party
is what makes politics, and the party is our party ... and once the
struggle began as to which party, the organisation became dominant.’</p>
<p>The battle which James had with Stalinism was clearly the ongoing
political fight of his life. He feels that it was a job well done.
‘Today it is becoming more clear that Stalinism is mainly a
projection of the need of certain sections of the movement for
political power. I wouldn’t say that the back of Stalinism is
broken, but there is a movement against them [Stalinists], not just a
few intellectuals or writers. People don’t rush to them as the hope
of the future as they used to do.</p>
<p>‘And if you will allow me to say so, and this is particularly
true in the former colonial territories, they understand Stalinism
owing to the fact that James and other colonial writers not only
spoke of independence but pointed out the evils of Stalinism. It was
a tremendous struggle, you know, to make people understand that the
Soviet Union, and the Communist Party it influenced, was the enemy of
the revolutionary movement, but it was done and the theoretical
foundations have been laid. We made clear that the things which
happened were not the mistakes of leaders or the weaknesses of
individuals, but were the result of the structure and system which
grew up to produce them. I think that is one of the most important
things we left behind.’</p>
<p>I asked about his fiction; does he have any favourite pieces now?</p>
<p>‘No. For this reason. I began by expecting to write fiction and
to write literature and about society in a traditional way. But I
came to Britain, joined the movement and became a political analyst
and writer.’ ‘And activist?’ I suggested. ‘Yes, activist.
Good. I left fiction behind. I don’t think anything should be made
about my fiction. I hadn’t really become soaked in the Marxist
movement. I was still on the surface.’</p>
<p>On the surface today, I put it to him finally, there is much
pessimism about the prospects for revolution. ‘Well my friend, I
want to say something about this. When I look at the revolutionary
movement over the ages, over the decades, for me emerges one thing.</p>
<p>‘You never know when it is going to explode. The revolutionary
movement is a series of explosions when the regular routine of things
reaches a pitch where it cannot go on. To me that’s a philosophical
question based on history and I am never in any doubt – I am in
doubt for tomorrow, maybe – but I am never in any doubt for the day
after tomorrow. It has been a fundamental part of my outlook, a
statement of Marx early on, that the revolution comes like a thief in
the night.</p>
<p>‘I believe, you know, that the Marxist theory is a scientific,
intellectual theory such as the world has never seen before, and
properly used, properly thought of, always with the feeling that
history brings things new, that you didn’t see before – with the
basic Marxist guide you can manage. On the whole we can view the
future with a certain confidence; we have a method that is aware of
the past, but open to the future.’</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="updat">Last updated on 18 July 2017</p>
</body> |
MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James & John Fitzpatrick
‘You never know when it is going to explode’
(April 1989)
From Living Marxism, April 1989.
Copied from ‘You never know when it is going to explode’ at Spiked Online
With thanks to Ceri Dingle and John Fitzpatrick.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
For once the publisher’s blurb is no exaggeration: ‘CLR James
is one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable individuals.’
Nobody could argue with that. Born in 1901, James was a leading
literary figure in his native Trinidad well before he came to
Britain. From Nelson, Lancashire, he became cricket correspondent for
the Manchester Guardian and other papers. In 1938 he published
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution, a landmark study of slave revolt. He has written
extensively on politics, dialectics, literature and sport. Beyond
a Boundary, his remarkable study of what cricket meant to him,
and should mean to us, came out in 1963.
Sensitive portrait
He lectured for years in the USA and in Africa, and acted as
eminence grise to such leaders of Pan-Africanism as Ghana’s
Kwame Nkrumah. He was also a relentless political activist, a leading
figure in British Trotskyism in the Thirties in the Marxist Group and
the Independent Labour Party; and in the Forties, a leading figure in
and out of the American Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist
Workers Party. In the Sixties he entered the fray in Trinidad with
his Workers and Farmers Party.
Paul Buhle’s book CLR James: The Artist as Revolutionary
is an intellectual, political and cultural biography, a sensitive
portrait by a man who has been an editorial collaborator with James
for years. Himself an historian of American Marxism and former
activist of the New Left, as well as cultural critic, Buhle is
steeped in many of the concerns and the personalities close to his
subject’s heart. If he sometimes makes inflated claims for his
hero, it is not simply out of affection for the man and regard for
his achievements. Buhle sees James as the nearest thing yet to an
ideal reconciliation of the multiple identities of a sundered human
nature, which is the fragmented condition of every man and woman in
late capitalist society. It is an almost mystical theme, seeking
redemption within the individual personality for problems which are
social in nature and origin. It is consistent with the over-emphasis
on ideology and the anti-Leninist bent of Buhle’s earlier work.
Nevertheless, the story of James’ life, and the detail and the
connections which Buhle brings to bear from his own wide learning,
make this a book worth reading.
Holding: how fast?
CLR James, not far from 90, is now ensconced in a second-floor
garret in Brixton. Perched above the offices of Race Today,
with a view down Railton Road, he sits in an armchair flanked by
shelves of books (a cricket ball is wedged among them). He gets the
first question in: ‘Are you Irish? I thought you might have some
whiskey in your pocket. No whiskey? Irish in name only.’
He is frail, but he talked for over an hour before tiring. Lucid
and serious, but with a spry wit, he often checked after a long
answer, ‘Is that clear? Good’. He was quick to rebuke any hint of
a lazy or patronising question, and careful in all his replies. When
towards the end I asked if he had ever seen anybody bowl as fast and
straight as Michael Holding, he weighed the question up: ‘I
couldn’t compare the pace of bowlers. I have known bowlers who were
as fast as anything when they were playing. I will say this much.
Holding ranks with the greatest fast bowlers there have ever been.
I’m not going to compare him with George John or Statham, but he’s
in that rank. There is no perhaps or maybe about it. He is one of the
great fast bowlers. You want to know more, ask the great batsmen of
the day.’
What did he think of the biography? ‘I thought it was a very
good book, and a hard book to write, a biography. I haven’t killed
anybody, but he made it interesting. A successful piece of work.’
The political climate in which the book has been published is very
different from the times that it describes, when James rubbed
shoulders with Leon Trotsky, and baulked at the latter’s advice to
enter the Labour Party in the Thirties. How would he compare
political work in Britain then and now? ‘In those days independent
revolutionary work was quite an adventure. Today things are more
organised. It’s harder in a way, but you know what you’re doing.
In the Thirties the whole thing was wide open. You were in an open
sea, and you worked hard or you sank. Today, it isn’t so. The
organisations are pretty much set and now you join this or you join that.’
He had been in many organisations, and often in none: did he still
believe in the importance of a revolutionary party? ‘I believe you
must have an organisation, but I don’t believe that means you have
to join something that’s there. Maybe you have to fight against an
organisation to get a clear policy. In the old days an organisation
meant a certain political and philosophical orientation. Today it is
that in theory, but in reality it is a structure. In the old days the
political line and the philosophical basis of it was dominant, not
today.’ So he hadn’t moved away from Leninism? ‘No, I have
always felt that I was a Leninist. I believe Lenin was the greatest
political leader, theoretician and organiser that we have known.’
James took great pains to distinguish Leninism from Trotskyism.
‘Trotskyism and Leninism are not the same. Leninism – you are for
the Leninist revolution; Trotskyism – you are for the Trotskyist
party. Lenin had a philosophical view of the revolution. He was not
on the surface. He was fundamentally opposed to bourgeois society and
unless you are aware that every step that he took had that in mind
you will go wrong with Lenin. Trotsky began to be for the party,
quoting Lenin for the party, but in reality his conception of the
party was different. Trotsky in the end was swept away by his
followers into having, I wouldn’t say a superficial, but a
conception of the party that was not fundamentally connected with the
state of society. Lenin never lost sight of the party and its
relation to the people.’
How would Lenin have dealt with Margaret Thatcher? ‘Lenin would
have said, “She has won three times. Something happens once, that
is an accident. The second time, maybe it is a coincidence. But the
third time, that is an orientation. She has won three times, let me
see why.” He wouldn’t rush into agitation to put up somebody
against her. He would have said, “Bring me all her books and
everything she has said”. He would have analysed them all and he
would have said “She represents this and this today is stronger
than it was, and she sticks to that, and that is why she wins; and
now to defeat her we have to get down to these fundamentals”.’
James is a mine of rare first-hand reflections, not just on
international revolutionaries but on the people who made the history
of the British left – men like Red Clydeside MP James Maxton of the
ILP. ‘Maxton was an orator. He had a fine voice and a rhetorical
manner, and he said all the things that everybody agrees with. Maxton
would get up and say “We are against these enemies. They support
king and country. They support the army. But we are with the people
and the ordinary soldier and the rank and file.” All these
abstractions. Maxton, he was a marvellous man for making the
abstraction revolutionary.’
$64,000 question
What of the issues for the left in Britain today, like the race
question? ‘I don’t see the race question in Britain as the race
question in the vast colonial areas. The dominant question in Britain
today is this: are you for the Labour Party or are you for the
revolution? And the race question has to fit itself into that. That
is the question in Britain.
‘When black people raise the race question it means to them a
lot more than when the Labour Party votes in favour of their
struggle. For them, that’s something in the paper. It means little.
Only coloured people in Britain really feel race. An Englishman in
Manchester or Salisbury or Dorset voting in favour of the black
struggle, to him that is something abstract.’
Battling Stalinism
What, then, of the colonial world, and the problems which beset
African states like Nkrumah’s Ghana after independence? ‘I
believe that in many an African country there was ultimately no
distinction between the party and the state. At first the development
of a party that had Marxism as its policy was undoubtedly valuable. I
want to make it clear, in many a formerly undeveloped country the
organisation of a party is a tremendous step forward. They leave the
tribe, they leave the religious structure and they make a political
structure. But if that political structure becomes a representation
of the politics of the advanced country, there is a hell of a mess.
That happened in Trinidad and it happened in many colonial
territories because the Communist Party, the Stalinists, picked up
these things and went to the colonial territories and said the party
is what makes politics, and the party is our party ... and once the
struggle began as to which party, the organisation became dominant.’
The battle which James had with Stalinism was clearly the ongoing
political fight of his life. He feels that it was a job well done.
‘Today it is becoming more clear that Stalinism is mainly a
projection of the need of certain sections of the movement for
political power. I wouldn’t say that the back of Stalinism is
broken, but there is a movement against them [Stalinists], not just a
few intellectuals or writers. People don’t rush to them as the hope
of the future as they used to do.
‘And if you will allow me to say so, and this is particularly
true in the former colonial territories, they understand Stalinism
owing to the fact that James and other colonial writers not only
spoke of independence but pointed out the evils of Stalinism. It was
a tremendous struggle, you know, to make people understand that the
Soviet Union, and the Communist Party it influenced, was the enemy of
the revolutionary movement, but it was done and the theoretical
foundations have been laid. We made clear that the things which
happened were not the mistakes of leaders or the weaknesses of
individuals, but were the result of the structure and system which
grew up to produce them. I think that is one of the most important
things we left behind.’
I asked about his fiction; does he have any favourite pieces now?
‘No. For this reason. I began by expecting to write fiction and
to write literature and about society in a traditional way. But I
came to Britain, joined the movement and became a political analyst
and writer.’ ‘And activist?’ I suggested. ‘Yes, activist.
Good. I left fiction behind. I don’t think anything should be made
about my fiction. I hadn’t really become soaked in the Marxist
movement. I was still on the surface.’
On the surface today, I put it to him finally, there is much
pessimism about the prospects for revolution. ‘Well my friend, I
want to say something about this. When I look at the revolutionary
movement over the ages, over the decades, for me emerges one thing.
‘You never know when it is going to explode. The revolutionary
movement is a series of explosions when the regular routine of things
reaches a pitch where it cannot go on. To me that’s a philosophical
question based on history and I am never in any doubt – I am in
doubt for tomorrow, maybe – but I am never in any doubt for the day
after tomorrow. It has been a fundamental part of my outlook, a
statement of Marx early on, that the revolution comes like a thief in
the night.
‘I believe, you know, that the Marxist theory is a scientific,
intellectual theory such as the world has never seen before, and
properly used, properly thought of, always with the feeling that
history brings things new, that you didn’t see before – with the
basic Marxist guide you can manage. On the whole we can view the
future with a certain confidence; we have a method that is aware of
the past, but open to the future.’
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<h2>Boris Souvarine</h2>
<h1><em>Stalin:</em></h1>
<h2><em>A Critical Survey of Bolshevism</em></h2>
<h4>Translated by C.L.R. James</h4>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<br>
<br>
<p class="fst"><strong>Published:</strong> Alliance Book Corp. Longman, Green and Co., 1939.<br>
<strong>Transcribed:</strong> For ETOL, June, 2000<br>
<strong>Proofread:</strong> By Micah Muer, 2017.</p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<br>
<br>
<h4>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h4>
<p class="tda"><a href="forward.htm">Foreword</a></p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch01.htm">Chapter I.</a> Sosso</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch02.htm">Chapter II.</a> The Years of Apprenticeship</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch03.htm">Chapter III.</a> Prologue to Revolution</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch04.htm">Chapter IV.</a> A Professional Revolutionary</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch05.htm">Chapter V.</a> The Revolution</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch06.htm">Chapter VI.</a> The Civil war</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch07.htm">Chapter VII.</a> The Soviet Republic</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch08.htm">Chapter VIII.</a> The Heritage</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch09.htm">Chapter IX.</a> The Inheritor</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="ch10.htm">Chapter X.</a> Stalin</p>
<p class="tda"><a href="post.htm">Postscript</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="link"><a href="forward.htm">Read Forward</a> | <a href="../../index.htm">Souvarine Internet Archive</a></p>
</body> |
Boris Souvarine
Stalin:
A Critical Survey of Bolshevism
Translated by C.L.R. James
Published: Alliance Book Corp. Longman, Green and Co., 1939.
Transcribed: For ETOL, June, 2000
Proofread: By Micah Muer, 2017.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Chapter I. Sosso
Chapter II. The Years of Apprenticeship
Chapter III. Prologue to Revolution
Chapter IV. A Professional Revolutionary
Chapter V. The Revolution
Chapter VI. The Civil war
Chapter VII. The Soviet Republic
Chapter VIII. The Heritage
Chapter IX. The Inheritor
Chapter X. Stalin
Postscript
Read Forward | Souvarine Internet Archive
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<p> </p>
<h2>A.A.B.</h2>
<h4>‘We Shall Hold Our Own,’ Says Churchill</h4>
<h1>Still Defending the British Empire</h1>
<h3>(13 September 1943</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_37" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 37</a>, 13 September 1943, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Winston Churchill is a bold and confident capitalist leader, and his words are always worth watching. He is also bold and confident from natural temperament. That is why the Baldwins, Chamberlains, Samuel Hoares and all the petty politicians who fattened on the sweets of office in peacetime hated him and did their utmost to keep him out of office.</p>
<p>Conflict of policy there was, but less than appears at first sight. When the war came, everybody knew Churchill had to come in. They admitted him grudgingly and, as was expected, he has eclipsed them all.</p>
<p>But Churchill is bold and confident for another, and far more important, reason: he has the Labor Party leadership in Britain tamed. Far more than Roosevelt, he can speak without having to face a stir of opposition among the people which can be used by political opponents. It is this which allows Churchill to give free rein to his fluent, counter-revolutionary tongue and express the schemes and plots cooked up by himself and Roosevelt. Observe —<br>
</p>
<h4>Defender of British Imperialism</h4>
<p class="fst">Churchill startled the liberals and the people everywhere by saying openly of the British Empire: “We shall hold our own.” He said that he was not going to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire. He said this chiefly to Wendell Willkie, but also to Franklin Roosevelt. But he could say this so shamelessly only because the Labor Party leaders in Britain were committed to his policy on India. Had they been opposed to him, he has sense enough to know that it would not have been wise to speak so openly.</p>
<p><em>People were shocked when Roosevelt showed himself so tender to Badoglio and the House of Savoy. But for months Churchill had felt himself free to say: “One man alone (Mussolini) in Italy is responsible.” Obviously, he was preparing the way for a deal with the real culprits, the Italian capitalist class. But note that he said it, while Roosevelt was silent.</em></p>
<p>There are other instances. Now, recently, Churchill made two speeches. Both of them came immediately after long conferences with Roosevelt. One significant part of the Quebec broadcast goes as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Certainly we see all Europe rising under Hitler’s tyranny, and what is now happening in Denmark is only another example. Certainly we see the Germans hated as no race has ever been hated in human history, or with such good reason.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Fear of the European Masses</h4>
<p class="fst">So far, so good. But note now what follows: “We see them sprawled over a dozen once free and happy countries with their talons making festering wounds, the scars of which will never be effaced.”</p>
<p><em>Why does Churchill go out of his way to emphasize that the bitterness between the German people and the people of Europe will “never be healed”? It is because he is afraid (1) of Stalin’s determination to bolster up a de-Hitlerized Germany, and if that is the only means of getting his way in Europe; (2) of a proletarian revolution in the main countries of the Continent, which could open a road for the German proletariat.</em></p>
<p>What Churchill means is that rather than see that, he will do everything possible to emphasize the bitterness and keep Europe divided. A few days before, however, Roosevelt had said that the masses of the people in the Axis countries had nothing to fear. The real policy of these two, you may be sure, came from the mouth of Churchill.</p>
<p>Now, in his latest speech at Harvard, the English Prime Minister has calmly enunciated a truly monstrous doctrine. He blandly proposes that Britain and America rule the world by force of arms, even aiming at making everybody speak English.<br>
</p>
<h4>And Contempt For Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">Roosevelt has not dared to be so open. But it is good to know from their own mouths exactly what is in the minds of these defenders of a rotten and dying system. And it is important for workers to note that Churchill’s contempt for public opinion can be exercised so freely because the official opposition in England, the labor leaders, has sold out completely and has no policy of its own.</p>
<p><em>Note that Churchill brought to Quebec his wife, his daughter, bis Foreign Secretary, his Minister of Information (called in Germany, Minister of Propaganda), his chief of the Army, his chief of the Navy, his chief of the Air Force. But no single member of the British Labor Party was there!</em></p>
<p>Let no one think that when Churchill says: “We shall hold our own,” he speaks for the British people. In nine cases out of ten, he speaks for the imperialist counter-revolutionaries. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that the majority of the British people, the great masses of the workers in particular, have ideas fundamentally different from his. They cannot get the opportunity to express them and to clarify them because the labor leaders echo Churchill and confuse and suppress the people in the name of “national defense.”</p>
<p>Let us listen carefully to Churchill. Let us remember that he can say openly what Roosevelt thinks but prefers not to say. Roosevelt acts! And let us have no doubt that the great body of the people in Britain and America will sooner or later express themselves. We help them to do so by exposing the real policies of the wily Roosevelt and the bold and impudent Churchill.</p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated on 12 June 2015</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
A.A.B.
‘We Shall Hold Our Own,’ Says Churchill
Still Defending the British Empire
(13 September 1943
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 37, 13 September 1943, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Winston Churchill is a bold and confident capitalist leader, and his words are always worth watching. He is also bold and confident from natural temperament. That is why the Baldwins, Chamberlains, Samuel Hoares and all the petty politicians who fattened on the sweets of office in peacetime hated him and did their utmost to keep him out of office.
Conflict of policy there was, but less than appears at first sight. When the war came, everybody knew Churchill had to come in. They admitted him grudgingly and, as was expected, he has eclipsed them all.
But Churchill is bold and confident for another, and far more important, reason: he has the Labor Party leadership in Britain tamed. Far more than Roosevelt, he can speak without having to face a stir of opposition among the people which can be used by political opponents. It is this which allows Churchill to give free rein to his fluent, counter-revolutionary tongue and express the schemes and plots cooked up by himself and Roosevelt. Observe —
Defender of British Imperialism
Churchill startled the liberals and the people everywhere by saying openly of the British Empire: “We shall hold our own.” He said that he was not going to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire. He said this chiefly to Wendell Willkie, but also to Franklin Roosevelt. But he could say this so shamelessly only because the Labor Party leaders in Britain were committed to his policy on India. Had they been opposed to him, he has sense enough to know that it would not have been wise to speak so openly.
People were shocked when Roosevelt showed himself so tender to Badoglio and the House of Savoy. But for months Churchill had felt himself free to say: “One man alone (Mussolini) in Italy is responsible.” Obviously, he was preparing the way for a deal with the real culprits, the Italian capitalist class. But note that he said it, while Roosevelt was silent.
There are other instances. Now, recently, Churchill made two speeches. Both of them came immediately after long conferences with Roosevelt. One significant part of the Quebec broadcast goes as follows:
“Certainly we see all Europe rising under Hitler’s tyranny, and what is now happening in Denmark is only another example. Certainly we see the Germans hated as no race has ever been hated in human history, or with such good reason.”
Fear of the European Masses
So far, so good. But note now what follows: “We see them sprawled over a dozen once free and happy countries with their talons making festering wounds, the scars of which will never be effaced.”
Why does Churchill go out of his way to emphasize that the bitterness between the German people and the people of Europe will “never be healed”? It is because he is afraid (1) of Stalin’s determination to bolster up a de-Hitlerized Germany, and if that is the only means of getting his way in Europe; (2) of a proletarian revolution in the main countries of the Continent, which could open a road for the German proletariat.
What Churchill means is that rather than see that, he will do everything possible to emphasize the bitterness and keep Europe divided. A few days before, however, Roosevelt had said that the masses of the people in the Axis countries had nothing to fear. The real policy of these two, you may be sure, came from the mouth of Churchill.
Now, in his latest speech at Harvard, the English Prime Minister has calmly enunciated a truly monstrous doctrine. He blandly proposes that Britain and America rule the world by force of arms, even aiming at making everybody speak English.
And Contempt For Labor
Roosevelt has not dared to be so open. But it is good to know from their own mouths exactly what is in the minds of these defenders of a rotten and dying system. And it is important for workers to note that Churchill’s contempt for public opinion can be exercised so freely because the official opposition in England, the labor leaders, has sold out completely and has no policy of its own.
Note that Churchill brought to Quebec his wife, his daughter, bis Foreign Secretary, his Minister of Information (called in Germany, Minister of Propaganda), his chief of the Army, his chief of the Navy, his chief of the Air Force. But no single member of the British Labor Party was there!
Let no one think that when Churchill says: “We shall hold our own,” he speaks for the British people. In nine cases out of ten, he speaks for the imperialist counter-revolutionaries. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that the majority of the British people, the great masses of the workers in particular, have ideas fundamentally different from his. They cannot get the opportunity to express them and to clarify them because the labor leaders echo Churchill and confuse and suppress the people in the name of “national defense.”
Let us listen carefully to Churchill. Let us remember that he can say openly what Roosevelt thinks but prefers not to say. Roosevelt acts! And let us have no doubt that the great body of the people in Britain and America will sooner or later express themselves. We help them to do so by exposing the real policies of the wily Roosevelt and the bold and impudent Churchill.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>One-Tenth of the Nation</h1>
<h3>(2 September 1946)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_35" target="new">Vol. 10 No. 35</a>, 2 September 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are fighting it out in Harlem and through their candidates (both Negroes) have given notable examples of their uselessness to the masses of the people.</p>
<p>State Commissioner of Correction Grant Reynolds, Republican, has been attacking his rival, Congressman Adam Powell. <strong>The Amsterdam News</strong>, a Republican Harlem paper, has printed a full account of this attack. It is a monument of cheap politics and name calling. It is worthwhile repeating some of it because it tells a political story – an old story – the bankruptcy of Republican politics, both in regard to the nation and to Negroes in particular.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reynolds Line Is Small Potatoes</h4>
<p class="fst">Commissioner Reynolds accuses Powell of getting $500 for a speech. Rev. Powell has an agent who books him for speaking tours and the Congressman makes a lot of money.</p>
<p>Furthermore:</p>
<p class="fst">The Congressman does not attend to his duties in Congress. And now that the Congressman is a father he will be so busy attending to his baby that he will have still less time for his congressional duties. Therefore, vote for Grant Reynolds. Presumably he has no babies or only big ones.</p>
<p>The Harlem people should laugh the Republican Party and Commissioner Reynolds out of court. <em>The Republican Party has no policy. All their Presidential candidate can say is that he will do what the Democrats are doing and do it better.</em></p>
<p>That was Willkie’s campaign line. That was Dewey’s campaign line. Commissioner Reynolds has nothing to say and for that reason is compelled to fall back on personal abuse of his rival.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Is Powell’s Record?</h4>
<p class="fst">No, we, the Workers Party, who are running E.R. McKinney for Congress in Powell’s district, have some political questions to ask of Congressman Powell. The <strong>People’s Voice</strong> speaks authoritatively for the Congressman. He is its editor-in-chief, although for the time being he is on leave of absence as a Congressman. What does the <strong>Voice</strong> say in his favor?</p>
<p>The issue of August 17 prints a list of jobs that were gotten for Negroes by Congressman Powell. Thus we are fold that Thomasina Johnson got a job at $7,500 a year in the Department of Labor. At the other end of the list one Corliss Crocker got a job in the House Office Building at $2,000 a year. Then follow others whose pay presumably is less than $2,000. Adelaide Holloway has got a job in the Bureau of Engraving, and Carrie Hill in the War Department has been promoted – yes, sir, “promoted to inspector of women’s garments.”</p>
<p>Are the people of Harlem going to accept this as a testimony to Congressman Powell’s good political record? Not for one moment do we wish to sneer at any Negro getting a good job? Negroes are shamefully excluded from the better-paid jobs in the U.S. Part of the Negro struggle for equality is the right to have any job for which he is fitted. It is a democratic right. But a Democratic Party politician can get jobs for his constituents when you have a Democratic administration. By the same logic Harlem should vote for Republican candidates for the state legislature. They can and do appoint Negroes to jobs. Did Congressman Powell get a job at $7,500 for Thomasina Johnson? But Governor Dewey appointed Mr. Rivers to a judgeship worth $15,000 a year. So Governor Dewey by this reasoning is worth twice as much as Congressman Powell. Did Congressman Powell get 100 jobs for Negroes? Then Governor Dewey can claim that he got 200 or 300 for that matter. Didn’t he appoint Lester Granger as one of the commissioners to enforce the Ives-Quinn Bill? The salary was $10,000 a year.</p>
<p>In fact, Dewey made these and other appointments precisely to fool Negroes and distract them from his reactionary politics. He has not lifted a finger to stop police brutality in New York. He whitewashed the police murder at Freeport, Long Island. O’Dwyer is a Democrat. Harlem is burning up with anger at the brutality of Mayor O’Dwyer’s police. Yet both Democrats and Republicans can point to a few jobs given to Negroes.<br>
</p>
<h4>There Are All Kinds of Jobs</h4>
<p class="fst">This is characteristic of. both parties. More than that. It is characteristic of reactionary political regimes which are defrauding the people. The British Government is an absolute master at it. Whenever people in the colonies demand <em>political</em> rights, the British Government appoints some local man to a big job and tries thereby to pacify the political aspirations of the people. The American Government is doing the same. It appointed Judge Hastie, a Negro, as Governor of the Virgin Islands. But that does not mean one ounce of greater freedom for the people of the Virgin Islands.</p>
<p><em>Negroes have rights to all jobs. But both parties have been using jobs for a few Negroes as substitutes for the democratic rights of the majority.</em></p>
<p>Now there are other kinds of jobs besides judgeships and jobs in the Labor Department. There are jobs for thousands of workers in industry. Those are the jobs we are interested in chiefly, for those are the jobs the masses need. And what did Congressman Powell’s party do about these jobs? Zero. <em>The Democrats and Republicans between them conspired to kill the Permanent FEPC Bill in Congress.</em></p>
<p>The Workers Party supports no representative of these parties. Both capitalist parties give out a few jobs for white-collar workers in order the more surely to distract the people from their failure to insure full democratic rights to the masses.</p>
<p>But didn’t the Congressman bring in bills, to cure these evils? Next week we shall examine this.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
(2 September 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 35, 2 September 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are fighting it out in Harlem and through their candidates (both Negroes) have given notable examples of their uselessness to the masses of the people.
State Commissioner of Correction Grant Reynolds, Republican, has been attacking his rival, Congressman Adam Powell. The Amsterdam News, a Republican Harlem paper, has printed a full account of this attack. It is a monument of cheap politics and name calling. It is worthwhile repeating some of it because it tells a political story – an old story – the bankruptcy of Republican politics, both in regard to the nation and to Negroes in particular.
Reynolds Line Is Small Potatoes
Commissioner Reynolds accuses Powell of getting $500 for a speech. Rev. Powell has an agent who books him for speaking tours and the Congressman makes a lot of money.
Furthermore:
The Congressman does not attend to his duties in Congress. And now that the Congressman is a father he will be so busy attending to his baby that he will have still less time for his congressional duties. Therefore, vote for Grant Reynolds. Presumably he has no babies or only big ones.
The Harlem people should laugh the Republican Party and Commissioner Reynolds out of court. The Republican Party has no policy. All their Presidential candidate can say is that he will do what the Democrats are doing and do it better.
That was Willkie’s campaign line. That was Dewey’s campaign line. Commissioner Reynolds has nothing to say and for that reason is compelled to fall back on personal abuse of his rival.
What Is Powell’s Record?
No, we, the Workers Party, who are running E.R. McKinney for Congress in Powell’s district, have some political questions to ask of Congressman Powell. The People’s Voice speaks authoritatively for the Congressman. He is its editor-in-chief, although for the time being he is on leave of absence as a Congressman. What does the Voice say in his favor?
The issue of August 17 prints a list of jobs that were gotten for Negroes by Congressman Powell. Thus we are fold that Thomasina Johnson got a job at $7,500 a year in the Department of Labor. At the other end of the list one Corliss Crocker got a job in the House Office Building at $2,000 a year. Then follow others whose pay presumably is less than $2,000. Adelaide Holloway has got a job in the Bureau of Engraving, and Carrie Hill in the War Department has been promoted – yes, sir, “promoted to inspector of women’s garments.”
Are the people of Harlem going to accept this as a testimony to Congressman Powell’s good political record? Not for one moment do we wish to sneer at any Negro getting a good job? Negroes are shamefully excluded from the better-paid jobs in the U.S. Part of the Negro struggle for equality is the right to have any job for which he is fitted. It is a democratic right. But a Democratic Party politician can get jobs for his constituents when you have a Democratic administration. By the same logic Harlem should vote for Republican candidates for the state legislature. They can and do appoint Negroes to jobs. Did Congressman Powell get a job at $7,500 for Thomasina Johnson? But Governor Dewey appointed Mr. Rivers to a judgeship worth $15,000 a year. So Governor Dewey by this reasoning is worth twice as much as Congressman Powell. Did Congressman Powell get 100 jobs for Negroes? Then Governor Dewey can claim that he got 200 or 300 for that matter. Didn’t he appoint Lester Granger as one of the commissioners to enforce the Ives-Quinn Bill? The salary was $10,000 a year.
In fact, Dewey made these and other appointments precisely to fool Negroes and distract them from his reactionary politics. He has not lifted a finger to stop police brutality in New York. He whitewashed the police murder at Freeport, Long Island. O’Dwyer is a Democrat. Harlem is burning up with anger at the brutality of Mayor O’Dwyer’s police. Yet both Democrats and Republicans can point to a few jobs given to Negroes.
There Are All Kinds of Jobs
This is characteristic of. both parties. More than that. It is characteristic of reactionary political regimes which are defrauding the people. The British Government is an absolute master at it. Whenever people in the colonies demand political rights, the British Government appoints some local man to a big job and tries thereby to pacify the political aspirations of the people. The American Government is doing the same. It appointed Judge Hastie, a Negro, as Governor of the Virgin Islands. But that does not mean one ounce of greater freedom for the people of the Virgin Islands.
Negroes have rights to all jobs. But both parties have been using jobs for a few Negroes as substitutes for the democratic rights of the majority.
Now there are other kinds of jobs besides judgeships and jobs in the Labor Department. There are jobs for thousands of workers in industry. Those are the jobs we are interested in chiefly, for those are the jobs the masses need. And what did Congressman Powell’s party do about these jobs? Zero. The Democrats and Republicans between them conspired to kill the Permanent FEPC Bill in Congress.
The Workers Party supports no representative of these parties. Both capitalist parties give out a few jobs for white-collar workers in order the more surely to distract the people from their failure to insure full democratic rights to the masses.
But didn’t the Congressman bring in bills, to cure these evils? Next week we shall examine this.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James October 1965</p>
<h3>On <em>The Vanguard</em></h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Delivered</span>: at a Conference of <em>The Vanguard</em> at the Palms Club, San Fernando, Trinidad, in October 1965;<br>
<span class="info">First Published</span>: by <em>The Vanguard </em>on October 11, 1969. It was first acquired in October 1966. <em>The Vanguard </em>is the publication of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) of Trinidad;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Matthew Quest.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:</p>
<p>I welcome this opportunity to speak to a Trinidad audience as if I were speaking in London or Detroit. A blight has seemed to descend on intellectual life in this country, that is since independence. It was not always so, and I am learning that the country is hungry for serious discussions. In intend therefore to speak on <em>The Vanguard </em>very plainly. </p>
<p>I shall divide my twenty five minutes as follows:</p>
<ol class="numbered"><li>15 minutes on the social background of West Indian political life. I shall use in particular the Russians Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. As I hope you will see West Indian political life has a peculiar affinity with the Russian experience.</li>
<li>5 minutes on the Russian Revolution on which was (and is) the direct results of the forces I will describe.</li>
<li>In light of the above what OWTU and <em>The Vanguard </em>ought to do. All analysis is mischievous unless you gather what you have to go and do.</li>
</ol>
<h5>The Russian and the West Indian Intellectual</h5>
<p>First then Pushkin. He wrote a famous poem called “The Gypsies.” You can buy or order it in a Pushkin selection in any descent bookshop in Port of Spain. It tells the story of Aleko, a civil servant, in St. Petersburg. Aleko got very sick of life in the big capital of a backward country and went to live among the gypsies running wild on the vast steppes of Russia. Welcomed, he lived happily for two years. But this city intellectual could not enjoy happiness and freedom. He killed two gypsies and the people asked him to go away and leave them.</p>
<p>Fifty years after the poem was written, in one of the most famous literary lectures ever delivered, Dostoyevsky explained the social origin and significance of this poem, and as you listen to two extracts which I will now read I hope, in fact I am sure, you will be increasingly astonished (and even frightened) about what it reveals about the West Indian intellectual:</p>
<p class="indentb">“In our day they no longer visit gypsy camps, seeking to discover their universal ideals and their consolation in that wild life, far from the confused and pointless activity of the Russian intellectuals; now with a new faith they adopt socialism which did not exist in Aleko’s day... It is the same essential man, appearing at a different time. This man was born at the second century after Czar Peter’s reforms, cast up from the people into a society of intellect. The greatest number of intellectuals served then, even as now, as civil servants in government positions, in railways, in banks, or other ways, or even engaged in science or lecturing, earning money in a regular peaceful, leisured fashion, even playing cards, without desire for escape, whether to the gypsies or refuges of more modern days. They only played at liberalism with a tinge of European socialism.”</p>
<p>There you have ourselves. After the abolition of slavery, the West Indian intellectual was projected out of the former slaves, to do the intellectual work of a backward society modernizing itself. But just as the Russian intellectual, out of the Russian masses, despite his education, could not penetrate Tsarism (Monarchy, Land Owning Aristocracy, Military, Orthodox Clergy), so the West Indian intellectual out of slavery, has not been able to penetrate the aristocracy of colonialism.</p>
<p>Hear now what happened to the Russian intellectual:</p>
<p class="indentb">“Meanwhile a restless and fantastic creature searches for salvation in external things, as needs he must. Truth continues external to him, perhaps in some European country, with its more stable organization and settled mode of life. Nor can he understand that truth after all is within him. How could he understand this? For a century he has not been himself in his own country. He has no culture of his own. He has grown up within closed walls, as in a convent.”</p>
<p>So that is your West Indian intellectual. PNM this, Williams that, and Capildeo the other; they are historical products, blind swimmers in a dark sea, who have been able to find planks to float on and are striking madly at whatever threatens their precarious perch. They have to be removed, that’s all.</p>
<p>But there is a great danger here for the OWTU and that is why I shall now deal for five minutes with the Russian revolution.</p>
<h5>The Russian Revolution and the OWTU</h5>
<p>Lenin was very conscious of two things, a) how small organized labor of heavy industry was in proportion to the vast mass of the population (as in the OWTU), and b) the inherent spinelessness and shallowness of the Russian intellectuals. Lenin therefore from 1903 – 1917 said:</p>
<p class="indentb">“All we can fight for is Parlaimentary Democracy, not Socialism. But the Russian proletarians have to lead it,... the Russian Intellectual is a rotten reed and he will fight for nothing not even Parliamentary Democracy by which he will profit.”</p>
<p>Lenin was only partially right. When the revolution came in 1917 the proletariat had to do all the fighting. The intellectuals and the progressives joined the foreign powers to crush the revolution. Lenin and the proletariat had to seize the power but they could not hold it. Under Stalin, the intellectuals, now bureaucrats and officials of the Soviet regime, succeeded to the power and to this day they are masters of Russia. The proletariat, organized labor, has been reenslaved. Now bearing this in mind what has OWTU and <em>The Vanguard </em>to do and not to do?</p>
<h5>Role of OWTU and <em>The Vanguard</em> </h5>
<p>If you accept the previous analysis of the West Indian intellectual, or for that matter, members of our middle classes, then one conclusion follows inevitably: The Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union has the responsibility to lead the struggle for parliamentary democracy and the defense of democratic rights. In fact it had better do so.</p>
<p>It is not a question of “ought to” or “a moral obligation.” The intellectuals as a class, the West Indian middle classes, never have, they never will. They will follow a strong lead. But they are constitutionally, organically, incapable of leading. 1956-1965 has proven that. In this sense OWTU has an immense political responsibility. </p>
<p>In my view the main burden of that has to be borne by <em>The Vanguard. </em>The Exceutive Committee and General Council have other things to do. <em>The Vanguard </em>can never forget that first and foremost it is a union organ. But it can, it must perform other social functions.</p>
<p>Our West Indian history, the principles of political thought, sociological analysis, biographies our important men, arts and letters, these are the intellectual foundations of a modern community, our pressing need. <em>The Vanguard </em>must do it. Who else will?</p>
<p>Once <em>The Nation</em> did it. Today <em>We the People </em>is doing all that it can. But <em>The Vanguard</em> is in a position today top undertake the responsibility on a widening scale. I have to emphasize that. </p>
<p><em>The Vanguard </em>must see itself as filling a breach no one else in sight can fill. It is a union paper and must inform and educate the public on all union matters. But the objective situation being what it is, <em>The Vanguard</em> must take on the production and dissemination of criticism, art, history, whatever a modern society like ours must have. It must be done. Who is to do it?</p>
<p>There is a political advantage waiting here. Many of our intellectuals and civil servants are sympathetic to labor but have all the prejudices of British Colonial Society against any leading role by labor in society except in labor matters. But they, more than anybody else, know the terrible gap in our society. They are incapable of filling it. They are afraid. If you step into the breach and open the way you raise the status of labor in their eyes. Remember, labor has to win over large sections of the population, particularly in an underdeveloped country, ie. where organized labor is small. That is what underdevelopment means. This is a positive task. It does not mean necessary mean association with a specific political party. It means pushing out into wider and wider spheres. This can be done, whatever the political positions you take. I have done it. I know papers that are doing it today.</p>
<p>Now if you undertake this, it is first and foremost a political question-your own internal politics. This is not a matter of PNM, DLP, or WFP, you have to first convince your own members that the whole situation in the country demands that through <em>The Vanguard</em>, O.W.T.U. play this role. You must systematically bring before them this political problem and win their agreement. That may take some time, even a year. But I think it is wrong to face a large body of men with far reaching plans they have not discussed. This will demand hard systematic work by the leadership. But that is what leadership is for.</p>
<h5>Recommendations</h5>
<p>Certain technical considerations flow from this.</p>
<ol class="numbered"><li><em>The Vanguard </em>must be a weekly paper. An interval of two weeks is too long. There is so much going on in the world today that the reader loses a sense of continuity in a fortnightly paper. I would prefer four pages every week then eight pages every two weeks. But if you handle yourselves well you can soon handle twelve pages a week.</li>
<li><em>The Vanguard </em>needs its own press.</li>
<li>Certain editorial needs flow from this. You have in Mr. Bowrin an editor of high qualification; Economist and lawyer, practical political experience abroad and a man not only of advanced political views but of personal experiences of this oil industry. </li>
</ol>
<p>You think this all to your advantage. I want to warn you of its dangers. Mr. Bowrin can not run <em>The Vanguard. </em>I have written in a local publication:</p>
<p class="indentb">“The days of newspapers built by brilliant writing of one or two individuals are gone forever. The interests of the modern public are too wide, rival demands on its attention are too great. The modern newspaper is an organization. The work of a managing editor is to build and set in motion such an organization.”</p>
<p>Furthermore, our past of slavery and colonialism have imbedded deep in us the habit of leaving things up to one man, especially if he is a good man. By doing that you could wear down Mr. Bowrin and prevent the emergence of <em>The Vanguard </em>as comprehensive journalistic force.</p>
<p>What <em>The Vanguard</em> needs, what Mr. Bowrin must have, is an editorial board that is responsible for organizing this material in <em>The Vanguard. </em>It should meet regularly once a week, discuss past and plan future issues. It’s members need not all be members of the union. Bring in some Alekos. I need not know that you have appointed a board. Ten minutes with two issues will tell me. The public will not know exactly why. But if you do not do this, it will feel in time, that something is missing in the paper.</p>
<p>And almost the last point. If you convince your membership, then there must be allocated a certain sum per year so that your editor and his board can plan their projects a year or more ahead. If you leave them in a situation where every time they want to do something, they have to take it to the General Council, you make it impossible for them to do serious, consistent planning; you burden the General Council with a constant series of irritating decisions. That is no good. Convince them that the job is a big one and they must give you the responsibility and the means. You place your plans before them and submit an annual report. I am sure the intellectual desert that we live is so eager to bloom that before long you will show a substantial profit. </p>
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C.L.R. James October 1965
On The Vanguard
Delivered: at a Conference of The Vanguard at the Palms Club, San Fernando, Trinidad, in October 1965;
First Published: by The Vanguard on October 11, 1969. It was first acquired in October 1966. The Vanguard is the publication of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) of Trinidad;
Transcribed: by Matthew Quest.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I welcome this opportunity to speak to a Trinidad audience as if I were speaking in London or Detroit. A blight has seemed to descend on intellectual life in this country, that is since independence. It was not always so, and I am learning that the country is hungry for serious discussions. In intend therefore to speak on The Vanguard very plainly.
I shall divide my twenty five minutes as follows:
15 minutes on the social background of West Indian political life. I shall use in particular the Russians Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. As I hope you will see West Indian political life has a peculiar affinity with the Russian experience.
5 minutes on the Russian Revolution on which was (and is) the direct results of the forces I will describe.
In light of the above what OWTU and The Vanguard ought to do. All analysis is mischievous unless you gather what you have to go and do.
The Russian and the West Indian Intellectual
First then Pushkin. He wrote a famous poem called “The Gypsies.” You can buy or order it in a Pushkin selection in any descent bookshop in Port of Spain. It tells the story of Aleko, a civil servant, in St. Petersburg. Aleko got very sick of life in the big capital of a backward country and went to live among the gypsies running wild on the vast steppes of Russia. Welcomed, he lived happily for two years. But this city intellectual could not enjoy happiness and freedom. He killed two gypsies and the people asked him to go away and leave them.
Fifty years after the poem was written, in one of the most famous literary lectures ever delivered, Dostoyevsky explained the social origin and significance of this poem, and as you listen to two extracts which I will now read I hope, in fact I am sure, you will be increasingly astonished (and even frightened) about what it reveals about the West Indian intellectual:
“In our day they no longer visit gypsy camps, seeking to discover their universal ideals and their consolation in that wild life, far from the confused and pointless activity of the Russian intellectuals; now with a new faith they adopt socialism which did not exist in Aleko’s day... It is the same essential man, appearing at a different time. This man was born at the second century after Czar Peter’s reforms, cast up from the people into a society of intellect. The greatest number of intellectuals served then, even as now, as civil servants in government positions, in railways, in banks, or other ways, or even engaged in science or lecturing, earning money in a regular peaceful, leisured fashion, even playing cards, without desire for escape, whether to the gypsies or refuges of more modern days. They only played at liberalism with a tinge of European socialism.”
There you have ourselves. After the abolition of slavery, the West Indian intellectual was projected out of the former slaves, to do the intellectual work of a backward society modernizing itself. But just as the Russian intellectual, out of the Russian masses, despite his education, could not penetrate Tsarism (Monarchy, Land Owning Aristocracy, Military, Orthodox Clergy), so the West Indian intellectual out of slavery, has not been able to penetrate the aristocracy of colonialism.
Hear now what happened to the Russian intellectual:
“Meanwhile a restless and fantastic creature searches for salvation in external things, as needs he must. Truth continues external to him, perhaps in some European country, with its more stable organization and settled mode of life. Nor can he understand that truth after all is within him. How could he understand this? For a century he has not been himself in his own country. He has no culture of his own. He has grown up within closed walls, as in a convent.”
So that is your West Indian intellectual. PNM this, Williams that, and Capildeo the other; they are historical products, blind swimmers in a dark sea, who have been able to find planks to float on and are striking madly at whatever threatens their precarious perch. They have to be removed, that’s all.
But there is a great danger here for the OWTU and that is why I shall now deal for five minutes with the Russian revolution.
The Russian Revolution and the OWTU
Lenin was very conscious of two things, a) how small organized labor of heavy industry was in proportion to the vast mass of the population (as in the OWTU), and b) the inherent spinelessness and shallowness of the Russian intellectuals. Lenin therefore from 1903 – 1917 said:
“All we can fight for is Parlaimentary Democracy, not Socialism. But the Russian proletarians have to lead it,... the Russian Intellectual is a rotten reed and he will fight for nothing not even Parliamentary Democracy by which he will profit.”
Lenin was only partially right. When the revolution came in 1917 the proletariat had to do all the fighting. The intellectuals and the progressives joined the foreign powers to crush the revolution. Lenin and the proletariat had to seize the power but they could not hold it. Under Stalin, the intellectuals, now bureaucrats and officials of the Soviet regime, succeeded to the power and to this day they are masters of Russia. The proletariat, organized labor, has been reenslaved. Now bearing this in mind what has OWTU and The Vanguard to do and not to do?
Role of OWTU and The Vanguard
If you accept the previous analysis of the West Indian intellectual, or for that matter, members of our middle classes, then one conclusion follows inevitably: The Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union has the responsibility to lead the struggle for parliamentary democracy and the defense of democratic rights. In fact it had better do so.
It is not a question of “ought to” or “a moral obligation.” The intellectuals as a class, the West Indian middle classes, never have, they never will. They will follow a strong lead. But they are constitutionally, organically, incapable of leading. 1956-1965 has proven that. In this sense OWTU has an immense political responsibility.
In my view the main burden of that has to be borne by The Vanguard. The Exceutive Committee and General Council have other things to do. The Vanguard can never forget that first and foremost it is a union organ. But it can, it must perform other social functions.
Our West Indian history, the principles of political thought, sociological analysis, biographies our important men, arts and letters, these are the intellectual foundations of a modern community, our pressing need. The Vanguard must do it. Who else will?
Once The Nation did it. Today We the People is doing all that it can. But The Vanguard is in a position today top undertake the responsibility on a widening scale. I have to emphasize that.
The Vanguard must see itself as filling a breach no one else in sight can fill. It is a union paper and must inform and educate the public on all union matters. But the objective situation being what it is, The Vanguard must take on the production and dissemination of criticism, art, history, whatever a modern society like ours must have. It must be done. Who is to do it?
There is a political advantage waiting here. Many of our intellectuals and civil servants are sympathetic to labor but have all the prejudices of British Colonial Society against any leading role by labor in society except in labor matters. But they, more than anybody else, know the terrible gap in our society. They are incapable of filling it. They are afraid. If you step into the breach and open the way you raise the status of labor in their eyes. Remember, labor has to win over large sections of the population, particularly in an underdeveloped country, ie. where organized labor is small. That is what underdevelopment means. This is a positive task. It does not mean necessary mean association with a specific political party. It means pushing out into wider and wider spheres. This can be done, whatever the political positions you take. I have done it. I know papers that are doing it today.
Now if you undertake this, it is first and foremost a political question-your own internal politics. This is not a matter of PNM, DLP, or WFP, you have to first convince your own members that the whole situation in the country demands that through The Vanguard, O.W.T.U. play this role. You must systematically bring before them this political problem and win their agreement. That may take some time, even a year. But I think it is wrong to face a large body of men with far reaching plans they have not discussed. This will demand hard systematic work by the leadership. But that is what leadership is for.
Recommendations
Certain technical considerations flow from this.
The Vanguard must be a weekly paper. An interval of two weeks is too long. There is so much going on in the world today that the reader loses a sense of continuity in a fortnightly paper. I would prefer four pages every week then eight pages every two weeks. But if you handle yourselves well you can soon handle twelve pages a week.
The Vanguard needs its own press.
Certain editorial needs flow from this. You have in Mr. Bowrin an editor of high qualification; Economist and lawyer, practical political experience abroad and a man not only of advanced political views but of personal experiences of this oil industry.
You think this all to your advantage. I want to warn you of its dangers. Mr. Bowrin can not run The Vanguard. I have written in a local publication:
“The days of newspapers built by brilliant writing of one or two individuals are gone forever. The interests of the modern public are too wide, rival demands on its attention are too great. The modern newspaper is an organization. The work of a managing editor is to build and set in motion such an organization.”
Furthermore, our past of slavery and colonialism have imbedded deep in us the habit of leaving things up to one man, especially if he is a good man. By doing that you could wear down Mr. Bowrin and prevent the emergence of The Vanguard as comprehensive journalistic force.
What The Vanguard needs, what Mr. Bowrin must have, is an editorial board that is responsible for organizing this material in The Vanguard. It should meet regularly once a week, discuss past and plan future issues. It’s members need not all be members of the union. Bring in some Alekos. I need not know that you have appointed a board. Ten minutes with two issues will tell me. The public will not know exactly why. But if you do not do this, it will feel in time, that something is missing in the paper.
And almost the last point. If you convince your membership, then there must be allocated a certain sum per year so that your editor and his board can plan their projects a year or more ahead. If you leave them in a situation where every time they want to do something, they have to take it to the General Council, you make it impossible for them to do serious, consistent planning; you burden the General Council with a constant series of irritating decisions. That is no good. Convince them that the job is a big one and they must give you the responsibility and the means. You place your plans before them and submit an annual report. I am sure the intellectual desert that we live is so eager to bloom that before long you will show a substantial profit.
C.L.R. JAmes Archive
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>Negroes Get Priority in Layoffs</h1>
<h3>(June 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_26" target="new">Vol. IX No. 26</a>, 25 June 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Two weeks ago ten thousand Negro workers were laid off in four cities of the Midwest, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Indianapolis. Other workers were laid off also, of course. Thus among 5,000 workers to be released from the Allison division of General Motors, only 400 are Negroes.</p>
<p><em>In Chicago at the Pressed Steel Car Co., of 1,800 workers released, 1,000 were Negroes. Ford Willow Run released 4,000. The Murray Co. of Detroit released all persons hired since 1943. The UAW-CIO has made certain that layoffs were made according to seniority. But most of the Negro workers who broke into war industries did so only after the war effort was well under way (1942 and 1943). Thus they are slated to be laid off first.</em></p>
<p>The Negro communities are hard hit. While unemployment among white workers is scattered in its geographical effects, the concentration of Negroes in Jim Crow areas brings home unemployment to them in a concentrated manner. Finally the industries in which most of them are employed are aircraft and other mushroom war industries. This is particularly true in California. These are the industries with the most uncertain future, which means an uncertain future for the Negroes more than for any other section of the population.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Is to Be Done?</h4>
<p class="fst">Two things must be established first. From all sides it is being hammered home into the heads of all workers that the problem of cutbacks, of layoffs, of unemployment, is a national problem. In the same way that the organization of production for the war was and is a national problem, so the organization of production to prevent unemployment is a national problem. This means also that it is a problem of <em>government</em>. In its broad outlines it has to be organized from one center.</p>
<p><em>Modern industry is too interdependent to he organized successfully in separate groupings. On the auto industry depends steel, coal, oil and transport. Disorganize one and you disorganize all. Whatever special difficulties the Negroes may suffer from, there is no special solution for them. In fact, the very uncertainties of their future in industry compel them to be more than all others concerned about a well planned, well organized industrial system in the United States. If there is no such planning then the weight of the chaotic economy will fall most heavily upon the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, i.e., among others, the Negroes.</em></p>
<p>The Negroes are concerned with the problem and are racking their brains to find a way out. The <strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> is a weekly paper which styles itself the official organ of the National Labor Council. Its avowed aim is equal rights for minority groups. It preoccupies itself with this very question of Negroes and unemployment. It claims, and this is very likely true, that it has been “virtually bombarded” with questions by colored workers as to what position organized labor will take on me retention of colored workers when the time for layoffs comes. It conducted a poll among labour leaders on this question and the result appears in a June issue.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Leaders Speak</h4>
<p class="fst">R.J. Thomas, William Green, K.C. Adams of the United Mine Workers (for John L. Lewis) sent replies. All stated that seniority was the foundation of the union. movement and that it was to be “respected and preserved,” in the words of William Green. R.J. Thomas, in a lengthy reply gave his positive solution of the problem.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Rather, we join with the national CIO in subscribing to a program of full employment for all workers with adequate safeguards which will insure equality and full employment opportunity for all alike.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> in its editorial of that issue was realistic and bitter. It more or less accepted the inevitability of the seniority rule being retained. But it poured scorn on the slogans of full employment and sixty million jobs. It pointed to the fact that in Harlem on V-E Day there was: no celebration.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“For, over and above the roar of guns, the peals of church bells and the screech of horns, the working masses heard the deafening clatter of empty larders. To them, V-E Day was the forerunner of hungry days.”</p>
<p class="fst">Sixty million jobs, full employment – this was talk and nothing more. All this is true. However, the editorial did put forward one suggestion. Labor and management must get together and devise a plan “to ameliorate the harshness of the cutback. President Truman’s unemployment compensation plan is a step in the right direction. But it is only a step – a government step. Labor and industry must devise a practical plan of their own to meet the situation.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Positive Program Needed</h4>
<p class="fst">Now here is a thoroughly defeatist, muddled and demoralizing attitude to an urgent problem affecting not only Negroes and other minorities, but the whole nation, it is particularly mischievous because it comes from an organization speaking in the name of labor minorities.</p>
<ul>
<li><em>What can “labor and management” do to mitigate cutbacks?</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>Why is the government excused simply because Truman has proposed unemployment compensation?</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>Is the country in a position to provide full employment and sixty million jobs?</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>The government organized production for the war. Why can’t it organize production for the peace?</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>If Roosevelt’s slogan of sixty million jobs was nothing but a fake, why not devise a practical plan for making this fake a reality?</em></li>
</ul>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> just lies down, accepts the idea of mass unemployment and tells the Negro workers that they and their white brothers must organize a plan to mitigate it.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Is Wrong?</h4>
<p class="fst">Negro labor cannot accept any such program. Negro labor, more than any other labor, has the right and the duty to say and say loudly, that there must be a plan to <em>prevent</em> unemployment. Production was organized for war. It can be organized for peace. Such is the program <strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> should place before those who bombard it with queries.</p>
<p><em><strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> should conduct polls among labor leaders, but the main purpose of the polls should be to find out: What do you propose to do about full employment?</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> should place most bitterly and realistically before them the evidence that Roosevelt’s slogans were not meant seriously.</em></p>
<p><strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> should inform the labor leaders that even their labor plans (for full employment) are fakes unless they show that they mean business and are prepared to take steps to carry them out.</p>
<p>Finally <strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> should say that when it agitates on behalf of Negro and other minority workers it is only expressing the most acute form of what is a national problem.<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Way Out</h4>
<p class="fst">This is the approach of <strong>Labor Action</strong> to this problem. Naturally <strong>Labor Action</strong> flights for substantial compensation for unemployment. <strong>Labor Action</strong> welcomes the struggle of minority groups against their special disabilities. But when those who speak in the name of these groups propose a policy of capitulation – then they mislead their followers and instead of being in the vanguard find themselves at the tail of the labor movement.</p>
<p>The problem is a national problem. It is a problem of government – of the government planning production. What is required is a workers’ government, a government of labor backed by all the millions who fear the coming unemployment and do not know what to do. By accepting so pitifully the whole idea of unemployment, <strong>Labor Vanguard</strong> misleads the people who bombarded it with questions.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
Negroes Get Priority in Layoffs
(June 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 26, 25 June 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Two weeks ago ten thousand Negro workers were laid off in four cities of the Midwest, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Indianapolis. Other workers were laid off also, of course. Thus among 5,000 workers to be released from the Allison division of General Motors, only 400 are Negroes.
In Chicago at the Pressed Steel Car Co., of 1,800 workers released, 1,000 were Negroes. Ford Willow Run released 4,000. The Murray Co. of Detroit released all persons hired since 1943. The UAW-CIO has made certain that layoffs were made according to seniority. But most of the Negro workers who broke into war industries did so only after the war effort was well under way (1942 and 1943). Thus they are slated to be laid off first.
The Negro communities are hard hit. While unemployment among white workers is scattered in its geographical effects, the concentration of Negroes in Jim Crow areas brings home unemployment to them in a concentrated manner. Finally the industries in which most of them are employed are aircraft and other mushroom war industries. This is particularly true in California. These are the industries with the most uncertain future, which means an uncertain future for the Negroes more than for any other section of the population.
What Is to Be Done?
Two things must be established first. From all sides it is being hammered home into the heads of all workers that the problem of cutbacks, of layoffs, of unemployment, is a national problem. In the same way that the organization of production for the war was and is a national problem, so the organization of production to prevent unemployment is a national problem. This means also that it is a problem of government. In its broad outlines it has to be organized from one center.
Modern industry is too interdependent to he organized successfully in separate groupings. On the auto industry depends steel, coal, oil and transport. Disorganize one and you disorganize all. Whatever special difficulties the Negroes may suffer from, there is no special solution for them. In fact, the very uncertainties of their future in industry compel them to be more than all others concerned about a well planned, well organized industrial system in the United States. If there is no such planning then the weight of the chaotic economy will fall most heavily upon the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, i.e., among others, the Negroes.
The Negroes are concerned with the problem and are racking their brains to find a way out. The Labor Vanguard is a weekly paper which styles itself the official organ of the National Labor Council. Its avowed aim is equal rights for minority groups. It preoccupies itself with this very question of Negroes and unemployment. It claims, and this is very likely true, that it has been “virtually bombarded” with questions by colored workers as to what position organized labor will take on me retention of colored workers when the time for layoffs comes. It conducted a poll among labour leaders on this question and the result appears in a June issue.
Labor Leaders Speak
R.J. Thomas, William Green, K.C. Adams of the United Mine Workers (for John L. Lewis) sent replies. All stated that seniority was the foundation of the union. movement and that it was to be “respected and preserved,” in the words of William Green. R.J. Thomas, in a lengthy reply gave his positive solution of the problem.
“Rather, we join with the national CIO in subscribing to a program of full employment for all workers with adequate safeguards which will insure equality and full employment opportunity for all alike.”
The Labor Vanguard in its editorial of that issue was realistic and bitter. It more or less accepted the inevitability of the seniority rule being retained. But it poured scorn on the slogans of full employment and sixty million jobs. It pointed to the fact that in Harlem on V-E Day there was: no celebration.
“For, over and above the roar of guns, the peals of church bells and the screech of horns, the working masses heard the deafening clatter of empty larders. To them, V-E Day was the forerunner of hungry days.”
Sixty million jobs, full employment – this was talk and nothing more. All this is true. However, the editorial did put forward one suggestion. Labor and management must get together and devise a plan “to ameliorate the harshness of the cutback. President Truman’s unemployment compensation plan is a step in the right direction. But it is only a step – a government step. Labor and industry must devise a practical plan of their own to meet the situation.”
Positive Program Needed
Now here is a thoroughly defeatist, muddled and demoralizing attitude to an urgent problem affecting not only Negroes and other minorities, but the whole nation, it is particularly mischievous because it comes from an organization speaking in the name of labor minorities.
What can “labor and management” do to mitigate cutbacks?
Why is the government excused simply because Truman has proposed unemployment compensation?
Is the country in a position to provide full employment and sixty million jobs?
The government organized production for the war. Why can’t it organize production for the peace?
If Roosevelt’s slogan of sixty million jobs was nothing but a fake, why not devise a practical plan for making this fake a reality?
The Labor Vanguard just lies down, accepts the idea of mass unemployment and tells the Negro workers that they and their white brothers must organize a plan to mitigate it.
What Is Wrong?
Negro labor cannot accept any such program. Negro labor, more than any other labor, has the right and the duty to say and say loudly, that there must be a plan to prevent unemployment. Production was organized for war. It can be organized for peace. Such is the program Labor Vanguard should place before those who bombard it with queries.
Labor Vanguard should conduct polls among labor leaders, but the main purpose of the polls should be to find out: What do you propose to do about full employment?
Labor Vanguard should place most bitterly and realistically before them the evidence that Roosevelt’s slogans were not meant seriously.
Labor Vanguard should inform the labor leaders that even their labor plans (for full employment) are fakes unless they show that they mean business and are prepared to take steps to carry them out.
Finally Labor Vanguard should say that when it agitates on behalf of Negro and other minority workers it is only expressing the most acute form of what is a national problem.
Our Way Out
This is the approach of Labor Action to this problem. Naturally Labor Action flights for substantial compensation for unemployment. Labor Action welcomes the struggle of minority groups against their special disabilities. But when those who speak in the name of these groups propose a policy of capitulation – then they mislead their followers and instead of being in the vanguard find themselves at the tail of the labor movement.
The problem is a national problem. It is a problem of government – of the government planning production. What is required is a workers’ government, a government of labor backed by all the millions who fear the coming unemployment and do not know what to do. By accepting so pitifully the whole idea of unemployment, Labor Vanguard misleads the people who bombarded it with questions.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>What India Means to the American Working Class</h4>
<h1>A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution</h1>
<h3>(18 January 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_01" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 3</a>, 18 January 1943, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong><a href="india5.htm">(Concluded from last issue)</a></strong></p>
<p class="fst">The British labor leaders, Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson of old, and Attlee, Bevin, Stafford Cripps and the others of today, know quite well that if Britain were to lose India tomorrow, nothing but socialism could save Britain from catastrophe and ruin. If you read their statements on India during the last twenty years, you will see that they have not one serious word of encouragement for the mass struggle of the workers and peasants of India. From India come the huge profits which enable these bureaucrats and the better-paid aristocrats of labor to get a little of the benefits of the British imperialist exploitation. They know, and that is why they shut their mouths.</p>
<p><em>But millions of workers in Britain, by far the vast majority, have no interest in the empire at all and when Gandhi visited Lancashire in 1931 many unemployed cotton workers, who were starving as a result of the Indian boycott, wished him the best of luck.</em></p>
<p>Today, among the rank and file, sentiment for Indian freedom is very strong. But already in the British labor press it is being said that Britain does not wish to “free” India only to see it fall into the hands of Wall Street. Neither Churchill nor the British labor leaders have the slightest doubt as to the game that Roosevelt and Willkie are playing.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor’s International Bond</h4>
<p class="fst">Murray, Green and John L. Lewis (yes, Lewis too) are as closely tied up with Roosevelt on this matter as Attlee and Bevin are tied up with Churchill. The statement about Wall Street, repeated above, appeared in the <strong>Tribune</strong>, the paper of Sir Stafford Cripps. That is Cripps’ alibi. All the more reason, therefore, for American workers to make it clear not only to the Indian masses but to the British people where they stand.</p>
<p><em>We must at all costs repudiate the sort of “freedom” Roosevelt and Willkie are planning for India, it is this way that the basis for the international solidarity of labor is established.</em></p>
<p>The rulers have their own foreign and colonial policy. We have seen what it is. The workers have their own foreign policy and must make it known, at the same time exposing pitilessly the policy of the rulers.</p>
<p><em>International solidarity in the struggle for socialism will come to the American masses in the same way as the Indian worker will learn to be a socialist – by constant experience with the unstable treachery of loud-mouthed leaders.</em></p>
<p>Many may believe that workers on opposite sides of the Pacific, so far separated from each other by distance, race, religion and language, without international organization, are many years away from the international solidarity which the struggle for socialism demands. We shall remind these doubters of a few facts:</p>
<p>Karl Marx, the greatest of all socialists, at whose name alone every imperialist jumps as if shot, founded the First International in 1864. It collapsed a few years later, but after its collapse Marx wrote confidently: “The international action of the working class does not by any means depend on the existence of the International Workingmen’s Association.” Some forty years later Lenin declared that the Russian Revolution would be saved by the working class of the world, though at that time no international organization existed. How this came true is another story, but this much can be said:</p>
<p><em>In 1914 the British workers were the most insular, the most narrow-minded, the most chauvinistic in the world. Six years later, when Winston Churchill (this very Churchill) had spent half a billion dollars to crush revolutionary Russia, the British working class gave him notice that if he didn’t leave Russia alone there would be a revolution in Britain. Seamen loaded a vessel with munitions in such a way that it could not sail. To save his skin Churchill had to capitulate.</em></p>
<p>The world today is a far tighter unit than it was in 1820. The chaos of imperialist war will teach American workers their duty to India. Meanwhile the first necessity of conscious workers is to see India not as a land over there, in the Pacific, far, far away, but to see it as Roosevelt, Willkie and Churchill see it – as a land whose future is vitally bound with ours.<br>
</p>
<h4>Win India for Labor!</h4>
<p class="fst">They seek to win India for capital, that is, for imperialism. We can fight this only by seeking to win India for labor, that is, for socialism. They see it and fight for it as a subject of their perpetual exploitation. We must see it as a means of oar immediate emancipation. They plan for a global war and a global imperialist peace. We must plan for as workers’ global peace, which can only be socialism.</p>
<p>We must see the world as broadly as the imperialists see it. In their way India is for them a vital question. We must recognize that they will win unless we in our way see that for us too India is a vital question. It is to contribute to this realization that these articles have been written.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
What India Means to the American Working Class
A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution
(18 January 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 3, 18 January 1943, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
(Concluded from last issue)
The British labor leaders, Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson of old, and Attlee, Bevin, Stafford Cripps and the others of today, know quite well that if Britain were to lose India tomorrow, nothing but socialism could save Britain from catastrophe and ruin. If you read their statements on India during the last twenty years, you will see that they have not one serious word of encouragement for the mass struggle of the workers and peasants of India. From India come the huge profits which enable these bureaucrats and the better-paid aristocrats of labor to get a little of the benefits of the British imperialist exploitation. They know, and that is why they shut their mouths.
But millions of workers in Britain, by far the vast majority, have no interest in the empire at all and when Gandhi visited Lancashire in 1931 many unemployed cotton workers, who were starving as a result of the Indian boycott, wished him the best of luck.
Today, among the rank and file, sentiment for Indian freedom is very strong. But already in the British labor press it is being said that Britain does not wish to “free” India only to see it fall into the hands of Wall Street. Neither Churchill nor the British labor leaders have the slightest doubt as to the game that Roosevelt and Willkie are playing.
Labor’s International Bond
Murray, Green and John L. Lewis (yes, Lewis too) are as closely tied up with Roosevelt on this matter as Attlee and Bevin are tied up with Churchill. The statement about Wall Street, repeated above, appeared in the Tribune, the paper of Sir Stafford Cripps. That is Cripps’ alibi. All the more reason, therefore, for American workers to make it clear not only to the Indian masses but to the British people where they stand.
We must at all costs repudiate the sort of “freedom” Roosevelt and Willkie are planning for India, it is this way that the basis for the international solidarity of labor is established.
The rulers have their own foreign and colonial policy. We have seen what it is. The workers have their own foreign policy and must make it known, at the same time exposing pitilessly the policy of the rulers.
International solidarity in the struggle for socialism will come to the American masses in the same way as the Indian worker will learn to be a socialist – by constant experience with the unstable treachery of loud-mouthed leaders.
Many may believe that workers on opposite sides of the Pacific, so far separated from each other by distance, race, religion and language, without international organization, are many years away from the international solidarity which the struggle for socialism demands. We shall remind these doubters of a few facts:
Karl Marx, the greatest of all socialists, at whose name alone every imperialist jumps as if shot, founded the First International in 1864. It collapsed a few years later, but after its collapse Marx wrote confidently: “The international action of the working class does not by any means depend on the existence of the International Workingmen’s Association.” Some forty years later Lenin declared that the Russian Revolution would be saved by the working class of the world, though at that time no international organization existed. How this came true is another story, but this much can be said:
In 1914 the British workers were the most insular, the most narrow-minded, the most chauvinistic in the world. Six years later, when Winston Churchill (this very Churchill) had spent half a billion dollars to crush revolutionary Russia, the British working class gave him notice that if he didn’t leave Russia alone there would be a revolution in Britain. Seamen loaded a vessel with munitions in such a way that it could not sail. To save his skin Churchill had to capitulate.
The world today is a far tighter unit than it was in 1820. The chaos of imperialist war will teach American workers their duty to India. Meanwhile the first necessity of conscious workers is to see India not as a land over there, in the Pacific, far, far away, but to see it as Roosevelt, Willkie and Churchill see it – as a land whose future is vitally bound with ours.
Win India for Labor!
They seek to win India for capital, that is, for imperialism. We can fight this only by seeking to win India for labor, that is, for socialism. They see it and fight for it as a subject of their perpetual exploitation. We must see it as a means of oar immediate emancipation. They plan for a global war and a global imperialist peace. We must plan for as workers’ global peace, which can only be socialism.
We must see the world as broadly as the imperialists see it. In their way India is for them a vital question. We must recognize that they will win unless we in our way see that for us too India is a vital question. It is to contribute to this realization that these articles have been written.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>An Answer to a Reader</h1>
<h3>(13 August 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_33" target="new">Vol. IX No. 33</a>, 13 August 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">I have received a letter from a member of the Lynn Committee for the Abolition of Segregation in the Armed Forces. The writer is Winston Olton and he challenges me on an article I wrote recently on<a href="../07/tenth.htm" target="new"><em>Eisenhower and Jim Crow</em></a> (<strong>Labor Action</strong>, July 2, 1945).</p>
<p>First of all there is a misunderstanding. He quotes “...efforts at collective action, completely integrated units of war, reached at least one impassible barrier, ” viz., “You cannot have, a Jim Crow society and a non-Jim Crow army.”</p>
<p>Olton says that this has no basis in fact, and he claims that there has been no collective action against Jim Crow.</p>
<p>I am glad to have the opportunity to develop the point further. By“collective action” I meant the powerful, in fact, the irresistible tendency of society to function in units which increasingly embrace greater and greater sections of the population.</p>
<p>Eisenhower expressed it most clearly at West Point when he said that if he had his way he would even put soldiers, sailors and airmen into one uniform. By this he meant to emphasize the great lesson of the war, that all armed forces have to be handled as one, so close is the interconnection and interplay between forces on land, on sea and in the air.<br>
</p>
<h4>Collective Tendencies</h4>
<p class="fst">Not only that. The home front, as everybody now knows, is linked to the battle front. The bombers attack soldiers in the field, lines of communication and factories where the munitions of war are being manufactured. The whole tendency of modern society is towards organization and action as a whole – collectively.</p>
<p>Now isn’t it obvious that in such a society the existence of<em>classes</em> comes into irreconcilable contradiction with the tendency towards collectivism? That is why we have the vicious oppression of the totalitarian states. Collective action is needed. But the division between <em>class</em> and <em>class</em> is so sharp and brings such fatal consequences in every sphere that, finally, only an iron dictatorship can insure any sort of order. The solution to this dilemma, of course, is the abolition of classes, i.e., socialism.</p>
<p><em>But the basic principles apply to the Negro question. The tendency of society is towards collective action. The segregation, the discrimination in other words, the separation of the Negroes continues. And I thought it remarkable that in the remarks of Eisenhower who hammers away at collective action, or if you will, unified action, in the armed forces, there should appear so clearly the special position of the Negro in American society.</em></p>
<p>Has this tendency to collective action any meaning for us who are enemies of Jim Crow? Yes. Most certainly. The workers are the only ones who can genuinely carry out collective action. The process of production itself today socializes labor, compels it to act in a unified manner on a national and soon, we hope, on an international scale.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Hope Is Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">When Olton complains that there has not been collective action against Jim Crow in the army he is in a sense justified. The only force which can abolish Jim Crow is the organized working-class. But so far the working class has been concerned chiefly with Jim Crow in the labor movement.</p>
<p><em>In general Negroes can legitimately complain that this is only a part of the struggle. Agreed. But it is the most important part. And Olton, I hope, will agree that since the Civil War no organization in the United States has struck such mighty blows at Jim Crow as the CIO.</em></p>
<p>The lesson is plain. The Negroes feel the discrimination most keenly and strike out against it everywhere. The Lynn Committee makes vigorous protests and organizes action against Jim Crow in the army. But Olton, I hope, understands that the Negro activity will have only incidental and unsatisfactory results if it does not finally stimulate the labor movement to enter into the struggle without reservations on all fronts.<br>
</p>
<h4>Prospects for Negro</h4>
<p class="fst">What are the prospects of this? In my opinion very good. And very good not on account of “optimism” and such like psychological reasons. First, I consider the chances good because of this same fundamental movement towards collective action which characterizes our contemporary society. The general tendency is towards collectivism.</p>
<p><em>The capitalists are drawn towards it. The workers are drawn towards it. The result is a sharpening of the class struggle. The contending parties seek more and more to mobilize under their own banner those forces closest to them. The Negroes are overwhelmingly proletarian and semi-proletarian. The signs are evident that the workers are becoming aware that the Negro struggle is their struggle. There is the great force to smash racism.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
An Answer to a Reader
(13 August 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 33, 13 August 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I have received a letter from a member of the Lynn Committee for the Abolition of Segregation in the Armed Forces. The writer is Winston Olton and he challenges me on an article I wrote recently onEisenhower and Jim Crow (Labor Action, July 2, 1945).
First of all there is a misunderstanding. He quotes “...efforts at collective action, completely integrated units of war, reached at least one impassible barrier, ” viz., “You cannot have, a Jim Crow society and a non-Jim Crow army.”
Olton says that this has no basis in fact, and he claims that there has been no collective action against Jim Crow.
I am glad to have the opportunity to develop the point further. By“collective action” I meant the powerful, in fact, the irresistible tendency of society to function in units which increasingly embrace greater and greater sections of the population.
Eisenhower expressed it most clearly at West Point when he said that if he had his way he would even put soldiers, sailors and airmen into one uniform. By this he meant to emphasize the great lesson of the war, that all armed forces have to be handled as one, so close is the interconnection and interplay between forces on land, on sea and in the air.
Collective Tendencies
Not only that. The home front, as everybody now knows, is linked to the battle front. The bombers attack soldiers in the field, lines of communication and factories where the munitions of war are being manufactured. The whole tendency of modern society is towards organization and action as a whole – collectively.
Now isn’t it obvious that in such a society the existence ofclasses comes into irreconcilable contradiction with the tendency towards collectivism? That is why we have the vicious oppression of the totalitarian states. Collective action is needed. But the division between class and class is so sharp and brings such fatal consequences in every sphere that, finally, only an iron dictatorship can insure any sort of order. The solution to this dilemma, of course, is the abolition of classes, i.e., socialism.
But the basic principles apply to the Negro question. The tendency of society is towards collective action. The segregation, the discrimination in other words, the separation of the Negroes continues. And I thought it remarkable that in the remarks of Eisenhower who hammers away at collective action, or if you will, unified action, in the armed forces, there should appear so clearly the special position of the Negro in American society.
Has this tendency to collective action any meaning for us who are enemies of Jim Crow? Yes. Most certainly. The workers are the only ones who can genuinely carry out collective action. The process of production itself today socializes labor, compels it to act in a unified manner on a national and soon, we hope, on an international scale.
The Hope Is Labor
When Olton complains that there has not been collective action against Jim Crow in the army he is in a sense justified. The only force which can abolish Jim Crow is the organized working-class. But so far the working class has been concerned chiefly with Jim Crow in the labor movement.
In general Negroes can legitimately complain that this is only a part of the struggle. Agreed. But it is the most important part. And Olton, I hope, will agree that since the Civil War no organization in the United States has struck such mighty blows at Jim Crow as the CIO.
The lesson is plain. The Negroes feel the discrimination most keenly and strike out against it everywhere. The Lynn Committee makes vigorous protests and organizes action against Jim Crow in the army. But Olton, I hope, understands that the Negro activity will have only incidental and unsatisfactory results if it does not finally stimulate the labor movement to enter into the struggle without reservations on all fronts.
Prospects for Negro
What are the prospects of this? In my opinion very good. And very good not on account of “optimism” and such like psychological reasons. First, I consider the chances good because of this same fundamental movement towards collective action which characterizes our contemporary society. The general tendency is towards collectivism.
The capitalists are drawn towards it. The workers are drawn towards it. The result is a sharpening of the class struggle. The contending parties seek more and more to mobilize under their own banner those forces closest to them. The Negroes are overwhelmingly proletarian and semi-proletarian. The signs are evident that the workers are becoming aware that the Negro struggle is their struggle. There is the great force to smash racism.
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<p class="title">CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya (Johnson-Forest Tendency), 1950</p>
<h1>State Capitalism and World Revolution</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source</span>: <em>State Capitalism and World Revolution</em>, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. <em>Note</em>: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen
bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage
where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society
in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in <em>The Invading Socialist
Society</em>:</p>
<p class="indentb">“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity
that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual
occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)</p>
<p>All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation
and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil
and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate
solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total
planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds
of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.</p>
<p>State-capitalism is in itself <em>the </em>total contradiction, absolute
antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and
counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today,
is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution
in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.</p>
<p>It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a
total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy
of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms
of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the
toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.</p>
<p>World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917
established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social
Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before
him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy.
But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the
Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the
Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s <em>Capital, </em>the proletarian revolution
and the dictatorship of the proletariat.</p>
<p>Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s <em>method </em>of economic analysis is
ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His <em>political </em>conception of
complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be
driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party
state. But today the problems of <em>production </em>which Lenin had to tackle
in Russia in 1920 are <em>universal</em>. No longer to be ignored is the
philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher
social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship
of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face
this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles
that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat,
the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.</p>
<p>The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual
and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the
sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor
between the intellectuals and the workers.</p>
<h3>Rationalism: the Philosophy of the Bourgeoisie</h3>
<p>The revolutionary bourgeoisie which established its power against feudalism
could only develop a philosophy of history and of society in which, on the one
hand, it spoke for the progress of all society, and on the other, for itself
as the leaders of society. This philosophy can be summed up in one word: rationalism.</p>
<p>Rationalism is the philosophy of bourgeois political economy. It is materialist
and not idealist in so far as it combats superstition, seeks to expand the productive
forces and increase the sum total of goods. But there is no such thing as a
classless materialism. Rationalism conceives this expansion as a division of
labor between the passive masses and the active elite. Thereby it reinstates
idealism. Because it does not and cannot doubt that harmonious progress is inevitable
by this path, the essence of rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism,
and uncritical or vulgar idealism.</p>
<p>In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was the
basis of a common attempt of individual men associated <em>in a natural environment
</em>to achieve <em>control over nature. </em>Today this division of labor is the
<em>control in social production </em>of the administrative elite <em>over the
masses. </em>Rationalism has reached its end in the complete divorce and absolute
disharmony between manual and intellectual labor, between the socialized proletariat
and the monster of centralized capital.</p>
<p>The specific political ideology developed by rationalism was democracy – equality
of opportunity for all men to rise to the top, and hence equality in all spheres
outside of production, before the law, at the polls and in the market.</p>
<p>Today, from end to end of the world, men know that democracy is bankrupt. What
is to take its place they do not know. The alternative seems to be planned economy
and one-party state. This is <em>the </em>philosophical question.</p>
<p>But the philosophy of planned economy and one-party state is distinguishable
from that of the bourgeoisie only by its more complete rationalism. The labor
bureaucracy in power or out of it sees the solution to the crisis of production
in scientific progress, greater output. It consciously seeks to plan and organize
the division of labor as the means to further accumulation of capital. In ideology
it is ready to expropriate those representatives of private property who stand
in the way of this complete rationalization.</p>
<p>But didn’t this bureaucracy develop out of the working class? It did and it
could only have developed out of the working class. It is a product of the modern
mass movement, created by the centralization of capital, and holds its position
only because of this movement. At the same time it cannot conceive the necessity
for abolishing the division of labor in production, the only solution to the
crisis in production. By a remorseless logic, therefore, representation of the
proletariat turns into its opposite, administration over the proletariat. The
end of bourgeois rationalism is this crisis of the revolution and counter-revolution
in production.</p>
<h3>The Hegelian Critique of Rationalism</h3>
<p>There are various critiques of rationalism. <em>All</em> base themselves on Hegel.
<em>All</em> are primarily concerned with the proletariat.</p>
<p>Until the epoch of the French Revolution, the philosophy of uncritical materialism
and uncritical idealism was not seriously challenged. It was the emergence of
the active masses in the French Revolution, on the one hand, and on the other,
the counter-revolution carried to its completion by Napoleon, which created
a crisis in this ideology.</p>
<p>As early as 1781, a challenge to rationalism had already come from backward
Germany. For the French and English petty-bourgeoisie, rationalism had
a material base, the advances of modern industry. The powerless German petty-bourgeoisie,
however, could criticize rationalism because for them it was only theory. Kant’s
<em>Critique of Pure Reason </em>posed the contradiction between advancing science
and human freedom. It was the first introduction into the modern world of dialectic
which begins with the recognition of contradiction. But Kant wrote before the
French Revolution and Napoleon. He could therefore believe in the solution of
the contradiction by a moral elite, all men who obeyed the moral law of acting
in accordance with the general interest. The uncritical or vulgar idealism of
rationalism was replaced by critical or moral idealism.</p>
<p>Hegel, on the other hand, having seen the revolution and counter�revolution,
could entertain no such reliance on men of goodwill. He began by placing contradiction
squarely in the center of reality. Thereby he rejected rationalism, either in
its traditional bourgeois form or its petty�bourgeois Kantian variation. Hegel
refused even to argue with anybody who doubted that contradictions are real.</p>
<p>In brief, Hegel’s critique of rationalism asserts:</p>
<p class="indentb">(a) Contradiction, <em>not</em> harmonious increase and decrease, is the creative
and moving principle of history. Society cannot develop unless it has to overcome
contradiction.</p>
<p class="indentb">(b) All development takes place as a result of <em>self</em>-movement,
<em>not</em> organization or direction by external forces.</p>
<p class="indentb">(c) Self-movement springs from and is the overcoming of antagonisms <em>within
</em>an organism, <em>not </em>the struggle against external foes.</p>
<p class="indentb">(d) It is<em> not </em>the world of nature that confronts man as an alien power
to be overcome. It is the alien power that he has himself created.</p>
<p class="indentb">(e) The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming
of internal antagonisms is <em>not </em>the enjoyment, ownership or use of goods,
but self-realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual
personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative
universality, <em>not </em>utility.</p>
<p>Between 1914 and 1917 Lenin, for the first time, mastered this.</p>
<p>These dialectical principles which were the heart of Hegel’s system are absolutely
revolutionary. After the French Revolution, no further progress in thought could
be made without holding fast to the principle of creativity and the contradictory
process by which this creativity develops. The next step forward in human thought
had to be the appropriation of these principles by the revolutionary masses,
dialectical materialism. Any other path meant barbarism and intellectual disintegration.
The Paris Commune and Marx’s <em>Capital, </em>these are the heights reached by
society in the nineteenth century. On the other side, what? Cavaignac, Napoleon
III, Bismarck; Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, the counter-revolutionary
regime of state-capital and the desperate soul-searching intellectuals.</p>
<p>It is fashionable to use Marx’s statement that he stood Hegel on his head to
transform Marx into a vulgar materialist preoccupied with technological progress
and the stomachs of the masses, expanded production and increased consumption.
It is today the most dangerous perversion of all Marx stood for. Marx himself
in his fight against vulgar materialism reaffirmed that "the Hegelian contradiction
(is) the source of all dialectic.” Without the dialectic of Hegel, the
idealism of Hegel could not be destroyed. But the dialectic of Hegel could be
retained and expanded only by the concept of the creative activity of the masses.
On this basis the dialectic became in Marx’s hands a revolutionary theoretical
weapon against bureaucracy in all its forms, but primarily and particularly
in the process of production.</p>
<p>As we wrote in <em>World Revolutionary Perspectives:</em></p>
<p class="indentb">“Hegel saw objective history as the successive manifestation of a world�spirit. Marx placed the objective movement in the process of production. Hegel had been
driven to see the perpetual quest for universality as necessarily confined to
the process of knowledge. Marx reversed this and rooted the quest for universality
in the need for the free and full development of all the inherent and acquired
characteristics in productive and intellectual labor. Hegel had made the motive
force of history the work of a few gifted individuals in whom was concentrated
the social movement. Marx propounded the view that it was only when ideas seized
hold of the masses that the process of history moved. Hegel dreaded the revolt
of the modern mass. Marx made the modern proletarian revolution the motive force
of modern history. Hegel placed the guardianship of society in the hands of the
bureaucracy. Marx saw future society as headed for ruin except under the rulership
of the proletariat and the vanishing distinction between intellectual and manual
labor.” (p. xx.)</p>
<p>Hegel could not carry the dialectical logic to its conclusions in the socialist
revolution because he did not and could not base himself on the advanced industrial
proletariat. He saw and described with horror the fragmentation and loss of
individuality by the worker under the capitalist division of labor. But the
workers whom he knew were not the organized, disciplined and united proletariat
which had by Marx’s time begun to announce itself as the new organizer of society
and which we know so well today.</p>
<p>Hegel could not know these and therefore he could not envisage universal freedom
for the masses of men. The result was that in politics, economics and philosophy,
he was compelled to reinstate the old rationalistic division of labor between
the intellectual elite and the masses. Hegel did not only imply this. He stated
it. The universal bureaucratic class, the intellectual class, must rule society.
Again, as we wrote in <em>World Revolutionary Perspectives:</em></p>
<p class="indentb">“Concrete universality for the mass of men was impossible. It was a mighty
decision to take. But Hegel did not flinch. Only the state, said Hegel, could
embody universality for the community. But <em>in particular </em>the state was
a defense against the revolutionary masses. Hegel had seen them and their activities
in European history and now the French Revolution had shown that nothing could
ever come of it. So it had been and it would ever be. At each stage, therefore,
a few chosen individuals represented the abstract spirit of mankind. Universality
had to be restricted to these. This was the basis of Hegel’s idealism. But with
the clear insight of a great scholar of both past and contemporary history,
and by his mastery of his method, he analyzed and drew his analysis to its conclusions.
The state would have to organize production. The chaos of capitalist production
would have to be disciplined by organizing the separate industries into corporations.
The state would be the state of the corporations. Universality being impossible
to all men, the state bureaucracy would embody universality and represent the
community.” (p. xix.)</p>
<p>So that in the end, the greatest of all the bourgeois philosophers, the most
encyclopedic mind that Europe had produced, the founder of the dialectic, in
Engels’ words, the maker of an epoch, could not transcend his historic barrier
and was recaptured in the rationalist trap from which he had sought so profoundly
to extricate European thought. Hegel destroyed all dogmatisms but one – the
dogmatism of the backwardness of the masses. Once the revolutionary solution
of the contradiction escaped him, he clung to the bureaucracy. The intellectual
elite would rescue society and discipline the revolting masses. Reinstated were
uncritical materialism, a purely material existence for the masses, and uncritical
idealism, the solution of social crisis by the intellectual bureaucracy.</p>
<p>We today who have seen Stalinism and the labor bureaucracy the world over can
first fully comprehend this, Marx’s essential critique of Hegel. [<a href="#n1">1</a>]<a name="r1"></a>
Only the revolutionary proletariat, said Marx, can appropriate the dialectical
logic of Hegel. Hegel himself, because he held fast to the intellectual elite,
ended up, despite his thoroughgoing analysis of contradiction and negativity,
in the crass materialism and crass idealism of the state bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Today Hegel’s idealism or Marx’s dialectical materialism are no longer theory.
The elite, the organizers, the administrators, the leaders, confront the self-mobilized
proletariat. Counter-revolution and revolution oppose one another without
intermediaries. Modern society offers no third camp between complete totalitarianism
and complete democracy.</p>
<h3>Rationalism: the Philosophy of Stalinism</h3>
<p>The philosophy of Stalinism is the philosophy of the elite, the bureaucracy,
the organizers, the leaders, clothed in Marxist terminology. It is the extreme,
the historical limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, carefully organized
to look like a new revolutionary doctrine.</p>
<p>Stalinism, the ideology of state-capitalism, is the reinstatement of
uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. The materialism is in the accumulation
theory: the kernel of all Stalinist-Titoist philosophy is that the worker
must work harder than he ever did before. The idealism is in the theory of the
party: the leaders, the elite, must lead as they never did before.</p>
<p>No one is more conscious of this than the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. At
the center of all ideological campaigns in Stalinist Russia is the attitude
of the workers toward their work:</p>
<p class="indentb">“People ... consider labor as something <em>alien </em>to them ... regard
their work joylessly or indifferently ... contrive to give society less output
and worse quality and to take from the government and from society as much as
they can."</p>
<p>The Stalinists call these workers:</p>
<p class="indentb">“... our loafers, our triflers, our grabbers, flouting labor discipline,
looking sullenly askance at their work – which leads to flaws in output,
to damaged equipment and tools, to breakdown in production schedules, and to
other <em>negative </em>manifestations which retard the increase of production.”
[<a href="#n2">2</a>]<a name="r2"></a> </p>
<p>For the Stalinist bureaucracy, state-property converts labor "from
the drab burden it was under capitalism into a matter of honor and glory, a
matter of prowess and heroism.” The intelligentsia tells the workers: You
work. The workers, on the other hand, continue to resist speed up and the discipline
of accumulated capital, statified or otherwise. This is called by the Stalinists
"the old outlook on labor,” a "capitalist survival in the popular
consciousness.” This is no longer a question of Soviet youth and textbooks
in political economy. It is now the workers counterposing to the bureaucracy
another "ideology” which the Stalinists admit "may spread to
alarming dimensions."</p>
<p>The Stalinists recognize the urgent necessity of mobilizing "all the vehicles
of ideological work” to combat this "outlook and conduct” and
to "educate the workers in the spirit of self-sacrificing work for
the national weal.” To the outlook and conduct of the workers, the bureaucracy
must counterpose its own outlook and conduct. The conduct is the unbridled savagery
of the police-state; the outlook is undisguised rationalism, "a materialistic
outlook upon life ... an exclusively scientific concept of the universe."</p>
<p>In June, 1947, the Central Committee of the CPSU withdrew from circulation
a textbook on the <em>History of Western Philosophy </em>by Georgi Alexandrov,
which in 1946 had won a Stalin prize. Zhdanov, who spoke for the Central Committee
at a national conference of "philosophical workers,” made it clear
that philosophy was no longer an "academic” question but of "enormous
scientific and political significance.” [<a href="#n3">3</a>]<a name="r3"></a>
The "gravest dangers” ("much graver than you imagine") threatened
unless the philosophical front was reorganized along two main lines: (a) the
rewriting of the history of philosophy as the history of science; and (b) the
divorce of Marx from Hegel and the purging of Hegel from philosophic discussion.
Six months later there appeared an outline of how "A Soviet History of
Philosophy” ought to be written. [<a href="#n4">4</a>]<a name="r4"></a></p>
<p>The main enemy of social progress from the days of the ancient Orient and Greece
to the present was discovered to be the idealism of superstition. Revolutionary
ideology was equated with the materialism of scientific progress. Quoting Stalin,
Marxism was described as retaining only "the rational kernel” of Hegel’s
dialectic logic, "so as to give it a contemporary scientific appearance."</p>
<p>On the surface it appeared that the Stalinist intervention was to defend the
materialism of Marx against the idealism of Hegel. In reality the theoretical
threat came from the revolutionary dialectical logic. In political economy the
Stalinists seek to defend the classless nature of state-property and planning.
The theoretical enemy is the theory of state-capitalism. In philosophy they
seek to propagate the fiction of the classless nature of rationalism and materialism.
The enemy is the proletariat resisting labor discipline by the bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Again and again Zhdanov attacked Alexandrov for "objectivism.” The
Stalinists are terrified by the obviously growing conviction that there is in
Stalinist Russia an "objective” basis for the "struggle of opposites,
the struggle between the old and the new, between the dying and the rising,
between the decaying and the developing.” Such an objective basis could
only be the class struggle. Hence they must purge Marxism of the Hegelian concept
of the objectivity of contradiction.</p>
<p>Materialism without the dialectics of objective contradiction is idealism.
If development does not take place by the overcoming of objective contradiction,
then everything depends on the subject, the leaders, the elite, the bureaucracy.
Zhdanov, the vulgar materialist, had therefore to demand that the philosophical
workers produce a "new aspect of movement, a new type of development, a
new dialectical law.” This exceptionally new, exceptionally subjective,
revision of Marxism was titled: "Criticism and Self-Criticism: The
Special Form of Struggle Between the Old and the New.” Zhdanov stated unambiguously
the inseparable connection between the new subjectivism and the Stalinist denial
of the class struggle in Russia:</p>
<p class="indentb">“In our Soviet society, where antagonistic classes have been liquidated,
the struggle between the old and the new, and consequently the development from
the lower to the higher, proceeds not in the form of struggle between antagonistic
classes and of cataclysms, as is the case under capitalism, but in the form
of criticism and self-criticism, which is the real motive force of our
development, a powerful instrument in the hands of the Party. This is, incontestably,
a new aspect of movement, a new type of development, a new dialectical law."</p>
<p>In 1949, the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR
delivered the new ideology which Zhdanov had ordered. [<a href="#n5">5</a>]<a name="r5"></a>
The development of Soviet society was identified with the consciousness, the
theory, the plan, the policy, the foresight of the Communist Party, the Soviet
state. The new idealism was proclaimed unequivocally:</p>
<p class="indentb">“Herein lies the strength and significance of our party, of scientific
theory, of socialist consciousness."</p>
<p>The steps of Hegel’s decline are here undeviatingly retraced. Hegel, who did
not know the socialized proletariat, began by regarding all history as the history
of the philosopher, of consciousness and self-consciousness, and ended
with the state bureaucracy. The Stalinists use almost the identical phrases.</p>
<p>The proletariat’s role in the struggle for socialism is to work harder and
harder, while the leadership and organization are left to the "criticism
and self-criticism” of the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. Everything
depends on the party, on the bureaucracy’s consciousness and self-consciousness
of correctness and incorrectness, <em>its </em>direction, <em>its </em>control,
<em>its </em>foresight. The masses are merely at the disposal of the party as
they are at the disposal of capital.</p>
<p>This is the Stalinist philosophy in every sphere, political economy, politics,
history, education, literature, art. The <em>History of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, </em>published before World War II, was the first comprehensive
statement of the primacy of the party, of political consciousness over objective
economic development, applied to the development of Russia before, during and
after the revolution. In 1943 <em>The Teaching of Political Economy in the Soviet
Union </em>was hailed as the reorganization by economists of all their work according
to the model of the <em>History. </em>Since the end of World War II, and particularly
with the philosophic systematization of the new idealism in 1947, the ideological
mobilization of the bureaucracy has been total. The Stalinist bureaucracy unambiguously
proclaims the one-party State of the Plan as the vital foundation of the Soviet
system.</p>
<p>To believe that this vigorous offensive in every sphere is a question of nationalism
is a mistake as crippling as the belief that Stalinism betrays the revolution
by social-patriotic support of the national state. In every country the
Stalinists represent bureaucratic manipulation of the proletariat by the elite,
the bureaucracy, the party. They are the extreme limit of the rationalism of
the bourgeoisie, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. Never before
has so gigantic a state mobilized itself with such murderous vigilance to keep
the proletariat at work while the leaders and organizers plan. This is the most
deadly enemy the proletariat has ever had. Rationalism and counter-revolution
have become one.</p>
<h3>The Ideological Crisis of the Intermediate Classes</h3>
<p>The totality of the crisis has given manifold forms to the counter-revolution.
The most deadly, the most insidious, the most dangerous is the Stalinist counter-revolution
because it springs from the proletariat and cloaks itself in Marxist terminology.
The most obviously reactionary, the most easily recognizable is the counter-revolution
of the middle classes. Because capitalism in its present stage, state-capitalism,
faces them with complete liquidation and absorption into the proletariat, they
propose the complete destruction of capitalism and return to a new medievalism,
based on natural inequality. This is the program of the Christian Humanists,
militantly anti-rationalist, militantly anti-democratic.</p>
<p>Like all forms of anti-rationalism, Christian Humanism leans heavily
upon the Hegelian dialectic. The Hegelian concept of objective contradiction – the
source of all dialectic – is transformed into a subjective conflict in the
individual between sin and salvation, between individual imperfection and divine
perfection. The crisis is moral and the solution must be moral, faith in divine
authority.</p>
<p>The Christian Humanists describe with brutal accuracy and prophetic dread the
fragmentation of the workers in large-scale production and therein the
threat to the very life of society. Nothing else could give them their crusading
obsession that rationalism has reached its ultimate, the destruction of society
itself. But the Christian Humanists cannot see the proletarian solution. That
is the hopeless dilemma out of which they have created a philosophy of complete
regression to religious idealism.</p>
<p>The Christian Humanists have a systematic political economy. They propose decentralized
self-governing corporations of private property with every worker in his
place. They have a philosophy of history. They believe in the eternal ambiguities
of the human situation and the impossibility of ever attaining human freedom
on earth. They have a theory of politics. The natural and ideological elite
must rule, the masses must not have absolute sovereignty. Since evil and imperfection
are eternal, they say, the alternatives are either limited sovereignty or unmitigated
authoritarianism.</p>
<p>These are the philosophic values which have helped de Gasperi in Italy and
the M.R.P. and de Gaulle in France to rally around them the desperate middle
classes. In increasing numbers, established university intellectuals in the
United States are attracted to the same conceptions, radiating from the University
of Chicago. There are individual nuances among the Christian Humanists, but
as an all-embracing philosophy, Christian Humanism prepares the middle
classes to resist to the end the proletarian revolution and to adapt themselves
at decisive moments to Fascism. (Of this Rauschning in Germany has given eloquent
testimony.) Hence, it is a useful weapon in the hands of big business and the
diminishing magnates, so diminished today that more than ever they are dependent
upon the middle classes for a mass base. In the United States, the Christian
Humanists (for example, Peter Drucker) will join with the labor bureaucracy
to keep the mass of workers in their place at the base of the hierarchy in production.</p>
<p>For the workers Christian Humanism is no problem. Their degradation in production
goes far beyond the moral capacity of any individual to aggravate or alleviate.
They attack the labor bureaucracy for precisely that for which the Christian
Humanists support it. However, for seducing intellectuals by the wholesale repudiation
of rationalism and for attracting them to Fascism, Christian Humanism plays
an important role in the war of ideologies springing from the total crisis in
production today.</p>
<p>The rationalism of the bourgeoisie has ended in the Stalinist one-party
bureaucratic-administrative state of the Plan. In their repulsion from
this rationalism and from the proletarian revolution, the middle classes fall
back upon the barbarism of Fascism. The anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist
petty-bourgeois intellectuals, themselves the victims of the absolute division
between mental and physical labor, do not know where to go or what to do. Unable
to base themselves completely upon the modern proletariat, they turn inward,
pursuing a self-destructive, soul-searching analysis of their own
isolation, alienation and indecision. They too appropriate the Hegelian dialectic,
interpreting it as an unceasing conflict in the individual between affirmation
and negation, between deciding for and deciding against.</p>
<p>These intellectuals are the most cultivated in the modern world, in the sense
of knowing the whole past of human culture. Having achieved what the idealism
of Hegel posed as the Absolute, they are undergoing a theoretical disintegration
without parallel in human history. In France this disintegration has assumed
the form of a literary movement, Existentialism. In America it takes the form
of a mania for psychoanalysis, reaching in to all layers of society but nowhere
more than among the most urbane, sensitive and cultivated individuals. In Germany
the intellectuals cannot choose between Christian Humanism and psychoanalysis,
whether guilt or sickness is the root of the German catastrophe. This is total
unreason, the disintegration of a society without values or perspective, the
final climax to centuries of division of labor between the philosophers and
the proletarians.</p>
<h3>Philosophy Must Become Proletarian</h3>
<p>There is no longer any purely <em>philosophical </em>answer to all this. These
philosophical questions, and very profound they are, Marxism says can be solved
only by the revolutionary action of the proletariat and the masses. There is
and can be no other answer. As we have said, we do not propose to do right what
the Stalinists have failed to do or do wrong.</p>
<p>Progress in Russia, says Zhdanov, is criticism and self-criticism. The
state owns the property, therefore the proletariat must work and work and work.
The proletarian revolution alone will put state-property in its place.</p>
<p>In the United States the bourgeoisie extols all the advantages of democracy,
the bureaucracy those of science. The proletarian revolution alone will put
science in its place and establish complete democracy.</p>
<p>The evils that Christian Humanism sees, the problem of alienation, of mechanized
existence, the alienated Existentialist, the alienated worker, internationalism,
peace – all are ultimate problems and beyond the reach of any <em>ideological
</em>solution.</p>
<p>The revolution, the mass proletarian revolution, the creativity of the masses,
everything begins here. This is Reason today. The great philosophical problems
have bogged down in the mire of Heidegger, Existentialism, psychoanalysis, or
are brutally "planned” by the bureaucracies. They can be solved only
in the revolutionary reason of the masses. This is what Lenin made into a universal
as early as the 1905 Revolution:</p>
<p class="indentb">“The point is that it is precisely the revolutionary periods that are
distinguished for their greater breadth, greater wealth, greater intelligence,
greater and more systematic activity, greater audacity and vividness of historical
creativeness, compared with periods of philistine, Cadet reformist progress."</p>
<p>He drove home the opposition between bourgeois reason and proletariat reason:</p>
<p class="indentb">“But Mr. Blank and Co. picture it the other way about, They pass off poverty
as historical-creative wealth. They regard the inactivity of the suppressed,
downtrodden masses as the triumph of the ‘systematic’ activity of the bureaucrats
and the bourgeoisie. They shout about the disappearance of sense and reason,
when the picking to pieces of parliamentary bills by all sorts of bureaucrats
and liberal ‘penny-a-liners’ gives way to a period of direct political
activity by the ‘common people,’ who in their simple way directly and immediately
destroy the organs of oppression of the people, seize power, appropriate for
themselves what was considered to be the property of all sorts of plunderers
of the people – in a word, precisely when the sense and reason of millions
of downtrodden people is awakening, not only for reading books but for action,
for living human action, for historical creativeness.” (<em>Selected Works</em>,
Vol. VII, p. 261.)</p>
<p>That was the first Russian Revolution. In the Second the proletariat created
the form of its political and social rule. Now the whole development of the
objective situation demands the fully liberated historical creativeness of the
masses, <em>their </em>sense and reason, a new and higher organization of labor,
new social ties, associated humanity. That is the solution to the problems of
production and to the problems of philosophy. Philosophy must become proletarian.</p>
<p>Yet there is a philosophical task in itself strictly philosophical. The doctrine
of negativity and the whole system of Hegel, the specific doctrines of Marx,
philosophical, political economy, party, all are geared to precisely this situation,
this impasse in every sphere which only the proletarian revolution can solve.
This is the task today, and politically and philosophically you cannot separate
it from production. The field is open, the proletariat, in so far as it is ready
to listen, is willing to hear this. Organized schools of bourgeois thought are
vulnerable from head to foot. In France, philosophers, historians, scientists,
and writers are active protagonists in heated debates over humanism (is it the
total rationalism of Stalinism, or Christian Humanism, or Existentialism?);
which of the three is the heir to Hegel?</p>
<p>Often intellectuals turn toward Marx and Lenin and Hegel. They meet Stalinism
which <em>spends incredible time, care, energy and vigilance in holding Marx
and Lenin within the bounds of their private-property state-property philos</em>ophy.
The Stalinists repeat interminably that dialectics is the transformation of
quantity into quality, leaps, breaks in continuity, opposition of capitalism
and socialism. It is part and parcel of their determination to represent state-property
as revolutionary. In 1917, when the struggle in the working class movement
was between reform and revolution, these conceptions may have been debatable.
Today all arguments fade into insignificance in face of the actuality. The critical
question today, which the Stalinists must avoid like the revolution, is how
was the October Revolution transformed into its opposite, the Stalinist counter-revolution,
and how is this counter-revolution in turn to be transformed into its
opposite. This is the dialectical law which Lenin mastered between 1914 and
1917, the negation of the negation, the self-mobilization of the proletariat
as the economics and politics of socialism.</p>
<p>The Stalinist bureaucracy is determined that not a hint of the revolutionary
doctrines of Hegel, Marx, Lenin should ever go out without <em>its</em> imprint,
<em>its </em>interpretation. The social cooperativeness and unity of modern labor
does not allow it any laxity from its cruel and merciless state-capitalist
need to make the workers work harder and harder. No hint of the <em>revolutionary
</em>struggle against bureaucracy must come to workers or to questing intellectuals.
Yet every strand of Marx’s and Lenin’s methodology, philosophy, political economy,
lead today directly to the destruction of bureaucracy as such.</p>
<p>Some petty-bourgeois professors and students, theoretically, in history,
philosophy and literature, are struggling through to a Marxist solution. The
proletariat constantly tries to create itself as the state, i.e., no state at
all. But Stalinism is the deadly enemy of both. It is the armed conscious active
counter-revolution.</p>
<p>The proletariat, like every organism, must from itself and its conditions develop
its own antagonisms and its own means of overcoming them. Stalinism is the decay
of world capitalism, a state-capitalism within the proletariat itself
and is in essence no more than an expression within the proletariat of the violent
and insoluble tensions of capitalism at the stage of state-capitalism.
One of the most urgent tasks is to trace the evolution of the counter-revolution
within the revolution, from liberalism through anarchism, Social-Democracy,
Noske, counter-revolutionary Menshevism, to Stalinism, its economic and
social roots at each stage, its political manifestations, its contradictions
and antagonisms. Unless Stalinism is attacked as the most potent mode of the
counter-revolution, the counter�revolution of our epoch, it cannot be
seriously attacked. But once this conception is grasped in all its implications,
philosophical and methodological, then Stalinism and its methods, its principles,
its aims, can be dealt a series of expanding blows against which it has no defense
except slander and assassination. Our document gives only a faint outline of
the tremendous scope of the revolutionary attack on Stalinism which the theory
of state-capitalism opens up. It is the very nature of our age which brings
philosophy from Lenin’s study in 1914 to the very forefront of the struggle
for the remaking of the world.</p>
<h3>Orthodox Trotskyism</h3>
<p>From all this the Fourth International has cut itself off by its state�property
theory.</p>
<p>The philosophical root of Trotsky’s mistake is not new, it is not difficult
when fully explained. The categories, the forms established by the proletarian
revolution in 1917, he took as permanent, fixed. The October Revolution had
undoubtedly manifested itself most strikingly in opposition to bourgeois society
by the abolition of private property and the institution of planning in the
sense of ability to direct "capital.” Trotsky drew the conclusion
that this was the distinguishing mark of the proletarian revolution. The reformist
bureaucracy was attached to private property, defense of the national state,
slavishly served the bourgeoisie, capitulated to it in crisis. He drew the conclusion
that all labor bureaucracies in the future would do the same, more or less.
The revolutionary party established state-property and was defeatist toward
the national state. Hence only revolutionary parties could do the same. Trotsky
did not recognize that although the October Revolution took these forms, the
forms were not permanent. There were antagonisms within them which would grow
and develop with the class struggle, presenting the revolution in new modes.
His philosophical method is known and clearly defined by Hegel the method of
synthetic cognition.</p>
<p>Today, the reading of Lenin shows that he never at any time allowed himself
to slip from seeing socialism as proletarian <em>power, </em>using all necessary
and objective forms but carefully distinguishing the <em>fundamental universal
</em>of proletarian power from the concrete molds into which history had forced
that specific revolution. For Lenin <em>the </em>readiness of Russia for socialism
was the appearance of the Soviet, a new form of social organization.</p>
<p>Trotsky, however, did not see what took place between 1944 and today. He is
not in any way responsible for the philosophical methods of Pablo and Germain.</p>
<p>Pablo has simply substituted <em>degeneration </em>for the universal of proletarian
power. This road is the road to ruin whether by way of Stalinism or otherwise.
Lenin’s <em>State and Revolution</em> is not a "norm.” It was the universal
drawn from analysis of the class struggle on a world scale and generalized.
It was an indispensable necessity of thought, by means of which Lenin could
grasp the concrete reality of 1917. Thought is and <em>must be </em>a relation
between the class, in our case the proletariat, the concrete conditions (Russia
in 1917) and the universal. Without the universal of proletarian democracy,
as Lenin pointed out with the utmost emphasis in 1916 against the imperialist
economists, the bourgeois crisis produces inevitably a <em>"depression </em>or
<em>suppression </em>of human reasoning.” There is only <em>"the effect
</em>of the horrible impressions, the painful consequences... .” Lenin
was not talking psychology. It was, he insisted, the method of <em>thought </em>which
was at stake.</p>
<p>In 1950 the universal is as far beyond 1917 as 1917 was beyond the Paris Commune.
A serious analysis of Stalinism will show that it is precisely the advanced
objective relations of society which compel the counter�revolution to assume
this form and dress itself in Marxism, fake action committees and all. We have
to draw a new universal, more concrete and embracing more creative freedom of
the masses than even <em>State and Revolution.</em></p>
<p>It is at this time that Pablo not only fails to do so but repudiates <em>State
and Revolution, </em>proposing instead that proletarian politics be guided for
centuries by the barbarous degradation in Russia and in the buffer states of
Eastern Europe. It is the end of any philosophic method and the most serious
of all theories of retrogression. In this mentality can be seen the germs which
in maturity make the complete Stalinist – absolute hostility to capitalism
as we have known it but a resigned acceptance that Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas
of proletarian power are Utopian. No more deadly deviation has ever appeared
in our movement.</p>
<p>Germain has no philosophical method for which we can spare space and time.
He bounces from side to side, affirming theories, dropping them and building
new ones, listing innumerable possibilities, analyzing not the laws of capitalism
but Outer Mongolia and the decrees of Mussolini in Northern Italy, gripped in
that most terrible of all logics, the logic of empiricism; effective only in
this important sense that his undisciplined verbiage and shifting generalizations
prepare minds for some such brutal solution as Pablo’s.</p>
<p>In a dark time Trotskyism maintained the continuity and struggled for the essentials
of Bolshevism. Its errors are not irreparable. Today it faces two roads: Pablo’s
road and the road of "Johnson-Forest.” The longer the hesitation,
the greater the price that will be paid.</p>
<p class="sig">August 4th, 1950.</p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="information"><span class="term"><a name="n1"></a><a href="#r1">1</a>.</span> Cf. "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,”
<em>Three Essays by Karl Marx, Selected from the Economic-Philosophical
Manuscripts</em>, p. 31; <em>Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, Marx-Engels
Gesamt-Ausgabe</em>, Abt. 1, Bd. 1, 1st Halbband. For English extract,
see <em>World Revolutionary Perspectives</em>, pp. xxi ff.</p>
<p class="information"><span class="term"><a name="n2"></a><a href="#r2">2</a>.</span> Communist Education of the Worker and
the Elimination of Capitalist Survivals from the Popular Consciousness”
by S. Kovalyov, published as <em>Ideological Conflicts in Soviet Russia</em> by
Public Affairs Press, Washington, D.C., 1948 (emphasis added).</p>
<p class="information"><span class="term"><a name="n3"></a><a href="#r3">3</a>.</span> "On the History of Philosophy,”
<em>Political Affairs</em>, April, 1948. </p>
<p class="information"><span class="term"><a name="n4"></a><a href="#r4">4</a>.</span> Published by the Public Affairs Press,
Washington, D.C., 1950.</p>
<p class="information"><span class="term"><a name="n5"></a><a href="#r5">5</a>.</span> <em>The Role of Socialist Consciousness
in the Development of Soviet Society </em>by F. V. Konstantinov, Foreign Languages
Publishing House, Moscow, 1950.</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../../index.htm">C L R James Archive</a>
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CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya (Johnson-Forest Tendency), 1950
State Capitalism and World Revolution
Source: State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. Note: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.
When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen
bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage
where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society
in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in The Invading Socialist
Society:
“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity
that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual
occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)
All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation
and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil
and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate
solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total
planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds
of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.
State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute
antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and
counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today,
is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution
in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.
It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a
total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy
of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms
of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the
toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.
World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917
established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social
Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before
him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy.
But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the
Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the
Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s Capital, the proletarian revolution
and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s method of economic analysis is
ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His political conception of
complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be
driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party
state. But today the problems of production which Lenin had to tackle
in Russia in 1920 are universal. No longer to be ignored is the
philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher
social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship
of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face
this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles
that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat,
the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.
The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual
and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the
sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor
between the intellectuals and the workers.
Rationalism: the Philosophy of the Bourgeoisie
The revolutionary bourgeoisie which established its power against feudalism
could only develop a philosophy of history and of society in which, on the one
hand, it spoke for the progress of all society, and on the other, for itself
as the leaders of society. This philosophy can be summed up in one word: rationalism.
Rationalism is the philosophy of bourgeois political economy. It is materialist
and not idealist in so far as it combats superstition, seeks to expand the productive
forces and increase the sum total of goods. But there is no such thing as a
classless materialism. Rationalism conceives this expansion as a division of
labor between the passive masses and the active elite. Thereby it reinstates
idealism. Because it does not and cannot doubt that harmonious progress is inevitable
by this path, the essence of rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism,
and uncritical or vulgar idealism.
In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was the
basis of a common attempt of individual men associated in a natural environment
to achieve control over nature. Today this division of labor is the
control in social production of the administrative elite over the
masses. Rationalism has reached its end in the complete divorce and absolute
disharmony between manual and intellectual labor, between the socialized proletariat
and the monster of centralized capital.
The specific political ideology developed by rationalism was democracy – equality
of opportunity for all men to rise to the top, and hence equality in all spheres
outside of production, before the law, at the polls and in the market.
Today, from end to end of the world, men know that democracy is bankrupt. What
is to take its place they do not know. The alternative seems to be planned economy
and one-party state. This is the philosophical question.
But the philosophy of planned economy and one-party state is distinguishable
from that of the bourgeoisie only by its more complete rationalism. The labor
bureaucracy in power or out of it sees the solution to the crisis of production
in scientific progress, greater output. It consciously seeks to plan and organize
the division of labor as the means to further accumulation of capital. In ideology
it is ready to expropriate those representatives of private property who stand
in the way of this complete rationalization.
But didn’t this bureaucracy develop out of the working class? It did and it
could only have developed out of the working class. It is a product of the modern
mass movement, created by the centralization of capital, and holds its position
only because of this movement. At the same time it cannot conceive the necessity
for abolishing the division of labor in production, the only solution to the
crisis in production. By a remorseless logic, therefore, representation of the
proletariat turns into its opposite, administration over the proletariat. The
end of bourgeois rationalism is this crisis of the revolution and counter-revolution
in production.
The Hegelian Critique of Rationalism
There are various critiques of rationalism. All base themselves on Hegel.
All are primarily concerned with the proletariat.
Until the epoch of the French Revolution, the philosophy of uncritical materialism
and uncritical idealism was not seriously challenged. It was the emergence of
the active masses in the French Revolution, on the one hand, and on the other,
the counter-revolution carried to its completion by Napoleon, which created
a crisis in this ideology.
As early as 1781, a challenge to rationalism had already come from backward
Germany. For the French and English petty-bourgeoisie, rationalism had
a material base, the advances of modern industry. The powerless German petty-bourgeoisie,
however, could criticize rationalism because for them it was only theory. Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason posed the contradiction between advancing science
and human freedom. It was the first introduction into the modern world of dialectic
which begins with the recognition of contradiction. But Kant wrote before the
French Revolution and Napoleon. He could therefore believe in the solution of
the contradiction by a moral elite, all men who obeyed the moral law of acting
in accordance with the general interest. The uncritical or vulgar idealism of
rationalism was replaced by critical or moral idealism.
Hegel, on the other hand, having seen the revolution and counter�revolution,
could entertain no such reliance on men of goodwill. He began by placing contradiction
squarely in the center of reality. Thereby he rejected rationalism, either in
its traditional bourgeois form or its petty�bourgeois Kantian variation. Hegel
refused even to argue with anybody who doubted that contradictions are real.
In brief, Hegel’s critique of rationalism asserts:
(a) Contradiction, not harmonious increase and decrease, is the creative
and moving principle of history. Society cannot develop unless it has to overcome
contradiction.
(b) All development takes place as a result of self-movement,
not organization or direction by external forces.
(c) Self-movement springs from and is the overcoming of antagonisms within
an organism, not the struggle against external foes.
(d) It is not the world of nature that confronts man as an alien power
to be overcome. It is the alien power that he has himself created.
(e) The end toward which mankind is inexorably developing by the constant overcoming
of internal antagonisms is not the enjoyment, ownership or use of goods,
but self-realization, creativity based upon the incorporation into the individual
personality of the whole previous development of humanity. Freedom is creative
universality, not utility.
Between 1914 and 1917 Lenin, for the first time, mastered this.
These dialectical principles which were the heart of Hegel’s system are absolutely
revolutionary. After the French Revolution, no further progress in thought could
be made without holding fast to the principle of creativity and the contradictory
process by which this creativity develops. The next step forward in human thought
had to be the appropriation of these principles by the revolutionary masses,
dialectical materialism. Any other path meant barbarism and intellectual disintegration.
The Paris Commune and Marx’s Capital, these are the heights reached by
society in the nineteenth century. On the other side, what? Cavaignac, Napoleon
III, Bismarck; Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, the counter-revolutionary
regime of state-capital and the desperate soul-searching intellectuals.
It is fashionable to use Marx’s statement that he stood Hegel on his head to
transform Marx into a vulgar materialist preoccupied with technological progress
and the stomachs of the masses, expanded production and increased consumption.
It is today the most dangerous perversion of all Marx stood for. Marx himself
in his fight against vulgar materialism reaffirmed that "the Hegelian contradiction
(is) the source of all dialectic.” Without the dialectic of Hegel, the
idealism of Hegel could not be destroyed. But the dialectic of Hegel could be
retained and expanded only by the concept of the creative activity of the masses.
On this basis the dialectic became in Marx’s hands a revolutionary theoretical
weapon against bureaucracy in all its forms, but primarily and particularly
in the process of production.
As we wrote in World Revolutionary Perspectives:
“Hegel saw objective history as the successive manifestation of a world�spirit. Marx placed the objective movement in the process of production. Hegel had been
driven to see the perpetual quest for universality as necessarily confined to
the process of knowledge. Marx reversed this and rooted the quest for universality
in the need for the free and full development of all the inherent and acquired
characteristics in productive and intellectual labor. Hegel had made the motive
force of history the work of a few gifted individuals in whom was concentrated
the social movement. Marx propounded the view that it was only when ideas seized
hold of the masses that the process of history moved. Hegel dreaded the revolt
of the modern mass. Marx made the modern proletarian revolution the motive force
of modern history. Hegel placed the guardianship of society in the hands of the
bureaucracy. Marx saw future society as headed for ruin except under the rulership
of the proletariat and the vanishing distinction between intellectual and manual
labor.” (p. xx.)
Hegel could not carry the dialectical logic to its conclusions in the socialist
revolution because he did not and could not base himself on the advanced industrial
proletariat. He saw and described with horror the fragmentation and loss of
individuality by the worker under the capitalist division of labor. But the
workers whom he knew were not the organized, disciplined and united proletariat
which had by Marx’s time begun to announce itself as the new organizer of society
and which we know so well today.
Hegel could not know these and therefore he could not envisage universal freedom
for the masses of men. The result was that in politics, economics and philosophy,
he was compelled to reinstate the old rationalistic division of labor between
the intellectual elite and the masses. Hegel did not only imply this. He stated
it. The universal bureaucratic class, the intellectual class, must rule society.
Again, as we wrote in World Revolutionary Perspectives:
“Concrete universality for the mass of men was impossible. It was a mighty
decision to take. But Hegel did not flinch. Only the state, said Hegel, could
embody universality for the community. But in particular the state was
a defense against the revolutionary masses. Hegel had seen them and their activities
in European history and now the French Revolution had shown that nothing could
ever come of it. So it had been and it would ever be. At each stage, therefore,
a few chosen individuals represented the abstract spirit of mankind. Universality
had to be restricted to these. This was the basis of Hegel’s idealism. But with
the clear insight of a great scholar of both past and contemporary history,
and by his mastery of his method, he analyzed and drew his analysis to its conclusions.
The state would have to organize production. The chaos of capitalist production
would have to be disciplined by organizing the separate industries into corporations.
The state would be the state of the corporations. Universality being impossible
to all men, the state bureaucracy would embody universality and represent the
community.” (p. xix.)
So that in the end, the greatest of all the bourgeois philosophers, the most
encyclopedic mind that Europe had produced, the founder of the dialectic, in
Engels’ words, the maker of an epoch, could not transcend his historic barrier
and was recaptured in the rationalist trap from which he had sought so profoundly
to extricate European thought. Hegel destroyed all dogmatisms but one – the
dogmatism of the backwardness of the masses. Once the revolutionary solution
of the contradiction escaped him, he clung to the bureaucracy. The intellectual
elite would rescue society and discipline the revolting masses. Reinstated were
uncritical materialism, a purely material existence for the masses, and uncritical
idealism, the solution of social crisis by the intellectual bureaucracy.
We today who have seen Stalinism and the labor bureaucracy the world over can
first fully comprehend this, Marx’s essential critique of Hegel. [1]
Only the revolutionary proletariat, said Marx, can appropriate the dialectical
logic of Hegel. Hegel himself, because he held fast to the intellectual elite,
ended up, despite his thoroughgoing analysis of contradiction and negativity,
in the crass materialism and crass idealism of the state bureaucracy.
Today Hegel’s idealism or Marx’s dialectical materialism are no longer theory.
The elite, the organizers, the administrators, the leaders, confront the self-mobilized
proletariat. Counter-revolution and revolution oppose one another without
intermediaries. Modern society offers no third camp between complete totalitarianism
and complete democracy.
Rationalism: the Philosophy of Stalinism
The philosophy of Stalinism is the philosophy of the elite, the bureaucracy,
the organizers, the leaders, clothed in Marxist terminology. It is the extreme,
the historical limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, carefully organized
to look like a new revolutionary doctrine.
Stalinism, the ideology of state-capitalism, is the reinstatement of
uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. The materialism is in the accumulation
theory: the kernel of all Stalinist-Titoist philosophy is that the worker
must work harder than he ever did before. The idealism is in the theory of the
party: the leaders, the elite, must lead as they never did before.
No one is more conscious of this than the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. At
the center of all ideological campaigns in Stalinist Russia is the attitude
of the workers toward their work:
“People ... consider labor as something alien to them ... regard
their work joylessly or indifferently ... contrive to give society less output
and worse quality and to take from the government and from society as much as
they can."
The Stalinists call these workers:
“... our loafers, our triflers, our grabbers, flouting labor discipline,
looking sullenly askance at their work – which leads to flaws in output,
to damaged equipment and tools, to breakdown in production schedules, and to
other negative manifestations which retard the increase of production.”
[2]
For the Stalinist bureaucracy, state-property converts labor "from
the drab burden it was under capitalism into a matter of honor and glory, a
matter of prowess and heroism.” The intelligentsia tells the workers: You
work. The workers, on the other hand, continue to resist speed up and the discipline
of accumulated capital, statified or otherwise. This is called by the Stalinists
"the old outlook on labor,” a "capitalist survival in the popular
consciousness.” This is no longer a question of Soviet youth and textbooks
in political economy. It is now the workers counterposing to the bureaucracy
another "ideology” which the Stalinists admit "may spread to
alarming dimensions."
The Stalinists recognize the urgent necessity of mobilizing "all the vehicles
of ideological work” to combat this "outlook and conduct” and
to "educate the workers in the spirit of self-sacrificing work for
the national weal.” To the outlook and conduct of the workers, the bureaucracy
must counterpose its own outlook and conduct. The conduct is the unbridled savagery
of the police-state; the outlook is undisguised rationalism, "a materialistic
outlook upon life ... an exclusively scientific concept of the universe."
In June, 1947, the Central Committee of the CPSU withdrew from circulation
a textbook on the History of Western Philosophy by Georgi Alexandrov,
which in 1946 had won a Stalin prize. Zhdanov, who spoke for the Central Committee
at a national conference of "philosophical workers,” made it clear
that philosophy was no longer an "academic” question but of "enormous
scientific and political significance.” [3]
The "gravest dangers” ("much graver than you imagine") threatened
unless the philosophical front was reorganized along two main lines: (a) the
rewriting of the history of philosophy as the history of science; and (b) the
divorce of Marx from Hegel and the purging of Hegel from philosophic discussion.
Six months later there appeared an outline of how "A Soviet History of
Philosophy” ought to be written. [4]
The main enemy of social progress from the days of the ancient Orient and Greece
to the present was discovered to be the idealism of superstition. Revolutionary
ideology was equated with the materialism of scientific progress. Quoting Stalin,
Marxism was described as retaining only "the rational kernel” of Hegel’s
dialectic logic, "so as to give it a contemporary scientific appearance."
On the surface it appeared that the Stalinist intervention was to defend the
materialism of Marx against the idealism of Hegel. In reality the theoretical
threat came from the revolutionary dialectical logic. In political economy the
Stalinists seek to defend the classless nature of state-property and planning.
The theoretical enemy is the theory of state-capitalism. In philosophy they
seek to propagate the fiction of the classless nature of rationalism and materialism.
The enemy is the proletariat resisting labor discipline by the bureaucracy.
Again and again Zhdanov attacked Alexandrov for "objectivism.” The
Stalinists are terrified by the obviously growing conviction that there is in
Stalinist Russia an "objective” basis for the "struggle of opposites,
the struggle between the old and the new, between the dying and the rising,
between the decaying and the developing.” Such an objective basis could
only be the class struggle. Hence they must purge Marxism of the Hegelian concept
of the objectivity of contradiction.
Materialism without the dialectics of objective contradiction is idealism.
If development does not take place by the overcoming of objective contradiction,
then everything depends on the subject, the leaders, the elite, the bureaucracy.
Zhdanov, the vulgar materialist, had therefore to demand that the philosophical
workers produce a "new aspect of movement, a new type of development, a
new dialectical law.” This exceptionally new, exceptionally subjective,
revision of Marxism was titled: "Criticism and Self-Criticism: The
Special Form of Struggle Between the Old and the New.” Zhdanov stated unambiguously
the inseparable connection between the new subjectivism and the Stalinist denial
of the class struggle in Russia:
“In our Soviet society, where antagonistic classes have been liquidated,
the struggle between the old and the new, and consequently the development from
the lower to the higher, proceeds not in the form of struggle between antagonistic
classes and of cataclysms, as is the case under capitalism, but in the form
of criticism and self-criticism, which is the real motive force of our
development, a powerful instrument in the hands of the Party. This is, incontestably,
a new aspect of movement, a new type of development, a new dialectical law."
In 1949, the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR
delivered the new ideology which Zhdanov had ordered. [5]
The development of Soviet society was identified with the consciousness, the
theory, the plan, the policy, the foresight of the Communist Party, the Soviet
state. The new idealism was proclaimed unequivocally:
“Herein lies the strength and significance of our party, of scientific
theory, of socialist consciousness."
The steps of Hegel’s decline are here undeviatingly retraced. Hegel, who did
not know the socialized proletariat, began by regarding all history as the history
of the philosopher, of consciousness and self-consciousness, and ended
with the state bureaucracy. The Stalinists use almost the identical phrases.
The proletariat’s role in the struggle for socialism is to work harder and
harder, while the leadership and organization are left to the "criticism
and self-criticism” of the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. Everything
depends on the party, on the bureaucracy’s consciousness and self-consciousness
of correctness and incorrectness, its direction, its control,
its foresight. The masses are merely at the disposal of the party as
they are at the disposal of capital.
This is the Stalinist philosophy in every sphere, political economy, politics,
history, education, literature, art. The History of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, published before World War II, was the first comprehensive
statement of the primacy of the party, of political consciousness over objective
economic development, applied to the development of Russia before, during and
after the revolution. In 1943 The Teaching of Political Economy in the Soviet
Union was hailed as the reorganization by economists of all their work according
to the model of the History. Since the end of World War II, and particularly
with the philosophic systematization of the new idealism in 1947, the ideological
mobilization of the bureaucracy has been total. The Stalinist bureaucracy unambiguously
proclaims the one-party State of the Plan as the vital foundation of the Soviet
system.
To believe that this vigorous offensive in every sphere is a question of nationalism
is a mistake as crippling as the belief that Stalinism betrays the revolution
by social-patriotic support of the national state. In every country the
Stalinists represent bureaucratic manipulation of the proletariat by the elite,
the bureaucracy, the party. They are the extreme limit of the rationalism of
the bourgeoisie, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. Never before
has so gigantic a state mobilized itself with such murderous vigilance to keep
the proletariat at work while the leaders and organizers plan. This is the most
deadly enemy the proletariat has ever had. Rationalism and counter-revolution
have become one.
The Ideological Crisis of the Intermediate Classes
The totality of the crisis has given manifold forms to the counter-revolution.
The most deadly, the most insidious, the most dangerous is the Stalinist counter-revolution
because it springs from the proletariat and cloaks itself in Marxist terminology.
The most obviously reactionary, the most easily recognizable is the counter-revolution
of the middle classes. Because capitalism in its present stage, state-capitalism,
faces them with complete liquidation and absorption into the proletariat, they
propose the complete destruction of capitalism and return to a new medievalism,
based on natural inequality. This is the program of the Christian Humanists,
militantly anti-rationalist, militantly anti-democratic.
Like all forms of anti-rationalism, Christian Humanism leans heavily
upon the Hegelian dialectic. The Hegelian concept of objective contradiction – the
source of all dialectic – is transformed into a subjective conflict in the
individual between sin and salvation, between individual imperfection and divine
perfection. The crisis is moral and the solution must be moral, faith in divine
authority.
The Christian Humanists describe with brutal accuracy and prophetic dread the
fragmentation of the workers in large-scale production and therein the
threat to the very life of society. Nothing else could give them their crusading
obsession that rationalism has reached its ultimate, the destruction of society
itself. But the Christian Humanists cannot see the proletarian solution. That
is the hopeless dilemma out of which they have created a philosophy of complete
regression to religious idealism.
The Christian Humanists have a systematic political economy. They propose decentralized
self-governing corporations of private property with every worker in his
place. They have a philosophy of history. They believe in the eternal ambiguities
of the human situation and the impossibility of ever attaining human freedom
on earth. They have a theory of politics. The natural and ideological elite
must rule, the masses must not have absolute sovereignty. Since evil and imperfection
are eternal, they say, the alternatives are either limited sovereignty or unmitigated
authoritarianism.
These are the philosophic values which have helped de Gasperi in Italy and
the M.R.P. and de Gaulle in France to rally around them the desperate middle
classes. In increasing numbers, established university intellectuals in the
United States are attracted to the same conceptions, radiating from the University
of Chicago. There are individual nuances among the Christian Humanists, but
as an all-embracing philosophy, Christian Humanism prepares the middle
classes to resist to the end the proletarian revolution and to adapt themselves
at decisive moments to Fascism. (Of this Rauschning in Germany has given eloquent
testimony.) Hence, it is a useful weapon in the hands of big business and the
diminishing magnates, so diminished today that more than ever they are dependent
upon the middle classes for a mass base. In the United States, the Christian
Humanists (for example, Peter Drucker) will join with the labor bureaucracy
to keep the mass of workers in their place at the base of the hierarchy in production.
For the workers Christian Humanism is no problem. Their degradation in production
goes far beyond the moral capacity of any individual to aggravate or alleviate.
They attack the labor bureaucracy for precisely that for which the Christian
Humanists support it. However, for seducing intellectuals by the wholesale repudiation
of rationalism and for attracting them to Fascism, Christian Humanism plays
an important role in the war of ideologies springing from the total crisis in
production today.
The rationalism of the bourgeoisie has ended in the Stalinist one-party
bureaucratic-administrative state of the Plan. In their repulsion from
this rationalism and from the proletarian revolution, the middle classes fall
back upon the barbarism of Fascism. The anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist
petty-bourgeois intellectuals, themselves the victims of the absolute division
between mental and physical labor, do not know where to go or what to do. Unable
to base themselves completely upon the modern proletariat, they turn inward,
pursuing a self-destructive, soul-searching analysis of their own
isolation, alienation and indecision. They too appropriate the Hegelian dialectic,
interpreting it as an unceasing conflict in the individual between affirmation
and negation, between deciding for and deciding against.
These intellectuals are the most cultivated in the modern world, in the sense
of knowing the whole past of human culture. Having achieved what the idealism
of Hegel posed as the Absolute, they are undergoing a theoretical disintegration
without parallel in human history. In France this disintegration has assumed
the form of a literary movement, Existentialism. In America it takes the form
of a mania for psychoanalysis, reaching in to all layers of society but nowhere
more than among the most urbane, sensitive and cultivated individuals. In Germany
the intellectuals cannot choose between Christian Humanism and psychoanalysis,
whether guilt or sickness is the root of the German catastrophe. This is total
unreason, the disintegration of a society without values or perspective, the
final climax to centuries of division of labor between the philosophers and
the proletarians.
Philosophy Must Become Proletarian
There is no longer any purely philosophical answer to all this. These
philosophical questions, and very profound they are, Marxism says can be solved
only by the revolutionary action of the proletariat and the masses. There is
and can be no other answer. As we have said, we do not propose to do right what
the Stalinists have failed to do or do wrong.
Progress in Russia, says Zhdanov, is criticism and self-criticism. The
state owns the property, therefore the proletariat must work and work and work.
The proletarian revolution alone will put state-property in its place.
In the United States the bourgeoisie extols all the advantages of democracy,
the bureaucracy those of science. The proletarian revolution alone will put
science in its place and establish complete democracy.
The evils that Christian Humanism sees, the problem of alienation, of mechanized
existence, the alienated Existentialist, the alienated worker, internationalism,
peace – all are ultimate problems and beyond the reach of any ideological
solution.
The revolution, the mass proletarian revolution, the creativity of the masses,
everything begins here. This is Reason today. The great philosophical problems
have bogged down in the mire of Heidegger, Existentialism, psychoanalysis, or
are brutally "planned” by the bureaucracies. They can be solved only
in the revolutionary reason of the masses. This is what Lenin made into a universal
as early as the 1905 Revolution:
“The point is that it is precisely the revolutionary periods that are
distinguished for their greater breadth, greater wealth, greater intelligence,
greater and more systematic activity, greater audacity and vividness of historical
creativeness, compared with periods of philistine, Cadet reformist progress."
He drove home the opposition between bourgeois reason and proletariat reason:
“But Mr. Blank and Co. picture it the other way about, They pass off poverty
as historical-creative wealth. They regard the inactivity of the suppressed,
downtrodden masses as the triumph of the ‘systematic’ activity of the bureaucrats
and the bourgeoisie. They shout about the disappearance of sense and reason,
when the picking to pieces of parliamentary bills by all sorts of bureaucrats
and liberal ‘penny-a-liners’ gives way to a period of direct political
activity by the ‘common people,’ who in their simple way directly and immediately
destroy the organs of oppression of the people, seize power, appropriate for
themselves what was considered to be the property of all sorts of plunderers
of the people – in a word, precisely when the sense and reason of millions
of downtrodden people is awakening, not only for reading books but for action,
for living human action, for historical creativeness.” (Selected Works,
Vol. VII, p. 261.)
That was the first Russian Revolution. In the Second the proletariat created
the form of its political and social rule. Now the whole development of the
objective situation demands the fully liberated historical creativeness of the
masses, their sense and reason, a new and higher organization of labor,
new social ties, associated humanity. That is the solution to the problems of
production and to the problems of philosophy. Philosophy must become proletarian.
Yet there is a philosophical task in itself strictly philosophical. The doctrine
of negativity and the whole system of Hegel, the specific doctrines of Marx,
philosophical, political economy, party, all are geared to precisely this situation,
this impasse in every sphere which only the proletarian revolution can solve.
This is the task today, and politically and philosophically you cannot separate
it from production. The field is open, the proletariat, in so far as it is ready
to listen, is willing to hear this. Organized schools of bourgeois thought are
vulnerable from head to foot. In France, philosophers, historians, scientists,
and writers are active protagonists in heated debates over humanism (is it the
total rationalism of Stalinism, or Christian Humanism, or Existentialism?);
which of the three is the heir to Hegel?
Often intellectuals turn toward Marx and Lenin and Hegel. They meet Stalinism
which spends incredible time, care, energy and vigilance in holding Marx
and Lenin within the bounds of their private-property state-property philosophy.
The Stalinists repeat interminably that dialectics is the transformation of
quantity into quality, leaps, breaks in continuity, opposition of capitalism
and socialism. It is part and parcel of their determination to represent state-property
as revolutionary. In 1917, when the struggle in the working class movement
was between reform and revolution, these conceptions may have been debatable.
Today all arguments fade into insignificance in face of the actuality. The critical
question today, which the Stalinists must avoid like the revolution, is how
was the October Revolution transformed into its opposite, the Stalinist counter-revolution,
and how is this counter-revolution in turn to be transformed into its
opposite. This is the dialectical law which Lenin mastered between 1914 and
1917, the negation of the negation, the self-mobilization of the proletariat
as the economics and politics of socialism.
The Stalinist bureaucracy is determined that not a hint of the revolutionary
doctrines of Hegel, Marx, Lenin should ever go out without its imprint,
its interpretation. The social cooperativeness and unity of modern labor
does not allow it any laxity from its cruel and merciless state-capitalist
need to make the workers work harder and harder. No hint of the revolutionary
struggle against bureaucracy must come to workers or to questing intellectuals.
Yet every strand of Marx’s and Lenin’s methodology, philosophy, political economy,
lead today directly to the destruction of bureaucracy as such.
Some petty-bourgeois professors and students, theoretically, in history,
philosophy and literature, are struggling through to a Marxist solution. The
proletariat constantly tries to create itself as the state, i.e., no state at
all. But Stalinism is the deadly enemy of both. It is the armed conscious active
counter-revolution.
The proletariat, like every organism, must from itself and its conditions develop
its own antagonisms and its own means of overcoming them. Stalinism is the decay
of world capitalism, a state-capitalism within the proletariat itself
and is in essence no more than an expression within the proletariat of the violent
and insoluble tensions of capitalism at the stage of state-capitalism.
One of the most urgent tasks is to trace the evolution of the counter-revolution
within the revolution, from liberalism through anarchism, Social-Democracy,
Noske, counter-revolutionary Menshevism, to Stalinism, its economic and
social roots at each stage, its political manifestations, its contradictions
and antagonisms. Unless Stalinism is attacked as the most potent mode of the
counter-revolution, the counter�revolution of our epoch, it cannot be
seriously attacked. But once this conception is grasped in all its implications,
philosophical and methodological, then Stalinism and its methods, its principles,
its aims, can be dealt a series of expanding blows against which it has no defense
except slander and assassination. Our document gives only a faint outline of
the tremendous scope of the revolutionary attack on Stalinism which the theory
of state-capitalism opens up. It is the very nature of our age which brings
philosophy from Lenin’s study in 1914 to the very forefront of the struggle
for the remaking of the world.
Orthodox Trotskyism
From all this the Fourth International has cut itself off by its state�property
theory.
The philosophical root of Trotsky’s mistake is not new, it is not difficult
when fully explained. The categories, the forms established by the proletarian
revolution in 1917, he took as permanent, fixed. The October Revolution had
undoubtedly manifested itself most strikingly in opposition to bourgeois society
by the abolition of private property and the institution of planning in the
sense of ability to direct "capital.” Trotsky drew the conclusion
that this was the distinguishing mark of the proletarian revolution. The reformist
bureaucracy was attached to private property, defense of the national state,
slavishly served the bourgeoisie, capitulated to it in crisis. He drew the conclusion
that all labor bureaucracies in the future would do the same, more or less.
The revolutionary party established state-property and was defeatist toward
the national state. Hence only revolutionary parties could do the same. Trotsky
did not recognize that although the October Revolution took these forms, the
forms were not permanent. There were antagonisms within them which would grow
and develop with the class struggle, presenting the revolution in new modes.
His philosophical method is known and clearly defined by Hegel the method of
synthetic cognition.
Today, the reading of Lenin shows that he never at any time allowed himself
to slip from seeing socialism as proletarian power, using all necessary
and objective forms but carefully distinguishing the fundamental universal
of proletarian power from the concrete molds into which history had forced
that specific revolution. For Lenin the readiness of Russia for socialism
was the appearance of the Soviet, a new form of social organization.
Trotsky, however, did not see what took place between 1944 and today. He is
not in any way responsible for the philosophical methods of Pablo and Germain.
Pablo has simply substituted degeneration for the universal of proletarian
power. This road is the road to ruin whether by way of Stalinism or otherwise.
Lenin’s State and Revolution is not a "norm.” It was the universal
drawn from analysis of the class struggle on a world scale and generalized.
It was an indispensable necessity of thought, by means of which Lenin could
grasp the concrete reality of 1917. Thought is and must be a relation
between the class, in our case the proletariat, the concrete conditions (Russia
in 1917) and the universal. Without the universal of proletarian democracy,
as Lenin pointed out with the utmost emphasis in 1916 against the imperialist
economists, the bourgeois crisis produces inevitably a "depression or
suppression of human reasoning.” There is only "the effect
of the horrible impressions, the painful consequences... .” Lenin
was not talking psychology. It was, he insisted, the method of thought which
was at stake.
In 1950 the universal is as far beyond 1917 as 1917 was beyond the Paris Commune.
A serious analysis of Stalinism will show that it is precisely the advanced
objective relations of society which compel the counter�revolution to assume
this form and dress itself in Marxism, fake action committees and all. We have
to draw a new universal, more concrete and embracing more creative freedom of
the masses than even State and Revolution.
It is at this time that Pablo not only fails to do so but repudiates State
and Revolution, proposing instead that proletarian politics be guided for
centuries by the barbarous degradation in Russia and in the buffer states of
Eastern Europe. It is the end of any philosophic method and the most serious
of all theories of retrogression. In this mentality can be seen the germs which
in maturity make the complete Stalinist – absolute hostility to capitalism
as we have known it but a resigned acceptance that Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas
of proletarian power are Utopian. No more deadly deviation has ever appeared
in our movement.
Germain has no philosophical method for which we can spare space and time.
He bounces from side to side, affirming theories, dropping them and building
new ones, listing innumerable possibilities, analyzing not the laws of capitalism
but Outer Mongolia and the decrees of Mussolini in Northern Italy, gripped in
that most terrible of all logics, the logic of empiricism; effective only in
this important sense that his undisciplined verbiage and shifting generalizations
prepare minds for some such brutal solution as Pablo’s.
In a dark time Trotskyism maintained the continuity and struggled for the essentials
of Bolshevism. Its errors are not irreparable. Today it faces two roads: Pablo’s
road and the road of "Johnson-Forest.” The longer the hesitation,
the greater the price that will be paid.
August 4th, 1950.
Notes
1. Cf. "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic,”
Three Essays by Karl Marx, Selected from the Economic-Philosophical
Manuscripts, p. 31; Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, Marx-Engels
Gesamt-Ausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 1, 1st Halbband. For English extract,
see World Revolutionary Perspectives, pp. xxi ff.
2. Communist Education of the Worker and
the Elimination of Capitalist Survivals from the Popular Consciousness”
by S. Kovalyov, published as Ideological Conflicts in Soviet Russia by
Public Affairs Press, Washington, D.C., 1948 (emphasis added).
3. "On the History of Philosophy,”
Political Affairs, April, 1948.
4. Published by the Public Affairs Press,
Washington, D.C., 1950.
5. The Role of Socialist Consciousness
in the Development of Soviet Society by F. V. Konstantinov, Foreign Languages
Publishing House, Moscow, 1950.
C L R James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Task of Building<br>
the American Bolshevik Party</h1>
<h3>(18 March 1946)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><span class="info">Source:</span> <strong>Bulletin of the Workers Party</strong>, Vol. 1 No. 9 (<strong>Convention Bulletin #3</strong>), 28 March 1946, pp. 11–24.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription & Mark-up:</span> by Damon Maxwell in 2009.<br>
<span class="info">Reply by Irving Howe:</span> <a href="../../../../../history/etol/writers/howe/1946/03/johnson.htm">On Comrade Johnson’s American Resolution – Or Soviets in the Sky</a></p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">At the Workers Conference a year ago it was brought to the attention of the party that there was in it unmistakable signs of disquiet and uncertainty about its course. It was pointed out that, unless this was clarified, a serious internal crises could easily result. (<em>Building the Bolshevik Party</em>, July 1945)</p>
<p>During the past five years the party has proved by its political activity and organizational achievements that its separation from the SWP was not motivated by petty-bourgeois pressure and fear of the sacrifices and demands which resistance to the war would entail. (Cannon) Though handicapped by the enforced withdrawal of a large percentage of its most active and experienced members, the party, by devoted labor and self-sacrifice was able to establish itself politically and organizationally as a revolutionary propaganda group in the U.S. A large percentage of the membership industrialized itself and achieved valuable experience in the class struggle. Our influence in the union movement, when seen in relation to our size, has been effective. Yet all this hard work has not bred confidence. Uncertainty can be found in all layers of the party.</p>
<p>The New York organization is the heart of the party. At its convention, less than six months after the Workers Conference, the incipient crisis expressed itself with the utmost clarity and almost with violence. In the words of a member of the National Committee who took part in the discussion: “Every one agrees that the morale of the membership is very low, that the members do not have much confidence in the leading committees, that significant numbers are beginning to lose confidence in the future of our party, that recruiting has all but stopped ...” (E. Erber, <strong>Internal Bulletin</strong>, December 31, 1945)</p>
<p>Different reasons were given, but there was substantial agreement among the rank and file that the above represented the actual condition of affairs. As the response to the organizational drive has shown and as its worst during five years has amply attested, the party as a whole is ready and anxious to throw itself into the task of building the mass revolutionary party in the United States. The doubts which have overtaken it as will be shown later, are fundamentally the result of a false political line. Readiness to struggle and sacrifice are not sufficient. If after great efforts the party gains only a small number of members a really serious, crisis would inevitably result, with greet damage to the Fourth International at home and abroad. The present resolution proposes:</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>to recall the party to the Bolshevik method of building the party.<br>
</li>
<li>to point out the root of the false course so that it may be more easily corrected.</li>
</ol>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p class="fst">With the adoption of the transitional program, the Fourth International in the U.S., made the turn from a propaganda circle existence to the organized workers in the U.S. Previously its propaganda was of a theoretical order, (theory of permanent revolution, socialism in a single country, crimes of the Comintern etc.), directed toward the Third International, the left-wing of the Second International (SP) and other advanced political elements. Its main task now became propaganda for revolutionary action to the advanced elements in the working class. Such a propaganda is based upon the analysis of the situation in the U.S. as pre-revolutionary, for without this, the idea of a transitional program becomes ridiculous. The actual process of building the party is the result of a political analysis of our epoch in general. (See the International and American Resolutions.) Its aim can be summarized briefly.</p>
<p>The party speaks to the advanced workers and, on the basis of the closest struggle with them on the immediate demands, uses every opportunity to propagandize for the organizational forms and actions whereby the workers can oppose and in time overthrow the outlived labor leadership. The party as every party except a propaganda circle begins always with the immediate demands of the masses but at the present stage of its development it keeps a clear distinction between a mass party (able to agitate the masses and lead them in action) and a propaganda group which can only aim at educating advanced workers.</p>
<p>The party concretely aims at:</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>winning over the developing revolutionary elements among workers.<br>
</li>
<li>preparing the minds of the masses so that in time they will come to recognize the Workers Party as a necessary revolutionary party and convert it rapidly into a party capable of leading the workers in action.<br>
</li>
</ol>
<h4>Proletarianization</h4>
<p class="fst">This type of propaganda demands the proletarianization of the previous propaganda circle.</p>
<p>The revolutionary propaganda group which has turned to the masses does not merely industrialize itself. Mere industrialization does not advance the purpose of building the revolutionary party, but merely drowns the revolutionaries in the mass. The party proletarianizes itself only to the degree that in the ranks of the working class it poses the proletarian solution of all questions, i. e. the propaganda and advocacy of revolutionary action leading to the social revolution. This must not be confused, as it so often is, with the tasks the individual party member who in the factory or union responds always to an existing concrete situation. (See <em>American Resolution</em>)<br>
</p>
<h4>Recruitment Campaigns</h4>
<p class="fst">Not only its own morale but the rapid radicalization of the American masses makes recruitment the first objective of the party in the present stage.</p>
<p>Both the history of the Fourth International in the U.S and the historical circumstances of the development of the American proletariat dictate special efforts to adapt the transitional program for the purpose of effective recruitment among the American workers.</p>
<p>The old propaganda circle was compelled to base its general line and its periods of recruiting activity chiefly upon the betrayals and failures of the Third International in Europe. <em>The turn from the old propaganda circle towards, this masses demands that that activity be now harmonized with the rhythm of the developing class struggle in the U.S.</em> Thus our recruiting campaigns must be based upon such events as the strike wave and the lessons to be drawn from it.</p>
<p>During periods of quiescence, the party is not impatient at slow growth but mobilizes both its membership and its sympathizers in preparation for the coming events. When these approach and are actually in process, the party with its own revolutionary line carries on an intensive propaganda activity. Thus. as in a period of the strike wave, the party should be mobilized and ready to produce a pamphlet every 14 days or even every week, giving the Marxist analysis of all aspects of the strike. At the conclusion of the mass action, the party then proceeds to initiate a final recruitment drive and cannot fail to win adherents. It is not in the least impossible for the party to double, treble or even further multiply its membership within a comparatively short period of a few weeks or months. But in order to be able to do this, the party must carefully train and prepare not only its membership but its contacts and sympathizers for the inevitability of revolutionary developments and the distinctive role to be played by the party at all stages.</p>
<p>To reach the new type of worker aimed at by the turn from the old propaganda circle the party must reorient itself and base its activity upon the special national characteristics of the American working class.</p>
<p>The American working class lacks at the present time a spirit of generalization and of theory. It becomes therefore the special function of the party to frame its propaganda for revolutionary action and its general propaganda not in terms of articles about socialism but in terms of the development of American society and particularly the development of the American proletariat.</p>
<p>“The truths of communism and the methods of social revolution” must be drawn and expounded on the basis of the historical development of Glasses in the U.S. and the concrete events today in the life of the American people. On this basis alone can the propaganda group as distinct from the old propaganda circle find a fertile reception in the minds of the ordinary rank and file American workers. Upon this basis the party can give to the advanced American workers the ideological conviction of the destiny of their class to lead society. It is this which brings workers to the revolutionary party and the full conclusions of Bolshevism. (See <em>Education, Propaganda and Agitation</em>)<br>
</p>
<h4>Integration</h4>
<p class="fst">The party, having turned from the old propaganda circle, faces the task of integrating rank and file workers into the organization. This task is accomplished:</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>by strict attention to the immediate problems of the individual worker in his factory and union.<br>
</li>
<li>the Americanization of Bolshevism as described above.<br>
</li>
<li>the presentation of the actions of the proletarian and peasant masses abroad, not in general, but in strict relation to the activity of the Fourth International as an active revolutionary organization.<br>
</li>
<li>instruction in the historic tradition, achievements and methods of Bolshevism in opposition to all bourgeois learning, theories and ideas.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Negro workers present special problems to the party. The situation of Negroes in the United States gives the party many opportunities to participate and give direction to Negro struggles for democratic rights. This meets the justified demand, characteristic of Negroes, for immediate attention to special problems.</p>
<p>The Negro worker, far more than the white worker, requires ideological understanding not only of the development of the American proletariat in American society but of the development of Negro struggles. An important part of his integration in the Workers Party is a Leninist education in the objective role which the Negro masses have played in the past and will play in the coming proletarian revolution. The education not only of Negroes but of the party as a whole in the significance of this objective role:</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>binds the Negroes to the party;<br>
</li>
<li>enables them to answer not only to themselves but to their contacts the justified doubts as to the fate of Negroes after they have participated in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie;<br>
</li>
<li>is the basis for harmonious relations between whites and Negroes under, the pressure of bourgeois race prejudice which will increasingly be felt in the party as it draws into its ranks not intellectuals, but rank and file workers, both white and Negro.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Experiences has also indicated that Negroes, properly integrated into the party, cannot only bring substantial numbers of Negroes into the party, but are also a means of attracting white workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Recruitment, Integration and Education</h4>
<p class="fst">The propaganda circle based its education upon the special differences between itself and other proletarian political organizations. On the contrary, the education of a propaganda group which has turned towards the masses must be founded on the general principles and traditions of Marxism as a new conception of society and a new way of life.</p>
<p>The <em>foundation</em> of the party’s education therefore must be:</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>the study of <strong>Capital</strong> and the related classics of Marxism so as to enable the party to analyze the different stages of the development of the American economy, American society and the developing role of the proletariat. The study of <strong>Capital</strong> has always been the basis<br>
(a) of all strategic analysis by which the Marxist parties developed their practical activity,<br>
(b) <em>the means by which rank and file workers translated their practical experiences at the point of production into conscious opposition to all aspects of bourgeois society</em>.<br>
</li>
<li>study of the numerous writings, discussions, conversations of Trotsky on the American question, Negro Question, etc. These documents form the indispensable manual for the development of the American revolutionary party.<br>
</li>
<li>the production and study of material, (pamphlets, outlines) of American history to familiarize the party members with all phases of past social revolutions in the U.S., leading to the inevitability of proletarian revolution.<br>
</li>
<li>the study of the history and development of the Fourth International, particularly in the U.S.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">In the special circumstances of American development, it is precisely the rank and file workers above all others to whom the party must give, both as contacts and far more as members, a comprehensive training in revolutionary thought and the revolutionary way of life as the concrete developing alternative to collapsing bourgeois society. Not only does the worker need this for himself, but it is only by this means that at the present state of the party’s development, he can make the deepest and most effective appeal to his fellow workers’ to join our party. With rank and file workers interest in and defence of the party line is the result of a passionate devotion to the party, both of gratitude for the new world which it has opened to them. <em>The most important part of this education is given not in formal classes but in <strong>Labor Action</strong>, the party press and pamphlets, the public meetings of the party and the whole atmosphere which the leadership above all instills the party.</em></p>
<p>A Bolshevik party at this stage, can be developed on no other foundation, least of all in the United States. The necessary education in the specific contributions of the party to Marxism in the past five years, concentration on “immediate demands”, the conception of “plenty for all” – none of these can be the means of attracting or holding rank and file workers in any numbers in the party.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Press</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>Labor Action</strong> – The new eight-page <strong>Labor Action</strong> must make no organized distinction between a section on day-to-day struggle and a “Magazine” section on theory. To maintain this separation would inculcate the old Menshevik conception of minimum demands and maximum program, a conception wholly foreign to the transitional program.</p>
<p><strong>Labor Action</strong> must so teach the doctrines of Marxism that it will prepare its readers to become the cadres of the Fourth International and be itself a direct recruiting agent for the Workers party. The technical means at the disposal of modern society and the radicalization of the masses demand that the paper perform this function. <strong>Labor Action</strong> must here profit by the experience of the French Party (1938) as to the aim of a mass newspaper:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This aim is above all interrelated with the aim of the party itself; to forge cadres, provide the explanation of the situation and not to stop at merely agitational slogans, which, lacking explanations and political generalization are powerless to make the workers understand the Fourth International’s reason for existence.” (<strong>Founding Conference</strong>, p. 101)</p>
<p class="fst">To put “more socialism” into the paper is not a matter of adding theoretical articles, but making the paper openly recognizable by the workers as an organ of revolutionary socialism.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>The New International</strong> – <strong>The New International</strong> as the theoretical organ of the party must perform its traditional function of making a Marxist analysis of current events, of vigorous propaganda for the party line and polemical attacks upon its opponents. But it cannot in this period address itself to opponents to the neglect of the theoretical preparation of its members for their main task; transforming the propaganda circle of the Fourth International to a mass revolutionary, party in the U.S.</p>
<p><strong>The New International</strong>, in its pages and other publications directed by it, must train the advanced cadres of the party in (a) dialectical materialism (b) Marxian political economy and (c) historical materialism. Thus trained party cadres will supply the party and the American proletariat with a constantly growing armory of weapons against American bourgeois society.</p>
<p>On the basis of this education the <strong>New International</strong> must make itself responsible for serious analysis of all aspects of American life and history, and particularly of the labor movement. The party must have patience and recognize that this serious theoretical work, long overdue, will in time permeate the party and be reflected in its every day life and immediate tasks.</p>
<p>In the present disintegration of American society and world capitalism as a whole the party must set itself as an <em>immediate task</em>:</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>making <strong>LA</strong> a direct recruiting agent<br>
</li>
<li>making the <strong>New International</strong>, far more than in 1938, the intellectual center of that growing body of radical thought in the US which is critical of American bourgeois society and hostile to Stalinism. The party must recognize that failure in this task cannot be laid to the objective situation which is overwhelmingly favorable.<br>
</li>
</ol>
<h4>The Fourth International</h4>
<p class="fst">The party must educate the members in the spirit and principles and best traditions of the Fourth International. This requires (a) publication of the official documents and important articles of the fourth International in the party press public and internal, and (b) while criticizing the International wherever its line conflicts with the party line, not to tolerate under any circumstances or to allow to go unchallenged abusive and contemptuous statements about its internationalism, or its open characterization by responsible party members as “not worth a pinch of salt”, and “a bunch of political bankrupts”.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>II.</h3>
<p class="fst">The future development of the party along the path outlined above can only be achieve if the party recognizes the causes for its previous stagnation and present uncertainty, and resolutely roots out all manifestations of them.</p>
<p>The greatest danger to the party’s growth and development at the present time is represented by the “small mass party” conception of Comrade Erber. For over three years Comrade Lund has carried on a persistent and sharp struggle in the National Committee over the method of building the party. In a related series of documents he has accused the party leadership of “pessimism, dimmed vision ... lack of sweeping imagination ... satisfaction with crumbs when loaves are available, routinism ... conservative traditionalism ... we are lucky to exist at all spirit.” He accuses the leadership of lagging behind the organization. “Nowhere does the lack of boldness and imagination strike one so sharply as in our topmost circles. Routinism and tradition seem to seek their final refuge there.” He has for three years denounced the party for baring no perspective. Comrade Erber’s views are the fruit of a theory built upon his conception of the past of our movement. For Erber: “Trotskyism has been synonymous with Sectarianism”. For him the “conservatism of Cannon was the typical expression of Trotskyism on the organizational side.” “The sterility of Cannon is the logical result of the sectarianism, ‘doctrinarism’, ‘rigid, ideological shell’ of Trotsky.” Trotsky himself was saved from this logical conclusion of his doctrine only by his “idealism and common sense”. According to Comrade Erber, the first Four Congresses of the Communist International and the history of Bolshevism have not been submitted to critical study but are viewed as “sacrosanct”. “The WP is not and should not be a Trotskyist party in the sense that is usually meant.” It is from this conception of the past of our movement, elaborated in lengthy and comprehensive documents, that Erber has consistently supported the present <strong>Labor Action</strong>. It is on this basis that he wishes the party to transform itself into a “small mass party”.</p>
<p>The theories of Erber on party-building are dangerous because the majority of the leadership in actuality have no other perspective to offer to the party as a guide to party building. Defining propaganda as polemic against rival parties, Comrade Shachtman rejects the conception of the party as a revolutionary propaganda organization. This rejection is the essence of Comrade Erber’s conception.</p>
<p>The party must realize the close connection between, the theoretical heresies of Erber, the equivocal position of Shachtman and the confusion on party building which is now rife in the party. (See <em>Building the Bolshevik Party</em>). The party must unhesitatingly reject these ideas and their manifestations, open or concealed, in all aspects of party life.<br>
</p>
<h4>The SWP and the “small mass party”</h4>
<p class="fst">The “small mass party” conception is no personal aberration of Comrade Erber. The party must recognize it as in essence the result of the political inexperience of the American proletariat and long years of struggle against the usurpation of “revolutionary” leadership by Stalinism. The party must especially recognize that in rejecting Marxist ideas and particularly their manifestations in the building of the party, it will be doing far more than putting itself on the right road towards building the Bolshevik Party. It will also help to correct the false course of the SWP, and lay the basis for an effective unified organization.</p>
<p>The SWP practices the “small mass party” conception in a form concealed (and to some extent corrected) by its strenuous attempts to adhere to the strategic conceptions of Trotsky. Parallel to its genuine revolutionary temper in concrete trade union activity it builds illusions among its membership about its influence in the unions and leading the workers in mass struggles. Only a powerful mass party can attempt to exercise the organization function of leading workers in day-to-day struggles without</p>
<ol type="i">
<li>succumbing to opportunism, and<br>
</li>
<li>ii. having the work of its members swept away by obvious inability to withstand the pressure of the trade union bureaucrats whenever these wish to destroy the influence of the propaganda group.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The past history of the party (Los Angeles and Philadelphia) show, and the inevitable puncturing of the illusions of the SWP will show, that only a correct conception of its function can save the Fourth International from diverting its precious energies into fruitless and demoralizing channels.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>III</h3>
<p class="fst">The particular persistence of Erber’s ideas in all layers of our party is not at all accidental. The WP was born out of a split of the SWP. In the course of the dispute Comrade Trotsky summed up his view of the historical significance of the dispute as follows (<strong>In Defense of Marxism</strong>, p. 104):</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Scientific socialism is the conscious expression of the unconscious historic process; namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings. These organic tendencies in the psychology of workers spring to life with utmost rapidity in the epoch of crises and wars. The discussion has revealed beyond all question a clash in the party between a petty-bourgeois tendency and a proletarian tendency. The petty-bourgeois tendency reveals its confusion in its attempt to reduce the program of the party to the small coin of ‘concrete’ questions. The proletarian tendency on the contrary strives to correlate all the partial questions into theoretical unity. At stake at the present time is not the extent to which individual members of the majority consciously apply the dialectic method. What is important is the fact that the majority as a whole pushes toward the proletarian posing of the questions and by very reason of this tends to assimilate the dialectic which is the algebra of the revolution.”</p>
<p class="fst">This statement does not exhaust or even express either the complete circumstances of the split in 1940, or the course of the WP or the SWP since that time. Nevertheless, the main difficulties of the party at the present stage can be traced directly to its refusal to base itself upon this instinctive drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings in the epoch of the ‘death-agony’ of capitalism.</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Because the party does not unequivocally base its policy on the instinctive revolutionary striving of the proletariat</strong>:</p>
<ol>
<li>it fails to make revolutionary propaganda and therefore does not recruit revolutionary workers.<br>
</li>
<li>it sends its members into industry overweighted with the impossible task of bringing not even socialist but mere political consciousness to sixty million “backward” American workers.<br>
</li>
<li>it does not recognize that at present the party’s only claim to leadership is ideological and therefore places the party in the hopeless situation of competing with the labor bureaucrats as a more sincere and more militant wing of the trade union movement.<br>
</li>
<li>it fails to teach the methods of social revolution and therefore is compelled to put “more Socialism” in the paper by increasing the number of abstract articles on the socialist idea.<br>
</li>
<li>it fails in its press to point out and steady move toward socialism and the leadership by the American wording class. It is therefore fall back on frenzied denunciation of the evils interpret the of the nation compelled to of capitalism.<br>
</li>
<li>it has developed a purely arbitrary distinction between propaganda and agitation, based on the conception of propaganda not as revolutionary propaganda for the social revolution but as political polemic with the SWP.<br>
</li>
<li>it fails to carry on a serious political education of the proletarian vanguard and, as a result, the party inevitably experiences an internal depoliticalization, which is merely an internal reflection of the external concentration on “immediate demands.”<br>
</li>
<li>it fails to teach Bolshevism to the American workers and therefore does not discuss its own development in Bolshevik terms but in terms of regime, conservatism of leadership (Erber), lack of forces (Shachtman) etc.</li>
</ol>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<h3>IV.</h3>
<p class="fst">Rejecting all types of bourgeois solutions to the problems of society, but at the same time governed by retrogressive concepts of the proletariat, the party leadership undermines the revolutionary confidence of the party membership in itself by a perpetual vacillation between opposing political positions:</p>
<p class="fst">The party vacillates on the</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Russian Question</strong> (between the position of Carter and the official party position)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>Character of our epoch</strong> (between the theory of retrogression and the theses of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>Negro question</strong> (between the old Social-Democratic conception of Debs and the Leninist Trotskyist conception)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>Stalinism</strong> (for and against the CP-SP-CGT slogan, support and non-support of the Chinese peasants, for and against the EAM, ELAS to power, etc.)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>German revolution during the war</strong> (implying its impossibility and predicting its imminence)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>Fourth International</strong> (between saying that the only hope of the revolution in Europe is the Fourth International and at the same time ignoring the publications and policy of the Fourth International and denouncing it as politically bankrupt)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>Bureaucratic collectivism</strong> (rejecting it as a new social order except for Russia and at the same time experimenting both in theory and in practice with the idea of a new bureaucratic collectivist social order)<br>
</li>
<li><strong>Historical foundations of the Fourth International</strong> (between attacking all who preach that Stalinism is inevitable fruit Bolshevism and at the same time asserting that Lenin’s and Trotsky’s treatment of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries (ratified by many Congresses and by Lenin himself) contributed to the degeneration of the revolution and the victory of Stalinism. (<em>The “Mistakes” of the Bolsheviks</em>, <strong>NI</strong>, November 1943)</li></ol>
<p class="fst">The party at this stage, lacking effective forces, can sustain itself only by a clear consistent political line and the firmest conviction of its past and its future. If even the line is proved incorrect, a healthy party can change it and thereby even gain in confidence. The present vacillating course of the party leadership on fundamental questions is one of the chief causes of the uncertainty of the party.</p>
<p>The party must establish and resolutely maintain until it is changed a firm political line on all fundamental questions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Democratic Centralism and the Cadre</h4>
<p class="fst">Unable to mobilize the full force of the party for action behind a firm, clear, political line, the party leadership is driven to intensify education in the special discoveries of the party during the past five yours. But inasmuch as this line cannot be related to the recent past of the Fourth International (e.g., CP-SP-CGT to <strong>Whither France</strong>; the Negro position to the writings of Trotsky, etc.) the party education cannot bring the desired results.</p>
<p>In full control of the party press and party education and with leading representatives of its line in nearly all the centers of the party, the leadership is forced to try to achieve by organization what it cannot do by political means. It is driven to attempt to establish cohesion in the organization by the imposition from above of a cadre, to be composed essentially of those who subscribe to the special theoretical contributions of the party.</p>
<p>Any attempt to carry out the cadre principle will result in the virtual creation of a thinly-disguised faction, the set-ting up of two types of membership, the relegation of experienced, politically developed, devoted party members to the status of second-class citizens, as well as give a false education to new members as to the relationship in the party between members of opposing political views. Thus, the word, cadre, which, in its Bolshevik sense, signifies the development of the whole membership in the basis principles and traditions of Marxism, rejection of all bourgeois concepts and ideas, devotion to the party and readiness to submit to its discipline, has now become degraded by the application of it to a factional maneuver.</p>
<p>The party must resolutely reject this concept and any at tempt to put it into practice.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>V.</h3>
<h4>Bolshevism and Unity</h4>
<p class="fst">The WP must base its demand for unity on the theories and practices of Bolshevism and the objective situation in the United States.</p>
<p>The WP condemns the leadership of the Fourth International for not pronouncing itself clearly and unequivocally and demanding that the SWP accept the proposals of the WP for unity. It condemns the SWP majority for its unprincipled and dishonest factional maneuvers in regard to the proposals of unity made by the WP and the SWP minority.</p>
<p>The WP, while recognizing the objective results of a concrete situation, disapproves of the actions of the SWP minority:</p>
<ol>
<li>in allowing its factional struggle to reach the perspective of a split on the question of Cannon’s regime.<br>
</li>
<li>in conducting its factional struggle in a manner harmful to the education of the Fourth International and particularly the youth in the traditions of principled Bolsheviks.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">By these actions it has done harm to the very cause of unity it initiated. It has lost the opportunity of effective resistance to the unprincipled Cannonite opposition to unity and has done harm to the Bolshevik morale of the whole movement in the United States.</p>
<p>The WP pronounces itself against splits in the Fourth International of any kind except on the political ground, that the party from which the split is proposed is no longer an instrument of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>The WP denounces splits in organizations which have left the propaganda circle stage and address themselves seriously to workers. It does great harm to the conceptions of Bolshevism when workers are asked to devote their lives to one party and then told that although the parties still stand on the revolutionary principles of the Fourth International, it should be abandoned in favor of another.</p>
<p>The WP does not unduly concern itself with problems such as Hansen’s article on Cannon and controversy in the SWP about the right of intellectuals to criticize the party and the publication or non-publication of letters, etc. It does not give the slightest credence to the conception that a party cannot be built with Cannon. It is confident that if Cannon or Cannonism or any other individual or tendency stands in the way of building the Fourth International in the U.S., then the revolutionary cadres in both the WP and the SWP will either defeat such individuals or tendencies or thereby prove their inability to defeat the bourgeoisie. The WP makes its main attack on Cannon’s regime its refusal to enter honestly fusion negotiations. This refusal betrays the stultifying monolithic conceptions. The WP recognizes that the mere acceptance of fusion between the two parties would strike a death blow at the monolithic conception. All other preoccupations are subordinate, disorient the membership of both parties and strengthen the Cannonite mis-education in the rank and file of the SWP on unity.</p>
<p>The WP stands for the unity of the Fourth International at home and abroad and recommends to the party to use all legitimate means to carry out its policy of unity, not being deterred by the dishonesty of the SWP leadership or the ignorance and fanaticism of its members. It is confident that its own devotion to the principles of the Fourth Intentional, its proved capacity to struggle against the bourgeoisie and the developing objective situation will compel the formation of a united party in the United States.</p>
<p>Finally, the WP denounces the invitations in any form, in public or in private, to any minority to leave the party.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<h3>VI</h3>
<p class="fst">The party must constantly bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which the Fourth International functions today, owing to the tension of the whole international situation and the smallness of the organized revolutionary forces. Its individual members will be called upon to carry out tasks of revolutionary leadership and responsibility which will tax their energies and resources to the utmost. It is therefore of extreme importance that workers who join the party find in the party itself a means of developing themselves as revolutionists of mastering to the fullest extent of their capabilities the theory and practice of Bolshevism. It should be impossible for any party member even after only a few months in the party to feel that he has not learned anything. In its present condition, of dissatisfaction with bourgeois society but yet lacking revolutionary theory, layers of the American proletariat will be found receptive to the ideas of Bolshevism, but only if the propagandist of Bolshevism is himself a trained, serious educated Bolshevik, preferably a worker, able to give by his personal example and personal exposition some indication not only of the socialism which the party aims at but the socialism which it represents today. This can be learnt first of all in the party.</p>
<p>Such a condition does not exist in our party today. That it should be realized, demands from the membership first of all a clear conception of the dialectical connection between the international perspectives of the party, its national perspectives and the task of party-building. It demands from the membership a resolute determination to discuss its problems with serious recognition of the great issues involved and to be merciless against all who show by their arguments, demeanor and general procedure that they seek least of all a clarification of issues and the education of the membership.</p>
<p>Above all, the united membership must drive out of cur ranks defeatism, pessimism and scepticism in any shape or form. It must base itself unequivocally upon confidence in the historic destiny of the proletariat and in the party as its expression. Without this basis, even the correct revolutionary line can only bring a few more members and continue the party on a more or less stagnant course. With this basis the party can by the proper education, training and patience so prepare itself that as the proletariat moves to its destiny, it will in increasing numbers recognize the propaganda group of the Fourth International and steadily transform it into the mass revolutionary party which will lead the social revolution.</p>
<p class="fst">March 18, 1946</p>
<p class="date"><em>J.R. Johnson</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Task of Building
the American Bolshevik Party
(18 March 1946)
Source: Bulletin of the Workers Party, Vol. 1 No. 9 (Convention Bulletin #3), 28 March 1946, pp. 11–24.
Transcription & Mark-up: by Damon Maxwell in 2009.
Reply by Irving Howe: On Comrade Johnson’s American Resolution – Or Soviets in the Sky
At the Workers Conference a year ago it was brought to the attention of the party that there was in it unmistakable signs of disquiet and uncertainty about its course. It was pointed out that, unless this was clarified, a serious internal crises could easily result. (Building the Bolshevik Party, July 1945)
During the past five years the party has proved by its political activity and organizational achievements that its separation from the SWP was not motivated by petty-bourgeois pressure and fear of the sacrifices and demands which resistance to the war would entail. (Cannon) Though handicapped by the enforced withdrawal of a large percentage of its most active and experienced members, the party, by devoted labor and self-sacrifice was able to establish itself politically and organizationally as a revolutionary propaganda group in the U.S. A large percentage of the membership industrialized itself and achieved valuable experience in the class struggle. Our influence in the union movement, when seen in relation to our size, has been effective. Yet all this hard work has not bred confidence. Uncertainty can be found in all layers of the party.
The New York organization is the heart of the party. At its convention, less than six months after the Workers Conference, the incipient crisis expressed itself with the utmost clarity and almost with violence. In the words of a member of the National Committee who took part in the discussion: “Every one agrees that the morale of the membership is very low, that the members do not have much confidence in the leading committees, that significant numbers are beginning to lose confidence in the future of our party, that recruiting has all but stopped ...” (E. Erber, Internal Bulletin, December 31, 1945)
Different reasons were given, but there was substantial agreement among the rank and file that the above represented the actual condition of affairs. As the response to the organizational drive has shown and as its worst during five years has amply attested, the party as a whole is ready and anxious to throw itself into the task of building the mass revolutionary party in the United States. The doubts which have overtaken it as will be shown later, are fundamentally the result of a false political line. Readiness to struggle and sacrifice are not sufficient. If after great efforts the party gains only a small number of members a really serious, crisis would inevitably result, with greet damage to the Fourth International at home and abroad. The present resolution proposes:
to recall the party to the Bolshevik method of building the party.
to point out the root of the false course so that it may be more easily corrected.
*
I.
With the adoption of the transitional program, the Fourth International in the U.S., made the turn from a propaganda circle existence to the organized workers in the U.S. Previously its propaganda was of a theoretical order, (theory of permanent revolution, socialism in a single country, crimes of the Comintern etc.), directed toward the Third International, the left-wing of the Second International (SP) and other advanced political elements. Its main task now became propaganda for revolutionary action to the advanced elements in the working class. Such a propaganda is based upon the analysis of the situation in the U.S. as pre-revolutionary, for without this, the idea of a transitional program becomes ridiculous. The actual process of building the party is the result of a political analysis of our epoch in general. (See the International and American Resolutions.) Its aim can be summarized briefly.
The party speaks to the advanced workers and, on the basis of the closest struggle with them on the immediate demands, uses every opportunity to propagandize for the organizational forms and actions whereby the workers can oppose and in time overthrow the outlived labor leadership. The party as every party except a propaganda circle begins always with the immediate demands of the masses but at the present stage of its development it keeps a clear distinction between a mass party (able to agitate the masses and lead them in action) and a propaganda group which can only aim at educating advanced workers.
The party concretely aims at:
winning over the developing revolutionary elements among workers.
preparing the minds of the masses so that in time they will come to recognize the Workers Party as a necessary revolutionary party and convert it rapidly into a party capable of leading the workers in action.
Proletarianization
This type of propaganda demands the proletarianization of the previous propaganda circle.
The revolutionary propaganda group which has turned to the masses does not merely industrialize itself. Mere industrialization does not advance the purpose of building the revolutionary party, but merely drowns the revolutionaries in the mass. The party proletarianizes itself only to the degree that in the ranks of the working class it poses the proletarian solution of all questions, i. e. the propaganda and advocacy of revolutionary action leading to the social revolution. This must not be confused, as it so often is, with the tasks the individual party member who in the factory or union responds always to an existing concrete situation. (See American Resolution)
Recruitment Campaigns
Not only its own morale but the rapid radicalization of the American masses makes recruitment the first objective of the party in the present stage.
Both the history of the Fourth International in the U.S and the historical circumstances of the development of the American proletariat dictate special efforts to adapt the transitional program for the purpose of effective recruitment among the American workers.
The old propaganda circle was compelled to base its general line and its periods of recruiting activity chiefly upon the betrayals and failures of the Third International in Europe. The turn from the old propaganda circle towards, this masses demands that that activity be now harmonized with the rhythm of the developing class struggle in the U.S. Thus our recruiting campaigns must be based upon such events as the strike wave and the lessons to be drawn from it.
During periods of quiescence, the party is not impatient at slow growth but mobilizes both its membership and its sympathizers in preparation for the coming events. When these approach and are actually in process, the party with its own revolutionary line carries on an intensive propaganda activity. Thus. as in a period of the strike wave, the party should be mobilized and ready to produce a pamphlet every 14 days or even every week, giving the Marxist analysis of all aspects of the strike. At the conclusion of the mass action, the party then proceeds to initiate a final recruitment drive and cannot fail to win adherents. It is not in the least impossible for the party to double, treble or even further multiply its membership within a comparatively short period of a few weeks or months. But in order to be able to do this, the party must carefully train and prepare not only its membership but its contacts and sympathizers for the inevitability of revolutionary developments and the distinctive role to be played by the party at all stages.
To reach the new type of worker aimed at by the turn from the old propaganda circle the party must reorient itself and base its activity upon the special national characteristics of the American working class.
The American working class lacks at the present time a spirit of generalization and of theory. It becomes therefore the special function of the party to frame its propaganda for revolutionary action and its general propaganda not in terms of articles about socialism but in terms of the development of American society and particularly the development of the American proletariat.
“The truths of communism and the methods of social revolution” must be drawn and expounded on the basis of the historical development of Glasses in the U.S. and the concrete events today in the life of the American people. On this basis alone can the propaganda group as distinct from the old propaganda circle find a fertile reception in the minds of the ordinary rank and file American workers. Upon this basis the party can give to the advanced American workers the ideological conviction of the destiny of their class to lead society. It is this which brings workers to the revolutionary party and the full conclusions of Bolshevism. (See Education, Propaganda and Agitation)
Integration
The party, having turned from the old propaganda circle, faces the task of integrating rank and file workers into the organization. This task is accomplished:
by strict attention to the immediate problems of the individual worker in his factory and union.
the Americanization of Bolshevism as described above.
the presentation of the actions of the proletarian and peasant masses abroad, not in general, but in strict relation to the activity of the Fourth International as an active revolutionary organization.
instruction in the historic tradition, achievements and methods of Bolshevism in opposition to all bourgeois learning, theories and ideas.
Negro workers present special problems to the party. The situation of Negroes in the United States gives the party many opportunities to participate and give direction to Negro struggles for democratic rights. This meets the justified demand, characteristic of Negroes, for immediate attention to special problems.
The Negro worker, far more than the white worker, requires ideological understanding not only of the development of the American proletariat in American society but of the development of Negro struggles. An important part of his integration in the Workers Party is a Leninist education in the objective role which the Negro masses have played in the past and will play in the coming proletarian revolution. The education not only of Negroes but of the party as a whole in the significance of this objective role:
binds the Negroes to the party;
enables them to answer not only to themselves but to their contacts the justified doubts as to the fate of Negroes after they have participated in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie;
is the basis for harmonious relations between whites and Negroes under, the pressure of bourgeois race prejudice which will increasingly be felt in the party as it draws into its ranks not intellectuals, but rank and file workers, both white and Negro.
Experiences has also indicated that Negroes, properly integrated into the party, cannot only bring substantial numbers of Negroes into the party, but are also a means of attracting white workers.
Recruitment, Integration and Education
The propaganda circle based its education upon the special differences between itself and other proletarian political organizations. On the contrary, the education of a propaganda group which has turned towards the masses must be founded on the general principles and traditions of Marxism as a new conception of society and a new way of life.
The foundation of the party’s education therefore must be:
the study of Capital and the related classics of Marxism so as to enable the party to analyze the different stages of the development of the American economy, American society and the developing role of the proletariat. The study of Capital has always been the basis
(a) of all strategic analysis by which the Marxist parties developed their practical activity,
(b) the means by which rank and file workers translated their practical experiences at the point of production into conscious opposition to all aspects of bourgeois society.
study of the numerous writings, discussions, conversations of Trotsky on the American question, Negro Question, etc. These documents form the indispensable manual for the development of the American revolutionary party.
the production and study of material, (pamphlets, outlines) of American history to familiarize the party members with all phases of past social revolutions in the U.S., leading to the inevitability of proletarian revolution.
the study of the history and development of the Fourth International, particularly in the U.S.
In the special circumstances of American development, it is precisely the rank and file workers above all others to whom the party must give, both as contacts and far more as members, a comprehensive training in revolutionary thought and the revolutionary way of life as the concrete developing alternative to collapsing bourgeois society. Not only does the worker need this for himself, but it is only by this means that at the present state of the party’s development, he can make the deepest and most effective appeal to his fellow workers’ to join our party. With rank and file workers interest in and defence of the party line is the result of a passionate devotion to the party, both of gratitude for the new world which it has opened to them. The most important part of this education is given not in formal classes but in Labor Action, the party press and pamphlets, the public meetings of the party and the whole atmosphere which the leadership above all instills the party.
A Bolshevik party at this stage, can be developed on no other foundation, least of all in the United States. The necessary education in the specific contributions of the party to Marxism in the past five years, concentration on “immediate demands”, the conception of “plenty for all” – none of these can be the means of attracting or holding rank and file workers in any numbers in the party.
The Press
Labor Action – The new eight-page Labor Action must make no organized distinction between a section on day-to-day struggle and a “Magazine” section on theory. To maintain this separation would inculcate the old Menshevik conception of minimum demands and maximum program, a conception wholly foreign to the transitional program.
Labor Action must so teach the doctrines of Marxism that it will prepare its readers to become the cadres of the Fourth International and be itself a direct recruiting agent for the Workers party. The technical means at the disposal of modern society and the radicalization of the masses demand that the paper perform this function. Labor Action must here profit by the experience of the French Party (1938) as to the aim of a mass newspaper:
“This aim is above all interrelated with the aim of the party itself; to forge cadres, provide the explanation of the situation and not to stop at merely agitational slogans, which, lacking explanations and political generalization are powerless to make the workers understand the Fourth International’s reason for existence.” (Founding Conference, p. 101)
To put “more socialism” into the paper is not a matter of adding theoretical articles, but making the paper openly recognizable by the workers as an organ of revolutionary socialism.
The New International – The New International as the theoretical organ of the party must perform its traditional function of making a Marxist analysis of current events, of vigorous propaganda for the party line and polemical attacks upon its opponents. But it cannot in this period address itself to opponents to the neglect of the theoretical preparation of its members for their main task; transforming the propaganda circle of the Fourth International to a mass revolutionary, party in the U.S.
The New International, in its pages and other publications directed by it, must train the advanced cadres of the party in (a) dialectical materialism (b) Marxian political economy and (c) historical materialism. Thus trained party cadres will supply the party and the American proletariat with a constantly growing armory of weapons against American bourgeois society.
On the basis of this education the New International must make itself responsible for serious analysis of all aspects of American life and history, and particularly of the labor movement. The party must have patience and recognize that this serious theoretical work, long overdue, will in time permeate the party and be reflected in its every day life and immediate tasks.
In the present disintegration of American society and world capitalism as a whole the party must set itself as an immediate task:
making LA a direct recruiting agent
making the New International, far more than in 1938, the intellectual center of that growing body of radical thought in the US which is critical of American bourgeois society and hostile to Stalinism. The party must recognize that failure in this task cannot be laid to the objective situation which is overwhelmingly favorable.
The Fourth International
The party must educate the members in the spirit and principles and best traditions of the Fourth International. This requires (a) publication of the official documents and important articles of the fourth International in the party press public and internal, and (b) while criticizing the International wherever its line conflicts with the party line, not to tolerate under any circumstances or to allow to go unchallenged abusive and contemptuous statements about its internationalism, or its open characterization by responsible party members as “not worth a pinch of salt”, and “a bunch of political bankrupts”.
*
II.
The future development of the party along the path outlined above can only be achieve if the party recognizes the causes for its previous stagnation and present uncertainty, and resolutely roots out all manifestations of them.
The greatest danger to the party’s growth and development at the present time is represented by the “small mass party” conception of Comrade Erber. For over three years Comrade Lund has carried on a persistent and sharp struggle in the National Committee over the method of building the party. In a related series of documents he has accused the party leadership of “pessimism, dimmed vision ... lack of sweeping imagination ... satisfaction with crumbs when loaves are available, routinism ... conservative traditionalism ... we are lucky to exist at all spirit.” He accuses the leadership of lagging behind the organization. “Nowhere does the lack of boldness and imagination strike one so sharply as in our topmost circles. Routinism and tradition seem to seek their final refuge there.” He has for three years denounced the party for baring no perspective. Comrade Erber’s views are the fruit of a theory built upon his conception of the past of our movement. For Erber: “Trotskyism has been synonymous with Sectarianism”. For him the “conservatism of Cannon was the typical expression of Trotskyism on the organizational side.” “The sterility of Cannon is the logical result of the sectarianism, ‘doctrinarism’, ‘rigid, ideological shell’ of Trotsky.” Trotsky himself was saved from this logical conclusion of his doctrine only by his “idealism and common sense”. According to Comrade Erber, the first Four Congresses of the Communist International and the history of Bolshevism have not been submitted to critical study but are viewed as “sacrosanct”. “The WP is not and should not be a Trotskyist party in the sense that is usually meant.” It is from this conception of the past of our movement, elaborated in lengthy and comprehensive documents, that Erber has consistently supported the present Labor Action. It is on this basis that he wishes the party to transform itself into a “small mass party”.
The theories of Erber on party-building are dangerous because the majority of the leadership in actuality have no other perspective to offer to the party as a guide to party building. Defining propaganda as polemic against rival parties, Comrade Shachtman rejects the conception of the party as a revolutionary propaganda organization. This rejection is the essence of Comrade Erber’s conception.
The party must realize the close connection between, the theoretical heresies of Erber, the equivocal position of Shachtman and the confusion on party building which is now rife in the party. (See Building the Bolshevik Party). The party must unhesitatingly reject these ideas and their manifestations, open or concealed, in all aspects of party life.
The SWP and the “small mass party”
The “small mass party” conception is no personal aberration of Comrade Erber. The party must recognize it as in essence the result of the political inexperience of the American proletariat and long years of struggle against the usurpation of “revolutionary” leadership by Stalinism. The party must especially recognize that in rejecting Marxist ideas and particularly their manifestations in the building of the party, it will be doing far more than putting itself on the right road towards building the Bolshevik Party. It will also help to correct the false course of the SWP, and lay the basis for an effective unified organization.
The SWP practices the “small mass party” conception in a form concealed (and to some extent corrected) by its strenuous attempts to adhere to the strategic conceptions of Trotsky. Parallel to its genuine revolutionary temper in concrete trade union activity it builds illusions among its membership about its influence in the unions and leading the workers in mass struggles. Only a powerful mass party can attempt to exercise the organization function of leading workers in day-to-day struggles without
succumbing to opportunism, and
ii. having the work of its members swept away by obvious inability to withstand the pressure of the trade union bureaucrats whenever these wish to destroy the influence of the propaganda group.
The past history of the party (Los Angeles and Philadelphia) show, and the inevitable puncturing of the illusions of the SWP will show, that only a correct conception of its function can save the Fourth International from diverting its precious energies into fruitless and demoralizing channels.
*
III
The particular persistence of Erber’s ideas in all layers of our party is not at all accidental. The WP was born out of a split of the SWP. In the course of the dispute Comrade Trotsky summed up his view of the historical significance of the dispute as follows (In Defense of Marxism, p. 104):
“Scientific socialism is the conscious expression of the unconscious historic process; namely, the instinctive and elemental drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings. These organic tendencies in the psychology of workers spring to life with utmost rapidity in the epoch of crises and wars. The discussion has revealed beyond all question a clash in the party between a petty-bourgeois tendency and a proletarian tendency. The petty-bourgeois tendency reveals its confusion in its attempt to reduce the program of the party to the small coin of ‘concrete’ questions. The proletarian tendency on the contrary strives to correlate all the partial questions into theoretical unity. At stake at the present time is not the extent to which individual members of the majority consciously apply the dialectic method. What is important is the fact that the majority as a whole pushes toward the proletarian posing of the questions and by very reason of this tends to assimilate the dialectic which is the algebra of the revolution.”
This statement does not exhaust or even express either the complete circumstances of the split in 1940, or the course of the WP or the SWP since that time. Nevertheless, the main difficulties of the party at the present stage can be traced directly to its refusal to base itself upon this instinctive drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist beginnings in the epoch of the ‘death-agony’ of capitalism.
Because the party does not unequivocally base its policy on the instinctive revolutionary striving of the proletariat:
it fails to make revolutionary propaganda and therefore does not recruit revolutionary workers.
it sends its members into industry overweighted with the impossible task of bringing not even socialist but mere political consciousness to sixty million “backward” American workers.
it does not recognize that at present the party’s only claim to leadership is ideological and therefore places the party in the hopeless situation of competing with the labor bureaucrats as a more sincere and more militant wing of the trade union movement.
it fails to teach the methods of social revolution and therefore is compelled to put “more Socialism” in the paper by increasing the number of abstract articles on the socialist idea.
it fails in its press to point out and steady move toward socialism and the leadership by the American wording class. It is therefore fall back on frenzied denunciation of the evils interpret the of the nation compelled to of capitalism.
it has developed a purely arbitrary distinction between propaganda and agitation, based on the conception of propaganda not as revolutionary propaganda for the social revolution but as political polemic with the SWP.
it fails to carry on a serious political education of the proletarian vanguard and, as a result, the party inevitably experiences an internal depoliticalization, which is merely an internal reflection of the external concentration on “immediate demands.”
it fails to teach Bolshevism to the American workers and therefore does not discuss its own development in Bolshevik terms but in terms of regime, conservatism of leadership (Erber), lack of forces (Shachtman) etc.
IV.
Rejecting all types of bourgeois solutions to the problems of society, but at the same time governed by retrogressive concepts of the proletariat, the party leadership undermines the revolutionary confidence of the party membership in itself by a perpetual vacillation between opposing political positions:
The party vacillates on the
Russian Question (between the position of Carter and the official party position)
Character of our epoch (between the theory of retrogression and the theses of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International)
Negro question (between the old Social-Democratic conception of Debs and the Leninist Trotskyist conception)
Stalinism (for and against the CP-SP-CGT slogan, support and non-support of the Chinese peasants, for and against the EAM, ELAS to power, etc.)
German revolution during the war (implying its impossibility and predicting its imminence)
Fourth International (between saying that the only hope of the revolution in Europe is the Fourth International and at the same time ignoring the publications and policy of the Fourth International and denouncing it as politically bankrupt)
Bureaucratic collectivism (rejecting it as a new social order except for Russia and at the same time experimenting both in theory and in practice with the idea of a new bureaucratic collectivist social order)
Historical foundations of the Fourth International (between attacking all who preach that Stalinism is inevitable fruit Bolshevism and at the same time asserting that Lenin’s and Trotsky’s treatment of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries (ratified by many Congresses and by Lenin himself) contributed to the degeneration of the revolution and the victory of Stalinism. (The “Mistakes” of the Bolsheviks, NI, November 1943)
The party at this stage, lacking effective forces, can sustain itself only by a clear consistent political line and the firmest conviction of its past and its future. If even the line is proved incorrect, a healthy party can change it and thereby even gain in confidence. The present vacillating course of the party leadership on fundamental questions is one of the chief causes of the uncertainty of the party.
The party must establish and resolutely maintain until it is changed a firm political line on all fundamental questions.
Democratic Centralism and the Cadre
Unable to mobilize the full force of the party for action behind a firm, clear, political line, the party leadership is driven to intensify education in the special discoveries of the party during the past five yours. But inasmuch as this line cannot be related to the recent past of the Fourth International (e.g., CP-SP-CGT to Whither France; the Negro position to the writings of Trotsky, etc.) the party education cannot bring the desired results.
In full control of the party press and party education and with leading representatives of its line in nearly all the centers of the party, the leadership is forced to try to achieve by organization what it cannot do by political means. It is driven to attempt to establish cohesion in the organization by the imposition from above of a cadre, to be composed essentially of those who subscribe to the special theoretical contributions of the party.
Any attempt to carry out the cadre principle will result in the virtual creation of a thinly-disguised faction, the set-ting up of two types of membership, the relegation of experienced, politically developed, devoted party members to the status of second-class citizens, as well as give a false education to new members as to the relationship in the party between members of opposing political views. Thus, the word, cadre, which, in its Bolshevik sense, signifies the development of the whole membership in the basis principles and traditions of Marxism, rejection of all bourgeois concepts and ideas, devotion to the party and readiness to submit to its discipline, has now become degraded by the application of it to a factional maneuver.
The party must resolutely reject this concept and any at tempt to put it into practice.
*
V.
Bolshevism and Unity
The WP must base its demand for unity on the theories and practices of Bolshevism and the objective situation in the United States.
The WP condemns the leadership of the Fourth International for not pronouncing itself clearly and unequivocally and demanding that the SWP accept the proposals of the WP for unity. It condemns the SWP majority for its unprincipled and dishonest factional maneuvers in regard to the proposals of unity made by the WP and the SWP minority.
The WP, while recognizing the objective results of a concrete situation, disapproves of the actions of the SWP minority:
in allowing its factional struggle to reach the perspective of a split on the question of Cannon’s regime.
in conducting its factional struggle in a manner harmful to the education of the Fourth International and particularly the youth in the traditions of principled Bolsheviks.
By these actions it has done harm to the very cause of unity it initiated. It has lost the opportunity of effective resistance to the unprincipled Cannonite opposition to unity and has done harm to the Bolshevik morale of the whole movement in the United States.
The WP pronounces itself against splits in the Fourth International of any kind except on the political ground, that the party from which the split is proposed is no longer an instrument of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
The WP denounces splits in organizations which have left the propaganda circle stage and address themselves seriously to workers. It does great harm to the conceptions of Bolshevism when workers are asked to devote their lives to one party and then told that although the parties still stand on the revolutionary principles of the Fourth International, it should be abandoned in favor of another.
The WP does not unduly concern itself with problems such as Hansen’s article on Cannon and controversy in the SWP about the right of intellectuals to criticize the party and the publication or non-publication of letters, etc. It does not give the slightest credence to the conception that a party cannot be built with Cannon. It is confident that if Cannon or Cannonism or any other individual or tendency stands in the way of building the Fourth International in the U.S., then the revolutionary cadres in both the WP and the SWP will either defeat such individuals or tendencies or thereby prove their inability to defeat the bourgeoisie. The WP makes its main attack on Cannon’s regime its refusal to enter honestly fusion negotiations. This refusal betrays the stultifying monolithic conceptions. The WP recognizes that the mere acceptance of fusion between the two parties would strike a death blow at the monolithic conception. All other preoccupations are subordinate, disorient the membership of both parties and strengthen the Cannonite mis-education in the rank and file of the SWP on unity.
The WP stands for the unity of the Fourth International at home and abroad and recommends to the party to use all legitimate means to carry out its policy of unity, not being deterred by the dishonesty of the SWP leadership or the ignorance and fanaticism of its members. It is confident that its own devotion to the principles of the Fourth Intentional, its proved capacity to struggle against the bourgeoisie and the developing objective situation will compel the formation of a united party in the United States.
Finally, the WP denounces the invitations in any form, in public or in private, to any minority to leave the party.
*
VI
The party must constantly bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which the Fourth International functions today, owing to the tension of the whole international situation and the smallness of the organized revolutionary forces. Its individual members will be called upon to carry out tasks of revolutionary leadership and responsibility which will tax their energies and resources to the utmost. It is therefore of extreme importance that workers who join the party find in the party itself a means of developing themselves as revolutionists of mastering to the fullest extent of their capabilities the theory and practice of Bolshevism. It should be impossible for any party member even after only a few months in the party to feel that he has not learned anything. In its present condition, of dissatisfaction with bourgeois society but yet lacking revolutionary theory, layers of the American proletariat will be found receptive to the ideas of Bolshevism, but only if the propagandist of Bolshevism is himself a trained, serious educated Bolshevik, preferably a worker, able to give by his personal example and personal exposition some indication not only of the socialism which the party aims at but the socialism which it represents today. This can be learnt first of all in the party.
Such a condition does not exist in our party today. That it should be realized, demands from the membership first of all a clear conception of the dialectical connection between the international perspectives of the party, its national perspectives and the task of party-building. It demands from the membership a resolute determination to discuss its problems with serious recognition of the great issues involved and to be merciless against all who show by their arguments, demeanor and general procedure that they seek least of all a clarification of issues and the education of the membership.
Above all, the united membership must drive out of cur ranks defeatism, pessimism and scepticism in any shape or form. It must base itself unequivocally upon confidence in the historic destiny of the proletariat and in the party as its expression. Without this basis, even the correct revolutionary line can only bring a few more members and continue the party on a more or less stagnant course. With this basis the party can by the proper education, training and patience so prepare itself that as the proletariat moves to its destiny, it will in increasing numbers recognize the propaganda group of the Fourth International and steadily transform it into the mass revolutionary party which will lead the social revolution.
March 18, 1946
J.R. Johnson
C.L.R James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
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<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
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<h3>(3 November 1939)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_84" target="new">Vol. III No. 84</a>, 3 November 1939, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<h3>The Negroes in Industry</h3>
<p class="fst">The future of the Negro is hound by unbreakable chains of iron and steel to the industrial system of this country. We, as a revolutionary party, must therefore has a very clear conception of the relationship of Negroes to this system, and the Negroes too must see the position as it is. Ninety-nine Negroes out of every hundred, to be more accurate, 999 out of every 1,000, firmly believe that Negroes are discriminated against in industry because they are black. “We could get such and such jobs. Only one thing prevents us. As soon as they see our black skins they turn us away. Obviously it is because we are black.”</p>
<p>The reasoning seems unanswerable. But it is false. In fact it is not the least exaggeration to say that the Negro’s skin has nothing at all to do with the fundamentals of this question. Bet me repeat that. The color of the Negro’s skin has nothing at all to do with the fundamentals of the question.</p>
<p>And now for the proof of this apparently bewildering statement. In India, Hindus and Moslems are quite often, the same color to the last shade. They, however, are divided by their religious differences. Therefore one of the chief strategies of the British government in India is to push fire between Hindus and Moslems in industry, in politics, and in every sphere of life. By this means they divide the Indians, particularly the masses, and make their own position more secure.</p>
<p>Take again Northern Ireland. There the population is white. The British ruling class must find some method of division, They find it in the different religions, one group Catholic and the other group Protestant.</p>
<p>The technique employed is simple as daylight. The Prime Minister and the chief spokesmen always preach about the necessity of unity, how the government duty is to keep the peace, protect the rights of all citizens, etc. So much in words. In action, however, the Government drives wedge after wedge between Catholics and Protestants, and keeps the antagonism at fever pitch.</p>
<p>In Germany Hitler found another source of dividing the workers, the peasants, and the lower middle class: he foamed at the mouth whenever he mentioned the Jews and persecuted them when he came to power.<br>
</p>
<h4>Divide in Order to Rule</h4>
<p class="fst">It is perfectly clear that your capitalists, your representative of the ruling class, seeks above all to divide in order to rule. In Britain where so much of the population is of the same racial type and of the same religion your capitalist is in difficulty as to how best to divide the workers. He does it by paying higher wages to some and creating a body, relatively small, of privileged workers. These, being quite satisfied, then become conservative and act as a check on the millions whose dissatisfaction with their lot would be a constant threat to the system if it were not suppressed by this privileged section within their own ranks.</p>
<p>Your capitalist must divide the workers in order to weaken them. In India he fans the flame between Hindus and Moslems. In Ireland between Protestant and Catholic, in many other countries between Jew and Gentile. But the Negro has a black skin. This makes him easily distinguishable from others. Your American capitalist, therefore, at his perpetual game of dividing the workers, leaps with joy and rubs his hands at the good God who made the Negro black. It is so easy to say: “There, don’t you see his black skin? White workers, my good friends, let us keep that black man in his place.”</p>
<p>The black skin business is only an excuse, as Hindu-Moslem, Catholic-Protestant, Jew-Gentile is only an excuse. Now you can’t look at a man and say whether he is Catholic or Protestant, Hindu or Moslem. But a Negro is seen to be different to the white man at first glance. Hence the viciousness and the obviousness of the discrimination against Negroes. But the root of it is in the system which gives the capitalist the need and the power to divide. And the cure is the abolition of the system which breeds this necessity to divide.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Wherefore of Race Prejudice</h4>
<p class="fst">Both Negroes and white workers who are advanced politically beyond their fellows must understand this, must have it in their bones. That is the truth and nothing but the truth. Naturally, there are other aspects of the question. Your capitalist does not say this openly. That would, ruin everything. He builds up great theories of Negro inferiority, Negro incapability, etc. These are taught in schools from generation to generation, and millions of unsuspecting people learn this and never think that it is in reality nothing else but capitalist rationalisation for the benefit of capitalist pockets.</p>
<p>Having imbibed these ideas with their mother’s milk so to speak and seeing Negroes living in dirt and slums, most white workers think what they hear all around them is quite true. And when white workers find that being white means the possibility of working in any factory and being black means exclusion from half of them, that being white means 70 cents an hour and being black 45 cents an hour for the same type of work, then these capitalist ideas receive a powerful material enforcement in the working class. This is the reason for race prejudice among the white workers. What the white worker does not see is that by combining with the Negro both can get 90 cents, or overthrow the system altogether. Your capitalist sees that quite clearly however.</p>
<p>How to clarify the minds of workers, both white and black, is the revolutionary problem. Propaganda and agitation to break down the capitalist propaganda; but above all joint action. As the economic crisis deepens, the white workers are driven to revise their previous conceptions. The crisis drove some 400,000 Negroes into the CIO. Thus millions of white workers have begun to think differently about Negroes. Another sharpening of the crisis, another stride forward of the organized workers, will bring thousands upon thousands of Negroes into the ranks of organized labor. But we cannot wait for these developments. We must work in preparation for them.</p>
<p>The first thing therefore is to know something about the Negro’s position in industry, not to know in the abstract, but to be familiar with it. How did the Negro enter into certain industries, what was his status there yesterday, what is it to-day? It is by this study, that we can get some real living conception of the role of the Negro in the working class movement. Few white workers have any conception of the history of this development. Still more tragic, fewer Negroes know anything about it.</p>
<p>Periodically this column will examine the Negro’s role in industry, the understanding of which is an indispensable preliminary to correct revolutionary action. In the next issue we shall have a general survey of the Negro in industry during the last hundred years, after which we shall examine his situation in steel, meat packing, etc. There we shall see how in the South, the employer used 5 Negros to one white in skilled industry before slavery was abolished, how after emancipation he used five whites to one Negro, how he started to use more Negroes to break the fighting power of the whites. In other words we shall see concretely how little the color question means to the employer where his pocket is concerned.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
(3 November 1939)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 84, 3 November 1939, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The Negroes in Industry
The future of the Negro is hound by unbreakable chains of iron and steel to the industrial system of this country. We, as a revolutionary party, must therefore has a very clear conception of the relationship of Negroes to this system, and the Negroes too must see the position as it is. Ninety-nine Negroes out of every hundred, to be more accurate, 999 out of every 1,000, firmly believe that Negroes are discriminated against in industry because they are black. “We could get such and such jobs. Only one thing prevents us. As soon as they see our black skins they turn us away. Obviously it is because we are black.”
The reasoning seems unanswerable. But it is false. In fact it is not the least exaggeration to say that the Negro’s skin has nothing at all to do with the fundamentals of this question. Bet me repeat that. The color of the Negro’s skin has nothing at all to do with the fundamentals of the question.
And now for the proof of this apparently bewildering statement. In India, Hindus and Moslems are quite often, the same color to the last shade. They, however, are divided by their religious differences. Therefore one of the chief strategies of the British government in India is to push fire between Hindus and Moslems in industry, in politics, and in every sphere of life. By this means they divide the Indians, particularly the masses, and make their own position more secure.
Take again Northern Ireland. There the population is white. The British ruling class must find some method of division, They find it in the different religions, one group Catholic and the other group Protestant.
The technique employed is simple as daylight. The Prime Minister and the chief spokesmen always preach about the necessity of unity, how the government duty is to keep the peace, protect the rights of all citizens, etc. So much in words. In action, however, the Government drives wedge after wedge between Catholics and Protestants, and keeps the antagonism at fever pitch.
In Germany Hitler found another source of dividing the workers, the peasants, and the lower middle class: he foamed at the mouth whenever he mentioned the Jews and persecuted them when he came to power.
Divide in Order to Rule
It is perfectly clear that your capitalists, your representative of the ruling class, seeks above all to divide in order to rule. In Britain where so much of the population is of the same racial type and of the same religion your capitalist is in difficulty as to how best to divide the workers. He does it by paying higher wages to some and creating a body, relatively small, of privileged workers. These, being quite satisfied, then become conservative and act as a check on the millions whose dissatisfaction with their lot would be a constant threat to the system if it were not suppressed by this privileged section within their own ranks.
Your capitalist must divide the workers in order to weaken them. In India he fans the flame between Hindus and Moslems. In Ireland between Protestant and Catholic, in many other countries between Jew and Gentile. But the Negro has a black skin. This makes him easily distinguishable from others. Your American capitalist, therefore, at his perpetual game of dividing the workers, leaps with joy and rubs his hands at the good God who made the Negro black. It is so easy to say: “There, don’t you see his black skin? White workers, my good friends, let us keep that black man in his place.”
The black skin business is only an excuse, as Hindu-Moslem, Catholic-Protestant, Jew-Gentile is only an excuse. Now you can’t look at a man and say whether he is Catholic or Protestant, Hindu or Moslem. But a Negro is seen to be different to the white man at first glance. Hence the viciousness and the obviousness of the discrimination against Negroes. But the root of it is in the system which gives the capitalist the need and the power to divide. And the cure is the abolition of the system which breeds this necessity to divide.
The Wherefore of Race Prejudice
Both Negroes and white workers who are advanced politically beyond their fellows must understand this, must have it in their bones. That is the truth and nothing but the truth. Naturally, there are other aspects of the question. Your capitalist does not say this openly. That would, ruin everything. He builds up great theories of Negro inferiority, Negro incapability, etc. These are taught in schools from generation to generation, and millions of unsuspecting people learn this and never think that it is in reality nothing else but capitalist rationalisation for the benefit of capitalist pockets.
Having imbibed these ideas with their mother’s milk so to speak and seeing Negroes living in dirt and slums, most white workers think what they hear all around them is quite true. And when white workers find that being white means the possibility of working in any factory and being black means exclusion from half of them, that being white means 70 cents an hour and being black 45 cents an hour for the same type of work, then these capitalist ideas receive a powerful material enforcement in the working class. This is the reason for race prejudice among the white workers. What the white worker does not see is that by combining with the Negro both can get 90 cents, or overthrow the system altogether. Your capitalist sees that quite clearly however.
How to clarify the minds of workers, both white and black, is the revolutionary problem. Propaganda and agitation to break down the capitalist propaganda; but above all joint action. As the economic crisis deepens, the white workers are driven to revise their previous conceptions. The crisis drove some 400,000 Negroes into the CIO. Thus millions of white workers have begun to think differently about Negroes. Another sharpening of the crisis, another stride forward of the organized workers, will bring thousands upon thousands of Negroes into the ranks of organized labor. But we cannot wait for these developments. We must work in preparation for them.
The first thing therefore is to know something about the Negro’s position in industry, not to know in the abstract, but to be familiar with it. How did the Negro enter into certain industries, what was his status there yesterday, what is it to-day? It is by this study, that we can get some real living conception of the role of the Negro in the working class movement. Few white workers have any conception of the history of this development. Still more tragic, fewer Negroes know anything about it.
Periodically this column will examine the Negro’s role in industry, the understanding of which is an indispensable preliminary to correct revolutionary action. In the next issue we shall have a general survey of the Negro in industry during the last hundred years, after which we shall examine his situation in steel, meat packing, etc. There we shall see how in the South, the employer used 5 Negros to one white in skilled industry before slavery was abolished, how after emancipation he used five whites to one Negro, how he started to use more Negroes to break the fighting power of the whites. In other words we shall see concretely how little the color question means to the employer where his pocket is concerned.
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<h2>C.L.R. James </h2>
<h1>National Stay-In Strike?</h1>
<h4>How the miners could win an increase – What I learned in Wales</h4>
<h3>(November 1935)</h3>
<hr class="end" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source:</span> <b>New Leader</b>, 1 November 1935.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> by Christian H�gsbjerg.<br>
Marked up for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.</p>
<hr class="end" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">South Wales has been squeezed almost dry by Capitalism, but the weaker the workers, the more ruthlessly Capitalism strikes at them. Harassed by an unceasing offensive, some of the miners have retaliated by means of the stay-in strike.</p>
<p>I happened to be in South Wales last weekend, and knowing by experience the lies, omissions, and evasions with which the Capitalist Press would have reported the strike, I took the opportunity of getting a first-hand account from Comrades William Mitchell and Bert Kear, who were mainly responsible for it. This is what they told me.<br>
</p>
<h4>Before the Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">The Ocean Company owns eleven collieries in South Wales, employing some 10,000 men. Between 1926 and today the Ocean Company has steadily reduced wages and abolished privileges. But the greatest danger that faces South Wales miners is the employment of scab-Union labour, drawn from unemployed men in South Wales, and financed by the companies.</p>
<p>To stop the steady growth of this blacklegging, all the miners’ lodges of the Ocean Company made the Executive of the South Wales Miners’ Federation tender to the company fourteen days notice to get rid of the scabs from Nine Mile Point and other collieries under the Ocean Combine. These notices terminated on September 28, and the men came out on strike.</p>
<p>The Ocean Company concentrated on Nine Mile Point. From a radius of 20–25 miles away they collected well over 70 men. They were paying these �4 to �4 10s. a week. The weekly wage of the Federation miner averaged �2 9s. a week, and for piece-work �3 5s. Furthermore, the scabs produced only one-third of the average output of the men regularly employed. But the owners did not mind paying. The scabs could be dealt with later.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Blacklegs</h4>
<p class="fst">During the whole of the nine days the Strike Committee was out every morning from 5 until 7 or 8, using peaceful means of persuasion to try and prevent the scabs working. The Strike Committee was anxious to prevent bloodshed, for day after day the temper of the Federation men rose, and near the end of the strike there were some 400 policemen escorting the blacklegs to work.</p>
<p>On Thursday, October 9, the Federation advised that the strike be abandoned, and the men obeyed. Here, however, the company showed its teeth.</p>
<p>There are three shafts at Nine Mile Point Colliery: the East Pit, the West Pit and Rock Vane. The company only permitted the men at Rock Vane and West Pit to work. No one was to be allowed to work in the East Pit.</p>
<p>The company offered an excuse that there was no work to be done, but at the same time it allowed the scabs who had been working there during the strike to continue. The rumour spread that on the Monday they were going to do the same at the West Pit.</p>
<p>On the Saturday at 1.30, just before the men in the West Pit were due to come up from below, first Mitchell and then Kear addressed them. After outlining the situation they pointed out to the men that feeling was rising so high between the scabs and the Federation men that if they went up as usual there would probably be in the coming week rioting, bloodshed, and perhaps terms of imprisonment, as had happened before. They had to fight, and it would be better to fight below than above.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Men’s Demands </h4>
<p class="fst">The men agreed: 74 of them decided that they would stop under for a month if necessary. They insisted that the younger boys should not stay, and these, on coming up, made known the demands of those below. These were:–</p>
<ol class="numbered">
<li>That all scab-Union labour should cease.<br>
</li>
<li>That there would be no victimisation; and, knowing the capitalist code of honour, they demanded the promises in writing.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The decision taken at 1.30, they made for the warmth of the stables, where they stayed until 3.30 on the Sunday morning, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink. At 3.30 they were informed by one of the officials that food had been sent. Mitchell and Kear asked by whom; if by the Ocean Company they would have refused it, but it had been sent by the officials of the S.W. Miners’ Federation. After that they had three meals a day, and parcels from friends and relatives.</p>
<p>But the company censored every parcel, even opening the sandwiches to look for messages. The men were thus kept in complete isolation.</p>
<p>On the Monday morning, the West Pit and Rock Vane were opened for work as usual by the company. Thirty comrades went down the West Pit, ostensibly to work, but really to join the strikers. In the East Pit, over a hundred scabs were working on the Monday morning. Twenty three of the Federation men were allowed by the company to work in connection with the haulage of the coal produced by the scabs, but when these twenty-three got down they refused to work, and stayed below.<br>
</p>
<h4>More Miners Out</h4>
<p class="fst">In Rock Vane, the third pit, 72 men went down on Monday, but they also refused to work, and stayed down in support of the West Pit. The scabs came to work on the Tuesday in the East Pit, but when coal came up the brakesman refused to handle it and went home. By Wednesday the scabs were less than half and dwindling (it was said in Merthyr that the engine-driver and staff had refused to man their train).</p>
<p>By this time, all over South Wales miners were stopping work in sympathy with the men below. On Thursday morning, at four o'clock, officials of the Nine Point Lodge came down the West Pit to try and bring the miners up. Asked by the men if they had brought the acceptance of their demands in writing, they said no, and were told to go up and stay up, and not to make any attempt whatever to fetch the miners out until they had the required document.</p>
<p>On Saturday, at 1.30, Marsden, the local miners’ official, came down and interviewed them once more. The agent produced a letter from the management stating that when the pits resumed work <em>no scab labour would be employed at the colliery in future, and there would be no victimisation.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>A New Weapon</h4>
<p class="fst">The letter also stated, however, that the Nine Mile Point Colliery would be closed down indefinitely, because the company had an obligation to the non-Union men to give fourteen days notice to them. So that the colliers who have fought and won are now out of work.</p>
<p>However, Mitchell and Kear have done better than the leaders of the stay-in strike in Hungary. He was interviewed in one of the upper storeys of a police-station. He was picked up later on the pavement many yards below, and the public was informed that he had thrown himself down. What in all probability happened was that he was beaten to death, and then all marks of the crime got rid of by this simple expedient. South Wales miners, however, have still some way to go before the class struggle in this country reaches that high pitch of ferocity.</p>
<p><em>The stay-in strike is not a mere novelty.</em></p>
<p><em>The miners may soon wake up to the fact that is this kind of strike they have a weapon with which they can break the resistance of the colliery owners through the length and breadth of the country.</em></p>
<p>The miners have an overwhelming case. The National Government will be fruitful of windy promises until the election is over. If miners all over the country were to go down and refuse to come up they would focus the attention of the whole country on their just demands, and would have a great chance of victory.<br>
</p>
<h4>Towards Revolutionary Action</h4>
<p class="fst">But for Revolutionary Socialists what is most significant in this whole strike is the way the minds of the workers move towards revolutionary action. The sudden speeches of Mitchell and Kear at the bottom of the mine, the immediate acquiescence of the men, the response from thousands all over the coalfield, the awakening of the whole country – these are the steps (on a larger scale) by which a revolutionary period suddenly boils over into a revolutionary situation.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James
National Stay-In Strike?
How the miners could win an increase – What I learned in Wales
(November 1935)
Source: New Leader, 1 November 1935.
Transcribed: by Christian H�gsbjerg.
Marked up for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
South Wales has been squeezed almost dry by Capitalism, but the weaker the workers, the more ruthlessly Capitalism strikes at them. Harassed by an unceasing offensive, some of the miners have retaliated by means of the stay-in strike.
I happened to be in South Wales last weekend, and knowing by experience the lies, omissions, and evasions with which the Capitalist Press would have reported the strike, I took the opportunity of getting a first-hand account from Comrades William Mitchell and Bert Kear, who were mainly responsible for it. This is what they told me.
Before the Strike
The Ocean Company owns eleven collieries in South Wales, employing some 10,000 men. Between 1926 and today the Ocean Company has steadily reduced wages and abolished privileges. But the greatest danger that faces South Wales miners is the employment of scab-Union labour, drawn from unemployed men in South Wales, and financed by the companies.
To stop the steady growth of this blacklegging, all the miners’ lodges of the Ocean Company made the Executive of the South Wales Miners’ Federation tender to the company fourteen days notice to get rid of the scabs from Nine Mile Point and other collieries under the Ocean Combine. These notices terminated on September 28, and the men came out on strike.
The Ocean Company concentrated on Nine Mile Point. From a radius of 20–25 miles away they collected well over 70 men. They were paying these �4 to �4 10s. a week. The weekly wage of the Federation miner averaged �2 9s. a week, and for piece-work �3 5s. Furthermore, the scabs produced only one-third of the average output of the men regularly employed. But the owners did not mind paying. The scabs could be dealt with later.
The Blacklegs
During the whole of the nine days the Strike Committee was out every morning from 5 until 7 or 8, using peaceful means of persuasion to try and prevent the scabs working. The Strike Committee was anxious to prevent bloodshed, for day after day the temper of the Federation men rose, and near the end of the strike there were some 400 policemen escorting the blacklegs to work.
On Thursday, October 9, the Federation advised that the strike be abandoned, and the men obeyed. Here, however, the company showed its teeth.
There are three shafts at Nine Mile Point Colliery: the East Pit, the West Pit and Rock Vane. The company only permitted the men at Rock Vane and West Pit to work. No one was to be allowed to work in the East Pit.
The company offered an excuse that there was no work to be done, but at the same time it allowed the scabs who had been working there during the strike to continue. The rumour spread that on the Monday they were going to do the same at the West Pit.
On the Saturday at 1.30, just before the men in the West Pit were due to come up from below, first Mitchell and then Kear addressed them. After outlining the situation they pointed out to the men that feeling was rising so high between the scabs and the Federation men that if they went up as usual there would probably be in the coming week rioting, bloodshed, and perhaps terms of imprisonment, as had happened before. They had to fight, and it would be better to fight below than above.
The Men’s Demands
The men agreed: 74 of them decided that they would stop under for a month if necessary. They insisted that the younger boys should not stay, and these, on coming up, made known the demands of those below. These were:–
That all scab-Union labour should cease.
That there would be no victimisation; and, knowing the capitalist code of honour, they demanded the promises in writing.
The decision taken at 1.30, they made for the warmth of the stables, where they stayed until 3.30 on the Sunday morning, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink. At 3.30 they were informed by one of the officials that food had been sent. Mitchell and Kear asked by whom; if by the Ocean Company they would have refused it, but it had been sent by the officials of the S.W. Miners’ Federation. After that they had three meals a day, and parcels from friends and relatives.
But the company censored every parcel, even opening the sandwiches to look for messages. The men were thus kept in complete isolation.
On the Monday morning, the West Pit and Rock Vane were opened for work as usual by the company. Thirty comrades went down the West Pit, ostensibly to work, but really to join the strikers. In the East Pit, over a hundred scabs were working on the Monday morning. Twenty three of the Federation men were allowed by the company to work in connection with the haulage of the coal produced by the scabs, but when these twenty-three got down they refused to work, and stayed below.
More Miners Out
In Rock Vane, the third pit, 72 men went down on Monday, but they also refused to work, and stayed down in support of the West Pit. The scabs came to work on the Tuesday in the East Pit, but when coal came up the brakesman refused to handle it and went home. By Wednesday the scabs were less than half and dwindling (it was said in Merthyr that the engine-driver and staff had refused to man their train).
By this time, all over South Wales miners were stopping work in sympathy with the men below. On Thursday morning, at four o'clock, officials of the Nine Point Lodge came down the West Pit to try and bring the miners up. Asked by the men if they had brought the acceptance of their demands in writing, they said no, and were told to go up and stay up, and not to make any attempt whatever to fetch the miners out until they had the required document.
On Saturday, at 1.30, Marsden, the local miners’ official, came down and interviewed them once more. The agent produced a letter from the management stating that when the pits resumed work no scab labour would be employed at the colliery in future, and there would be no victimisation.
A New Weapon
The letter also stated, however, that the Nine Mile Point Colliery would be closed down indefinitely, because the company had an obligation to the non-Union men to give fourteen days notice to them. So that the colliers who have fought and won are now out of work.
However, Mitchell and Kear have done better than the leaders of the stay-in strike in Hungary. He was interviewed in one of the upper storeys of a police-station. He was picked up later on the pavement many yards below, and the public was informed that he had thrown himself down. What in all probability happened was that he was beaten to death, and then all marks of the crime got rid of by this simple expedient. South Wales miners, however, have still some way to go before the class struggle in this country reaches that high pitch of ferocity.
The stay-in strike is not a mere novelty.
The miners may soon wake up to the fact that is this kind of strike they have a weapon with which they can break the resistance of the colliery owners through the length and breadth of the country.
The miners have an overwhelming case. The National Government will be fruitful of windy promises until the election is over. If miners all over the country were to go down and refuse to come up they would focus the attention of the whole country on their just demands, and would have a great chance of victory.
Towards Revolutionary Action
But for Revolutionary Socialists what is most significant in this whole strike is the way the minds of the workers move towards revolutionary action. The sudden speeches of Mitchell and Kear at the bottom of the mine, the immediate acquiescence of the men, the response from thousands all over the coalfield, the awakening of the whole country – these are the steps (on a larger scale) by which a revolutionary period suddenly boils over into a revolutionary situation.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h4>FEPC Hearings Emphasize —</h4>
<h1>The Labor Unions Must Smash Jim Crow</h1>
<h3>(4 October 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_40" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 40</a>, 4 October 1943, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Labor is meeting in conventions these days. Every convention discusses its own problems in the framework of the general situation of labor In the country. Both in public discussion or private conference, the Negroes’ position in the labor movement will continually crop up. These discussions and conferences will do well to bear in mind exactly what has been revealed at the recent hearings, organized by the Fair Employment Practices Committee, on discrimination against Negroes on the railroads.</p>
<p>The facts themselves are familiar. Yet labor, which faces great battles for its existence in the coming turbulent years, cannot afford to let scores of Negro newspapers, like, for instance, the <strong>Chicago Defender</strong>, September 25, say things like the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The testimony tended to prove beyond any doubt that the railroads have refused to hire or upgrade Negroes, ignored their seniority rights, maintained their unfair differentials in wages paid Negroes for identical work as done by whites ... refused them employment or promotion to jobs as locomotive engineers, flagmen, cabinmen, boiler-makers ... trainmen ...”</p>
<p class="fst">and a long and impressive list of discriminations.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor’s Big Task</h4>
<p class="fst">Labor as a whole cannot afford this sort of thing because, first, the wages and conditions of all workers are the concern of all labor; and, secondly, the railroad companies are saying that it is not their fault, it is the result of agreements arrived at with railroad labor. They are excusing themselves and saying the fault is labor’s.</p>
<p>The railroad companies present made no defense. They cross-examined no witnesses. But the railroad brotherhoods made no defense either. Yet Sydney S. Alderman, who made a statement for all the railroads except the Union Pacific, showed the company’s main line of defense to be: it is not our fault, it is labor’s.</p>
<p>Listen to this: “The agreement with labor organizations (openly approving discriminatory exclusions of Negroes) placed before this committee have been arrived at by processes under the Railway Labor Act and earlier controlling United States labor laws, often with governmental assistance and approval.”</p>
<p>See his emphasis. The LABOR unions agree, under LABOR legislation. The government too approved. Why blame us?<br>
</p>
<h4>The Railway Labor Act</h4>
<p class="fst">When the railroad companies have a disagreement with the government they shout loud enough. When they want to attack labor’s wages or living conditions they mobilize, hit hard and fight long. But now they shrug their shoulders and say: “Labor is responsible.”</p>
<p>Next comes Dr. Northrup for the government. He is a member of the National War Labor Board. This bureaucrat condemns the Railroad Act. But why? Because</p>
<p class="quoteb">“under it the National (Railway) Mediation Board must often designate, as exclusive bargaining agent for Negroes, a union which excluded Negroes or confines them to an inferior auxiliary status ... It has refused to take the racial policies of unions into consideration in determining appropriate bargaining units.”</p>
<p class="fst">Was there ever such impudence and disgusting hypocrisy?<br>
</p>
<h4>CIO Sets an Example</h4>
<p class="fst">Very wisely the CIO sent a representative to the hearings, Myers of the National Maritime Union. Myers testified that the NMU, by a referendum among its 50,000 members, had condemned discrimination. It was “particularly proud,” said Myers, that his union had abolished discrimination among seamen in the South, where, as he pointed out, it was generally believed “it cannot be done.” Said Myers:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Negro and white seamen work side by side, eat together in the same messroom and are quartered together in the same fo’csle.”</p>
<p class="fst">Myers mixed up this fine record with a lot of pro-war talk which had nothing to do with the case.</p>
<p>Most important testimony of all came from L. Abner, a white man and former fireman of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. He said that promotions of Negroes would NOT lead to disruptions of service. He said that there would be some grumbling. But “seniority plays a great place in a railroad man’s life, and he isn’t going to do anything in the line of violence to challenge it.”</p>
<p>There spoke the very voice of the ordinary progressive worker. Today that type is in the majority in the labor movement.<br>
</p>
<h4>Press Suppresses Hearings</h4>
<p class="fst">The capitalist press for the most part boycotted the hearings. This proves quite clearly that the railroad companies wish the discrimination to continue. The capitalist press does not advocate the wishes or express the sentiments at labor. The situation is therefore clear. The government and capitalism as represented by the railroad companies have been forced to recognize the discrimination publicly. The responsibility is basically theirs.</p>
<p>They and their press are the great teachers, upholders and practitioners of Jim Crow and discrimination in this country. But they want to smear labor with it. And the railroad unions, by maintaining the discrimination, are not only weakening their union, but are disgracing themselves before the general public, antagonizing the Negroes and opening labor as a whole to damaging blows by capital and its state, just when American labor needs to show the country and the world as a whole that it is the only really powerful force for democracy in the country.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Can Settle Its Own Problems</h4>
<p class="fst">The railroad unions cannot remain silent any longer. They should not allow their reactionary constitutions with its discriminatory practices to remain. But we do not want the government meddling in this. The rank and file in the railroad unions, the people who think as Abner should say to their leaders: “Put an end to it.”</p>
<p>And the CIO unions and the labor movement as a whole, as they all meet in convention, should express themselves to their railroad brothers, in clear terms:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This is no time to continue such practices. You owe it to yourselves and to all of us to take the lead. Discrimination and Jim Crow are vices of the boss class. We are not waiting now for big business to lecture us. There, as in all other fields, labor must take the lead.”</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
FEPC Hearings Emphasize —
The Labor Unions Must Smash Jim Crow
(4 October 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 40, 4 October 1943, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Labor is meeting in conventions these days. Every convention discusses its own problems in the framework of the general situation of labor In the country. Both in public discussion or private conference, the Negroes’ position in the labor movement will continually crop up. These discussions and conferences will do well to bear in mind exactly what has been revealed at the recent hearings, organized by the Fair Employment Practices Committee, on discrimination against Negroes on the railroads.
The facts themselves are familiar. Yet labor, which faces great battles for its existence in the coming turbulent years, cannot afford to let scores of Negro newspapers, like, for instance, the Chicago Defender, September 25, say things like the following:
“The testimony tended to prove beyond any doubt that the railroads have refused to hire or upgrade Negroes, ignored their seniority rights, maintained their unfair differentials in wages paid Negroes for identical work as done by whites ... refused them employment or promotion to jobs as locomotive engineers, flagmen, cabinmen, boiler-makers ... trainmen ...”
and a long and impressive list of discriminations.
Labor’s Big Task
Labor as a whole cannot afford this sort of thing because, first, the wages and conditions of all workers are the concern of all labor; and, secondly, the railroad companies are saying that it is not their fault, it is the result of agreements arrived at with railroad labor. They are excusing themselves and saying the fault is labor’s.
The railroad companies present made no defense. They cross-examined no witnesses. But the railroad brotherhoods made no defense either. Yet Sydney S. Alderman, who made a statement for all the railroads except the Union Pacific, showed the company’s main line of defense to be: it is not our fault, it is labor’s.
Listen to this: “The agreement with labor organizations (openly approving discriminatory exclusions of Negroes) placed before this committee have been arrived at by processes under the Railway Labor Act and earlier controlling United States labor laws, often with governmental assistance and approval.”
See his emphasis. The LABOR unions agree, under LABOR legislation. The government too approved. Why blame us?
The Railway Labor Act
When the railroad companies have a disagreement with the government they shout loud enough. When they want to attack labor’s wages or living conditions they mobilize, hit hard and fight long. But now they shrug their shoulders and say: “Labor is responsible.”
Next comes Dr. Northrup for the government. He is a member of the National War Labor Board. This bureaucrat condemns the Railroad Act. But why? Because
“under it the National (Railway) Mediation Board must often designate, as exclusive bargaining agent for Negroes, a union which excluded Negroes or confines them to an inferior auxiliary status ... It has refused to take the racial policies of unions into consideration in determining appropriate bargaining units.”
Was there ever such impudence and disgusting hypocrisy?
CIO Sets an Example
Very wisely the CIO sent a representative to the hearings, Myers of the National Maritime Union. Myers testified that the NMU, by a referendum among its 50,000 members, had condemned discrimination. It was “particularly proud,” said Myers, that his union had abolished discrimination among seamen in the South, where, as he pointed out, it was generally believed “it cannot be done.” Said Myers:
“Negro and white seamen work side by side, eat together in the same messroom and are quartered together in the same fo’csle.”
Myers mixed up this fine record with a lot of pro-war talk which had nothing to do with the case.
Most important testimony of all came from L. Abner, a white man and former fireman of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. He said that promotions of Negroes would NOT lead to disruptions of service. He said that there would be some grumbling. But “seniority plays a great place in a railroad man’s life, and he isn’t going to do anything in the line of violence to challenge it.”
There spoke the very voice of the ordinary progressive worker. Today that type is in the majority in the labor movement.
Press Suppresses Hearings
The capitalist press for the most part boycotted the hearings. This proves quite clearly that the railroad companies wish the discrimination to continue. The capitalist press does not advocate the wishes or express the sentiments at labor. The situation is therefore clear. The government and capitalism as represented by the railroad companies have been forced to recognize the discrimination publicly. The responsibility is basically theirs.
They and their press are the great teachers, upholders and practitioners of Jim Crow and discrimination in this country. But they want to smear labor with it. And the railroad unions, by maintaining the discrimination, are not only weakening their union, but are disgracing themselves before the general public, antagonizing the Negroes and opening labor as a whole to damaging blows by capital and its state, just when American labor needs to show the country and the world as a whole that it is the only really powerful force for democracy in the country.
Labor Can Settle Its Own Problems
The railroad unions cannot remain silent any longer. They should not allow their reactionary constitutions with its discriminatory practices to remain. But we do not want the government meddling in this. The rank and file in the railroad unions, the people who think as Abner should say to their leaders: “Put an end to it.”
And the CIO unions and the labor movement as a whole, as they all meet in convention, should express themselves to their railroad brothers, in clear terms:
“This is no time to continue such practices. You owe it to yourselves and to all of us to take the lead. Discrimination and Jim Crow are vices of the boss class. We are not waiting now for big business to lecture us. There, as in all other fields, labor must take the lead.”
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Must Have His Share of the New Jobs</h1>
<h3>(16 September 1930)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>The Negro’s Fight</em>, <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1940/index.htm#la04_18" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 23</a>, 16 September 1940, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Business is going to boom soon. This capitalist society, under which we live in America, has been stewing in its own juice since 1929. The average unemployment has been ten million, very probably more. Of these, the Negroes constitute at least three or four million. This question of unemployment is a vital question for the workers as a whole, but for Negroes it is life itself.</p>
<p>Now! business is going to boom. People are going to get to work. Bravo! True, it is the building of planes, battleships, guns and tanks to kill people. The more the American capitalists build, the more the German, the Japanese and all the others will build. So they go round and round, piling up the weapons of destruction until they are ready to blow the poor people on earth to pieces. But still, there are going to be jobs. And where there are going to be jobs, there the Negroes must be.<br>
</p>
<h4>The “American Way Of Life” Isn’t Good Enough</h4>
<p class="fst">The Negroes are being told that it is a war for democracy. the Negroes reply that this is a lie. Democracy in America is a lying fraud. When the capitalists say that we must preserve the American way of life, the Negroes say that they do not want to preserve the American way of life. It has meant for them oppression, misery, humiliation. The Negro, the poor, hard-working Negro, says that for him this war is a war of his masters. They may force him into a uniform, but support the war, root for it; NO! It is a capitalist war, Wall Street’s War, an imperialist war, but not a war that poor people, white or Negro, have anything to gain from.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Negroes Must Claim Jobs – Today!</h4>
<p class="fst">But does this mean that, because a Negro opposes the war, he has no right to the jobs which the coming slaughter will provide? That is just nonsense. The capitalists are piling up profits on the war orders. For them that is good business. As a matter of fact, a few of them will oppose the war and still make profits out of war orders.</p>
<p>It is a worker’s right to have a job. If this dirty bankrupt capitalist system can only give jobs based on war and destruction, so much the worse for the capitalist system. But the worker is not responsible for the capitalist system. If he is a class-conscious worker, he hates the capitalist system. But the workers do not make the war. They can still oppose the war, and still, by rights, claim jobs.</p>
<p>Now the Negroes must claim the jobs – not tomorrow, but today. The Negroes must seize every opportunity – by meetings, by demonstrations, by petitions, by delegations to mayors and corporations, by letters to the press, by telegrams to governors and the President, by proposing resolutions for action in trades unions. By these and all other means possible, the Negroes must let every one know: “You have new jobs for five million people. We Negroes are one-third of the unemployed. We demand a fair proportion of the new jobs. It is our right. We are determined to have it. We shall fight for it. In fighting for it, we shall be fighting for democracy.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Organize to Establish Your Claim</h4>
<p class="fst">No man who talks about the poor Negroes and does not do battle for jobs for them, is any friend of the Negro. Negroes, we warn you! Organize yourselves! Join the workers organizations! If they wish to keep you out, carry on a campaign against them, but, at all costs, establish your claim, your rightful claim to jobs. For if you do not, you will have no strength, no resistance, for the great battles that are to come. Make your voices heard. Claim your rights, organize and fight mercilessly all those who wish to keep you on relief and starving.</p>
<p>But do not think that the struggle is on the economic side alone, that is to say, purely a question of fighting for jobs. No. The political struggle must be carried on. <em>If Negroes had more political power today, they would be in a better position to make their claim good to some of the new jobs.</em></p>
<p>When Negroes go up for jobs, they will find that they lack technical education. They will not have the opportunity to train themselves. That is the result of <em>political</em> weakness. Let us therefore bear it in mind that we can never neglect the political struggle. But, for the time being, in this period, there are going to be jobs and the Negro unemployed must have a substantial number of these jobs.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Must Have His Share of the New Jobs
(16 September 1930)
The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, Vol. 4 No. 23, 16 September 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Business is going to boom soon. This capitalist society, under which we live in America, has been stewing in its own juice since 1929. The average unemployment has been ten million, very probably more. Of these, the Negroes constitute at least three or four million. This question of unemployment is a vital question for the workers as a whole, but for Negroes it is life itself.
Now! business is going to boom. People are going to get to work. Bravo! True, it is the building of planes, battleships, guns and tanks to kill people. The more the American capitalists build, the more the German, the Japanese and all the others will build. So they go round and round, piling up the weapons of destruction until they are ready to blow the poor people on earth to pieces. But still, there are going to be jobs. And where there are going to be jobs, there the Negroes must be.
The “American Way Of Life” Isn’t Good Enough
The Negroes are being told that it is a war for democracy. the Negroes reply that this is a lie. Democracy in America is a lying fraud. When the capitalists say that we must preserve the American way of life, the Negroes say that they do not want to preserve the American way of life. It has meant for them oppression, misery, humiliation. The Negro, the poor, hard-working Negro, says that for him this war is a war of his masters. They may force him into a uniform, but support the war, root for it; NO! It is a capitalist war, Wall Street’s War, an imperialist war, but not a war that poor people, white or Negro, have anything to gain from.
The Negroes Must Claim Jobs – Today!
But does this mean that, because a Negro opposes the war, he has no right to the jobs which the coming slaughter will provide? That is just nonsense. The capitalists are piling up profits on the war orders. For them that is good business. As a matter of fact, a few of them will oppose the war and still make profits out of war orders.
It is a worker’s right to have a job. If this dirty bankrupt capitalist system can only give jobs based on war and destruction, so much the worse for the capitalist system. But the worker is not responsible for the capitalist system. If he is a class-conscious worker, he hates the capitalist system. But the workers do not make the war. They can still oppose the war, and still, by rights, claim jobs.
Now the Negroes must claim the jobs – not tomorrow, but today. The Negroes must seize every opportunity – by meetings, by demonstrations, by petitions, by delegations to mayors and corporations, by letters to the press, by telegrams to governors and the President, by proposing resolutions for action in trades unions. By these and all other means possible, the Negroes must let every one know: “You have new jobs for five million people. We Negroes are one-third of the unemployed. We demand a fair proportion of the new jobs. It is our right. We are determined to have it. We shall fight for it. In fighting for it, we shall be fighting for democracy.”
Organize to Establish Your Claim
No man who talks about the poor Negroes and does not do battle for jobs for them, is any friend of the Negro. Negroes, we warn you! Organize yourselves! Join the workers organizations! If they wish to keep you out, carry on a campaign against them, but, at all costs, establish your claim, your rightful claim to jobs. For if you do not, you will have no strength, no resistance, for the great battles that are to come. Make your voices heard. Claim your rights, organize and fight mercilessly all those who wish to keep you on relief and starving.
But do not think that the struggle is on the economic side alone, that is to say, purely a question of fighting for jobs. No. The political struggle must be carried on. If Negroes had more political power today, they would be in a better position to make their claim good to some of the new jobs.
When Negroes go up for jobs, they will find that they lack technical education. They will not have the opportunity to train themselves. That is the result of political weakness. Let us therefore bear it in mind that we can never neglect the political struggle. But, for the time being, in this period, there are going to be jobs and the Negro unemployed must have a substantial number of these jobs.
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<h2 class="western">J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4 class="western">What India Means to the American Workers</h4>
<h1>India and the International Situation</h1>
<h3>(16 November 1942</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1942/index.htm#la06_46" target="new">Vol. 6 No. 46</a>, 16 November 1942, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">An American working man who periodically tries to get events into some sort of perspective must at some time or other reflect on the puzzle of India. Two years ago this sub-continent, with its 400,000,000 people, occupied little part in the American consciousness and in the American press. Then came Pearl Harbor.</p>
<p>As soon as Churchill learned of the disaster that had befallen the American fleet, he saw at once that the whole situation in the Far East had changed. Britain’s Eastern empire was in serious danger. Shortly after, Churchill let Nehru and others out of jail. Something was cooking, though exactly what, it was impossible to say.</p>
<p>After Pearl Harbor followed the catastrophes of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and Burma. One thing stood out in all these defeats. The native peoples took not the slightest interest in either British defeat or Japanese victory. In Burma many fought on the Japanese side. Next on the Japanese road was India. At all costs something had to be done in India to prevent a repetition of what had taken place in other colonies and particularly in Burma. This was one of the immediate causes of the Cripps mission. We therefore come to the first point.</p>
<p>It was defeat and fear of further defeat that made the British make some pretense of solving the Indian question. The first shock to the centuries-old British domination came from the armies of a rival imperialist power. War for democracy had nothing to do with it.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">India and the American People</h4>
<p class="fst">By this time the American people were aware of the Indian problem. They began to distrust the British colonial policy, because, first, it was a policy leading to defeat; and, second, it raised the whole question of what the war was about. In the East, at any rate, this was no war for democracy.</p>
<p>It was then that a deafening barrage of propaganda fell upon American ears. During the Cripps negotiations in India, nearly every American newspaper, in news and editorial columns, every radio commentator, all labored to impress the American public that Cripps, on behalf of Britain, was generously offering all that could be offered; only Gandhi’s mysticism and Indian religious and racial disunity could refuse such a generous settlement.</p>
<p><strong>This too was pumped into India as American opinion. Perhaps it went down with the American public as a whole. No one can say. IT DIDN’T GO DOWN IN INDIA. Cripps failed and then, after a steadily growing agitation, there entered on the scene the second real force in all serious politics – THE MASSES OF THE PEOPLE. All over India, the students, the Workers and even some peasants rebelled against the British domination. Nearly a thousand people have been killed, thousands wounded and the wave of hate for Britain has become nation-wide.</strong></p>
<p>No propaganda could camouflage the fact of the Indian revolt. Which brings us to the second point.</p>
<h4 class="western">Indian Question Is International</h4>
<p class="fst">First, the Japanese army threatened the British in India and shook up the whole Indian situation. The second force, the masses of the people, have entered and they have shown up not only the Indian but the whole international situation. There is now a crack in British-American relations. It is only a crack, but it widens every day.</p>
<p>So far the Japanese have only threatened. The Indian masses have not yet staged a real revolution. If the Japanese army were seriously to strike and win, or the Indian masses were to burst out in revolution as they did twenty years ago and as they certainly will some time or other, then the reverberations will be heard round the globe. It will shake the American war effort to its foundations. The British government will experience the gravest political crisis of the war.</p>
<p><strong>The war may be shortened; the war may be lengthened. It is impossible to predict. In war it is military victory or mass revolt that is decisive and yon cannot prophesy about these things. But this much is certain: the war will have entered upon a new political phase of incalculable significance. And, as we shall show, nobody knows this more than the rulers of America. The American worker must learn this too. The Indian question is no longer a question over there, in the Far East. It is everywhere, in Washington, in Birmingham, Ala., in New Orleans, in London, in Cape Town, in Berlin and Tokyo.</strong></p>
<p>The United Nations plan of action is to strike Hitler with its mass armies in front and to blow him up from the rear by means of the revolt of the occupied countries. They maintain an incelant propaganda, and they have their “Free” French, “Free” Polish, “Free” Czech and the other governments. The Axis powers are doing precisely the same. They aim to strike the United Nations armies and to blow them up from their rear. .For them the Indian revolution is their trump card. They drown India with propaganda. They have their “Free” India government.</p>
<p><strong>There are, we must remember, 400,000,000 people in India, a greater number than the number in all Western Europe. Furthermore, an Arab leader has put it up to Churchill: Guarantee the freedom of a Pan-Arabian Federation and we will fight with you. And if not? Churchill’s reply is not reported.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Egypt has 50,000 good soldiers who are not used in the desert fighting. Egypt, too, is bombarded with Axis propaganda and Axis agents. A successful revolt in India will wipe out the United Nations from the Far and Middle East. It will have repercussions all over Africa. A revolt, even though unsuccessful, will cripple the United Nations military effort.</strong></p>
<p>It is with this in mind that we must re-read recent speeches by Willkie, Churchill and others. The press is once more almost unanimous: something must be done by the British in India.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">America’s “New Line” in India</h4>
<p class="fst">Willkie went all over the Far East carrying messages for the President. He carried no message to India – a British colony. But when he returned he delivered a message to India. The most pointed parts of his speech dealt with precisely the country he had not visited. Said Willkie: “The wisest man in China (note: the wisest man) said to me: ‘When the aspiration of India for freedom was put aside to some future date, it was not Great Britain that suffered in public esteem in the Far East. It was the United States.’” The point is obvious. Britain cannot sink lower in the East. Nobody expects anything from Britain.</p>
<p><strong>Over and over again Willkie drove the point home in pointed reference to Britain. Note the danger spots he mentions. “In Africa, in the Middle East, throughout the Arab world, as well as in China and the whole Far East, freedom means the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system.” This can mean only the abolition of the British Empire.</strong></p>
<p>Willkie tried to soften the blow a little. “British colonial possessions are but remnants of Empire.” But that is nonsense. India, with its 400,000,000 inhabitants is no remnant. IT IS THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Of his report he said: “Such facts should not be censored. They should be given to us all. For unless we recognize and correct them we may lose the friendship of half of our allies before the war is over and then lose the peace.” More than that: they may lose the war. He concludes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“They (the hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe and Asia) are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations.”</p>
<p class="fst">In the U.S.A. Willkie’s voice is second only to the President’s. Willkie knew the whole world was listening to what he had to say. He could speak like that to an ally, during a war, only if his government agreed with what he said. And at his press conference the next day, the President, so that there could be no mistake, made it quite clear that he had no serious disagreement with Willkie.<br>
</p>
<h4 class="western">A Challenge to Britain</h4>
<p class="fst">The challenge to Britain is open and direct. It has been coming for a long time and Willkie’s speech is merely a climax. Once it was clear not only that the Cripps mission had failed, but that the Indian masses were on the move, the American press and propaganda changed their tune with unanimous suddenness. Hans V. Kaltenborn, Raymond Gram Swing, Johannes Steel, the editorials and columns all began to sing the same song: Britain must do something.</p>
<p><strong>The most vicious attack of all came from <em>Life</em>, which on October 12 addressed an open letter to the British people: “If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing alone.” That was too raw and the threat, besides, was stupid. Luce, the owner of <em>Life</em>, had to apologize. But just one day before, the <em>New York Times</em>, which had slandered the Indian people for months, came out with this. “The lesson of India is mordantly clear. Too late is futile and may be tragic.”</strong></p>
<p>The new line can be quoted to fill whole pages. Only two more need be mentioned. William Philip Simms wrote from Washington on October 1:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Talks with representative Englishmen and Indians indicate that unless some outside, but delicately wielded influence is soon brought into play, Gandhi’s open revolt in India may yet play havoc with the United Nations chances of victory.”</p>
<p class="fst">A dispatch from New Delhi published in the <strong>New York World-Telegram</strong> reports that “with China’s survival at stake, Chiang Kai-shek is demanding that Churchill accept a compromise settlement to get the Indians to fight Japan instead of Britain.” This is a matter of life and death for Chiang. Now comes Willkie’s carefully prepared blast at Britain, and Roosevelt’s indorsement. Meanwhile the British ruling class is furious and Goebbels and the Japanese on the radio agitate the Indians and the people in the Far East.</p>
<p><strong>Willkie’s speech is undoubtedly spreading like wildfire throughout India, as it was designed to do, What is happening here? Are Willkie and Roosevelt champions of Indian nationalism and freedom for the colonial peoples? NOTHING OF THE KIND! As Hitler has been swallowing Italy and its hopes inch by inch, so America, has been swallowing Britain and all her precious economic possessions yard by yard. First, Latin America, then the West Indies, then Africa.</strong></p>
<p>Britain has been giving way. But Britain will not give way in India. Roosevelt was prepared to wait. The prize would fall to him sooner or later. But the Japanese armies and, infinitely more, the Indian masses, have forced his hand. Roosevelt cannot run risks with the war. Even as it is, not only the political offensive, but the military strategy of the war is being seriously upset by India and the Indian question, and all that is involved in it. How this is so, we shall see in <a href="../12/india.htm" target="new">next week’s article</a>.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
What India Means to the American Workers
India and the International Situation
(16 November 1942
From Labor Action, Vol. 6 No. 46, 16 November 1942, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
An American working man who periodically tries to get events into some sort of perspective must at some time or other reflect on the puzzle of India. Two years ago this sub-continent, with its 400,000,000 people, occupied little part in the American consciousness and in the American press. Then came Pearl Harbor.
As soon as Churchill learned of the disaster that had befallen the American fleet, he saw at once that the whole situation in the Far East had changed. Britain’s Eastern empire was in serious danger. Shortly after, Churchill let Nehru and others out of jail. Something was cooking, though exactly what, it was impossible to say.
After Pearl Harbor followed the catastrophes of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and Burma. One thing stood out in all these defeats. The native peoples took not the slightest interest in either British defeat or Japanese victory. In Burma many fought on the Japanese side. Next on the Japanese road was India. At all costs something had to be done in India to prevent a repetition of what had taken place in other colonies and particularly in Burma. This was one of the immediate causes of the Cripps mission. We therefore come to the first point.
It was defeat and fear of further defeat that made the British make some pretense of solving the Indian question. The first shock to the centuries-old British domination came from the armies of a rival imperialist power. War for democracy had nothing to do with it.
India and the American People
By this time the American people were aware of the Indian problem. They began to distrust the British colonial policy, because, first, it was a policy leading to defeat; and, second, it raised the whole question of what the war was about. In the East, at any rate, this was no war for democracy.
It was then that a deafening barrage of propaganda fell upon American ears. During the Cripps negotiations in India, nearly every American newspaper, in news and editorial columns, every radio commentator, all labored to impress the American public that Cripps, on behalf of Britain, was generously offering all that could be offered; only Gandhi’s mysticism and Indian religious and racial disunity could refuse such a generous settlement.
This too was pumped into India as American opinion. Perhaps it went down with the American public as a whole. No one can say. IT DIDN’T GO DOWN IN INDIA. Cripps failed and then, after a steadily growing agitation, there entered on the scene the second real force in all serious politics – THE MASSES OF THE PEOPLE. All over India, the students, the Workers and even some peasants rebelled against the British domination. Nearly a thousand people have been killed, thousands wounded and the wave of hate for Britain has become nation-wide.
No propaganda could camouflage the fact of the Indian revolt. Which brings us to the second point.
Indian Question Is International
First, the Japanese army threatened the British in India and shook up the whole Indian situation. The second force, the masses of the people, have entered and they have shown up not only the Indian but the whole international situation. There is now a crack in British-American relations. It is only a crack, but it widens every day.
So far the Japanese have only threatened. The Indian masses have not yet staged a real revolution. If the Japanese army were seriously to strike and win, or the Indian masses were to burst out in revolution as they did twenty years ago and as they certainly will some time or other, then the reverberations will be heard round the globe. It will shake the American war effort to its foundations. The British government will experience the gravest political crisis of the war.
The war may be shortened; the war may be lengthened. It is impossible to predict. In war it is military victory or mass revolt that is decisive and yon cannot prophesy about these things. But this much is certain: the war will have entered upon a new political phase of incalculable significance. And, as we shall show, nobody knows this more than the rulers of America. The American worker must learn this too. The Indian question is no longer a question over there, in the Far East. It is everywhere, in Washington, in Birmingham, Ala., in New Orleans, in London, in Cape Town, in Berlin and Tokyo.
The United Nations plan of action is to strike Hitler with its mass armies in front and to blow him up from the rear by means of the revolt of the occupied countries. They maintain an incelant propaganda, and they have their “Free” French, “Free” Polish, “Free” Czech and the other governments. The Axis powers are doing precisely the same. They aim to strike the United Nations armies and to blow them up from their rear. .For them the Indian revolution is their trump card. They drown India with propaganda. They have their “Free” India government.
There are, we must remember, 400,000,000 people in India, a greater number than the number in all Western Europe. Furthermore, an Arab leader has put it up to Churchill: Guarantee the freedom of a Pan-Arabian Federation and we will fight with you. And if not? Churchill’s reply is not reported.
Egypt has 50,000 good soldiers who are not used in the desert fighting. Egypt, too, is bombarded with Axis propaganda and Axis agents. A successful revolt in India will wipe out the United Nations from the Far and Middle East. It will have repercussions all over Africa. A revolt, even though unsuccessful, will cripple the United Nations military effort.
It is with this in mind that we must re-read recent speeches by Willkie, Churchill and others. The press is once more almost unanimous: something must be done by the British in India.
America’s “New Line” in India
Willkie went all over the Far East carrying messages for the President. He carried no message to India – a British colony. But when he returned he delivered a message to India. The most pointed parts of his speech dealt with precisely the country he had not visited. Said Willkie: “The wisest man in China (note: the wisest man) said to me: ‘When the aspiration of India for freedom was put aside to some future date, it was not Great Britain that suffered in public esteem in the Far East. It was the United States.’” The point is obvious. Britain cannot sink lower in the East. Nobody expects anything from Britain.
Over and over again Willkie drove the point home in pointed reference to Britain. Note the danger spots he mentions. “In Africa, in the Middle East, throughout the Arab world, as well as in China and the whole Far East, freedom means the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system.” This can mean only the abolition of the British Empire.
Willkie tried to soften the blow a little. “British colonial possessions are but remnants of Empire.” But that is nonsense. India, with its 400,000,000 inhabitants is no remnant. IT IS THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Of his report he said: “Such facts should not be censored. They should be given to us all. For unless we recognize and correct them we may lose the friendship of half of our allies before the war is over and then lose the peace.” More than that: they may lose the war. He concludes:
“They (the hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe and Asia) are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations.”
In the U.S.A. Willkie’s voice is second only to the President’s. Willkie knew the whole world was listening to what he had to say. He could speak like that to an ally, during a war, only if his government agreed with what he said. And at his press conference the next day, the President, so that there could be no mistake, made it quite clear that he had no serious disagreement with Willkie.
A Challenge to Britain
The challenge to Britain is open and direct. It has been coming for a long time and Willkie’s speech is merely a climax. Once it was clear not only that the Cripps mission had failed, but that the Indian masses were on the move, the American press and propaganda changed their tune with unanimous suddenness. Hans V. Kaltenborn, Raymond Gram Swing, Johannes Steel, the editorials and columns all began to sing the same song: Britain must do something.
The most vicious attack of all came from Life, which on October 12 addressed an open letter to the British people: “If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing alone.” That was too raw and the threat, besides, was stupid. Luce, the owner of Life, had to apologize. But just one day before, the New York Times, which had slandered the Indian people for months, came out with this. “The lesson of India is mordantly clear. Too late is futile and may be tragic.”
The new line can be quoted to fill whole pages. Only two more need be mentioned. William Philip Simms wrote from Washington on October 1:
“Talks with representative Englishmen and Indians indicate that unless some outside, but delicately wielded influence is soon brought into play, Gandhi’s open revolt in India may yet play havoc with the United Nations chances of victory.”
A dispatch from New Delhi published in the New York World-Telegram reports that “with China’s survival at stake, Chiang Kai-shek is demanding that Churchill accept a compromise settlement to get the Indians to fight Japan instead of Britain.” This is a matter of life and death for Chiang. Now comes Willkie’s carefully prepared blast at Britain, and Roosevelt’s indorsement. Meanwhile the British ruling class is furious and Goebbels and the Japanese on the radio agitate the Indians and the people in the Far East.
Willkie’s speech is undoubtedly spreading like wildfire throughout India, as it was designed to do, What is happening here? Are Willkie and Roosevelt champions of Indian nationalism and freedom for the colonial peoples? NOTHING OF THE KIND! As Hitler has been swallowing Italy and its hopes inch by inch, so America, has been swallowing Britain and all her precious economic possessions yard by yard. First, Latin America, then the West Indies, then Africa.
Britain has been giving way. But Britain will not give way in India. Roosevelt was prepared to wait. The prize would fall to him sooner or later. But the Japanese armies and, infinitely more, the Indian masses, have forced his hand. Roosevelt cannot run risks with the war. Even as it is, not only the political offensive, but the military strategy of the war is being seriously upset by India and the Indian question, and all that is involved in it. How this is so, we shall see in next week’s article.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Economics of Miners’ Fight</h1>
<h3>(12 March 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_11" target="new">Vol. IX No. 11</a>, 12 March 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">John L. Lewis has demanded a royalty of ten cents per ton on every ton of coal mined for use or sale. Apart from its actual effect in the struggle for wage increases the demand, as made by Lewis is of the most profound social significance.</p>
<p>Lewis says:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Such royalty shall be deemed partial compensation in equity to the mine worker for the establishment and maintenance of his ready-to-serve status, so vital to the profit motive of the employer and so essential to public welfare.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">It is a grand sentence, leading far. It does not go far enough, but it makes a serious attempt to lift labor theoretically to the status of capital. And it does so, not in general, not in the abstract, not in a convention address, but in wage demands and negotiations. It is aimed at disturbing the pockets of capital and not at soothing the ears of the workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Position of Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">The key phrase here is “the establishment and maintenance of his ready-to-serve status.” Lewis here touches on the fundamental relation between capital and labor.</p>
<p>Karl Marx, the great economist, made it the basis of his analysis of capitalist society, that the worker was paid only what was necessary to enable him to live so as to produce profit. As he would in time die, he received a little more so as to enable him to raise a new generation of laborers – to produce profit. Some small sections of the workers might get more than that. The general level of wages might be higher in one country than in another. But if you took any country as a whole, calculated the wages of a worker from the time his working-life began, included unemployment periods and the generally rising cost of living, including also the years of old age, then it became clear that, like coal or oil or cotton, the power to labor of the worker was a commodity, bought and paid for like other commodities at their value.</p>
<p>Lewis challenges this, and in widely publicized wage negotiations. He says, in effect: Labor is NOT a mere commodity. Labor is different from cotton, coal, oil, steel or potatoes. Labor lives and maintains itself, and is always ready to serve capital; Labor therefore demands something more than its mere value as a commodity.</p>
<p><em>In principle, this royalty is excluded from wages. It is NOT unemployment pay. It is a sum demanded “in equity,” that is to say, as a claim of legal and social justice. It is demanded because the mere fact that the laborer has to exist and be ready to work is “vital to the profit motive of the employer.”</em></p>
<p>Coal, oil, cotton and other commodities are put in their place. They are inert, lifeless, waiting to be used. They don’t have to establish and to maintain themselves, to be ready to serve. They are always there, ready to serve, Lewis places the capitalist and the laborer in a category apart, both as human beings with human aims, human responsibilities and human privileges. He says: <em>“You get your royalty to encourage you. We must get our royalty to encourage us.”</em></p>
<p>Note what the fund is to be used for. Modern medical and surgical service, hospitalization, etc.; but the last two items are “rehabilitation and economic protection.” That can mean anything, from establishing workers’ recreation clubs to building a university for training workers to master the processes of managing the coal industry.</p>
<p>In thus raising the question of the dignity of labor, not in a general sense but specifically in a wage contract, expressible in dollars and cents, coming from the pockets of capital and established as a principle, Lewis shows himself once more to be far ahead of the average run of labor leaders. Yet it also lays bare the fundamental weakness of Lewis in that he cannot escape from the limitations of capitalist society.<br>
</p>
<h4>Lewis’ Errors</h4>
<p class="fst">It was Marx’s contention that the essential process of capitalist production was an interchange between capital and labor. By capital Marx meant the mass of raw materials either in its natural form or in a form processed by labor, such as machinery. In the early days of capitalism the capitalist carried out a certain function necessary to the process. He organized it. Today the capitalist is no longer necessary to the productive process.</p>
<p><em>If the Sixty Families all collapsed from heart failure at Lewis’ demand or from overeating or from whatever cause you wish, it would make not the slightest difference to the production and distribution of goods for American society. The word “royalty” here is very important. It has nothing to do with funds paid to those who supervise. It carries the connotation of paying the capitalist for what he likes to think is his ready-to-serve status. In reality, he has no ready-to-serve status. He is absolutely useless. The laborer is not. He is vitally necessary. This is Lewis’ theoretical error. He says in the paragraph that the laborer’s ready-to-serve status is vital to the profit motive of the employer and “imperatively essential to public welfare.”</em></p>
<p>It is a gross error. The laborer’s ready-to-serve status is imperatively necessary to public welfare, Lewis does not say but he implies or at least accepts the profit motive of the employer as imperatively essential to public welfare. He does not repudiate it. He leaves it on an equality with what he demands for labor. In fact, as <strong>Labor Action</strong> has demonstrated a thousand times in a thousand different ways, it is this very profit motive as the basis of the productive system which limits it, distorts it, ruins it and leads mankind into ever deepening difficulties of economic crisis, fascism and imperialist war.</p>
<p>We do not propose for one moment that every labor leader engaged in wage negotiations should raise or emphasize the uselessness of the capitalist to modern production. There is a time and place for everything. But Lewis has never shown the slightest understanding of the fact that the basic premise of labor’s progress today must be the elevation of the productive laborer to the role, formerly held and rightly so, by the capitalist of master in the process of production.</p>
<p>The point is not merely theoretical. Lewis’ whole conception is based on the idea of the continuance of private profit with the worker making bolder and bolder demands to be realized within the structure of capitalist production. It cannot be done. Capitalism is bankrupt. The war is one proof. Another proof is the fact that the President has to take it upon himself to promise 60,000,000 jobs. Capital can no longer be trusted to do any such thing. And we may note that the medical and surgical services, hospitalization, etc., for which Lewis demands royalties, should be rightly the province of the state.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Change Is Coming</h4>
<p class="fst">Lewis seeks to establish in principle that the workers’ remuneration should be such as to enable him to live as a human being with social needs corresponding to his vitally important status in production. Good. But at the present stage of capitalism, this is a political question. It can only be done by the workers themselves seizing the economic power. That, we repeat, is not a question of wage negotiations today or tomorrow. It is a question of principle.</p>
<p>Yet it would be a mistake not to see the social significance of this demand, its causes and its probable effects. There is the increasing awareness in the minds of labor as to what is, its role in production, and not only its responsibilities, but also its privileges in society as a whole.</p>
<p>That spirit is spreading and penetrating into the minds and hearts of tens of millions of American workers. It manifests itself in various ways, among others in the lip service which the capitalist politicians pay to the so-called Four Freedoms and the century of the common man. Lewis here shows himself a shrewd and bold trade union leader. In reality, he is but an expression of the general social consciousness and half-conscious aims and aspirations of American labor in this stage of social development.</p>
<p><em>By his demand and its formulation, the stir which it has created and will create among not only the miners but among the millions of other workers, he lifts a stage higher the social consciousness of American labor. Thereby he brings them closer to the day when they will realize that the only solution for their increasing problems is to lift themselves to the position of masters of the process of production now held by the capitalist. But by so doing they will not substitute another dominance for the capitalist dominance. Labor being the majority; and the most oppressed class by emancipating itself lays the basis for the emancipation of all.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Economics of Miners’ Fight
(12 March 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 11, 12 March 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
John L. Lewis has demanded a royalty of ten cents per ton on every ton of coal mined for use or sale. Apart from its actual effect in the struggle for wage increases the demand, as made by Lewis is of the most profound social significance.
Lewis says:
“Such royalty shall be deemed partial compensation in equity to the mine worker for the establishment and maintenance of his ready-to-serve status, so vital to the profit motive of the employer and so essential to public welfare.”
It is a grand sentence, leading far. It does not go far enough, but it makes a serious attempt to lift labor theoretically to the status of capital. And it does so, not in general, not in the abstract, not in a convention address, but in wage demands and negotiations. It is aimed at disturbing the pockets of capital and not at soothing the ears of the workers.
The Position of Labor
The key phrase here is “the establishment and maintenance of his ready-to-serve status.” Lewis here touches on the fundamental relation between capital and labor.
Karl Marx, the great economist, made it the basis of his analysis of capitalist society, that the worker was paid only what was necessary to enable him to live so as to produce profit. As he would in time die, he received a little more so as to enable him to raise a new generation of laborers – to produce profit. Some small sections of the workers might get more than that. The general level of wages might be higher in one country than in another. But if you took any country as a whole, calculated the wages of a worker from the time his working-life began, included unemployment periods and the generally rising cost of living, including also the years of old age, then it became clear that, like coal or oil or cotton, the power to labor of the worker was a commodity, bought and paid for like other commodities at their value.
Lewis challenges this, and in widely publicized wage negotiations. He says, in effect: Labor is NOT a mere commodity. Labor is different from cotton, coal, oil, steel or potatoes. Labor lives and maintains itself, and is always ready to serve capital; Labor therefore demands something more than its mere value as a commodity.
In principle, this royalty is excluded from wages. It is NOT unemployment pay. It is a sum demanded “in equity,” that is to say, as a claim of legal and social justice. It is demanded because the mere fact that the laborer has to exist and be ready to work is “vital to the profit motive of the employer.”
Coal, oil, cotton and other commodities are put in their place. They are inert, lifeless, waiting to be used. They don’t have to establish and to maintain themselves, to be ready to serve. They are always there, ready to serve, Lewis places the capitalist and the laborer in a category apart, both as human beings with human aims, human responsibilities and human privileges. He says: “You get your royalty to encourage you. We must get our royalty to encourage us.”
Note what the fund is to be used for. Modern medical and surgical service, hospitalization, etc.; but the last two items are “rehabilitation and economic protection.” That can mean anything, from establishing workers’ recreation clubs to building a university for training workers to master the processes of managing the coal industry.
In thus raising the question of the dignity of labor, not in a general sense but specifically in a wage contract, expressible in dollars and cents, coming from the pockets of capital and established as a principle, Lewis shows himself once more to be far ahead of the average run of labor leaders. Yet it also lays bare the fundamental weakness of Lewis in that he cannot escape from the limitations of capitalist society.
Lewis’ Errors
It was Marx’s contention that the essential process of capitalist production was an interchange between capital and labor. By capital Marx meant the mass of raw materials either in its natural form or in a form processed by labor, such as machinery. In the early days of capitalism the capitalist carried out a certain function necessary to the process. He organized it. Today the capitalist is no longer necessary to the productive process.
If the Sixty Families all collapsed from heart failure at Lewis’ demand or from overeating or from whatever cause you wish, it would make not the slightest difference to the production and distribution of goods for American society. The word “royalty” here is very important. It has nothing to do with funds paid to those who supervise. It carries the connotation of paying the capitalist for what he likes to think is his ready-to-serve status. In reality, he has no ready-to-serve status. He is absolutely useless. The laborer is not. He is vitally necessary. This is Lewis’ theoretical error. He says in the paragraph that the laborer’s ready-to-serve status is vital to the profit motive of the employer and “imperatively essential to public welfare.”
It is a gross error. The laborer’s ready-to-serve status is imperatively necessary to public welfare, Lewis does not say but he implies or at least accepts the profit motive of the employer as imperatively essential to public welfare. He does not repudiate it. He leaves it on an equality with what he demands for labor. In fact, as Labor Action has demonstrated a thousand times in a thousand different ways, it is this very profit motive as the basis of the productive system which limits it, distorts it, ruins it and leads mankind into ever deepening difficulties of economic crisis, fascism and imperialist war.
We do not propose for one moment that every labor leader engaged in wage negotiations should raise or emphasize the uselessness of the capitalist to modern production. There is a time and place for everything. But Lewis has never shown the slightest understanding of the fact that the basic premise of labor’s progress today must be the elevation of the productive laborer to the role, formerly held and rightly so, by the capitalist of master in the process of production.
The point is not merely theoretical. Lewis’ whole conception is based on the idea of the continuance of private profit with the worker making bolder and bolder demands to be realized within the structure of capitalist production. It cannot be done. Capitalism is bankrupt. The war is one proof. Another proof is the fact that the President has to take it upon himself to promise 60,000,000 jobs. Capital can no longer be trusted to do any such thing. And we may note that the medical and surgical services, hospitalization, etc., for which Lewis demands royalties, should be rightly the province of the state.
A Change Is Coming
Lewis seeks to establish in principle that the workers’ remuneration should be such as to enable him to live as a human being with social needs corresponding to his vitally important status in production. Good. But at the present stage of capitalism, this is a political question. It can only be done by the workers themselves seizing the economic power. That, we repeat, is not a question of wage negotiations today or tomorrow. It is a question of principle.
Yet it would be a mistake not to see the social significance of this demand, its causes and its probable effects. There is the increasing awareness in the minds of labor as to what is, its role in production, and not only its responsibilities, but also its privileges in society as a whole.
That spirit is spreading and penetrating into the minds and hearts of tens of millions of American workers. It manifests itself in various ways, among others in the lip service which the capitalist politicians pay to the so-called Four Freedoms and the century of the common man. Lewis here shows himself a shrewd and bold trade union leader. In reality, he is but an expression of the general social consciousness and half-conscious aims and aspirations of American labor in this stage of social development.
By his demand and its formulation, the stir which it has created and will create among not only the miners but among the millions of other workers, he lifts a stage higher the social consciousness of American labor. Thereby he brings them closer to the day when they will realize that the only solution for their increasing problems is to lift themselves to the position of masters of the process of production now held by the capitalist. But by so doing they will not substitute another dominance for the capitalist dominance. Labor being the majority; and the most oppressed class by emancipating itself lays the basis for the emancipation of all.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1949</p>
<h3>Herbert Aptheker’s Distortions</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Fourth International</em>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi49_12" target="_top">Vol.10 No.11</a>, December 1949, pp.337-341;<br>
<span class="info">Written</span>: by C.L.R. James under the name J. Meyer;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Daniel Gaido.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">In the last article, <a href="../11/stalinism-negro.htm" target="new"><em>Stalinism and Negro History</em></a>, (<em>Fourth International</em>, November 1949) we showed: 1) that from 1826 to 1831 the Negro people, slave and free, being locked in mortal combat with the slave-owners, were the driving force of what became the political movement of Abolitionism; 2) that Herbert Aptheker’s whole account shows that he sees the historical role of Negroes essentially as predecessors of the National Negro Congress and other Stalinist Negro organizations, that is to say, as groups whose sole function was to organize Negroes as appendages to the anti-slavery coalition. Thus Aptheker reverses completely the political relation of the, Negro slaves and free Negroes to the other revolutionary classes.</p>
<p>This becomes absolutely clear when he touches what he calls “The Pre-Civil War Generation” (<em>The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement</em>). He lists conventions, meetings, articles, speeches, etc. that occupy three pages (pp.36-39). Never once is there the slightest reference to the political perspectives or political line of any one of these organizations, groups or individuals. Just as the Stalinists view the function of the Negroes (and the proletariat) today as being one of abandoning all independent political activity and being simply “anti-fascist,” following docilely behind the CP, so it is sufficient that the Negroes in those days were “anti-slavery,” following docilely behind the Abolitionists.</p>
<p>We must follow Aptheker’s account closely. First, the Negroes meet and organize Negro resistance. Then, in addition to this, they organize “encouragement and assistance for progressive forces.” Thus we are told that certain Philadelphia Negroes, only two months after the launching of the <em>Liberator</em>, met and pledged their support to it, to which is added: “Such gatherings were common in various cities throughout the paper’s life.” The <em>Liberator</em> and the Abolitionists over here; the Negroes over there, pledging support. Under the heading of “United Struggles,” we read that Negroes “did not, of course, restrict themselves to independent work but struggled side by side with white people in the common effort.”</p>
<p>How did the Negroes struggle side by side? These Negroes “wrote many letters to Garrison, giving not only moral stimulation but also ... money and subscriptions.” We are informed that “contributions by Negroes in that paper and other Abolitionist publications were exceedingly common.” Again we can see here the sharp division between the <em>Liberator</em>, Abolitionism, and the Negroes.</p>
<p>Now Aptheker takes a leap. He gives us examples of what the Negroes wrote. “The <em>Liberator</em> for February 12, 1831, gave a third of its space to articles by two Philadelphia Negroes, a call to an anti-Colonization mass meeting in Boston.” Aptheker notes an account of a similar meeting held earlier in New York. He then informs us that these contributions of Negroes to the paper are “fairly typical of the entire thirty-five volumes of the paper.”</p>
<p>The observant reader cannot help being startled and can very well ask himself: Is this all that Negroes wrote about in a paper that lasted from 1831 to 1864? He need not be disturbed. Aptheker’s account is an incredible falsification. But let us continue with more of it. He says that the record of the proceedings of the Abolitionist organizations “is studded with accounts of, or contributions by, Negroes.” Aptheker is always making statements of this kind. But the moment you examine what he says concretely, a different picture appears.</p>
<p>Here, for instance, are the examples chosen at random by Aptheker. The 1849 meeting of one of these organizations was opened by an invocation by the Reverend Sam R. Wood and “the entertainment was furnished by the four Luca boys, Negro youngsters, who sang an anti-slavery song called <em>Car of Emancipation</em>.” Then Aptheker describes for us a Negro lady at a meeting who said that she had, heard of the Abolitionists as inciters to violence, knaves, fools, etc., but she had been sitting and listening and “she knew the Lord would bless them for they were good and righteous folk.” It has been necessary to give almost word for word Aptheker’s account. For it represents as vicious and subtle a piece of anti-Negro historical writing as it is possible to find and infinitely more dangerous than the chauvinism of the Bourbon historian.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Real Facts of History</h4>
<p class="fst">Any unbiased person who spends a few hours looking through the <em>Liberator</em> and other Abolitionist papers, and the accounts of Abolitionist societies will see that they are studded with innumerable political contributions, by Negroes to some of the greatest political conflicts that have ever taken place in the United States.</p>
<p>Here are only a few taken at random.</p>
<p>On June 8, 1849, Frederick Douglass made the open call for a slave insurrection in the South. Garrison, the pacifist, was sitting on the platform. The whole speech appeared in the <em>Liberator</em>. At the World Convention against Slavery held in London in June 1840, among the delegates representing the United States were Garrison and Charles Lenox Remond, a Negro. The World Convention objected to women being seated and Remond with three other American delegates sat amongst the rejected women and fought the issue through to the end.</p>
<p>During the intense excitement generated by the 1850 Compromise, the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society fell due. The notorious Captain Isaiah Rynders, with a band of hoodlums who had the backing of the metropolitan papers and official society, sat in the gallery determined to break up the convention. Garrison’s incendiary speech started the disturbance. Rynders shouted from the organ loft and then marched down the aisle, followed by his band. But as Garrison’s biographer tells us, on that first day, Rynders and his men were “quite vanquished by the wit, repartee and eloquence of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Furness and Reverend Samuel R. Ward whom Wendell Phillips described as so black that “when he shut his eyes you could not see him.”</p>
<p>In the <em>Liberator</em> and other Abolitionist papers and in Abolitionist proceedings, you will find the great debates upon the US Constitution, the reports of tours, at home and abroad, by Douglass, Remend, Wells Brown, Douglass’ defense of having purchased his freedom, the question of political action versus “moral suasion.”</p>
<p>At the May 1855 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass attacked Garrison’s theory of the US Constitution. The <em>New York Daily News</em> reports the meeting as follows: “A grand and terrific set-to came off between Abby Kelley Foster, “Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who defended the Union while claiming rights for his people. He was insulted, interrupted and denounced by the Garrison Cabinet, but stood amid them and overtopped them like a giant among pigmies.”</p>
<p>At the end of the Civil War, when Garrison wanted to disband his society, Douglass, Remend and Wendell Phillips led the attack against him and insisted that the Society should continue until at least the Negroes got the vote.</p>
<p>We cannot go here into the history of the Abolition movement. But enough has been said to show the political mentality of a writer who in this mass of material selects a call for a meeting as typical of thirty-five years of Negro contributions to the Liberator and finds that Negro parsons giving invocations, Negro boys singing, and old Negro women blessing Abolitionism are the most characteristic aspects of Negro contributions to the struggle.<br>
</p>
<h4>Subtle Form of Prejudice</h4>
<p class="fst">This is no ordinary, racial prejudice. It is something far worse. It is a political method which compels the writer to place the Negroes in a subordinate category and at whatever sacrifice of historical fact keep them there. Whatever does not fit into this scheme must go out. Aptheker cannot escape the consequences of his political ideas. Any history of the Civil War which does not base itself upon the Negroes, slave and free, as the subject and not the object of politics, is ipso facto a Jim Crow history. That is why even the Negro writers, with all the good work that they have done and their subjective desire to elevate the Negro’s past, seldom escape paternalism or apologies-both of them forms of white chauvinism: paternalism, an inflation, and apologetics a deflation of the subtle chauvinistic poison. But these and the carelessness or traditional ignorance of liberals can be fought and corrected. You cannot correct Stalinist history without destroying Stalinism.</p>
<p>To keep his history within the confines of his politics, Aptheker must not only omit, he must falsify. We cannot pursue all his falsifications. What he have to do, however, is to show the thoroughly reactionary anti-Negro, anti-proletarian and even anti-liberal ideas which stage by stage emerge from the encomiums to the Negroes with which he plasters his writings.</p>
<p>One of the greatest lessons of the Abolitionist movement is the way in which (despite constant accusations of racial chauvinism) the political representatives of the classes, while in perpetual conflict with each other, achieved a racial unity, cooperation and solidarity unknown in the United States up to that time and afterwards, until the formation of the CIO. While it is possible formally and for special purposes to separate Negroes from whites, any account either of whites or Negroes in the Abolitionist struggle is totally false unless it shows this integration. Aptheker, while perpetually talking about the “united struggles” of Negroes and whites, destroys this precious heritage.</p>
<p>In his attempt to show how Negroes contributed to “the progressive forces,” he cites the fact that in the first issue of a popular annual called <em>Autographs For Freedom</em>, there is a sketch of a Scottish Abolitionist John Murray and a sixty-seven page history of a slave rebellion aboard the domestic slave trader <em>Creble</em> by Frederick Douglass. He adds that the second issue of <em>Autographs</em> also had five articles by Negroes. This sounds innocent and can be used as an example of progressive historical writing. But what are the real facts?</p>
<p>When Douglass toured in England; he made a vast number of friends for the movement and for himself as a representative of it. Money was subscribed to pay for his freedom, and a substantial sum was given him for the purpose of starting a paper of his own. He finally did so, but the expense was great, he had to mortgage his house and he got heavily into debt.</p>
<p>At this time one of his English friends, Miss Julia Griffiths, and her sister came to the United States, and settled down in Rochester, taking over the management of Douglass’ paper to leave him free to write and carry on his general political activities. A woman of literary ability and great energy, she not only made a success of the management of the paper but in her spare time edited <em>Autographs For Freedom</em>. To characterize Douglass’ article in this publication as an example of how Negroes contributed to “the progressive forces” is to show how alien to the actual struggle is the mentality which Stalinism brings to this striking but characteristic episode in the history of Abolitionism.<br>
</p>
<h4>Douglass in the Forefront</h4>
<p class="fst">Let us continue with this aspect of Douglass’ career, for Aptheker’s treatment of Douglass more than anything else betrays his conception of the role of the Negro in politics. In the struggle for women’s emancipation as in all the causes of the day, Douglass was in the forefront. His paper, <em>Frederick Douglass’ Paper</em>, was the official organ of the Free Soil Party in New York State. At the second convention of that party he was elected secretary by acclamation. At the National Loyalist Convention after the Civil War, sponsored by the Republican party, Douglass represented the city of Rochester. The people of Rochester asked him to stand for Congress as a Republican and Theodore Weld made a special visit to Rochester to persuade him. But he refused. Here obviously was no “mere” Negro appendage to the Abolitionist Movement.</p>
<p>Now to return to Aptheker. Undoubtedly conscious of the fact that this account so far had been terribly lacking, Aptheker pulls out all his stops when he comes to the Negro propagandists of Abolitionism. This, he says, is “the most vital part” of the story, and he is correct: it is the most vital part of his story. Again he tosses in one of his misleading phrases about the “decisive role of Negroes.” Close examination, however, shows that as usual here where the phrasing is most radical, the political content is correspondingly reactionary. To see this we must transfer ourselves to the Abolition period and try to catch some of its social atmosphere.</p>
<p>In the middle of the nineteenth century the slaveowners sought to prove that the Negroes loved slavery, and in any case that Negroes were not men. Therefore when escaped slaves denounced the institution with eloquence and logic, they had a tremendous effect. Aptheker quotes Garrison on this. But there was another side to this question. Escaped slaves who gained some education, insofar as they formed a group apart from others, carried on their own political activity. As we have repeated, the fundamental struggle within Abolitionism was the struggle represented by these against the humanitarian tendency of the New England intellectuals.</p>
<p>“Give us the facts – and leave the philosophy to us,” said a Garrisonian to the aspiring young Douglass. Douglass was to say later that these white Abolitionists thought that they “owned him.” Later Garrison fought Douglass with extreme ferocity, not only on his politics but on the very idea that Douglass should have a paper of his own. There were all kinds of conflicts in the Abolition Movement on the chauvinist issue. Yet it must be remembered that Douglass, who stood no nonsense on any slights upon him as a Negro, revered Garrison to the end; to the extent that the accusations of chauvinism were true, they were essentially political; and Garrison’s character, reputation and achievements were such that they could stand the charges, not only today but then.</p>
<p>Aptheker cannot claim similar consideration. The pernicious character of Stalinist politics is revealed by the fact that in the middle of the twentieth century, when even some of the reactionary Southern senators have dropped the argument of organic Negro inferiority, Aptheker’s whole argumentation remains within the confines of the nineteenth century debate. That is why for him, the Negro propagandists are “the most vital part” of the story. Like the Garrisonian who spoke to Douglass, Aptheker has no use for Negro philosophy, i.e., Negro politics. The escaped Negroes by “their bearing, courage, and intelligence” were the most “devastating anti-slavery forces.” This is the politics which sees the share-cropper’s contribution essentially as a recital of his wrongs.</p>
<p>Aptheker does not merely mention the suitability of the ex-slaves as propagandists and then pass on. This is his main theme. “Had none of these people existed but one, his existence and participation in the Abolitionist movement would justify the assertion that the Negro’s role therein was decisive. That man is Frederick Douglass who ...” This is what Aptheker means by the role of the Negroes – not their politics, but their heroic deaths, the contributions of money, songs and stray articles to the <em>Liberator</em> and Abolitionist agitation. Thus he no sooner touches Douglass than he defiles him. He says that Douglass “from his first public speech in 1841 to his organizing and recruiting activities during the war against the slavocracy was the voice of America’s millions of slaves.” Completely one-sided and therefore totally wrong.</p>
<p>From 1841 to his recruiting for the Northern army, Douglass was the voice of the American Revolution. Stage by stage he embodied its development until in 1860 he gave critical support to the Republican Party while defiantly proclaiming that he was still a radical Abolitionist. It was precisely when the bourgeoisie took over that Douglass became primarily a leader of the Negroes. (And at this time also, Wendell Phillips, who had been for a time eclipsed by Douglass, rose to his greatest heights and spoke superbly for a revolutionary conduct of the war and the revolutionary settlement of the Southern question.)<br>
</p>
<h4>Question of Racial Equality</h4>
<p class="fst">Had that been all Aptheker had to say, it would have been bad enough. But Aptheker then spends almost a page on Douglass as follows: He was a magnificent figure of a man, impregnable, incorruptible, scars on his back, African prince, majestic in his wrath, grand in his physical proportions. A tailor in England who heard him had never been so moved in his life, etc., etc. Why all this? Why? When there has not been a word about Douglass’ politics?</p>
<p>Aptheker gives the show away when he quotes a famous incident in Douglass’ career. Captain Rynders once baited Douglass with the taunt, that Negroes were monkeys. Douglass turned to him and asked him: “Am I a man?” Aptheker relates: “the effect was nothing short of stupendous.” No doubt it was. The reader, however, cannot help noting, after all these “African prince” paragraphs, that the effect on Aptheker in 1940 is still stupendous.</p>
<p>American racial prejudice is usually crude but at the same time can be a very subtle thing. To understand how unhealthy is Aptheker’s ignoring of Douglass’ politics and his excitement at the Rynders episode, we must see how Douglass himself treated the question.</p>
<p>Douglass personally fought race prejudice wherever he met it. But in discussion he treated the purely racial attacks of his enemies not only with counter-arguments but with a certain humorous contempt. Thus in this very debate he switched the problem aside by saying if he was a monkey, his father was a white man, and therefore Rynders was his half-brother. Twice he called Rynders his half-brother. On another occasion, after speaking very movingly in England on this question of Negroes being considered monkeys in the United States, he broke the tension by relating that a few days before a big dog had come up to him and stared him in the face, and, said Douglass, I could see in his eyes that he recognized humanity.</p>
<p>He used to relate how when sleeping space was limited on the benches aboard ship, he would simply show his face and say to newcomers “I am a Negro,” hoping they would go along. But one man said to him: “Negro be damned, you move down.” So concluded Douglass, my being black is no longer of any use to me.</p>
<p>Some hecklers who asked him if it was true that his wife was a white woman, were treated to a long discourse as to the irrelevance of the question, what business was it of theirs, etc., and were constantly led up to the point where they expected him to make the admission. He never admitted anything but soon went on with his speech, leaving them to find out afterwards that his wife (his first wife) was Negro.</p>
<p>This sort of thing occurs in many speeches and was obviously habitual with him. The reason is not far to seek. Douglass was not only a sensitive Negro, but a highly political person. And despite the powerful social pressure, he would not allow this question to occupy any status more than was absolutely necessary. He dealt with it, brushed it aside often with a smile, and then went on to politics.</p>
<p>Exactly the opposite is Aptheker’s Stalinist method. The politics he ignores and therefore reaches the most genuine pitch of enthusiasm when he is proving that Negroes were not only men but some Negro slaves were marvelous men and did wonderful work side by side with “the progressive forces.” This is not merely popular writing. A portion of this pamphlet appeared in the Stalinist theoretical journal, <em>Science and Society</em>, replete with footnotes and references.<br>
</p>
<h4>Anti-Fascist Not Anti-capitalist</h4>
<p class="fst">Aptheker’s politics not only in relation to Negroes but in relation to the American workers is pitched at the very lowest level. He is busy proving to the American proletariat, to labor bureaucrats and liberals that the Negro is a man and a brother, will struggle hard, and can produce many brilliant men who will speak for the Negro far more effectively than any white man can. At the same time he is offering to the Negro leaders place at the table of the anti-fascist coalition. Aptheker by the way does not hide this. Here is the conclusion of his book <em>Negro Slave Revolts</em>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“An awareness of its history should give the modern Negro added confidence and courage in his heroic present-day battle for complete and perfect equality with all other American citizens. And it should make those other Americans eager and proud to grasp the hands of the Negro and march forward with him against their common oppressors-against the industrial and financial overlords and the plantation oligarchs who today stand in the way of liberty, equality and prosperity.</p>
<p class="quote">“That unity between the white and Negro masses was necessary to overthrow nineteenth-century slavery. That same unity is necessary now to defeat twentieth-century slavery-to defeat fascism.”</p>
<p class="fst">See how swiftly in the last paragraph capitalism is pushed aside and fascism is substituted for it. This is vital for the whole scheme. To talk about the overthrow of capitalism would destroy the concept of the anti-fascist coalition; it would bring on to the scene independent proletarian politics and independent Negro politics. Aptheker maintains an unrelenting hostility to any such manifestation among Negroes either today or in the Civil War.</p>
<p>Aptheker, writing on “Militant Abolitionism” in the <em>Journal of Negro History</em> (Vol.26, p.463) had to refer to Douglass’ call for a slave insurrection. That a Negro should consciously call for insurrection! God forbid! Aptheker writes that Douglass “<em>found himself saying</em> ...” The magnificent African prince could do much, but that he could stand on a platform and out of his own head consciously speak of insurrection – that Aptheker simply could not stand. He makes it into a visitation from on high. Douglass just “found himself saying” it. In <em>To Be Free</em>, where he article reappears, the damning phrase is omitted but Aptheker cannot get rid of his whole reactionary conception of Negroes in American history which this phrase embodies without withdrawing every line he has written.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinist Sleight of Hand</h4>
<p class="fst">Stalinism tries to manipulate history as a sleight-of-hand man manipulates cards. But unlike the conjurer, a stern logic pushes Stalinism in an ever more reactionary direction. For five years Aptheker covered up his anti-Negro concepts with constant broad statements about the “decisive character” of slave insurrections, Negro agitators etc. in the Civil War and the period preceding it. In 1946, however, in <em>The Negro People in America</em>, Aptheker broke new ground. He put forward a new theory that at one stroke made a wreck of all that he had said before. Let his own words speak:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It was the development of increased agitation on the part of non-slaveholding whites prior to the Civil War for the realization of the American creed that played a major part in provoking the desperation that led the slaveholders to take up arms.” (p.41)</p>
<p class="fst">Upon the flimsiest scraps of evidence, the theory is elaborated that it was the withholding of democracy from non-slaveholding whites that pushed the South to the Civil War.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In terms of practice, as concerns the mass of the white people of the South, this anti-democratic philosophy was everywhere implemented. The property qualifications for voting and office-holding, the weighing of the legislature to favor slaveholding against non-slaveholding counties, the inequitable taxation system falling most heavily on mechanics’ tools and least heavily on slaves, the whole system of economic, social and educational preferment for the possessors of slaves, and the organized, energetic, and partially successful struggles carried on against this system by the non-slaveholding whites form – outside of the response of the Negroes to enslavement – the actual content of the South’s internal history for the generation preceding the Civil War.”</p>
<p class="fst">It is clear that only at the last minute Aptheker remembered the slaves and threw in the phrase about their “response.” Historically this is a crime. The non-slaveholding whites who supposedly pushed the South into the Civil War were not in any way democrats. They were small planters and city people who formed a rebellious but reactionary social force, hostile to the big planters, the slaves and the democratically minded farmers in the non-plantation regions.</p>
<p>What particular purpose this new development is to serve does not concern us here. What is important, however, is its logical identity with the hostility to Negro radicalism and independent Negro politics which has appeared in Aptheker’s work from the very beginning to this climax-pushing the Negroes aside for the sake of non slaveholding whites in the South.</p>
<p>However fair may be the outside of Stalinist history and politics, however skillful may be the means by which its internal corruption is disguised, inevitably its real significance appears. There is no excuse today for those who allow themselves to be deceived by it. For all interested in this sphere, it is a common duty, whatever differences may exist between us, to see to it that the whole Stalinist fakery on Negro history be thoroughly exposed for what it really is.</p>
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C.L.R. James 1949
Herbert Aptheker’s Distortions
Source: Fourth International, Vol.10 No.11, December 1949, pp.337-341;
Written: by C.L.R. James under the name J. Meyer;
Transcribed: by Daniel Gaido.
In the last article, Stalinism and Negro History, (Fourth International, November 1949) we showed: 1) that from 1826 to 1831 the Negro people, slave and free, being locked in mortal combat with the slave-owners, were the driving force of what became the political movement of Abolitionism; 2) that Herbert Aptheker’s whole account shows that he sees the historical role of Negroes essentially as predecessors of the National Negro Congress and other Stalinist Negro organizations, that is to say, as groups whose sole function was to organize Negroes as appendages to the anti-slavery coalition. Thus Aptheker reverses completely the political relation of the, Negro slaves and free Negroes to the other revolutionary classes.
This becomes absolutely clear when he touches what he calls “The Pre-Civil War Generation” (The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement). He lists conventions, meetings, articles, speeches, etc. that occupy three pages (pp.36-39). Never once is there the slightest reference to the political perspectives or political line of any one of these organizations, groups or individuals. Just as the Stalinists view the function of the Negroes (and the proletariat) today as being one of abandoning all independent political activity and being simply “anti-fascist,” following docilely behind the CP, so it is sufficient that the Negroes in those days were “anti-slavery,” following docilely behind the Abolitionists.
We must follow Aptheker’s account closely. First, the Negroes meet and organize Negro resistance. Then, in addition to this, they organize “encouragement and assistance for progressive forces.” Thus we are told that certain Philadelphia Negroes, only two months after the launching of the Liberator, met and pledged their support to it, to which is added: “Such gatherings were common in various cities throughout the paper’s life.” The Liberator and the Abolitionists over here; the Negroes over there, pledging support. Under the heading of “United Struggles,” we read that Negroes “did not, of course, restrict themselves to independent work but struggled side by side with white people in the common effort.”
How did the Negroes struggle side by side? These Negroes “wrote many letters to Garrison, giving not only moral stimulation but also ... money and subscriptions.” We are informed that “contributions by Negroes in that paper and other Abolitionist publications were exceedingly common.” Again we can see here the sharp division between the Liberator, Abolitionism, and the Negroes.
Now Aptheker takes a leap. He gives us examples of what the Negroes wrote. “The Liberator for February 12, 1831, gave a third of its space to articles by two Philadelphia Negroes, a call to an anti-Colonization mass meeting in Boston.” Aptheker notes an account of a similar meeting held earlier in New York. He then informs us that these contributions of Negroes to the paper are “fairly typical of the entire thirty-five volumes of the paper.”
The observant reader cannot help being startled and can very well ask himself: Is this all that Negroes wrote about in a paper that lasted from 1831 to 1864? He need not be disturbed. Aptheker’s account is an incredible falsification. But let us continue with more of it. He says that the record of the proceedings of the Abolitionist organizations “is studded with accounts of, or contributions by, Negroes.” Aptheker is always making statements of this kind. But the moment you examine what he says concretely, a different picture appears.
Here, for instance, are the examples chosen at random by Aptheker. The 1849 meeting of one of these organizations was opened by an invocation by the Reverend Sam R. Wood and “the entertainment was furnished by the four Luca boys, Negro youngsters, who sang an anti-slavery song called Car of Emancipation.” Then Aptheker describes for us a Negro lady at a meeting who said that she had, heard of the Abolitionists as inciters to violence, knaves, fools, etc., but she had been sitting and listening and “she knew the Lord would bless them for they were good and righteous folk.” It has been necessary to give almost word for word Aptheker’s account. For it represents as vicious and subtle a piece of anti-Negro historical writing as it is possible to find and infinitely more dangerous than the chauvinism of the Bourbon historian.
The Real Facts of History
Any unbiased person who spends a few hours looking through the Liberator and other Abolitionist papers, and the accounts of Abolitionist societies will see that they are studded with innumerable political contributions, by Negroes to some of the greatest political conflicts that have ever taken place in the United States.
Here are only a few taken at random.
On June 8, 1849, Frederick Douglass made the open call for a slave insurrection in the South. Garrison, the pacifist, was sitting on the platform. The whole speech appeared in the Liberator. At the World Convention against Slavery held in London in June 1840, among the delegates representing the United States were Garrison and Charles Lenox Remond, a Negro. The World Convention objected to women being seated and Remond with three other American delegates sat amongst the rejected women and fought the issue through to the end.
During the intense excitement generated by the 1850 Compromise, the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society fell due. The notorious Captain Isaiah Rynders, with a band of hoodlums who had the backing of the metropolitan papers and official society, sat in the gallery determined to break up the convention. Garrison’s incendiary speech started the disturbance. Rynders shouted from the organ loft and then marched down the aisle, followed by his band. But as Garrison’s biographer tells us, on that first day, Rynders and his men were “quite vanquished by the wit, repartee and eloquence of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Furness and Reverend Samuel R. Ward whom Wendell Phillips described as so black that “when he shut his eyes you could not see him.”
In the Liberator and other Abolitionist papers and in Abolitionist proceedings, you will find the great debates upon the US Constitution, the reports of tours, at home and abroad, by Douglass, Remend, Wells Brown, Douglass’ defense of having purchased his freedom, the question of political action versus “moral suasion.”
At the May 1855 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass attacked Garrison’s theory of the US Constitution. The New York Daily News reports the meeting as follows: “A grand and terrific set-to came off between Abby Kelley Foster, “Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who defended the Union while claiming rights for his people. He was insulted, interrupted and denounced by the Garrison Cabinet, but stood amid them and overtopped them like a giant among pigmies.”
At the end of the Civil War, when Garrison wanted to disband his society, Douglass, Remend and Wendell Phillips led the attack against him and insisted that the Society should continue until at least the Negroes got the vote.
We cannot go here into the history of the Abolition movement. But enough has been said to show the political mentality of a writer who in this mass of material selects a call for a meeting as typical of thirty-five years of Negro contributions to the Liberator and finds that Negro parsons giving invocations, Negro boys singing, and old Negro women blessing Abolitionism are the most characteristic aspects of Negro contributions to the struggle.
Subtle Form of Prejudice
This is no ordinary, racial prejudice. It is something far worse. It is a political method which compels the writer to place the Negroes in a subordinate category and at whatever sacrifice of historical fact keep them there. Whatever does not fit into this scheme must go out. Aptheker cannot escape the consequences of his political ideas. Any history of the Civil War which does not base itself upon the Negroes, slave and free, as the subject and not the object of politics, is ipso facto a Jim Crow history. That is why even the Negro writers, with all the good work that they have done and their subjective desire to elevate the Negro’s past, seldom escape paternalism or apologies-both of them forms of white chauvinism: paternalism, an inflation, and apologetics a deflation of the subtle chauvinistic poison. But these and the carelessness or traditional ignorance of liberals can be fought and corrected. You cannot correct Stalinist history without destroying Stalinism.
To keep his history within the confines of his politics, Aptheker must not only omit, he must falsify. We cannot pursue all his falsifications. What he have to do, however, is to show the thoroughly reactionary anti-Negro, anti-proletarian and even anti-liberal ideas which stage by stage emerge from the encomiums to the Negroes with which he plasters his writings.
One of the greatest lessons of the Abolitionist movement is the way in which (despite constant accusations of racial chauvinism) the political representatives of the classes, while in perpetual conflict with each other, achieved a racial unity, cooperation and solidarity unknown in the United States up to that time and afterwards, until the formation of the CIO. While it is possible formally and for special purposes to separate Negroes from whites, any account either of whites or Negroes in the Abolitionist struggle is totally false unless it shows this integration. Aptheker, while perpetually talking about the “united struggles” of Negroes and whites, destroys this precious heritage.
In his attempt to show how Negroes contributed to “the progressive forces,” he cites the fact that in the first issue of a popular annual called Autographs For Freedom, there is a sketch of a Scottish Abolitionist John Murray and a sixty-seven page history of a slave rebellion aboard the domestic slave trader Creble by Frederick Douglass. He adds that the second issue of Autographs also had five articles by Negroes. This sounds innocent and can be used as an example of progressive historical writing. But what are the real facts?
When Douglass toured in England; he made a vast number of friends for the movement and for himself as a representative of it. Money was subscribed to pay for his freedom, and a substantial sum was given him for the purpose of starting a paper of his own. He finally did so, but the expense was great, he had to mortgage his house and he got heavily into debt.
At this time one of his English friends, Miss Julia Griffiths, and her sister came to the United States, and settled down in Rochester, taking over the management of Douglass’ paper to leave him free to write and carry on his general political activities. A woman of literary ability and great energy, she not only made a success of the management of the paper but in her spare time edited Autographs For Freedom. To characterize Douglass’ article in this publication as an example of how Negroes contributed to “the progressive forces” is to show how alien to the actual struggle is the mentality which Stalinism brings to this striking but characteristic episode in the history of Abolitionism.
Douglass in the Forefront
Let us continue with this aspect of Douglass’ career, for Aptheker’s treatment of Douglass more than anything else betrays his conception of the role of the Negro in politics. In the struggle for women’s emancipation as in all the causes of the day, Douglass was in the forefront. His paper, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, was the official organ of the Free Soil Party in New York State. At the second convention of that party he was elected secretary by acclamation. At the National Loyalist Convention after the Civil War, sponsored by the Republican party, Douglass represented the city of Rochester. The people of Rochester asked him to stand for Congress as a Republican and Theodore Weld made a special visit to Rochester to persuade him. But he refused. Here obviously was no “mere” Negro appendage to the Abolitionist Movement.
Now to return to Aptheker. Undoubtedly conscious of the fact that this account so far had been terribly lacking, Aptheker pulls out all his stops when he comes to the Negro propagandists of Abolitionism. This, he says, is “the most vital part” of the story, and he is correct: it is the most vital part of his story. Again he tosses in one of his misleading phrases about the “decisive role of Negroes.” Close examination, however, shows that as usual here where the phrasing is most radical, the political content is correspondingly reactionary. To see this we must transfer ourselves to the Abolition period and try to catch some of its social atmosphere.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the slaveowners sought to prove that the Negroes loved slavery, and in any case that Negroes were not men. Therefore when escaped slaves denounced the institution with eloquence and logic, they had a tremendous effect. Aptheker quotes Garrison on this. But there was another side to this question. Escaped slaves who gained some education, insofar as they formed a group apart from others, carried on their own political activity. As we have repeated, the fundamental struggle within Abolitionism was the struggle represented by these against the humanitarian tendency of the New England intellectuals.
“Give us the facts – and leave the philosophy to us,” said a Garrisonian to the aspiring young Douglass. Douglass was to say later that these white Abolitionists thought that they “owned him.” Later Garrison fought Douglass with extreme ferocity, not only on his politics but on the very idea that Douglass should have a paper of his own. There were all kinds of conflicts in the Abolition Movement on the chauvinist issue. Yet it must be remembered that Douglass, who stood no nonsense on any slights upon him as a Negro, revered Garrison to the end; to the extent that the accusations of chauvinism were true, they were essentially political; and Garrison’s character, reputation and achievements were such that they could stand the charges, not only today but then.
Aptheker cannot claim similar consideration. The pernicious character of Stalinist politics is revealed by the fact that in the middle of the twentieth century, when even some of the reactionary Southern senators have dropped the argument of organic Negro inferiority, Aptheker’s whole argumentation remains within the confines of the nineteenth century debate. That is why for him, the Negro propagandists are “the most vital part” of the story. Like the Garrisonian who spoke to Douglass, Aptheker has no use for Negro philosophy, i.e., Negro politics. The escaped Negroes by “their bearing, courage, and intelligence” were the most “devastating anti-slavery forces.” This is the politics which sees the share-cropper’s contribution essentially as a recital of his wrongs.
Aptheker does not merely mention the suitability of the ex-slaves as propagandists and then pass on. This is his main theme. “Had none of these people existed but one, his existence and participation in the Abolitionist movement would justify the assertion that the Negro’s role therein was decisive. That man is Frederick Douglass who ...” This is what Aptheker means by the role of the Negroes – not their politics, but their heroic deaths, the contributions of money, songs and stray articles to the Liberator and Abolitionist agitation. Thus he no sooner touches Douglass than he defiles him. He says that Douglass “from his first public speech in 1841 to his organizing and recruiting activities during the war against the slavocracy was the voice of America’s millions of slaves.” Completely one-sided and therefore totally wrong.
From 1841 to his recruiting for the Northern army, Douglass was the voice of the American Revolution. Stage by stage he embodied its development until in 1860 he gave critical support to the Republican Party while defiantly proclaiming that he was still a radical Abolitionist. It was precisely when the bourgeoisie took over that Douglass became primarily a leader of the Negroes. (And at this time also, Wendell Phillips, who had been for a time eclipsed by Douglass, rose to his greatest heights and spoke superbly for a revolutionary conduct of the war and the revolutionary settlement of the Southern question.)
Question of Racial Equality
Had that been all Aptheker had to say, it would have been bad enough. But Aptheker then spends almost a page on Douglass as follows: He was a magnificent figure of a man, impregnable, incorruptible, scars on his back, African prince, majestic in his wrath, grand in his physical proportions. A tailor in England who heard him had never been so moved in his life, etc., etc. Why all this? Why? When there has not been a word about Douglass’ politics?
Aptheker gives the show away when he quotes a famous incident in Douglass’ career. Captain Rynders once baited Douglass with the taunt, that Negroes were monkeys. Douglass turned to him and asked him: “Am I a man?” Aptheker relates: “the effect was nothing short of stupendous.” No doubt it was. The reader, however, cannot help noting, after all these “African prince” paragraphs, that the effect on Aptheker in 1940 is still stupendous.
American racial prejudice is usually crude but at the same time can be a very subtle thing. To understand how unhealthy is Aptheker’s ignoring of Douglass’ politics and his excitement at the Rynders episode, we must see how Douglass himself treated the question.
Douglass personally fought race prejudice wherever he met it. But in discussion he treated the purely racial attacks of his enemies not only with counter-arguments but with a certain humorous contempt. Thus in this very debate he switched the problem aside by saying if he was a monkey, his father was a white man, and therefore Rynders was his half-brother. Twice he called Rynders his half-brother. On another occasion, after speaking very movingly in England on this question of Negroes being considered monkeys in the United States, he broke the tension by relating that a few days before a big dog had come up to him and stared him in the face, and, said Douglass, I could see in his eyes that he recognized humanity.
He used to relate how when sleeping space was limited on the benches aboard ship, he would simply show his face and say to newcomers “I am a Negro,” hoping they would go along. But one man said to him: “Negro be damned, you move down.” So concluded Douglass, my being black is no longer of any use to me.
Some hecklers who asked him if it was true that his wife was a white woman, were treated to a long discourse as to the irrelevance of the question, what business was it of theirs, etc., and were constantly led up to the point where they expected him to make the admission. He never admitted anything but soon went on with his speech, leaving them to find out afterwards that his wife (his first wife) was Negro.
This sort of thing occurs in many speeches and was obviously habitual with him. The reason is not far to seek. Douglass was not only a sensitive Negro, but a highly political person. And despite the powerful social pressure, he would not allow this question to occupy any status more than was absolutely necessary. He dealt with it, brushed it aside often with a smile, and then went on to politics.
Exactly the opposite is Aptheker’s Stalinist method. The politics he ignores and therefore reaches the most genuine pitch of enthusiasm when he is proving that Negroes were not only men but some Negro slaves were marvelous men and did wonderful work side by side with “the progressive forces.” This is not merely popular writing. A portion of this pamphlet appeared in the Stalinist theoretical journal, Science and Society, replete with footnotes and references.
Anti-Fascist Not Anti-capitalist
Aptheker’s politics not only in relation to Negroes but in relation to the American workers is pitched at the very lowest level. He is busy proving to the American proletariat, to labor bureaucrats and liberals that the Negro is a man and a brother, will struggle hard, and can produce many brilliant men who will speak for the Negro far more effectively than any white man can. At the same time he is offering to the Negro leaders place at the table of the anti-fascist coalition. Aptheker by the way does not hide this. Here is the conclusion of his book Negro Slave Revolts:
“An awareness of its history should give the modern Negro added confidence and courage in his heroic present-day battle for complete and perfect equality with all other American citizens. And it should make those other Americans eager and proud to grasp the hands of the Negro and march forward with him against their common oppressors-against the industrial and financial overlords and the plantation oligarchs who today stand in the way of liberty, equality and prosperity.
“That unity between the white and Negro masses was necessary to overthrow nineteenth-century slavery. That same unity is necessary now to defeat twentieth-century slavery-to defeat fascism.”
See how swiftly in the last paragraph capitalism is pushed aside and fascism is substituted for it. This is vital for the whole scheme. To talk about the overthrow of capitalism would destroy the concept of the anti-fascist coalition; it would bring on to the scene independent proletarian politics and independent Negro politics. Aptheker maintains an unrelenting hostility to any such manifestation among Negroes either today or in the Civil War.
Aptheker, writing on “Militant Abolitionism” in the Journal of Negro History (Vol.26, p.463) had to refer to Douglass’ call for a slave insurrection. That a Negro should consciously call for insurrection! God forbid! Aptheker writes that Douglass “found himself saying ...” The magnificent African prince could do much, but that he could stand on a platform and out of his own head consciously speak of insurrection – that Aptheker simply could not stand. He makes it into a visitation from on high. Douglass just “found himself saying” it. In To Be Free, where he article reappears, the damning phrase is omitted but Aptheker cannot get rid of his whole reactionary conception of Negroes in American history which this phrase embodies without withdrawing every line he has written.
Stalinist Sleight of Hand
Stalinism tries to manipulate history as a sleight-of-hand man manipulates cards. But unlike the conjurer, a stern logic pushes Stalinism in an ever more reactionary direction. For five years Aptheker covered up his anti-Negro concepts with constant broad statements about the “decisive character” of slave insurrections, Negro agitators etc. in the Civil War and the period preceding it. In 1946, however, in The Negro People in America, Aptheker broke new ground. He put forward a new theory that at one stroke made a wreck of all that he had said before. Let his own words speak:
“It was the development of increased agitation on the part of non-slaveholding whites prior to the Civil War for the realization of the American creed that played a major part in provoking the desperation that led the slaveholders to take up arms.” (p.41)
Upon the flimsiest scraps of evidence, the theory is elaborated that it was the withholding of democracy from non-slaveholding whites that pushed the South to the Civil War.
“In terms of practice, as concerns the mass of the white people of the South, this anti-democratic philosophy was everywhere implemented. The property qualifications for voting and office-holding, the weighing of the legislature to favor slaveholding against non-slaveholding counties, the inequitable taxation system falling most heavily on mechanics’ tools and least heavily on slaves, the whole system of economic, social and educational preferment for the possessors of slaves, and the organized, energetic, and partially successful struggles carried on against this system by the non-slaveholding whites form – outside of the response of the Negroes to enslavement – the actual content of the South’s internal history for the generation preceding the Civil War.”
It is clear that only at the last minute Aptheker remembered the slaves and threw in the phrase about their “response.” Historically this is a crime. The non-slaveholding whites who supposedly pushed the South into the Civil War were not in any way democrats. They were small planters and city people who formed a rebellious but reactionary social force, hostile to the big planters, the slaves and the democratically minded farmers in the non-plantation regions.
What particular purpose this new development is to serve does not concern us here. What is important, however, is its logical identity with the hostility to Negro radicalism and independent Negro politics which has appeared in Aptheker’s work from the very beginning to this climax-pushing the Negroes aside for the sake of non slaveholding whites in the South.
However fair may be the outside of Stalinist history and politics, however skillful may be the means by which its internal corruption is disguised, inevitably its real significance appears. There is no excuse today for those who allow themselves to be deceived by it. For all interested in this sphere, it is a common duty, whatever differences may exist between us, to see to it that the whole Stalinist fakery on Negro history be thoroughly exposed for what it really is.
C.L.R. James Archive
Last updated on: 11 April 2009
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h3>Capitalist Society and the War</h3>
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<p class="information"><span class="info">First Published:</span> <strong>The New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni40_07">, Vol. VI No. 6</a>, July 1940, pp. 114–128.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> Damon Maxwell.<br>
<span class="info">Proofread:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> (July 2013).</p>
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<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>WAR is one great destroyer of illusions. Churchill tells the British people that they were so glutted with victory in 1918 that they failed to use it: imperialist Germany should have been destroyed once and for all in 1918. Thus even in the mouth of a great democrat the survival of democracy in Britain demands the destruction of the greatest nation in Europe. Reynaud’s representative in Britain, General de Gaules, with a third of France in German hands and the French army in full retreat, advises his countrymen that the “same methods” which gave Germany victory can give them to France: this patriotic Frenchman believes that if Fascist boots are to tramp down the Champs Elysees, at least they should enclose French feet. The eternal unity of France and Britain in defence of liberty has burst asunder, revealing two groups of greedy and frightened self-seekers, each one blaming the disaster on the other, trying to throw the responsibility on the United States, finally exchanging bullets. Hitler the conqueror sits in the very chair of Foch, and does to France what Churchill now regrets was not done to Germany in 1918. He makes one exception-France will retain enough armed forces to protect her colonies. On this point, “protective custody” for the colonies, Fascism and democracy are agreed.<br>
</p>
<h4>The War and Marxism</h4>
<p class="fst">The Marxist movement, the Fourth International, has not been taken unawares as to the general character of this war. But we have been guilty of some grievous, if excusable blunders. We predicated all our strategy on the victory of British and French imperialism. With that schematism which is the besetting danger of Marxism, we have applied the concept of victory going automatically to the countries of greater economic resources. Trotsky who told the Dewey Commission that Germany was certain to be defeated in the coming war now digs out a quotation of 1934 to prove that the “weakness of France and Great Britain was not unexpected” and “The power of the Fourth International lies in this, that its program is capable of withstanding the test of great events.” The power of the program can be amply enough demonstrated without these papal claims to infallibility – even when obvious mistakes have been committed. We have underestimated the political and subjective factors in war. The result is we were mentally unprepared for the possibility far less the probability of a German victory. In the war of the classes, as in any other war, surprise is a powerful weapon for disorganization, and disorganization is weakness. From a complete underestimation of the military and political power of Fascism, the bourgeois world today is swinging to an opposite extreme, in part propaganda, but in part genuine. The revolutionary movement cannot escape the consequences of so strong and sudden a reversal of opinion. Already, before the blitzkrieg, there were on the left, genuflections before Fascism. Some comrades posed the probability of “bureaucratic state” or “managerial society” as the next stage in social evolution. Should Hitler dominate Europe we shall see a rapid growth of these ideas in the revolutionary movement. Fascism as we know it has reached its culmination in the present war, and we must analyze its role in the war in specific and not in general terms.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Marxists Predicted Fascism</h4>
<p>First, however, we must restate some fundamentals. Neither the war nor Fascism fell from the sky. Your democrat and your empiricist hate to be reminded of this. As in 1914 they want to forget everything in view of the new unexpected danger. The danger is not new, it is not unexpected.</p>
<p>Lenin and Trotsky not only stated the broad alternatives of our period, but specified its details with a precision which is a triumph as much of their method as of their minds.</p>
<p>The Communist International, in its first manifesto, predicated the coming forms of the state.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The statification of economic life against which liberal capitalism protested so much, is an accomplished fact. The return to free competition is henceforth impossible; we move inevitably to the domination of trusts, syndicates, and other capitalist octopuses. One question alone remains to be decided: who will control the statification of production, the Imperialist State or the victorious Proletarian State?”</p>
<p class="fst">That was Trotsky. Just a year before that, in March, 1918, Lenin, speaking at the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party on the program and name of the party almost in an aside revealed his conception of the years ahead</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Marxists have never forgotten that violence will be an inevitable accompaniment of the collapse of capitalism on its full scale and of the birth of a socialist society. And this violence will cover a historical period, a whole era of wars of the most varied kinds – imperialist wars, civil wars within the country, the interweaving of the former with the latter, national wars, the emancipation of the nationalities crushed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers which will inevitably form various alliances with each other in the era of vast state-capitalist and military trusts and syndicates. This is an era of tremendous collapses, of wholesale military decisions of a violent nature, of crises. It has already begun, we see it clearly – it is only the beginning.”</p>
<p class="fst">German Fascism is “a vast state-capitalist military trust and syndicate.” By the German blitzkrieg is achieved the first of the “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.” There will be others. At the rate the American bourgeoisie is going we shall not have to wait long for them. But however powerful the military trusts, and however wholesale the military decisions, the situation of capitalism is to use another of Lenin’s phrases, “objectively hopeless.”</p>
<p>These are the boundaries of our theoretical arena. No armed guards prohibit the adventurous from wandering further afield, but those who cross the border either turn up in the camp of the enemy or reappear penitent and chastened.</p>
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<h3>I. “Dynamic” Fascism</h3>
<h4>The German Army Before Hitler</h4>
<p class="fst">HITLER’s chief contribution to modern civilization so far has been the blitzkrieg. Now the spearhead of the blitzkrieg is the German army, its basis is the German economy. Let us note well that German Fascism created neither. The military achievements and traditions of the German army date back before Frederick the Great. The French and British bourgeoisie, as far back as the late seventeenth century, owed their power to wealth created by their success in the scramble for colonies and international commerce. Germany, ruined by the Thirty Years War, first achieved European importance through the efforts of Frederick Wilhelm who, soldier by soldier, built a powerful army, drilled and equipped as no other army in Europe: the Prussian drill-sergeant, in actuality if not in tradition, dates back nearly 200 years. This was the army used by Frederick II to make Prussia into one of the great powers of Europe and extend its boundaries at the cost of its neighbors. However, the Prussian State, under Frederick, in comparison with the rest of Europe, represented no progressive social formation. The creation of the army was a tour-de-force. It declined in Frederick’s last years and deteriorated after his death; Prussia, along with the rest of Europe, reeled under the blows of Napoleon’s military genius manipulating the new mass armies of the French Revolution. But the basis of the Prussian tradition had been laid.</p>
<p>The Treaty of Tilsit, 1807, was for Prussia a nineteenth century Versailles. Germany’s army was reduced to 42,000. But Stein and Fichte, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau led a movement of national regeneration whose psychological significance must undoubtedly have played an important part in the creation of Fascist morale. They evaded the limitations placed on the army by passing men through it with great speed, thus accumulating reserves. They dismissed incompetent officers. They opened schools for military training. They reduced the privileges of the officers. They created the <em>landwehr</em>, a national militia, the nearest they could get to conscription. They remodelled the whole educational system. They tried even to tinker with the social system. In all these efforts they met with stiff opposition from the Junkers. Intimately, however, the Reformers succeeded in transplanting to the German army as much of the spirit and organization of the French revolutionary armies as was possible without a social overturn. They reaped their reward when Blücher’s troops marched into Paris in 1814 and played the decisive role in the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Blitzkrieg Before Hitler</h4>
<p class="fst">Surrounded by France and Russia and on the south by Austria, her powerful rival for hegemony over the numerous Germany states, the Prussian army became to Prussia what the British navy has been to Britain. The greatest theoretician of war, Clausewitz, was a German who analysed the transformation of warfare which had followed the French Revolution. The theory of total war which Clausewitz developed from his personal experiences in the French Revolutionary wars, was put into practice by the Germans more than by any other European people. The idea of the blitzkrieg, the lightning stroke, was conceived and practised long before Hitler.</p>
<p>In 1886 Bismarck crushed Austria in 7 weeks. In 1871 the Prussian army was outside the walls of Paris in 7 weeks and 3 days. The organization of the army, the study of military strategy and technique kept pace with the phenomenal progress of German industry between 1871 and 1914. In 1914 the Germans came within an ace of winning the first imperialist war. The Schlieffen plan just failed, and, in the words of Winston Churchill, “we survive to this day,” a tribute by one well qualified to judge how nearly the Kaiser’s blitzkrieg came to making Germany the master of Europe. Even before the 1914 war, in 1911, a military critic of the <strong>Encyclopaedia Britannica</strong>, an Englishman, made the following profound summation of the old German army: “The value of war was analyzed and the secrets of success and failure were laid bare; and on these investigations a system of organisation and of training were built up which, not only from a military, but from a political and even an economical point of view, is the most striking product of the nineteenth century.” Hitler has achieved much. We shall examine it, but we must render to Hitler the things that are Hitler’s no more.<br>
</p>
<h4>Germany Economy Before Hitler</h4>
<p class="fst">If Fascism inherited in Germany the skeleton and military tradition of the most powerful army of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it inherited also the magnificent economic structure of Germany, the finest in Europe, and in many respects, the most highly organized in the world. Any well-informed person knows the history of the rise and development of pre-1914 German industry, its efficiency, its mastery of the most modern processes, the scientific character of its technicians, its high degree of concentration of production and centralization of ownership. Much of this forms an important part of Lenin’s book, <strong>Imperialism</strong>.</p>
<p>But there is one special feature of pre-war German capitalism which it is worth while to recall at this moment. The German bourgeoisie unlike the French, English and Dutch, who bordered the Atlantic Ocean, was never wealthy enough either to establish the national state or accumulate large reserves. British industry had a long start when Germany really began in the nineteenth century. German capitalism was tended: it grew up behind tariffs, it fed on state subsidies, the Junkers deserted their estates and made vast profits supplying the needs of the army. Thus German industry was the foster-child of the state more than any of the great industrial structures of Europe. From its very birth it was trained in the school of statification.</p>
<p>In 1919, chaos set in which was checked only by the entry of American capital after the defeat of the German workers in 1923. To pay reparations, Germany had to extend her foreign trade. But the workers’ organizations still existed and the workers could not be reduced to impotence. To meet the demands placed upon it, the already highly efficient technical capacity, concentration of production and cartelisation of German industry underwent a further process, rationalisation, which awakened the interest and tempered admiration of industrialists and technicians the world over. If post-1918 Germany has contributed anything progressive to the technique and administration of production it was this rationalisation, which took place between 1924 and 1929.</p>
<p>Already in 1931 in the important exporting industries, coal, potash, metallurgical, electro-technical, and chemical, large-scale production had reached a level of concentration comparable with that in the United States, though in mechanization Germany still was second. In 1924 the Steel Ingot Cartel controlled about 94 of output and by 1931 production was in the hands of two great enterprises. By 1930, in the iron and steel industry taken as a whole, the existence of a few large combines had facilitated the organisation of a cartel structure more closely integrated and of a wider range than ever before. Two corporations accounted in 1931 for about 75 of the total output and more than 80 of the exports of the German electro-technical industry. In 1929 an international cartel of chemical dye-stuffs was formed consisting of five countries which two years before had produced between them three-quarters of the quantity and more than four-fifths of the world’s exports of coal-tar dyes. Germany in 1931 had 75 of the total export quota. One chemical trust was responsible for 90 of German production. The coal industry had failed so completely to prosper under private ownership that by 1924 the whole industry was subjected to state regulation. The potash industry was similarly controlled. Later the whole iron and steel industry came under state control. Thus by 1933 when Hitler took over Germany, the Nazis had two enormous advantages, both sides of the same coin. Not only was German industry of a high technical standard, but more than any other industry in the world, it was ready for its inevitable end – statification.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fascism: The Marxian Analysis</h4>
<p>The Nazis inherited the skeleton German army and the German economic potential. They also inherited a country whose actual industrial production was just half of what it had been in 1929. There were six million unemployed. By 1938 production was 138% of 1932; unemployment has been abolished. The Nazis have constructed a military machine such as the world has never seen before. How did they do it? What is their “secret”? Have they solved the contradictions of capitalism?</p>
<p>Marx wrote three large volumes describing the structure and function of capitalist economy. For Marxists, labor power is a commodity like any other commodity which the capitalists buys and sells. Consumption is a function of production. The iron law of such a method of production is the accumulation of profits in the form of capital leading to an ever-greater concentration. The increasing disproportion, inevitable in the capitalist system, between the accumulating capital and the possibilities of consumption causes great and increasingly devastating economic crises. At a certain stage concentrated capital assumes a form which we know as imperialism. Lenin analyzed the nature of imperialism, contrasting its need for foreign markets, colonies and spheres of influence with the limitations of the avail-able supply. Under such circumstances, the necessary division among the competing imperialisms takes place by war. <em>Such a war the Kaiser fought in 1914. Such a war capitalist Germany is fighting today.</em> But capitalist Germany of 1933 was a Germany economically at the last gasp. It had to win the coming war or go down to ruin. The Fascist bureaucracy therefore transformed the whole of German economy into a vast state-capitalist and military trust. To do this, the Fascists cheapened the most important element of production, labor power, and compelled the bourgeoisie to invest a portion of its profits in armaments. The system however, remains a capitalist system, in the method of production, the use of labor power as a commodity, the inevitable accumulation of capital, the need for imperialist expansion. <em>The bourgeois investment in armaments is in reality a form of investment in colonies and new industrial opportunities which the armaments will win for them.</em> The Fascist bureaucracy acts in the interests of German imperialism as a whole, as did the German imperial and royal families and their nobility. The nature of bureaucratic power and the extent of its revenues are subordinate to the essential features of capitalist production in Germany. Fascism politically and economically is neither a new society nor world revolution. It is the old society land counter revolution. It is capitalism in its last stages, stripped to the waist and trained for war as its sole means of survival. Such is the Marxian analysis of this question.</p>
<p>We must bear this in mind when we address ourselves to the question of how Germany created the economic and military power which resulted in the defeat of France.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Marxist Investigator</h4>
<p class="fst">Guerin in his book, <strong>Fascism and Big Business</strong>, gives an admirable analysis of the economic policy of Fascism. It places the working class at the mercy of the capitalists in regard to wages and working conditions. At the same time, Fascism limits the liberty of movement of each capitalist and sacrifices all other branches of economic activity on the altar of heavy industry.</p>
<p>For heavy industry write armaments for war and the interior structure of the whole process is laid bare before us.</p>
<p>Guerin points out that when the Fascists came to power they hastened to give back to Kirdorf and Thyssen control of the businesses which they had lost in 1932. The Nazis gave back the state’s share of capital to big bank mergers, in one case 90, in another 70, in another 35. Municipally-owned enterprises, which even during the depression, had made profits amounting to 650,000,000 marks, were ruthlessly liquidated and their business restored to private capital.</p>
<p>The capitalists were allowed to deduct from their taxable income all sums used to purchase new equipment. Finance-capital was assisted by the formation of compulsory cartels. The Nazis, according to Guerin, created new enterprises but only when it was a question of profitless ventures. When profits could be made the enterprise was left to the capitalists.</p>
<p>Pre-Nazi capital could find no field for investment. The Nazis found an unlimited one – the field of what we can call “public works.” All capitalist politicians know this method of creating business, Roosevelt more than any other. But whereas Roosevelt knew that unlimited taxation for public works which bring in no returns leads to bankruptcy, the Fascists taxed heavily and invested all in their military construction, because these “public works” might someday bring fat returns in the shape of colonies, markets, and industrial opportunities wrenched by war from rival Imperialisms. That is the Fascist contribution to the science of capitalist economy. The famous abolition of unemployment is no more than a gigantic WPA for the destruction of rival imperialisms.</p>
<p>Inevitably, the Fascist state piled up a mountainous debt. But it had at its disposal all the wages which it could squeeze out of the defeated workers. It could force the capitalists to invest in its novel form of “public works.” It took savings in banks, and insurance companies under its protective custody. The only security it could offer was what it hoped to win by the war.</p>
<p>It is true that the Nazis compelled capitalists to reinvest profits over a certain amount in such industries as were indicated by the state, chiefly the armament industry. But the direction of these enterprises they left to the capitalists themselves and they forbade any increase in the state ad-ministration of industry.</p>
<p>Such a form of economy carries with it the danger of inflation, the most terrible word in the German language. To prevent this inflation getting out of bounds the Nazis rigidly controlled prices. But they also controlled consumption, feeding the people as little as possible, clothing them as badly as possible, so that all available funds could go into the production not of butter but of guns.</p>
<p>Like every modern nation, the Germans had to battle for foreign trade. The Nazis particularly needed raw materials for the great preparations demanded by war. They set out on the reactionary task of creating synthetic products, oil from coal, etc. most of it at a cost far beyond its production elsewhere. By this means they struck more blows at the living standards of the country, and under-mined still further one of capitalism’s most important contributions to society – the international division of labor. But with war in mind they had to be as far as possible self-sufficient, to create what the economists call the regime of autarchy.</p>
<p>The Nazis had promised, among other promises, to expropriate the big estates for the benefit of the peasants. This, with communal farming, is one of the most pressing economic needs for the advancement of modern society. Germany needed an expansion of agriculture, but the Nazis carefully guarded the property of the Junkers.</p>
<p>Such in essentials is the analysis made by a Marxist of what the Nazis with their usual impudence and bluster pronounce to be a world revolution.<br>
</p>
<h4>An Observer on the Spot</h4>
<p class="fst">How the Nazis mobilized economy is the question which naturally occupies the central position in any discussion of the war. To many sincere observers Guerin’s analysis may seem too strongly colored by Marxist spectacles. Let us therefore look through the spectacles of Otto D. Tolischus, for years <strong>New York Times</strong> correspondent in Germany. Mr. Tolischus’ paper is sufficient guarantee that those of his writings which appear in it will not reflect the least tinge of Marxism. In the <strong>New York Times Magazine</strong> of June 30 he sums up his unrivalled experience of Germany’s economic mobilization for Hitler’s world revolution. Though he and his employers would be horrified at this, his summary has a familiar sound. “A nation of 80,000,000 ... has been converted into a gigantic trust which has no other aims or dogmas except total economic and military war ... that will establish German world supremacy.” In other words, “a vast state-capitalist and military trust” aiming at “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.” Lenin with his sharp eye for good theoretical work and his genial objectivity would have said “Bravo, Mr. Bourgeois, Bravo!”</p>
<p>Tolischus lists “the main principles and measures.”</p>
<h5>FOR CAPITAL, TRADE AND INDUSTRY:</h5>
<p class="quoteb">1. Fixed prices and adjusted currency by a price commissar “on a cost plus basis.” This limited the inevitable inflation to not more than 25%.</p>
<p class="quoteb">2. The limitation of profits; these were limited by price control and by compulsory investment of all profits above 6 to 8 in government loans. But this investment was subject to later distribution to stock holders. “The gross dividend declaration is still up to 14.%.” This we may note in passing is what admirers of Fascism call “abolition of the profit motive.”</p>
<h5>FOR LABOR:</h5>
<p class="quoteb">Fixed wage rates based mainly on deflated wage levels of 1932, job control, abolition of the right to strike.</p>
<h5>FOR THE CONSUMER:</h5>
<p class="quoteb">Rationing of virtually all food and of most other necessities under the slogan cannon instead of butter “which lowered the living standard almost to the point of mal-nutrition.”</p>
<p class="fst">In no essential does Mr. Tolischus differ from the analysis and details of the Marxist, Guerin.</p>
<p>Mr. Tolischus finds this system, which reduces the consumer to the point of malnutrition, while the level of dividends remains at 14 per cent, a form of “paternal socialism.” But Tolischus at any rate makes no claim to be a Marxist. As to its future he says that “while it lasts it compensates for loss of liberty with economic security.” On the whole, Mr. Tolischus comes very well out of this. His “while it lasts” shows a caution which hotter heads might emulate.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Bourgeois Economist</h4>
<p class="fst">Tolischus is a reporter on the spot. John C. de Wilde is an economist who investigates German economy for the Foreign Policy Association. He has written on Germany three times during the past year, using almost exclusively German sources, official and unofficial.</p>
<p>The gross earnings of workers and salaried employees rose from 25.7 to 38.8 billion marks and probably attained 41.5 billion in 1938. The increase came largely from extension of the average working day in industry to the extent of 12%. This, we may waste some time in pointing out, is no new economic discovery. Capitalists have always known it. The question is to be able to carry it out and that is a question of the class-struggle.</p>
<p>The share in the national income of those living on investments in real property or stocks and bonds dropped from 6.6 to 5%, but increased about 3 times between 1932 and 1937. “As production increased and plants were utilized more fully, industry did in fact earn handsome profits;” but these had to be re-invested in business and were in many cases conscripted for the Four Year Plan. (The nature of this conscription, Wilde makes clear later.)</p>
<p>The Nazis have done all they could to increase agriculture, and large sums have been spent on land reclamations and improvement, but the acreage affected has been smaller than the area used for “air ports, roads, buildings, and other purposes connected with rearmament.” The German bourgeoisie invests its surplus in air ports. The air ports will give it good land at the expense of Denmark, Holland, Belgium, French Colonial Africa, etc.</p>
<p>Of Goering’s Four Year Plan, Wilde says that it obviously costs much money. Obviously. Producing oil from coal and rubber of the synthetic variety usually does. But it profits were conscripted for this necessary preparation for war let no one believe that capitalism suffered. The “main burden” of Goering’s plan has been “thrust” upon private enterprise. The private capitalist financed some of the enterprises. When he needed outside capital the government guaranteed bank-credits or opened up the capital market. The State made 5 or 10 year contracts with him, guaranteeing a price that would cover cost of production Interest and the amortization charges, as well as a definite profit The government often guaranteed him a market. These are the burdens borne by the suffering capitalists in Germany.</p>
<p>Writing again on June the 15th, 1940, on the German economy after some months of war, Wilde has little to say that we do not know before. The cost of the war has been imposed on private business. This is not strange – little more can be squeezed out of the workers in Germany. But Dr. Funk, Minister of Economics, has repeatedly warned against heavier taxation which would impair the capital of industry and “deprive business of the incentive to produce, a factor he apparently believes essential even in a totalitarian state.” Funk, that noble Nazi, sounds remarkably like the leaders of the Republican Party, and we may be sure that Hitler like Roosevelt, heard the cry of anguish. Finally, although everything is subordinated to the war and sacrifices are being exacted from all, yet “the State did not with few exceptions assume direct charge of production. It decided what was to be done, but imposed the responsibility for carrying out the program squarely on private enterprise. It has readily employed expert engineers and industrialists, but always under the strict control and direction of the government.” Wilde concludes: “this is an example which the United States could perhaps follow with profit. He need not be afraid. The United States government and the capitalists will follow, both with profit.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fascism – Guardian of Profits</h4>
<p class="fst">That is the way Germany accomplished her economic mobilization. But the Fascist bureaucracy in the course of mobilizing the country for war gathered enormous power into its hands? How else pray can a vast state-capitalist military trust be created? The German bourgeoisie was too discredited to undertake this task by itself. The bureaucracy takes a large part of the national income? Every bureaucracy takes as much as it can get and Fascism has rendered services to the German bourgeoisie that can never be repaid. How much did the bureaucracy take from the capitalist share? Between 1932 and 1937 the percentage of dividends dropped a little over 1%. Without Fascism there would have been no dividends at all. The bureaucracy expropriated the Jewish capitalists? Yes. To give their property and profits not to some abstract “state” but to some very concrete Aryan finance-capitalists. We know their names and how much they got. A bureaucracy does not function in the void It has from its beginning and always intensifies the closest political social and personal relationships with decisive sections of the class whose interests it serves. Ah, but it expropriated the Aryan Thyssen. So what? Thyssen opposed the alliance with Russia. The Nazis were not going to have anyone however powerful disrupting them at that critical moment. Thyssen left the country and probably intrigued with the enemy. After all. Fascism is the government of finance-capital in decay. It cannot afford the freedoms and privileges of a healthy organism. The Nazis expropriated the Polish capitalists. Of course. What do you think they fought the war tor? Glory? Later we shall see they will precede. Their present business is to win the war. But they have given state property to capitalists before. They will give it to them again. We need not lose sleep at nights about the share which German capital will get in the exploitation of Poland.</p>
<p>We have gone at some length into this question of the whence, how and why of Germany’s economic mobilization. It can be summed up in a few words. Germany spent 253.5 million dollars on armaments in 1932. In 1935 she spent over two and a half billion, in 1936 over three and a half. In 1937, 1938 and 1939 she spent over four billion dollars each year. Such a gigantic transfusion of economic resources takes place only when it is an absolutely inescapable necessity for survival. Inevitably it brought vast changes in the political and economic structure. There has been a redistribution of income and a shift in political power, which afford scope for close study, and periodic revaluation. But through all the changes, the Fascist bureaucracy, even when, Bonapartist-fashion it makes gestures, concrete and symbolic, to other classes, preserved the fundamentals of capitalist society in our day, the profits of finance-capital with its inevitable consequences for national Germany and the world. And even such limitations as were imposed on individual capitalists were suffered for the purposes of imperialist war which meant, with victory, the greater glory and aggrandisement of the whole capitalist structure.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Economic Blitzkrieg Abroad</h4>
<p class="fst">With full control of economy at home, the Nazis prepared for war by an economic blitzkrieg – the economic warfare which they would afterwards continue by other means.</p>
<p>The war of 1914–1918 had ruptured the economic equilibrium of European capitalism and demonstrated the intolerable restriction of the national state. The bourgeois order stood squarely in the way of economic expansion. But France and Britain at Versailles could find no other solution to the taming of Germany and the isolation of Bolshevik contamination than by creating a number of small states with tariffs and customs barriers, thus adding considerably to those which had existed before 1914 and had so powerfully contributed to the chaos and ruin of the first imperialist war.</p>
<p>The fourth Congress of the Communist International pointed out that the economic basis of France, though enriched by the Versailles robbery, was still too small to dominate the entire continent. France had bitten off more than she could chew. Loans for armaments to Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and Yugo-Slavia were not enough to keep Eastern Europe within France’s economic orbit. Once the Nazis had reorganized German economy on the backs of the prostrate workers they proceeded to dig themselves deep into the economic life of all the countries surrounding them, l process already begun by republican Germany. There is no need here to go into the methods of barter of buying dear and reselling cheap on the world market which the Nazis used. The bare data of results is sufficient.</p>
<p>In 1938 Yugo-Slavia’s imports from Germany represented 32.5% of her trade, her exports to Germany 35.9%. But this export percentage represented only 2.6% of Germany’s foreign trade. Germany thus could exercise enormous pressure upon Yugo-Slavia’s internal and external politics. In regard to France, imports and exports were each low down on Yugo-Slavia’s list. In 1939 France belatedly concluded a trade agreement with Yugo-Slavia. But that was useless. France’s economy, inferior to Germany’s, was geared to the trade of her empire. She could not be an economic power in Europe as well.</p>
<p>Germany stood at the head of both the import and export list of Czecho-Slovakia, France’s closest ally on the continent. The same with Austria before the annexation. The same with Poland, with Bulgaria and Rumania.</p>
<p>In 1938 Germany took 27% of Rumanian exports and sent Rumania 37% of her exports. She was at the head of the import and export tables of Greece, Poland and Italy. With Holland and Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, she held in their imports and exports either first or second place and more often first than second.</p>
<p>In the key area of South Eastern Europe, the percentage share in German exports was in 1929, 4.3%, in 1932 it was 9.4% and in nine months of 1938 it had risen to 10.1%. The percentage share of German imports from these countries had risen in the same period from 3.8% to 8.9%.</p>
<p>Inheriting a high technique and strategic position the Nazis used the broken working class and state control to speed their war preparations and to serve as the advance-guard of the diplomatic blitzkrieg. The economic basis of France was too weak to sustain her elaborate system of political alliances.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Diplomatic Blitzkrieg</h4>
<p class="fst">Hitler could fight no war without a statified industry. But during its organisation he had to prepare military strategy as well, involving the choice of the enemy and the preparation of allies, in the sinister business which masquerades under the name of diplomacy. He had one central problem – not to fight on two fronts at the same time. In alliance or entente with Russia he could strike at France and Britain. He could strike at Russia in alliance or entente with Western Europe. There is not the slightest reason as yet to doubt that his first plan was to strike at Russia.</p>
<p>As late as May 1939, Beck, speaking in the Polish parliament, referred to conversations with Reich representatives when “various other hints were made which extended much further than the subjects under discussion.” Beck very properly reserved the right “to return to this matter if necessary.” The French Yellow Book tells us what it needed no great perspicacity to know, that these proposals were for an alliance against Russia. The British were ready to support this fully. Hitler’s claim to be the advance guard of Western civilization against Bolshevism suited them exactly. Hitler tied Mussolini and Japan to him with promises of loot. By this means these two could squeeze Britain, alternately in the Mediterranean and in the Far East; and Hitler in the North Sea as well. He moved with Mussolini in Spain and Britain retreated. Mussolini being engaged in Ethiopia and Spain, Hitler struck at Austria and Britain acquiesced.</p>
<p>Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich seemed to make it clear to Hitler that Britain would not fight unless directly attacked, and Hitler could take his time over that. Chamberlain, and with him the British bourgeoisie, counted above all on war between Germany and Russia. J.L. Garvin openly explained the British plan. Hitler was to be given no free hand in the East. When he attacked Russia, the British, French and others would declare a state of armed neutrality and see that the war ended “for the benefit of civilization.” The German domination of Czecho-Slovakia lost the British and French forty divisions, and armament factories three times as large as Italy’s. Britain did not deviate. As late as May 1939, Neville Henderson told Goering that compromise had its limits and he did not see how the situation could be saved unless the German government was prepared to wait “in order to allow excited spirits to calm down again and negotiations to be resumed in a better atmosphere.” When Henderson was leaving the house, Goering showed him pictures of naked ladies labelled “Goodness” “Mercy,” etc. Henderson commented that he failed to see Patience among them. In 1939 as in 1919 the British remained faithful to their policy. They were ready to appease to the last French colony. Hitler’s alliance with Russia, therefore, was a last attempt to squeeze some more appeasement out of Britain. He had no reason to believe that Britain would fight.</p>
<p>Hitler destroyed Poland and clamored for peace. If he had got his peace he could at will come to terms with Britain and France and strike at Russia, or, peace being refused, he could continue the entente with Russia and strike in the West. As we review this pliant and audacious diplomacy, one thing emerges. Never before has any modern statesman been able to exercise such an astonishing suppleness and freedom of maneuver. In comparison with that of Britain and France, his diplomacy pivoted with the range and oiled freedom of a modern machine-gun as compared to a seventeenth century muzzle-loader in the hands of a horseman.</p>
<p>Thyssen, and we can be sure, not Thyssen alone, thought the Russian alliance suicidal for Germany. In France, Britain or America he and his supporters might have been strong enough to paralyze the government or create a grave dissention beneath a fictitious unity. In Germany he had to fly for his life.</p>
<p>Whence this absolute control of the economic and political system, control not only of the workers but of all sections of the bourgeoisie? The Fascists owed it to the complete bankruptcy of the German bourgeoisie between 1918 and 1933. It had no force at its command, dared not show its battered and ugly face, and could find no new words to demand sacrifices from the population and even if it had had power, obedience. Secondly, however roughly the Nazis treated this or that section of the bourgeoisie, whatever expedients orthodox or unorthodox they adopted, however openly Hitler lied and deceived, he was doing the main job, getting rid of the Versailles chains which bound German economy; he was preparing to give German capitalism its place in the sun. He was consistently successful. But basically the Nazis owed their power over all sections of the bourgeoisie to the power they had established over the working-class.</p>
<p>In France Daladier could manoeuvre with the Social-Democracy and the Communists whenever the pressure against him was strong. In Britain Churchill, the anti-appeaser, was a hot candidate in 1938 for the Premiership in a Popular Front Combine. In Germany before 1933 Schleicher sought an alliance with the Trade Union bureaucracy. Even in Tzarist Russia in 1916 Miliukov and Kerensky could criticize Tzarist policy because they were certain of response outside. But once the working-class was prostrate the Nazis could systematically make themselves master of every aspect of economic and political life. Hence the suppleness and bewildering passes of their diplomatic sword.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Blitzkrieg on Morale</h4>
<p class="fst">Where the revolutionary movement as a whole blundered, and the British, French and American bourgeoisie, as well, was to indulge in fantastic hopes of a German army and people whose morale would be immeasurably affected by the steel chains in which Hitler held Germany. Clausewitz himself had stressed the impossibility of waging war with a hostile population, and Hitler’s regime was the regime of a ruler who ruled by terror. From these false expectations the bourgeoisie and some revolutionaries alike have rushed to exaggerate and hopelessly magnify the “inspiration” and the “new vision” given by Hitler to the German people. Hitler’s inspiration to the German people is not a new vision but a refurbished version of a very old one. For consider. Anti-Bolshevism was the very heart and core of it. Such were Hitler’s tirades against Bolshevism that for years the revolutionary movement foolishly thought an understanding between Hitler and Stalin an impossibility.</p>
<p>The revolutionary movement, after violently denying the very idea, did point to the possibility of an alliance between the two; but so did many others. What all said, however, was that Stalin was seeking an alliance with Hitler. And that was no great discovery because Stalin had openly proclaimed his wish for such an alliance in 1933. But this insistence on seeing it always as Stalin seeking the alliance from an adamant Hitler shows where our weakness lay – we had imbibed too much Hitler propaganda and took his anti-Bolshevik crusade too seriously. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> We never once, until perhaps after Munich, considered that Hitler might want such an alliance, because we didn’t think that Hitler could put it over to the German people. We took his anti-Bolshevism for granted as something permanent. Thereby we paid Fascism the compliment of accepting it at its own inflated valuation as a new order of society with a revolutionary ideology. But the ease and suddenness with which Hitler swung the German army and the nation behind him to the alliance with Russia indicate clearly that Fascist morale owes its strength in the minds of its supporters, not to its anti-Bolshevism, but to the fact that it is nothing else but old-fashioned bourgeois nationalism decked out with anti-Semitism and pseudo-revolutionary trappings. Had Fascist ideology been based on any true conception of a new society to which “Jewish Bolshevism” was the anti-thesis, the sudden friendship with Russia, the joint campaign against Poland would have shaken the morale of the armies and disoriented the population. That Hitler could switch without a tremor means only that Germany, a victory for Germany, the defense of Germany from another Versailles, is the thought uppermost in the mind of his followers. The <em>Horst Wessel song</em> turns out to be a Wagnerian variation of <em>My Country, ’tis of Thee</em>.</p>
<p>All governments make abrupt turns of policy but, a genuinely new society which is the product of a revolution creates a genuinely new ideology which is a moral factor of enormous power and cannot be trifled with. As late as 1814 not only the peasants but even the workers of France, after all they had suffered from Napoleon, clamored for him to lead them in revolutionary struggle against the hated Bourbons. Napoleon had only to land in France for army and people to turn to him. He marched from Toulon to Paris without firing a single shot. After Waterloo the plebs called on Napoleon to invoke the revolution. For Stalin to be able to carry out his maneuvers in foreign policy without friction demanded the murder, exile, imprisonment or banishment of hundreds of thousands of Soviet revolutionaries, old and new. Hitler spun his followers around in less than a week, whereby he showed exactly how closely allied is his ideology to plain bourgeois patriotism, my country right or wrong.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fascist Fakery</h4>
<p class="fst">Even the famous war mentality so carefully instilled for years, has not captured the people. When Chamberlain went to Munich they crowded round him and cheered for peace. When Mussolini returned from Munich, the Italians welcomed him as never before. Never in 17 years was the prestige of Mussolini so high. The international brotherhood of Fascism is also a patent fraud. Not only did the two countries almost go to war over Austria; the great bulk of the Italian people hate and fear German imperialism and in recent months one could trace in the Italian press the frantic intensification of anti-British propaganda to whip the Italians into line with Germany. Can anyone imagine similar antipathy between two proletarian states?</p>
<p>That being understood we have to realize that Hitler’s army has shown an astonishingly high morale. He had the youth. Before 1933 he had a large following, and between 1933 and 1940 on the impressionable blank minds of the I young people of Germany he hammered home the national I socialist philosophy such as it was.</p>
<p>Every device of modern technique and psychology was used to make them docile subjects for his military machine. They learned history, geography, literature and science, all taught with the one purpose. Even educated minds find it difficult to resist such a barrage day after day. The raw youth had no defense against it at all. They succumbed in millions. There Hitlerism has won a notable victory, of a scope that was unsuspected even by enemies of the regime. But even this in the last analysis owed its success to the one cardinal fact. No hint of any other ideas was allowed to corrupt the unadulterated stream of Nazi filth and lies. Under similar circumstances, as André Gide found in Russia, you can teach millions to believe that subways exist only in Russia, due to the superiority of socialism to capitalism; and with no opposition even Chamberlain could have inspired millions of British youth with the idea that an Englishman was born for no other purpose than to die for the British Empire. Unfortunately, when Chamberlain said so, Winston Churchill the Social-Democracy and the Liberal and Labor press called him in their various ways a liar, a traitor, or an incompetent scoundrel.</p>
<p>How long the Fascist morale would resist under strain is another story. The morale of revolutionary France frightened Alexander I even after Bonaparte’s defeat in 1814. Could the morale of Hitler’s world revolution outlast one defeat? We doubt it. The diplomatic victories of Hitler raised his followers to wild enthusiasm, and correspondingly demoralized the millions of old Social-Democrats, Communists and Liberals who remain hostile to Hitler but hopeless. The youth in the army, and the army is for the most part, a young army, are swept forward on an un-checked tide of sweeping victory. The question, unanswered and for the time being unanswerable in precise terms, is whether this morale is such as to enable the nation to endure as Germany endured between 1914 and 1918. Even when we revise our previous estimates of Hitler’s grip over large sections of the German people, there is nothing, not one single fact, to make us believe that Hitlerite Germany is inspired with such a love for the “new society” as could enable it to stand half the strain of 1914–1918, or for that matter, even a single colossal defeat. Uncertain of their supplies and doubtful of the morale of their followers, facing either victory or annihilation, the German General Staff sought for an early and decisive victory. On the first page of his <strong>World Revolution</strong>, C.L.R. James in 1937 wrote as follows: “The working classes of Germany, of Austria, of Italy and of Hungary, will not bear the strain of the coming war as they bore the strain of the last ... Capitalists in those countries know that they must win and win quickly.” It is obvious that though they guarded against the worst it is on this belief that the German General Staff worked.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Blitzkrieg: A Capitalist Strategy</h4>
<p class="fst">If the revolutionary movement underestimated Hitler’s grip over the imagination and allegiance of German youth, it still more grievously underestimated the capacity of the German General Staff. Whatever secret stores of food and oil the Germans had accumulated, however much they badgered Rumania, in any long drawn-out war with France and Britain, they were losing with every day that the war dragged on. The Germans knew that the entry of the United States into the war in 1917 defeated them the last time. And any fool could see that Roosevelt was determined to bring America in just as soon as it was politically possible. Whatever Germany might hope to gain from Russia could be no compensation whatever when thrown into the scale against the incomparable resources and man-power of the United States. Ludendorff’s great offensive in 1918 was a last desperate attempt to break through before America could throw its full weight into the scale. This time the entry of America was a foregone conclusion, and the uncertain sources of supply, the large number of the disaffected in the rear, not only Germans, but millions of Austrians and Czechs, demanded that what Ludendorff tried as a last resort in 1918 should be tried first in 1940. This time it was not to fail, for failure and a war of stalemate meant certain disaster. The German High Command worked in the spirit and traditions which had been theirs since the days of Frederick the Great.</p>
<p>They used every device of existing technique to improvise a means of breaking through the center. They carried to a high pitch the concentration of weapons. How brilliantly they succeeded is now history. Any attempt to underestimate the scope of this victory and Germany’s military superiority to France, i.e. by attributing the victory to the treachery of General Corap or Fifth column activity, is to betray not a mistaken judgment but fanatical stupidity. There was wide-spread treachery in the revolutionary armies of France from 1792 onwards and in those of Russia in 1918 but both won victories which altered the whole course of history.</p>
<p>Yet there is one reflection which must be made about the German victory. Like the victories of Hannibal, Gustavus and Frederick the Great it represents nothing new. The strategy and tactics are essentially an adaptation and refinement of existing technique. Of an entirely different order were the victories of Alexander the Great and Bonaparte. Alexander’s army was of a type never seen in Europe before, not only technically and tactically superior, but based on the people of Macedon, whereas the Greek democracies and the Persian King employed mercenaries. When we come to Napoleon’s armies we have an absolutely new phenomenon in European history, the nation in arms, the mass armies served by a centralized government which could devote all its resources to the prosecution of war.</p>
<p>All modern strategy stems from Napoleon. Clausewitz’ great treatise is based on his experiences of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon himself said that tactics should be changed every ten years, and they change, though it is generally defeated armies with small economic resources which initiate the changes. But from Napoleon, through Clausewitz, Moltke and VonBrauchitsch and Von Keitel a straight line can be drawn-all are makers of war in bourgeois society. For a new type of warfare we shall have to wait for a new type of society, but the one will bring the other as surely as the French Revolution brought Napoleon. International social-ism will abolish imperialist war. But if for example the cursed Social-Democrats had taken hold of Germany in 1918, such wars as a Red Army of Germany may have had to fight would not only have resulted in brilliant victories. They would have been victories beyond the very conception of bourgeois strategists. Not only would socialist organisation in Germany have put bourgeois technique to shame. The millions of the international proletariat who rallied to the support of Soviet Russia in 1918 would have been doubled and trebled at the march of a revolutionary Ger-man army. The general staffs of capitalism would be beaten before they began.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Blitzkrieg and The Fifth Column</h4>
<p class="fst">In one sphere alone the Nazis have invented an apparently new method of warfare – their use of the “Fifth Column.” <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a> Though this has been grossly exaggerated, it is not without importance. Most certainly in Norway and probably in Denmark, to some degree also in Holland and in Belgium, there was actual treachery and cooperation with the Nazis by highly-placed officers and wealthy bourgeois. The evidence for similar treachery among the French and British is conflicting and in the light of the above analysis, there is no need whatever for that hypothesis. Treachery did not win the German victory.</p>
<p><em>We can sum up the “dynamism” of Fascism in a sentence. Every victory of Hitler in every field is due to his first act on coming into power – the destruction of the organized working-class movement.</em></p>
<p>Norway, we should note, and Holland and Belgium, can have no independent existence. The Norwegian bourgeoisie having to choose between its own Social-Democratic Government and Hitler, chose unhesitatingly. But Britain and France had huge empires to defend. That there were negotiations for a deal is certain. Also great unwillingness to prosecute the war. But treachery such as working from the start to ensure conquest by the Nazi armies is unlikely. These gentlemen understand each other’s merciless rapacity too well to work for defeat at one another’s hands, except at the prospect of a proletarian revolution. To that all other considerations bow.</p>
<p>Yet the Fifth Column, though the bourgeoisie is blowing up the smoke to make the fire as large as possible, has a deep symbolic significance. In 1914 it did not exist. Today, the bankruptcy of capitalism has reached such a stage that, at both ends of society, there are groups that stretch out their hands to similar groups in other countries. The Stalinists are one group and, misguided as are most of their followers, they on the whole represent a genuine repudiation of national patriotism in favor of another idea, symbolized for them in the defense of the Soviet Union as they conceive it. The Fascists represent another such grouping at the other wing of society. The corruption of the Stalinist leadership has weakened, disoriented and demoralized the immense revolutionary forces which it controlled in a country as decisive as France. But for their vicious masquerade as defenders of democracy between 1935 and 1939, they could have exercised an enormous power against Hitler’s domination of Germany, particularly in France and Czecho-Slovakia, and the other countries that ringed Germany. Their treachery and the treachery of Stalin deprived the anti-Hitler forces in Germany of their last shred of moral and material support. In comparison to the genuinely revolutionary forces that they controlled in France, Hitler’s Fifth Column in France was negligible. For the unity of revolutionary workers knows no frontiers, whereas Weygand and Petain would have won a victory if they could. In that lies the immense difference between Fascist “inter-nationalism” and the internationalism of revolutionary socialism.</p>
<p>Finally, Chamberlain and Daladier could have used the Fifth Column with even more devastating effect than Hitler. The anti-Hitler forces in Germany were large. But the appeasers were handicapped by the same circumstances which lay at the root of all their difficulties. They could make no attempt to touch the vast reserves of anti-Hitler forces in Germany because they feared to. Blowing up Hitler from the rear was the last thing they wanted.</p>
<p>They could not stamp down on their own nearest approach to Fifth Columnists, the appeasers, because they were appeasers themselves. On the other hand. Hitler could contact and guide the forces sympathetic to him in the democracies while he and his Gestapo, once they had exterminated the working class organizations, established a regime in which terrible dangers hampered those who genuinely wanted to intervene, far less those who did not want to. Only at the very last moment, when they had decided at last to fight, did the British attempt some serious Fifth Column work on their own. But the leaflets with which Chamberlain showered Germany at the beginning of the war fell like artificial snow-flakes from the warm September sky.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<a id="pt2" name="pt2"></a>
<h3>II. “Decadent” Democracies</h3>
<h4>The Democracies Before Hitler</h4>
<p class="fst">A mere recital of what Germany did is also an enumeration of what the democracies did not do, could not do. Now that France has been defeated there is a mounting rubbish heap of talk about the treachery of French generals, the sabotage of French industrialists etc. Most of this is superficial and beside the point. The fundamental question is: why did Britain and France allow Germany, beaten to her knees in 1918, rise again to become once more powerful. That being answered, all is answered. The first cause was the division between France and Britain.</p>
<p>This constant use of the term, the “democracies,” the “allies,” blinds us to the fact that all imperialisms are in constant conflict with each other. France wanted to destroy Germany in 1919, either by breaking it up into its separate states, or by creating a Rhineland republic. That would have finished with imperialist Germany for good and for all. Britain refused. Why? For the soundest imperialist reasons. A dismembered Germany would have meant the substitution of France for Germany as master of the European continent, and Britain didn’t want anybody, however democratic, to be master of the European continent. Further, the economic system of Germany would have been destroyed and Britain’s chief customer on the continent was Germany; thirdly, Germany would not have been able to pay reparations. France would have cheerfully foregone reparations to be master of the continent. But Britain would not have it.</p>
<p>France, bitterly disappointed, invaded the Ruhr in 1923. Whereupon the French learned another lesson. They unwittingly unloosed a tremendous revolutionary movement in Germany which threatened the whole capitalist structure of Europe. Poincaré had to retreat, having failed to accomplish anything enduring except the creation of the Hitler movement. On Feb. 21, 1924, Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s Prime Minister, wrote a letter to Poincaré.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“France is endeavoring to create a situation in order to gain what it failed to get during the Allied peace negotiations ... Our economic existence has been gravely endangered, owing not to the inability of Germany to pay ... reparations, but to the acute and persistent dislocation of the markets – occasioned mainly by the uncertainty in the relation between France and I Germany, the continual economic chaos in Germany shown so clearly by the violent fluctuations in the value of currency, and the ultimate uncertainty in the relations between France and ourselves. Thus ... the people in this country regard with anxiety what appears to them the determination of France to ruin Germany, to dominate the Continent without consideration of our reasonable interests and future consequences to European settlement; that they feel apprehensive of the large military and aereal establishments I maintained, not only in Eastern but also in Western France; that they are disturbed by the interest shown by your government in the military organization of the new states in Central Europe ...”</p>
<p class="fst">What we are seeing here is not the “decadence” of democracies, but the “decadence” of capitalism. These rats are in a hole blocked at both ends. Will the defenders of democracy tell us what they would have done then, or what they will do if they defeat Germany tomorrow?<br>
</p>
<h4>The Democracies Against Each Other</h4>
<p class="fst">The Second Congress of the Comintern in one pregnant passage summed up the inescapable contradictions of post-Versailles European capitalism: “German scientific technique and the very high level of production of German industry, two factors of an extreme importance for the rebirth of European economic life, are paralyzed by the clauses of the Versailles treaty even more than they had been by the war. The entente finds itself in face of a dilemma: to demand payment it must allow Germany to work; to let Germany work it must let Germany live. And to give Germany, ruined, dismembered, bleeding to death, the means of once more making a life for itself, is to render possible an eruption of protest.” This was no mere question of reparations. It involved the whole economic life of Europe.</p>
<p>This division between Britain and France over Germany’s future, rooted in the bankruptcy of European capitalism, continued right up to 1936 and in one sense never ceased. It was on this that Hitler throve.</p>
<p>After Hitler came to power, France turned to Italy. Laval wanted to guarantee Austria, i.e., South-Eastern Europe, with the help of Mussolini, who would receive in return Ethiopia and certain concessions in French Africa. Hitler was to be encouraged to strike at the Soviet Union through the Baltic countries. And Britain? To the devil with Britain. Britain on the other hand aimed at precisely a similar agreement, an understanding with Mussolini and Germany, with France as the vassal state.</p>
<p>When Sir Samuel Hoare invoked the League of Nations against Mussolini, M. Cambon the French ambassador, on the very next day visited the British Foreign Office and asked if sanctions would apply to the invasion of Austria as well. Sir Samuel replied that the British were an idealistic nation, but that times change and Britain could not commit herself. Thus Hitler marched unchallenged into the Rhineland in March 1936.</p>
<p>The bourgeoisie is not homogenous. At various times sections of the French bourgeoisie wanted to fight a preventive war. The British set their face sternly against it. When the Spanish Civil War broke out and Hitler and Mussolini intervened; the much abused Gamelin urged intervention and the checking of the Axis powers: The French have always been acutely conscious of the German army and Britain could have turned the scale in favor of intervention. Britain said no. The British never wanted a Germany destroyed. They wanted a strong Germany, but not only against the Soviet Union, which we all know, but also as a counter-balance to France, and for the sake of the German market. If they could come to terms with Germany, then, dominating Europe, they could challenge America in the world market. Even after Munich, British industry was seeking an entente with German industry. It was only at the last moment that Churchill offered complete union between France and Britain. It was done only because the British felt the cold muzzle of the blitzkrieg on their temples.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Democracies Against the Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">The British bourgeoisie feared the domination of the continent by France. But it feared more the proletarian revolution in Europe and the revolution in the colonial countries. The French bourgeoisie, concerned at first about security against Germany, moved with increasing speed to the British policy of “order” at all costs.</p>
<p>To understand the British mentality we must realize that their empire nearly went to pieces in 1918–1920. The Russian Revolution, the revolutions in Central Europe, have overshadowed the convulsive shocks which Britain suffered. The population of Britain is seventy per cent proletarianised. In parts of Lancashire, and Yorkshire, Central England and South Wales, the proletariat is clustered thickly together in towns that are scarcely ever more than five miles from each other. In many great seaport towns, there are hundreds of thousands of sailors and ship-building workers. Instead of a large class of farmers, there is an agricultural proletariat of nearly a million workers, not one of whom is more than twenty miles from an industrial town of some size. When in 1919 the English working class formed councils of action and presented an ultimatum to the British government “Cease intervention in Russia or we shall violently overthrow the government,” the British bourgeoisie received a shock from which it has never recovered. At this very period, with the British workers in a state of ferment that was not conceivable to Englishmen in 1914, Ireland staged a revolution which resulted in the formation of the Irish Free State; in Egypt the nationalist movement broke out with uncontrollable violence. The Indian revolution made its first great attempt to eject the British. British power shook and it was Gandhi with his counter-revolutionary non-violence who came to the rescue of Britain. In the West Indies, in South Africa, in Kenya, in Malta there were risings. Between 1919 and 1921 it seemed that the British Empire might fall to pieces. Read the pre-1939 writings of J.L. Garvin, Editor of the <strong>Observer</strong>. Openly stated sometimes, and always underlying his argument, is the following thought: the next war means the end of the British Empire. Hence the main preoccupation of the British statesmen were – hostility to the Soviet Union, the fountain-head of revolutionary activity, and the preservation of “order” in Europe. Who more “orderly” than Hitler and Mussolini? Early in 1935 Anthony Eden visited Stalin. The Englishman made but one demand: cessation of Soviet propaganda in the colonies. Stalin of course agreed. The British welcomed the regime of Mussolini, and rejoiced at the coming to power of Hitler.</p>
<p>A mere enumeration of events will show the perils which hung over European capitalism and from which it was delivered by the triumphant Hitlerite counter-revolution in Germany. In February, 1934, the French workers and the Fascists fought bloodily in the streets of Paris. A few months after, the Communists and the Social Democracy formed a united front and the progress of French labor became an avalanche which culminated in the Popular Front victory the seizure of the factories and some four million workers joining the Trade Union movement in three months, a rate of 40,000 a day. At this same period, the Spanish workers and peasants were gathering momentum for the outburst which took place in July 1936. In Catalonia, the key province, bordering on France, the revolution was the most violent and powerful that history has yet seen. In less than seventy-two hours, the economic and social power of the bourgeoisie was destroyed and workers’ power to clinch the victory was to be had for the taking.<br>
</p>
<h4>Democracies’ Main Enemy</h4>
<p class="fst">In 1935 in Poland there was fighting on the barricades. There were barricades and pitched fighting on the streets in Amsterdam in 1935. Both engagements ended in drawn battles. The stay-in strikes in France were immediately followed by a general strike in Belgium, the uprising in Spain was immediately followed by a mutiny in the Portuguese fleet. In 1935 as soon as there was a threat of war between Italy and Britain the Egyptian <em>WAFD</em> with 90 of the population behind it forced dominion status from the British government. A few months after a similar rising broke out in French Syria with similar results. In Tunis and Morocco and Algeria there were risings against the government. Palestine blazed with revolt and the whole Arab world sat up to watch the course and result of the Palestinian struggle. In November 1934, in Great Britain itself, during the municipal elections, labor won such sweeping victories as had never been seen before. Constituencies which had been Tory for fifty years became completely Labor. Thus from 1933 on, a British statesman, looking at the map of Europe (with the British proletariat muttering outside) could draw a continuous line from Polish Danzig through Holland, France, Belgium, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine and French Syria, along which a flame of revolt could encircle the whole Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean. Further north, the Scandinavian countries were Social-Democratic, which might be a prelude to anything. The Indian Congress grew to a strength of five million and Gandhi steadily lost his restraining influence in India. Stalin began (publicly) to wash his hands of the revolution but so powerful was the Bolshevik tradition that it took years for people to understand that he meant it.</p>
<p>The British bourgeoisie did not need Hitler’s propaganda to arrive at a pro-Hitler policy. The destruction Europe and the Near East might end in Bolshevism. That is the second reason why Hitler was allowed to grow so that he could ultimately conquer.</p>
<p>For that very reason also, the French bourgeoisie from being a vigorous advocate of “security” became increasingly conscious of the revolutionary threat and ultimately, far more than the British, saw the main enemy at home.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Popular Front Saved Bourgeois Democracy</h4>
<p class="fst">The Popular Front Government epitomised the rottenness of bourgeois France. We did not see it then with sufficient clearness. All the more reason to see it now. The defenders of democracy who are prepared now to tell us what should have been done, have plenty to tell. The French bourgeoisie would have been glad for some real advice then. The French bourgeoisie would have needed advice first as to how to prevent the world economic crisis. French industrial production, 100 in 1929, was 76.7 in 1933 and 67 in 1935. The monthly average of bankruptcies, 726 in 1929, was 1,239 in 1935. Foreign trade, 9,030 millions of francs in 1929 was 3,034 francs in 1935, the wholesale price index, 100 in 1929 was 54 in 1935. The official number of unemployed 928 in 1929, was 426,336 in 1935. The budget deficit, 2,638 millions in 1930 was 5,000 millions in 1935. Now, Messrs, democrats, will you state precisely how you would have dealt with that situation? In America you shouted loudly enough for exactly the policy of the Popular Front only you called it the New Deal.</p>
<p>The French bourgeoisie did its best all things considered. The advance-guard of the counter-revolution struck at the workers, in February 1934. The thing would be solved in the Hitlerian manner. The workers resisted – defending their democracy; and the political struggle was launched. The workers thinking that the Communist Party was the party of the revolution followed it. They lifted the Party to a position of importance and influence never previously held by any proletarian party under capitalism. Its membership moved from 30,000 in February, 1934, to 350,000 in 1938. Such influence as the Communist Party did not have was kept by Blum and his Social-Democratic Party. And what did these two aim at? Have Messrs, supporters of democracy forgotten already? Have they forgotten that from start to finish, from the formation of the Popular Front in July 1935 until the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Communist Party and the Social Democracy used all their influence to make the workers moderate their demands, to impress upon them the necessity of working for “national defence?” The bourgeoisie was powerless. But for these “defenders of democracy” and advocates of “national defense,” the French bourgeoisie would have been swept away.</p>
<p>In 1937 after the Senate had refused his request for special powers, Blum told the National Council of the Socialist Party: We had a revolutionary situation and there was good hope of success, but for reasons of an international nature which I need not go into, it was necessary to be moderate. The Popular Front saved French democracy. Such concessions as were made had to be made or the workers would never have left the factories at all. Today, Messrs. democrats join the bourgeoisie and without a blush inform us “It was the fault of the Popular Front.” It was. Stalin, wanting his alliance with France, gave his blessing to French rearmament in the Stalin-Laval communiqué, and through the Stalinists the French revolution was ruined. In that sense the present situation is undoubtedly the fault of the Popular Front. But you should be grateful to it, Messrs. believers in democracy. It saved French democracy for you from 1936 to 1940. Four long years. What more do you want?</p>
<p>It took time to wear down the workers, by constant transference of capital from Paris abroad and back again, by raising prices, by artificial financial panics. The French bourgeoisie could not build tanks or prepare a strategy. It had more urgent matters on hand.</p>
<p>The whole regime was in an insoluble crisis, the crisis of decadent capitalism. If the crisis was not so obvious in Britain it was because in traditional fashion, the Empire, especially after the Ottawa Conference was squeezed still drier. With the result that in Africa, East and West in the West Indies, in Ceylon and in India the class struggle approached the heights of 1918–1921. The end of that chapter is as yet unwritten.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Democracies Mobilize Economy</h4>
<p class="fst">The democracies had great resources. German economy in its basic structure, was, as we have seen more amenable to the totalitarian regimentation necessary for modern war than the more liberal economies of Britain and France. These had a thousand tentacles stretching to all parts of the world, particularly the colonies. Totalitarianism meant for them a far greater dislocation of the normal processes of their economy than it meant for German capital. But the resources at the disposal of Hitler’s rivals were immensely greater than his. French industrial production, 48 per cent of Germany’s in 1913, was 66 per cent in 1928. The areas reconstructed after the war were second to none in Europe.</p>
<p>But the governments of France, the constantly changing governments, never had the ability nor the will to regiment industry and trade to the degree required. Another task had to be settled first, the destruction of the working class movement. And that they could not do. The lethargy of a great class of rentiers reinforced their political difficulties. Yet, despite all these difficulties, the movement to statification was unmistakable even before the war – in both France and Britain.</p>
<p>Three months before hostilities began, James Frederick Green summed up his study of the <strong>Economic Mobilization of Great Britain</strong> as follows: “Great Britain appears to be gradually forced into the type of regimented economy which it is preparing to combat in Europe – but as yet without the accompanying political and social controls. The government is thus confronted with the dilemma of effecting an economic mobilization sufficient to enforce its diplomatic objectives but without resort to the methods of fascist states.”</p>
<p>That was their Achilles heel. For capitalism in crisis there is only one way. Fascism. And imperialist war is the greatest crisis of capitalism. Within their limits they tried. Britain spent 426 millions in 1932 and in 1937 had raised the amount to 1,263 millions, for 1939 it was 1,800 millions. France went from 509 millions to 1,800 millions in 1939. But in 1938 she spent only 731 millions whereas in 1937 she had spent 909 millions. The fierce class conflict had her paralyzed and to our wishful-thinking democrats we must respectfully urge that you do not solve great class-conflicts except by force. When Daladier, with the help of the Stalinists, had exhausted the working class and beaten it down sufficiently, military expenditure moved from 731 millions in 1938 to 1,800 millions in 1939.</p>
<p>The British capitalists, fighting a similar battle, could not mobilize their workers. They had to give every post in the Cabinet of any importance to a Labour member before they could dare to call for the effort the situation demanded.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Democratic Diplomacy</h4>
<p class="fst">Allied diplomacy, rooted in the same disorder, blundered continuously. The democratic idealists had it all solved: an alliance with Russia. But we have seen what that meant. We must not forget also that to the French capitalists an inevitable consequence of such an alliance was that the Communists, tools of Stalin, would have assumed commanding positions in every sphere of the national life, industrial, parliamentary, administrative and military, in addition to their almost complete control of the labor movement.</p>
<p>If we leave Britain and France for the moment and consider Belgium, Poland, Switzerland and Czecho-Slovakia, countries bordering on Germany, the democratic diplomatic dilemma becomes still clearer. Leopold at first continued the alliance with France. When he saw Hitler re-enter the Rhineland unopposed, he withdrew and called himself neutral. If Germany did go to the East, he was safe tor some years at least. Meanwhile he would do nothing to offend his powerful neighbor until war actually broke out. To the last he hoped that Germany might make a direct assault on the Maginot line or attack through Switzerland. If Britain and France in 1936 had shown him that they meant business, the confusion about the defense of the border between France and Belgium would never have arisen. Poland asked France tor joint action against Hitler in 1933. France refused. Whereupon Poland sat on an excruciating fence: alliance with Germany and a German victory over Soviet Russia meant that German troops would never leave Polish soil; alliance with Soviet Russia, and Soviet victory meant the Red Army on Polish soil. Poland had 5 million members of oppressed nationalities living on the Soviet border and her social system was almost as dislocated as Tzarist Russia’s in 1914. Poland knew this and France and Britain knew it too. Sections of the Czecho-Slovakian bourgeoisie wanted to fight and the social structure of Czecho-Slovakia was more stable than that of Poland. But the big agrarian interests feared a victorious Red Army as much as did the Polish landlords. Czech economy and German were closely inter-woven. Around Czecho-Slovakia were the rickety structures of the Balkans and Hungary. Which European capitalists wanted to set that dry tinder afire? Hitler alone could dare to risk it. And for him there was no turning back.</p>
<p>Switzerland, in bourgeois mythology, was the democracy of democracies. But during the period of sanctions against Mussolini, Switzerland asked that in view of her special situation in regard to Italy, geographical and otherwise, she be absolved. The request was magnanimously granted.</p>
<p>All these smaller countries took their cue from the vacillations of Britain and France, beside which they had a very healthy desire to have the war fought if possible somewhere else. These were the problems with which the democracies had to deal. They did their best according to their lights. It their lights burned low and gave a feeble gleam in which they could not see their way, they could honestly say that it was not their fault.</p>
<p>Thinking itself safe behind the fleet Britain temporized and appeased. The French, watching the German army, had more misgivings than the British. But in essence now they were united. At the period of Munich, a section of the British cabinet, led by Duff Cooper, representing the views of the army, appalled at the military and strategic consequences if Czecho-Slovakia were lost, challenged appeasement. But Daladier and Bonnet, against the advice of Gamelin, supported Chamberlain and thus assured capitulation.</p>
<p>It is out of such a rich and fertile soil of class conflict, dangers at home and abroad, that grew the tangled weeds of divided counsel, defeatist moods, inadequate preparation which is now reaping its reward. What policy could have saved the French bourgeoisie? To do what and when? The war has stripped it of its past and held it up in all its bloated and diseased nakedness.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Democratic Morale</h4>
<p class="fst">What moral preparation could leaders so torn by inner contradictions make for war? The answer is none. How could they mobilize populations to fight in a war which they did not want to fight themselves? How could they create or develop morale of any kind when the difference between what they said and what they did was obvious to all politically-minded persons in the country? They could oppose to Hitler only the slogan of defense of democracy. But the words turned to ashes in their mouths. For the crisis of French economy and the bankruptcy of the system united them only on one policy – the crushing of the workers and the destruction of democratic rights.</p>
<p>The Stalinists and the Social Democracy having the confidence of the French working class had by 1938 tamed it sufficiently for the French bourgeoisie to abandon their rear-guard action of the Popular Front period and attack on the most approved theories of the offensive. The workers were struck at from all sides. The burdens of rearmament were placed upon them, their militants were thrown into jail, and drastic restrictions placed upon their political liberties. And for what reason? In the sacred name of anti-fascism. At the same time the Cagoulards and notorious fascists went free and flourished.</p>
<p>In Britain the Prime Minister and leading members of his cabinet expressly disclaimed any intention of fighting on behalf of any form of government. As the crisis neared, their halting phrases and stiff-jointed obeisances to democracy not only failed to inspire but carried doubt and de-moralization into all sections of the people.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Democratic Strategy</h4>
<p class="fst">On France as the continental power would fall the main burden of the first military conflict. A strategy had to be worked out, embracing all aspects of the national life. But bourgeois France, feeling the proletarian pressure more than Britain, was divided into warring groups. Weygand and Reynaud wanted an offensive, but Laval and Bonnet were for appeasement to the end. In the Radical-Socialist party Herriot was for a firm policy, Daladier was for compromise. In the Social Democracy Blum was for a vigorous policy, Paul Faure for appeasement. Laval made the pact with Stalin, but on the way home stopped in Berlin to intrigue with Hitler. Doubtless they all underestimated Germany’s power. But they had underestimated in it 1914 also. Their error in 1940 was the error of having to guide a bankrupt society. They feared victory as much as they feared defeat. From their gangrenous society flowed like pus their ruinous strategy of the defensive.</p>
<p>Today the bourgeois theorists wake up to the fact that the strategy of the defensive was a criminal blunder and in fact always has been. But which country torn as the democracies were torn could even attempt to consider any other strategy but the defensive, in other words, the strategy of temporization, of hesitation, of waiting and seeing, of trying to compromise. Perhaps the most ironic commentary on the French defeat is that the method of breaking the center by a heavy concentration of mechanized forces was insistently urged on the French Government by the French general, de Gaule, as far back as 1934. In 1935 Reynaud published a whole volume on the subject He was ignored. The Germans, intent on victory, worked on the plan for years. They tried it out in the Spanish Civil War. They perfected it in Poland. It was open to the French if they had wanted it. THEY COULDN’t USE IT.</p>
<p>Was there treachery at Sedan? Perhaps, though this writer has seen no conclusive evidence. Did a French general sabotage the sending of tanks to the front? It is possible. Did Laval and Baudouin from the start oppose the war and do all they could to bring it to an end? That they most certainly did. To all those who never wanted to fight, the disaster in Flanders would certainly be the signal for frantic negotiations with the enemy. But in the French revolutionary wars, whole armies with their generals deserted. There were traitors in the Red Army. But revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia were not defeated, because the government knew its mind and had the enthusiastic support of large sections of the people. Blum and the Stalinists fought to save a rotting bourgeois France in 1936. They are the immediate cause of the catastrophe and the heavy travail of Europe today. <em>Had they seized the power in 1936, they would have ensured the success of the Spanish revolution and the initiative would have passed from Hitler</em>.</p>
<p>A revolution in France and another in Spain would have cut off Hitler’s blitzkrieg at its base. The corpse of German proletarian organizations upon which he sits would have stirred under him, and at its first movement every ad-vantage he enjoyed would have trembled in his hands.</p>
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<a id="pt3" name="pt3"></a>
<h3>III. The Future</h3>
<h4>The Fraud of Self-Sufficiency</h4>
<p class="fst">WE have insisted that the superiority of Hitler’s “dynamism” to the “decadence” of the democracies rests on the destruction of the working class movement. This is not a moral question. The existence or disappearance of the workers’ organisations is judged on the historical scale by its effect on the general life of mankind – in this age, the crisis of capitalism. Though by his destruction of the German movement Hitler girded himself the more efficiently for war, by this very means he aggravated unbearably the general crisis of capitalist society and has opened the way to a future in which crises and wars of the past and present will be like the petty storms of inland lakes to the tempests of the open sea.</p>
<p>Unlike those dabblers in Marxism who can neither understand what is in books nor see what is happening around them, Hitler’s economic advisers know that national socialism is as bleak a utopia as Stalin’s socialism in a single country. By his regime of economic self-sufficiency Hitler sought merely <em>reculer pour mieux sauter</em>. The war was fought to bring the whole continent under German domination, not for the benefit of capitalism in general but as the sole way out for German imperialism. The idiocy of the German master-race theory is no more than a propaganda embellishment of the needs of German industry. Europe is doomed to become one vast colony of a victorious Germany. The industries of Britain, Northern France and Czechoslovakia are to be as restricted and subordinated to German imperialism as the industries of India have been to those of Britain. The whole continent is driven back a generation in the imagined interest of the German people. Imagined, for bitter disappointment awaits the fanatical Hitler youth of Germany.</p>
<p>A continent is not sufficient. Capitalism established the world market. It was the basis of progress. It is woven into the lives of more than a billion people. It can be destroyed only by incredible suffering. Hitler is not fool enough to attempt it. All theory apart, for anyone with eyes in his head it is clear that the Nazis, even while they are at war for the domination of Europe, are waging a gloves-off battle for control of Latin-America. Whoever listens to Hitler’s “Europeans to control Europe” is as dumb as those who listened to his “Germans to be controlled by Germany.” The American bourgeoisie has no illusions whatever about Hitler’s continental socialism. It knows what Hitler has done and what Hitler cannot do. What Hitler has done has driven American capitalism still further on its pre-destined road.<br>
</p>
<h4>U.S. Moves Toward Totalitarianism</h4>
<p class="fst">The crisis in 1929 pushed the United States, most liberal of capitalist states, violently along the road of statification. The Roosevelt government made the first attempt to control individual capitalists in the interests of capitalism as a whole. The New Deal was the response to the first serious crisis of American capitalism. But the continued depression and the Nazi threat foreshadow still greater crises in the years to come. Roosevelt now aims at the cartelization of a whole continent to meet the German economic warfare, and he does not neglect the “other means” by which the economic warfare will be continued. We have seen the methods Hitler adopted. What else is there for American capitalism to do but batter down the workers’ living standards, regiment industry and labor, and bring the whole continent under its command in the devilish competition with continental Germany. The “new” society has all the vices and none of the virtues of the old. Japan has now adopted the corporate state and the fascist one-party system, thus getting Ad of encumbrances to the better organisation of the “new order” in Asia. Sooner or later, according to the intensity of the internal and external pressure, American bourgeois society will find its way to the same solution. Walter Lippman, that great democrat, complains bitterly that “Washington ... has not yet nerved itself to asking for the authority over capital and labor which such a program requires ... Little has been done with lucidity and courage to liberate the national effort from the endless restrictions and complications enforced by vested interests, pressure groups, political indifference and bureaucratic inertia.” He wants “a labor policy suited to the emergency.” He wants the government to ask for “the necessary authority to commandeer and compel.” (Lippman must restrain himself and have patience until after the election.) Yet for American capitalism the case is indeed urgent. It faces two enemies who may ally themselves.</p>
<p>Thus the war that we face now is a world war for world mastery. It is today that we can fully appreciate the meaning of the passage in the theses of the Third Congress (1921), which said: “The last war has been in one sense the European preface to the genuinely world-wide war which will decide the question of <em>exclusive imperialist domination</em>.” Thus the word is made flesh.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fascism or Socialism</h4>
<p class="fst">Capitalism after climbing great heights came to a stand-still and has now slipped from its foundations. Great states crash, communities of millions are torn up by the roots; shocks, catastrophes, sudden reversals and annihilations, drawn-out agonies, events unpredicted and unpredictable follow and will follow each other with bewildering speed. As we look at the film of history it seems that the operator has gone mad. But through it all the general line is clear, the objective hopelessness of the profit system, the statification of production by the imperialist state, the reduction of the living standards of the people, political and social servitude, the creation of “vast state-capitalist military trusts and syndicates,” the struggle for world mastery by “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.”</p>
<p>How ridiculous is therefore the would-be Marxist who in 1940 discovers that Fascism is a “new” society; or the Marxist, who in the face of a whole society in violent motion, dives into his cupboard, emerges with a spotted flag on a little stick, and waving it with the clumsiness of the renegade, proposes to arrest the march to world catastrophe by – the defense of American democracy. Even rats desert the sinking ship and brave the uncharted sea.</p>
<p>No, Mr. Democrat. To the tremendous forces that are leading us to a total ruin we must oppose forces of like range and scope – the scores of millions of proletarians and the hundreds of millions of colonial peoples. The same mastery of the historical process which enabled Lenin to foretell the precise nature of the colossal transformations of our day enabled him to see also the “civil wars within the country ... national wars, the emancipation of the nationalities crushed by the imperialists ...” The one are as inevitable as the other. It is in those wars that lie the struggle for a new society, not in peering anxiously with a microscope at Fascism, seeking what is not there, nor in supporting the democratic imperialists against the fascists in their common road to ruin. Just as the democratic rights and privileges of bourgeois society followed on the rise in the productive forces under early capitalism, were unthinkable without that expansion, and are now disappearing with capitalism’s decline, so not only the extension but the very preservation of such democratic rights as exist can come only from the release of the productive forces, that is to say, by the struggle for international socialism, in irreconcilable conflict with imperialism in all its shapes and forms.</p>
<p>Stalemate in Europe and compromise, or a victory for Britain do not solve one single contradiction of capitalist society. The crisis grows deeper every day. War is only one manifestation of it. The post war will contain others. Even, remote possibility, a capitalist Britain dominating capitalist Europe, could no more escape ultimate statification and fascism than a victorious Italy escaped it after the last war. And let us not forget: a victorious Britain that dominates Europe will at last face not only Japan but also America on equal terms ...</p>
<p>Bourgeois society is on its way. It can turn back as easily as a rock tumbling down a mountainside can turn back. Fascism or Socialism, that is the choice. And every additional human being who sees that clearly brings the socialist society just so much nearer.</p>
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<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> Which does not mean that Hitler may not attack Stalin tomorrow.</p>
<p class="note"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">1.</a> Before the age of nationalist states, treachery was common in war.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Capitalist Society and the War
First Published: The New International, , Vol. VI No. 6, July 1940, pp. 114–128.
Transcribed: Damon Maxwell.
Proofread: Einde O’Callaghan (July 2013).
Introduction
WAR is one great destroyer of illusions. Churchill tells the British people that they were so glutted with victory in 1918 that they failed to use it: imperialist Germany should have been destroyed once and for all in 1918. Thus even in the mouth of a great democrat the survival of democracy in Britain demands the destruction of the greatest nation in Europe. Reynaud’s representative in Britain, General de Gaules, with a third of France in German hands and the French army in full retreat, advises his countrymen that the “same methods” which gave Germany victory can give them to France: this patriotic Frenchman believes that if Fascist boots are to tramp down the Champs Elysees, at least they should enclose French feet. The eternal unity of France and Britain in defence of liberty has burst asunder, revealing two groups of greedy and frightened self-seekers, each one blaming the disaster on the other, trying to throw the responsibility on the United States, finally exchanging bullets. Hitler the conqueror sits in the very chair of Foch, and does to France what Churchill now regrets was not done to Germany in 1918. He makes one exception-France will retain enough armed forces to protect her colonies. On this point, “protective custody” for the colonies, Fascism and democracy are agreed.
The War and Marxism
The Marxist movement, the Fourth International, has not been taken unawares as to the general character of this war. But we have been guilty of some grievous, if excusable blunders. We predicated all our strategy on the victory of British and French imperialism. With that schematism which is the besetting danger of Marxism, we have applied the concept of victory going automatically to the countries of greater economic resources. Trotsky who told the Dewey Commission that Germany was certain to be defeated in the coming war now digs out a quotation of 1934 to prove that the “weakness of France and Great Britain was not unexpected” and “The power of the Fourth International lies in this, that its program is capable of withstanding the test of great events.” The power of the program can be amply enough demonstrated without these papal claims to infallibility – even when obvious mistakes have been committed. We have underestimated the political and subjective factors in war. The result is we were mentally unprepared for the possibility far less the probability of a German victory. In the war of the classes, as in any other war, surprise is a powerful weapon for disorganization, and disorganization is weakness. From a complete underestimation of the military and political power of Fascism, the bourgeois world today is swinging to an opposite extreme, in part propaganda, but in part genuine. The revolutionary movement cannot escape the consequences of so strong and sudden a reversal of opinion. Already, before the blitzkrieg, there were on the left, genuflections before Fascism. Some comrades posed the probability of “bureaucratic state” or “managerial society” as the next stage in social evolution. Should Hitler dominate Europe we shall see a rapid growth of these ideas in the revolutionary movement. Fascism as we know it has reached its culmination in the present war, and we must analyze its role in the war in specific and not in general terms.
The Marxists Predicted Fascism
First, however, we must restate some fundamentals. Neither the war nor Fascism fell from the sky. Your democrat and your empiricist hate to be reminded of this. As in 1914 they want to forget everything in view of the new unexpected danger. The danger is not new, it is not unexpected.
Lenin and Trotsky not only stated the broad alternatives of our period, but specified its details with a precision which is a triumph as much of their method as of their minds.
The Communist International, in its first manifesto, predicated the coming forms of the state.
“The statification of economic life against which liberal capitalism protested so much, is an accomplished fact. The return to free competition is henceforth impossible; we move inevitably to the domination of trusts, syndicates, and other capitalist octopuses. One question alone remains to be decided: who will control the statification of production, the Imperialist State or the victorious Proletarian State?”
That was Trotsky. Just a year before that, in March, 1918, Lenin, speaking at the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party on the program and name of the party almost in an aside revealed his conception of the years ahead
“Marxists have never forgotten that violence will be an inevitable accompaniment of the collapse of capitalism on its full scale and of the birth of a socialist society. And this violence will cover a historical period, a whole era of wars of the most varied kinds – imperialist wars, civil wars within the country, the interweaving of the former with the latter, national wars, the emancipation of the nationalities crushed by the imperialists and by various combinations of imperialist powers which will inevitably form various alliances with each other in the era of vast state-capitalist and military trusts and syndicates. This is an era of tremendous collapses, of wholesale military decisions of a violent nature, of crises. It has already begun, we see it clearly – it is only the beginning.”
German Fascism is “a vast state-capitalist military trust and syndicate.” By the German blitzkrieg is achieved the first of the “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.” There will be others. At the rate the American bourgeoisie is going we shall not have to wait long for them. But however powerful the military trusts, and however wholesale the military decisions, the situation of capitalism is to use another of Lenin’s phrases, “objectively hopeless.”
These are the boundaries of our theoretical arena. No armed guards prohibit the adventurous from wandering further afield, but those who cross the border either turn up in the camp of the enemy or reappear penitent and chastened.
I. “Dynamic” Fascism
The German Army Before Hitler
HITLER’s chief contribution to modern civilization so far has been the blitzkrieg. Now the spearhead of the blitzkrieg is the German army, its basis is the German economy. Let us note well that German Fascism created neither. The military achievements and traditions of the German army date back before Frederick the Great. The French and British bourgeoisie, as far back as the late seventeenth century, owed their power to wealth created by their success in the scramble for colonies and international commerce. Germany, ruined by the Thirty Years War, first achieved European importance through the efforts of Frederick Wilhelm who, soldier by soldier, built a powerful army, drilled and equipped as no other army in Europe: the Prussian drill-sergeant, in actuality if not in tradition, dates back nearly 200 years. This was the army used by Frederick II to make Prussia into one of the great powers of Europe and extend its boundaries at the cost of its neighbors. However, the Prussian State, under Frederick, in comparison with the rest of Europe, represented no progressive social formation. The creation of the army was a tour-de-force. It declined in Frederick’s last years and deteriorated after his death; Prussia, along with the rest of Europe, reeled under the blows of Napoleon’s military genius manipulating the new mass armies of the French Revolution. But the basis of the Prussian tradition had been laid.
The Treaty of Tilsit, 1807, was for Prussia a nineteenth century Versailles. Germany’s army was reduced to 42,000. But Stein and Fichte, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau led a movement of national regeneration whose psychological significance must undoubtedly have played an important part in the creation of Fascist morale. They evaded the limitations placed on the army by passing men through it with great speed, thus accumulating reserves. They dismissed incompetent officers. They opened schools for military training. They reduced the privileges of the officers. They created the landwehr, a national militia, the nearest they could get to conscription. They remodelled the whole educational system. They tried even to tinker with the social system. In all these efforts they met with stiff opposition from the Junkers. Intimately, however, the Reformers succeeded in transplanting to the German army as much of the spirit and organization of the French revolutionary armies as was possible without a social overturn. They reaped their reward when Blücher’s troops marched into Paris in 1814 and played the decisive role in the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
The Blitzkrieg Before Hitler
Surrounded by France and Russia and on the south by Austria, her powerful rival for hegemony over the numerous Germany states, the Prussian army became to Prussia what the British navy has been to Britain. The greatest theoretician of war, Clausewitz, was a German who analysed the transformation of warfare which had followed the French Revolution. The theory of total war which Clausewitz developed from his personal experiences in the French Revolutionary wars, was put into practice by the Germans more than by any other European people. The idea of the blitzkrieg, the lightning stroke, was conceived and practised long before Hitler.
In 1886 Bismarck crushed Austria in 7 weeks. In 1871 the Prussian army was outside the walls of Paris in 7 weeks and 3 days. The organization of the army, the study of military strategy and technique kept pace with the phenomenal progress of German industry between 1871 and 1914. In 1914 the Germans came within an ace of winning the first imperialist war. The Schlieffen plan just failed, and, in the words of Winston Churchill, “we survive to this day,” a tribute by one well qualified to judge how nearly the Kaiser’s blitzkrieg came to making Germany the master of Europe. Even before the 1914 war, in 1911, a military critic of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an Englishman, made the following profound summation of the old German army: “The value of war was analyzed and the secrets of success and failure were laid bare; and on these investigations a system of organisation and of training were built up which, not only from a military, but from a political and even an economical point of view, is the most striking product of the nineteenth century.” Hitler has achieved much. We shall examine it, but we must render to Hitler the things that are Hitler’s no more.
Germany Economy Before Hitler
If Fascism inherited in Germany the skeleton and military tradition of the most powerful army of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it inherited also the magnificent economic structure of Germany, the finest in Europe, and in many respects, the most highly organized in the world. Any well-informed person knows the history of the rise and development of pre-1914 German industry, its efficiency, its mastery of the most modern processes, the scientific character of its technicians, its high degree of concentration of production and centralization of ownership. Much of this forms an important part of Lenin’s book, Imperialism.
But there is one special feature of pre-war German capitalism which it is worth while to recall at this moment. The German bourgeoisie unlike the French, English and Dutch, who bordered the Atlantic Ocean, was never wealthy enough either to establish the national state or accumulate large reserves. British industry had a long start when Germany really began in the nineteenth century. German capitalism was tended: it grew up behind tariffs, it fed on state subsidies, the Junkers deserted their estates and made vast profits supplying the needs of the army. Thus German industry was the foster-child of the state more than any of the great industrial structures of Europe. From its very birth it was trained in the school of statification.
In 1919, chaos set in which was checked only by the entry of American capital after the defeat of the German workers in 1923. To pay reparations, Germany had to extend her foreign trade. But the workers’ organizations still existed and the workers could not be reduced to impotence. To meet the demands placed upon it, the already highly efficient technical capacity, concentration of production and cartelisation of German industry underwent a further process, rationalisation, which awakened the interest and tempered admiration of industrialists and technicians the world over. If post-1918 Germany has contributed anything progressive to the technique and administration of production it was this rationalisation, which took place between 1924 and 1929.
Already in 1931 in the important exporting industries, coal, potash, metallurgical, electro-technical, and chemical, large-scale production had reached a level of concentration comparable with that in the United States, though in mechanization Germany still was second. In 1924 the Steel Ingot Cartel controlled about 94 of output and by 1931 production was in the hands of two great enterprises. By 1930, in the iron and steel industry taken as a whole, the existence of a few large combines had facilitated the organisation of a cartel structure more closely integrated and of a wider range than ever before. Two corporations accounted in 1931 for about 75 of the total output and more than 80 of the exports of the German electro-technical industry. In 1929 an international cartel of chemical dye-stuffs was formed consisting of five countries which two years before had produced between them three-quarters of the quantity and more than four-fifths of the world’s exports of coal-tar dyes. Germany in 1931 had 75 of the total export quota. One chemical trust was responsible for 90 of German production. The coal industry had failed so completely to prosper under private ownership that by 1924 the whole industry was subjected to state regulation. The potash industry was similarly controlled. Later the whole iron and steel industry came under state control. Thus by 1933 when Hitler took over Germany, the Nazis had two enormous advantages, both sides of the same coin. Not only was German industry of a high technical standard, but more than any other industry in the world, it was ready for its inevitable end – statification.
Fascism: The Marxian Analysis
The Nazis inherited the skeleton German army and the German economic potential. They also inherited a country whose actual industrial production was just half of what it had been in 1929. There were six million unemployed. By 1938 production was 138% of 1932; unemployment has been abolished. The Nazis have constructed a military machine such as the world has never seen before. How did they do it? What is their “secret”? Have they solved the contradictions of capitalism?
Marx wrote three large volumes describing the structure and function of capitalist economy. For Marxists, labor power is a commodity like any other commodity which the capitalists buys and sells. Consumption is a function of production. The iron law of such a method of production is the accumulation of profits in the form of capital leading to an ever-greater concentration. The increasing disproportion, inevitable in the capitalist system, between the accumulating capital and the possibilities of consumption causes great and increasingly devastating economic crises. At a certain stage concentrated capital assumes a form which we know as imperialism. Lenin analyzed the nature of imperialism, contrasting its need for foreign markets, colonies and spheres of influence with the limitations of the avail-able supply. Under such circumstances, the necessary division among the competing imperialisms takes place by war. Such a war the Kaiser fought in 1914. Such a war capitalist Germany is fighting today. But capitalist Germany of 1933 was a Germany economically at the last gasp. It had to win the coming war or go down to ruin. The Fascist bureaucracy therefore transformed the whole of German economy into a vast state-capitalist and military trust. To do this, the Fascists cheapened the most important element of production, labor power, and compelled the bourgeoisie to invest a portion of its profits in armaments. The system however, remains a capitalist system, in the method of production, the use of labor power as a commodity, the inevitable accumulation of capital, the need for imperialist expansion. The bourgeois investment in armaments is in reality a form of investment in colonies and new industrial opportunities which the armaments will win for them. The Fascist bureaucracy acts in the interests of German imperialism as a whole, as did the German imperial and royal families and their nobility. The nature of bureaucratic power and the extent of its revenues are subordinate to the essential features of capitalist production in Germany. Fascism politically and economically is neither a new society nor world revolution. It is the old society land counter revolution. It is capitalism in its last stages, stripped to the waist and trained for war as its sole means of survival. Such is the Marxian analysis of this question.
We must bear this in mind when we address ourselves to the question of how Germany created the economic and military power which resulted in the defeat of France.
The Marxist Investigator
Guerin in his book, Fascism and Big Business, gives an admirable analysis of the economic policy of Fascism. It places the working class at the mercy of the capitalists in regard to wages and working conditions. At the same time, Fascism limits the liberty of movement of each capitalist and sacrifices all other branches of economic activity on the altar of heavy industry.
For heavy industry write armaments for war and the interior structure of the whole process is laid bare before us.
Guerin points out that when the Fascists came to power they hastened to give back to Kirdorf and Thyssen control of the businesses which they had lost in 1932. The Nazis gave back the state’s share of capital to big bank mergers, in one case 90, in another 70, in another 35. Municipally-owned enterprises, which even during the depression, had made profits amounting to 650,000,000 marks, were ruthlessly liquidated and their business restored to private capital.
The capitalists were allowed to deduct from their taxable income all sums used to purchase new equipment. Finance-capital was assisted by the formation of compulsory cartels. The Nazis, according to Guerin, created new enterprises but only when it was a question of profitless ventures. When profits could be made the enterprise was left to the capitalists.
Pre-Nazi capital could find no field for investment. The Nazis found an unlimited one – the field of what we can call “public works.” All capitalist politicians know this method of creating business, Roosevelt more than any other. But whereas Roosevelt knew that unlimited taxation for public works which bring in no returns leads to bankruptcy, the Fascists taxed heavily and invested all in their military construction, because these “public works” might someday bring fat returns in the shape of colonies, markets, and industrial opportunities wrenched by war from rival Imperialisms. That is the Fascist contribution to the science of capitalist economy. The famous abolition of unemployment is no more than a gigantic WPA for the destruction of rival imperialisms.
Inevitably, the Fascist state piled up a mountainous debt. But it had at its disposal all the wages which it could squeeze out of the defeated workers. It could force the capitalists to invest in its novel form of “public works.” It took savings in banks, and insurance companies under its protective custody. The only security it could offer was what it hoped to win by the war.
It is true that the Nazis compelled capitalists to reinvest profits over a certain amount in such industries as were indicated by the state, chiefly the armament industry. But the direction of these enterprises they left to the capitalists themselves and they forbade any increase in the state ad-ministration of industry.
Such a form of economy carries with it the danger of inflation, the most terrible word in the German language. To prevent this inflation getting out of bounds the Nazis rigidly controlled prices. But they also controlled consumption, feeding the people as little as possible, clothing them as badly as possible, so that all available funds could go into the production not of butter but of guns.
Like every modern nation, the Germans had to battle for foreign trade. The Nazis particularly needed raw materials for the great preparations demanded by war. They set out on the reactionary task of creating synthetic products, oil from coal, etc. most of it at a cost far beyond its production elsewhere. By this means they struck more blows at the living standards of the country, and under-mined still further one of capitalism’s most important contributions to society – the international division of labor. But with war in mind they had to be as far as possible self-sufficient, to create what the economists call the regime of autarchy.
The Nazis had promised, among other promises, to expropriate the big estates for the benefit of the peasants. This, with communal farming, is one of the most pressing economic needs for the advancement of modern society. Germany needed an expansion of agriculture, but the Nazis carefully guarded the property of the Junkers.
Such in essentials is the analysis made by a Marxist of what the Nazis with their usual impudence and bluster pronounce to be a world revolution.
An Observer on the Spot
How the Nazis mobilized economy is the question which naturally occupies the central position in any discussion of the war. To many sincere observers Guerin’s analysis may seem too strongly colored by Marxist spectacles. Let us therefore look through the spectacles of Otto D. Tolischus, for years New York Times correspondent in Germany. Mr. Tolischus’ paper is sufficient guarantee that those of his writings which appear in it will not reflect the least tinge of Marxism. In the New York Times Magazine of June 30 he sums up his unrivalled experience of Germany’s economic mobilization for Hitler’s world revolution. Though he and his employers would be horrified at this, his summary has a familiar sound. “A nation of 80,000,000 ... has been converted into a gigantic trust which has no other aims or dogmas except total economic and military war ... that will establish German world supremacy.” In other words, “a vast state-capitalist and military trust” aiming at “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.” Lenin with his sharp eye for good theoretical work and his genial objectivity would have said “Bravo, Mr. Bourgeois, Bravo!”
Tolischus lists “the main principles and measures.”
FOR CAPITAL, TRADE AND INDUSTRY:
1. Fixed prices and adjusted currency by a price commissar “on a cost plus basis.” This limited the inevitable inflation to not more than 25%.
2. The limitation of profits; these were limited by price control and by compulsory investment of all profits above 6 to 8 in government loans. But this investment was subject to later distribution to stock holders. “The gross dividend declaration is still up to 14.%.” This we may note in passing is what admirers of Fascism call “abolition of the profit motive.”
FOR LABOR:
Fixed wage rates based mainly on deflated wage levels of 1932, job control, abolition of the right to strike.
FOR THE CONSUMER:
Rationing of virtually all food and of most other necessities under the slogan cannon instead of butter “which lowered the living standard almost to the point of mal-nutrition.”
In no essential does Mr. Tolischus differ from the analysis and details of the Marxist, Guerin.
Mr. Tolischus finds this system, which reduces the consumer to the point of malnutrition, while the level of dividends remains at 14 per cent, a form of “paternal socialism.” But Tolischus at any rate makes no claim to be a Marxist. As to its future he says that “while it lasts it compensates for loss of liberty with economic security.” On the whole, Mr. Tolischus comes very well out of this. His “while it lasts” shows a caution which hotter heads might emulate.
A Bourgeois Economist
Tolischus is a reporter on the spot. John C. de Wilde is an economist who investigates German economy for the Foreign Policy Association. He has written on Germany three times during the past year, using almost exclusively German sources, official and unofficial.
The gross earnings of workers and salaried employees rose from 25.7 to 38.8 billion marks and probably attained 41.5 billion in 1938. The increase came largely from extension of the average working day in industry to the extent of 12%. This, we may waste some time in pointing out, is no new economic discovery. Capitalists have always known it. The question is to be able to carry it out and that is a question of the class-struggle.
The share in the national income of those living on investments in real property or stocks and bonds dropped from 6.6 to 5%, but increased about 3 times between 1932 and 1937. “As production increased and plants were utilized more fully, industry did in fact earn handsome profits;” but these had to be re-invested in business and were in many cases conscripted for the Four Year Plan. (The nature of this conscription, Wilde makes clear later.)
The Nazis have done all they could to increase agriculture, and large sums have been spent on land reclamations and improvement, but the acreage affected has been smaller than the area used for “air ports, roads, buildings, and other purposes connected with rearmament.” The German bourgeoisie invests its surplus in air ports. The air ports will give it good land at the expense of Denmark, Holland, Belgium, French Colonial Africa, etc.
Of Goering’s Four Year Plan, Wilde says that it obviously costs much money. Obviously. Producing oil from coal and rubber of the synthetic variety usually does. But it profits were conscripted for this necessary preparation for war let no one believe that capitalism suffered. The “main burden” of Goering’s plan has been “thrust” upon private enterprise. The private capitalist financed some of the enterprises. When he needed outside capital the government guaranteed bank-credits or opened up the capital market. The State made 5 or 10 year contracts with him, guaranteeing a price that would cover cost of production Interest and the amortization charges, as well as a definite profit The government often guaranteed him a market. These are the burdens borne by the suffering capitalists in Germany.
Writing again on June the 15th, 1940, on the German economy after some months of war, Wilde has little to say that we do not know before. The cost of the war has been imposed on private business. This is not strange – little more can be squeezed out of the workers in Germany. But Dr. Funk, Minister of Economics, has repeatedly warned against heavier taxation which would impair the capital of industry and “deprive business of the incentive to produce, a factor he apparently believes essential even in a totalitarian state.” Funk, that noble Nazi, sounds remarkably like the leaders of the Republican Party, and we may be sure that Hitler like Roosevelt, heard the cry of anguish. Finally, although everything is subordinated to the war and sacrifices are being exacted from all, yet “the State did not with few exceptions assume direct charge of production. It decided what was to be done, but imposed the responsibility for carrying out the program squarely on private enterprise. It has readily employed expert engineers and industrialists, but always under the strict control and direction of the government.” Wilde concludes: “this is an example which the United States could perhaps follow with profit. He need not be afraid. The United States government and the capitalists will follow, both with profit.
Fascism – Guardian of Profits
That is the way Germany accomplished her economic mobilization. But the Fascist bureaucracy in the course of mobilizing the country for war gathered enormous power into its hands? How else pray can a vast state-capitalist military trust be created? The German bourgeoisie was too discredited to undertake this task by itself. The bureaucracy takes a large part of the national income? Every bureaucracy takes as much as it can get and Fascism has rendered services to the German bourgeoisie that can never be repaid. How much did the bureaucracy take from the capitalist share? Between 1932 and 1937 the percentage of dividends dropped a little over 1%. Without Fascism there would have been no dividends at all. The bureaucracy expropriated the Jewish capitalists? Yes. To give their property and profits not to some abstract “state” but to some very concrete Aryan finance-capitalists. We know their names and how much they got. A bureaucracy does not function in the void It has from its beginning and always intensifies the closest political social and personal relationships with decisive sections of the class whose interests it serves. Ah, but it expropriated the Aryan Thyssen. So what? Thyssen opposed the alliance with Russia. The Nazis were not going to have anyone however powerful disrupting them at that critical moment. Thyssen left the country and probably intrigued with the enemy. After all. Fascism is the government of finance-capital in decay. It cannot afford the freedoms and privileges of a healthy organism. The Nazis expropriated the Polish capitalists. Of course. What do you think they fought the war tor? Glory? Later we shall see they will precede. Their present business is to win the war. But they have given state property to capitalists before. They will give it to them again. We need not lose sleep at nights about the share which German capital will get in the exploitation of Poland.
We have gone at some length into this question of the whence, how and why of Germany’s economic mobilization. It can be summed up in a few words. Germany spent 253.5 million dollars on armaments in 1932. In 1935 she spent over two and a half billion, in 1936 over three and a half. In 1937, 1938 and 1939 she spent over four billion dollars each year. Such a gigantic transfusion of economic resources takes place only when it is an absolutely inescapable necessity for survival. Inevitably it brought vast changes in the political and economic structure. There has been a redistribution of income and a shift in political power, which afford scope for close study, and periodic revaluation. But through all the changes, the Fascist bureaucracy, even when, Bonapartist-fashion it makes gestures, concrete and symbolic, to other classes, preserved the fundamentals of capitalist society in our day, the profits of finance-capital with its inevitable consequences for national Germany and the world. And even such limitations as were imposed on individual capitalists were suffered for the purposes of imperialist war which meant, with victory, the greater glory and aggrandisement of the whole capitalist structure.
The Economic Blitzkrieg Abroad
With full control of economy at home, the Nazis prepared for war by an economic blitzkrieg – the economic warfare which they would afterwards continue by other means.
The war of 1914–1918 had ruptured the economic equilibrium of European capitalism and demonstrated the intolerable restriction of the national state. The bourgeois order stood squarely in the way of economic expansion. But France and Britain at Versailles could find no other solution to the taming of Germany and the isolation of Bolshevik contamination than by creating a number of small states with tariffs and customs barriers, thus adding considerably to those which had existed before 1914 and had so powerfully contributed to the chaos and ruin of the first imperialist war.
The fourth Congress of the Communist International pointed out that the economic basis of France, though enriched by the Versailles robbery, was still too small to dominate the entire continent. France had bitten off more than she could chew. Loans for armaments to Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and Yugo-Slavia were not enough to keep Eastern Europe within France’s economic orbit. Once the Nazis had reorganized German economy on the backs of the prostrate workers they proceeded to dig themselves deep into the economic life of all the countries surrounding them, l process already begun by republican Germany. There is no need here to go into the methods of barter of buying dear and reselling cheap on the world market which the Nazis used. The bare data of results is sufficient.
In 1938 Yugo-Slavia’s imports from Germany represented 32.5% of her trade, her exports to Germany 35.9%. But this export percentage represented only 2.6% of Germany’s foreign trade. Germany thus could exercise enormous pressure upon Yugo-Slavia’s internal and external politics. In regard to France, imports and exports were each low down on Yugo-Slavia’s list. In 1939 France belatedly concluded a trade agreement with Yugo-Slavia. But that was useless. France’s economy, inferior to Germany’s, was geared to the trade of her empire. She could not be an economic power in Europe as well.
Germany stood at the head of both the import and export list of Czecho-Slovakia, France’s closest ally on the continent. The same with Austria before the annexation. The same with Poland, with Bulgaria and Rumania.
In 1938 Germany took 27% of Rumanian exports and sent Rumania 37% of her exports. She was at the head of the import and export tables of Greece, Poland and Italy. With Holland and Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, she held in their imports and exports either first or second place and more often first than second.
In the key area of South Eastern Europe, the percentage share in German exports was in 1929, 4.3%, in 1932 it was 9.4% and in nine months of 1938 it had risen to 10.1%. The percentage share of German imports from these countries had risen in the same period from 3.8% to 8.9%.
Inheriting a high technique and strategic position the Nazis used the broken working class and state control to speed their war preparations and to serve as the advance-guard of the diplomatic blitzkrieg. The economic basis of France was too weak to sustain her elaborate system of political alliances.
The Diplomatic Blitzkrieg
Hitler could fight no war without a statified industry. But during its organisation he had to prepare military strategy as well, involving the choice of the enemy and the preparation of allies, in the sinister business which masquerades under the name of diplomacy. He had one central problem – not to fight on two fronts at the same time. In alliance or entente with Russia he could strike at France and Britain. He could strike at Russia in alliance or entente with Western Europe. There is not the slightest reason as yet to doubt that his first plan was to strike at Russia.
As late as May 1939, Beck, speaking in the Polish parliament, referred to conversations with Reich representatives when “various other hints were made which extended much further than the subjects under discussion.” Beck very properly reserved the right “to return to this matter if necessary.” The French Yellow Book tells us what it needed no great perspicacity to know, that these proposals were for an alliance against Russia. The British were ready to support this fully. Hitler’s claim to be the advance guard of Western civilization against Bolshevism suited them exactly. Hitler tied Mussolini and Japan to him with promises of loot. By this means these two could squeeze Britain, alternately in the Mediterranean and in the Far East; and Hitler in the North Sea as well. He moved with Mussolini in Spain and Britain retreated. Mussolini being engaged in Ethiopia and Spain, Hitler struck at Austria and Britain acquiesced.
Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich seemed to make it clear to Hitler that Britain would not fight unless directly attacked, and Hitler could take his time over that. Chamberlain, and with him the British bourgeoisie, counted above all on war between Germany and Russia. J.L. Garvin openly explained the British plan. Hitler was to be given no free hand in the East. When he attacked Russia, the British, French and others would declare a state of armed neutrality and see that the war ended “for the benefit of civilization.” The German domination of Czecho-Slovakia lost the British and French forty divisions, and armament factories three times as large as Italy’s. Britain did not deviate. As late as May 1939, Neville Henderson told Goering that compromise had its limits and he did not see how the situation could be saved unless the German government was prepared to wait “in order to allow excited spirits to calm down again and negotiations to be resumed in a better atmosphere.” When Henderson was leaving the house, Goering showed him pictures of naked ladies labelled “Goodness” “Mercy,” etc. Henderson commented that he failed to see Patience among them. In 1939 as in 1919 the British remained faithful to their policy. They were ready to appease to the last French colony. Hitler’s alliance with Russia, therefore, was a last attempt to squeeze some more appeasement out of Britain. He had no reason to believe that Britain would fight.
Hitler destroyed Poland and clamored for peace. If he had got his peace he could at will come to terms with Britain and France and strike at Russia, or, peace being refused, he could continue the entente with Russia and strike in the West. As we review this pliant and audacious diplomacy, one thing emerges. Never before has any modern statesman been able to exercise such an astonishing suppleness and freedom of maneuver. In comparison with that of Britain and France, his diplomacy pivoted with the range and oiled freedom of a modern machine-gun as compared to a seventeenth century muzzle-loader in the hands of a horseman.
Thyssen, and we can be sure, not Thyssen alone, thought the Russian alliance suicidal for Germany. In France, Britain or America he and his supporters might have been strong enough to paralyze the government or create a grave dissention beneath a fictitious unity. In Germany he had to fly for his life.
Whence this absolute control of the economic and political system, control not only of the workers but of all sections of the bourgeoisie? The Fascists owed it to the complete bankruptcy of the German bourgeoisie between 1918 and 1933. It had no force at its command, dared not show its battered and ugly face, and could find no new words to demand sacrifices from the population and even if it had had power, obedience. Secondly, however roughly the Nazis treated this or that section of the bourgeoisie, whatever expedients orthodox or unorthodox they adopted, however openly Hitler lied and deceived, he was doing the main job, getting rid of the Versailles chains which bound German economy; he was preparing to give German capitalism its place in the sun. He was consistently successful. But basically the Nazis owed their power over all sections of the bourgeoisie to the power they had established over the working-class.
In France Daladier could manoeuvre with the Social-Democracy and the Communists whenever the pressure against him was strong. In Britain Churchill, the anti-appeaser, was a hot candidate in 1938 for the Premiership in a Popular Front Combine. In Germany before 1933 Schleicher sought an alliance with the Trade Union bureaucracy. Even in Tzarist Russia in 1916 Miliukov and Kerensky could criticize Tzarist policy because they were certain of response outside. But once the working-class was prostrate the Nazis could systematically make themselves master of every aspect of economic and political life. Hence the suppleness and bewildering passes of their diplomatic sword.
The Blitzkrieg on Morale
Where the revolutionary movement as a whole blundered, and the British, French and American bourgeoisie, as well, was to indulge in fantastic hopes of a German army and people whose morale would be immeasurably affected by the steel chains in which Hitler held Germany. Clausewitz himself had stressed the impossibility of waging war with a hostile population, and Hitler’s regime was the regime of a ruler who ruled by terror. From these false expectations the bourgeoisie and some revolutionaries alike have rushed to exaggerate and hopelessly magnify the “inspiration” and the “new vision” given by Hitler to the German people. Hitler’s inspiration to the German people is not a new vision but a refurbished version of a very old one. For consider. Anti-Bolshevism was the very heart and core of it. Such were Hitler’s tirades against Bolshevism that for years the revolutionary movement foolishly thought an understanding between Hitler and Stalin an impossibility.
The revolutionary movement, after violently denying the very idea, did point to the possibility of an alliance between the two; but so did many others. What all said, however, was that Stalin was seeking an alliance with Hitler. And that was no great discovery because Stalin had openly proclaimed his wish for such an alliance in 1933. But this insistence on seeing it always as Stalin seeking the alliance from an adamant Hitler shows where our weakness lay – we had imbibed too much Hitler propaganda and took his anti-Bolshevik crusade too seriously. [1] We never once, until perhaps after Munich, considered that Hitler might want such an alliance, because we didn’t think that Hitler could put it over to the German people. We took his anti-Bolshevism for granted as something permanent. Thereby we paid Fascism the compliment of accepting it at its own inflated valuation as a new order of society with a revolutionary ideology. But the ease and suddenness with which Hitler swung the German army and the nation behind him to the alliance with Russia indicate clearly that Fascist morale owes its strength in the minds of its supporters, not to its anti-Bolshevism, but to the fact that it is nothing else but old-fashioned bourgeois nationalism decked out with anti-Semitism and pseudo-revolutionary trappings. Had Fascist ideology been based on any true conception of a new society to which “Jewish Bolshevism” was the anti-thesis, the sudden friendship with Russia, the joint campaign against Poland would have shaken the morale of the armies and disoriented the population. That Hitler could switch without a tremor means only that Germany, a victory for Germany, the defense of Germany from another Versailles, is the thought uppermost in the mind of his followers. The Horst Wessel song turns out to be a Wagnerian variation of My Country, ’tis of Thee.
All governments make abrupt turns of policy but, a genuinely new society which is the product of a revolution creates a genuinely new ideology which is a moral factor of enormous power and cannot be trifled with. As late as 1814 not only the peasants but even the workers of France, after all they had suffered from Napoleon, clamored for him to lead them in revolutionary struggle against the hated Bourbons. Napoleon had only to land in France for army and people to turn to him. He marched from Toulon to Paris without firing a single shot. After Waterloo the plebs called on Napoleon to invoke the revolution. For Stalin to be able to carry out his maneuvers in foreign policy without friction demanded the murder, exile, imprisonment or banishment of hundreds of thousands of Soviet revolutionaries, old and new. Hitler spun his followers around in less than a week, whereby he showed exactly how closely allied is his ideology to plain bourgeois patriotism, my country right or wrong.
Fascist Fakery
Even the famous war mentality so carefully instilled for years, has not captured the people. When Chamberlain went to Munich they crowded round him and cheered for peace. When Mussolini returned from Munich, the Italians welcomed him as never before. Never in 17 years was the prestige of Mussolini so high. The international brotherhood of Fascism is also a patent fraud. Not only did the two countries almost go to war over Austria; the great bulk of the Italian people hate and fear German imperialism and in recent months one could trace in the Italian press the frantic intensification of anti-British propaganda to whip the Italians into line with Germany. Can anyone imagine similar antipathy between two proletarian states?
That being understood we have to realize that Hitler’s army has shown an astonishingly high morale. He had the youth. Before 1933 he had a large following, and between 1933 and 1940 on the impressionable blank minds of the I young people of Germany he hammered home the national I socialist philosophy such as it was.
Every device of modern technique and psychology was used to make them docile subjects for his military machine. They learned history, geography, literature and science, all taught with the one purpose. Even educated minds find it difficult to resist such a barrage day after day. The raw youth had no defense against it at all. They succumbed in millions. There Hitlerism has won a notable victory, of a scope that was unsuspected even by enemies of the regime. But even this in the last analysis owed its success to the one cardinal fact. No hint of any other ideas was allowed to corrupt the unadulterated stream of Nazi filth and lies. Under similar circumstances, as André Gide found in Russia, you can teach millions to believe that subways exist only in Russia, due to the superiority of socialism to capitalism; and with no opposition even Chamberlain could have inspired millions of British youth with the idea that an Englishman was born for no other purpose than to die for the British Empire. Unfortunately, when Chamberlain said so, Winston Churchill the Social-Democracy and the Liberal and Labor press called him in their various ways a liar, a traitor, or an incompetent scoundrel.
How long the Fascist morale would resist under strain is another story. The morale of revolutionary France frightened Alexander I even after Bonaparte’s defeat in 1814. Could the morale of Hitler’s world revolution outlast one defeat? We doubt it. The diplomatic victories of Hitler raised his followers to wild enthusiasm, and correspondingly demoralized the millions of old Social-Democrats, Communists and Liberals who remain hostile to Hitler but hopeless. The youth in the army, and the army is for the most part, a young army, are swept forward on an un-checked tide of sweeping victory. The question, unanswered and for the time being unanswerable in precise terms, is whether this morale is such as to enable the nation to endure as Germany endured between 1914 and 1918. Even when we revise our previous estimates of Hitler’s grip over large sections of the German people, there is nothing, not one single fact, to make us believe that Hitlerite Germany is inspired with such a love for the “new society” as could enable it to stand half the strain of 1914–1918, or for that matter, even a single colossal defeat. Uncertain of their supplies and doubtful of the morale of their followers, facing either victory or annihilation, the German General Staff sought for an early and decisive victory. On the first page of his World Revolution, C.L.R. James in 1937 wrote as follows: “The working classes of Germany, of Austria, of Italy and of Hungary, will not bear the strain of the coming war as they bore the strain of the last ... Capitalists in those countries know that they must win and win quickly.” It is obvious that though they guarded against the worst it is on this belief that the German General Staff worked.
The Blitzkrieg: A Capitalist Strategy
If the revolutionary movement underestimated Hitler’s grip over the imagination and allegiance of German youth, it still more grievously underestimated the capacity of the German General Staff. Whatever secret stores of food and oil the Germans had accumulated, however much they badgered Rumania, in any long drawn-out war with France and Britain, they were losing with every day that the war dragged on. The Germans knew that the entry of the United States into the war in 1917 defeated them the last time. And any fool could see that Roosevelt was determined to bring America in just as soon as it was politically possible. Whatever Germany might hope to gain from Russia could be no compensation whatever when thrown into the scale against the incomparable resources and man-power of the United States. Ludendorff’s great offensive in 1918 was a last desperate attempt to break through before America could throw its full weight into the scale. This time the entry of America was a foregone conclusion, and the uncertain sources of supply, the large number of the disaffected in the rear, not only Germans, but millions of Austrians and Czechs, demanded that what Ludendorff tried as a last resort in 1918 should be tried first in 1940. This time it was not to fail, for failure and a war of stalemate meant certain disaster. The German High Command worked in the spirit and traditions which had been theirs since the days of Frederick the Great.
They used every device of existing technique to improvise a means of breaking through the center. They carried to a high pitch the concentration of weapons. How brilliantly they succeeded is now history. Any attempt to underestimate the scope of this victory and Germany’s military superiority to France, i.e. by attributing the victory to the treachery of General Corap or Fifth column activity, is to betray not a mistaken judgment but fanatical stupidity. There was wide-spread treachery in the revolutionary armies of France from 1792 onwards and in those of Russia in 1918 but both won victories which altered the whole course of history.
Yet there is one reflection which must be made about the German victory. Like the victories of Hannibal, Gustavus and Frederick the Great it represents nothing new. The strategy and tactics are essentially an adaptation and refinement of existing technique. Of an entirely different order were the victories of Alexander the Great and Bonaparte. Alexander’s army was of a type never seen in Europe before, not only technically and tactically superior, but based on the people of Macedon, whereas the Greek democracies and the Persian King employed mercenaries. When we come to Napoleon’s armies we have an absolutely new phenomenon in European history, the nation in arms, the mass armies served by a centralized government which could devote all its resources to the prosecution of war.
All modern strategy stems from Napoleon. Clausewitz’ great treatise is based on his experiences of the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon himself said that tactics should be changed every ten years, and they change, though it is generally defeated armies with small economic resources which initiate the changes. But from Napoleon, through Clausewitz, Moltke and VonBrauchitsch and Von Keitel a straight line can be drawn-all are makers of war in bourgeois society. For a new type of warfare we shall have to wait for a new type of society, but the one will bring the other as surely as the French Revolution brought Napoleon. International social-ism will abolish imperialist war. But if for example the cursed Social-Democrats had taken hold of Germany in 1918, such wars as a Red Army of Germany may have had to fight would not only have resulted in brilliant victories. They would have been victories beyond the very conception of bourgeois strategists. Not only would socialist organisation in Germany have put bourgeois technique to shame. The millions of the international proletariat who rallied to the support of Soviet Russia in 1918 would have been doubled and trebled at the march of a revolutionary Ger-man army. The general staffs of capitalism would be beaten before they began.
The Blitzkrieg and The Fifth Column
In one sphere alone the Nazis have invented an apparently new method of warfare – their use of the “Fifth Column.” [2] Though this has been grossly exaggerated, it is not without importance. Most certainly in Norway and probably in Denmark, to some degree also in Holland and in Belgium, there was actual treachery and cooperation with the Nazis by highly-placed officers and wealthy bourgeois. The evidence for similar treachery among the French and British is conflicting and in the light of the above analysis, there is no need whatever for that hypothesis. Treachery did not win the German victory.
We can sum up the “dynamism” of Fascism in a sentence. Every victory of Hitler in every field is due to his first act on coming into power – the destruction of the organized working-class movement.
Norway, we should note, and Holland and Belgium, can have no independent existence. The Norwegian bourgeoisie having to choose between its own Social-Democratic Government and Hitler, chose unhesitatingly. But Britain and France had huge empires to defend. That there were negotiations for a deal is certain. Also great unwillingness to prosecute the war. But treachery such as working from the start to ensure conquest by the Nazi armies is unlikely. These gentlemen understand each other’s merciless rapacity too well to work for defeat at one another’s hands, except at the prospect of a proletarian revolution. To that all other considerations bow.
Yet the Fifth Column, though the bourgeoisie is blowing up the smoke to make the fire as large as possible, has a deep symbolic significance. In 1914 it did not exist. Today, the bankruptcy of capitalism has reached such a stage that, at both ends of society, there are groups that stretch out their hands to similar groups in other countries. The Stalinists are one group and, misguided as are most of their followers, they on the whole represent a genuine repudiation of national patriotism in favor of another idea, symbolized for them in the defense of the Soviet Union as they conceive it. The Fascists represent another such grouping at the other wing of society. The corruption of the Stalinist leadership has weakened, disoriented and demoralized the immense revolutionary forces which it controlled in a country as decisive as France. But for their vicious masquerade as defenders of democracy between 1935 and 1939, they could have exercised an enormous power against Hitler’s domination of Germany, particularly in France and Czecho-Slovakia, and the other countries that ringed Germany. Their treachery and the treachery of Stalin deprived the anti-Hitler forces in Germany of their last shred of moral and material support. In comparison to the genuinely revolutionary forces that they controlled in France, Hitler’s Fifth Column in France was negligible. For the unity of revolutionary workers knows no frontiers, whereas Weygand and Petain would have won a victory if they could. In that lies the immense difference between Fascist “inter-nationalism” and the internationalism of revolutionary socialism.
Finally, Chamberlain and Daladier could have used the Fifth Column with even more devastating effect than Hitler. The anti-Hitler forces in Germany were large. But the appeasers were handicapped by the same circumstances which lay at the root of all their difficulties. They could make no attempt to touch the vast reserves of anti-Hitler forces in Germany because they feared to. Blowing up Hitler from the rear was the last thing they wanted.
They could not stamp down on their own nearest approach to Fifth Columnists, the appeasers, because they were appeasers themselves. On the other hand. Hitler could contact and guide the forces sympathetic to him in the democracies while he and his Gestapo, once they had exterminated the working class organizations, established a regime in which terrible dangers hampered those who genuinely wanted to intervene, far less those who did not want to. Only at the very last moment, when they had decided at last to fight, did the British attempt some serious Fifth Column work on their own. But the leaflets with which Chamberlain showered Germany at the beginning of the war fell like artificial snow-flakes from the warm September sky.
II. “Decadent” Democracies
The Democracies Before Hitler
A mere recital of what Germany did is also an enumeration of what the democracies did not do, could not do. Now that France has been defeated there is a mounting rubbish heap of talk about the treachery of French generals, the sabotage of French industrialists etc. Most of this is superficial and beside the point. The fundamental question is: why did Britain and France allow Germany, beaten to her knees in 1918, rise again to become once more powerful. That being answered, all is answered. The first cause was the division between France and Britain.
This constant use of the term, the “democracies,” the “allies,” blinds us to the fact that all imperialisms are in constant conflict with each other. France wanted to destroy Germany in 1919, either by breaking it up into its separate states, or by creating a Rhineland republic. That would have finished with imperialist Germany for good and for all. Britain refused. Why? For the soundest imperialist reasons. A dismembered Germany would have meant the substitution of France for Germany as master of the European continent, and Britain didn’t want anybody, however democratic, to be master of the European continent. Further, the economic system of Germany would have been destroyed and Britain’s chief customer on the continent was Germany; thirdly, Germany would not have been able to pay reparations. France would have cheerfully foregone reparations to be master of the continent. But Britain would not have it.
France, bitterly disappointed, invaded the Ruhr in 1923. Whereupon the French learned another lesson. They unwittingly unloosed a tremendous revolutionary movement in Germany which threatened the whole capitalist structure of Europe. Poincaré had to retreat, having failed to accomplish anything enduring except the creation of the Hitler movement. On Feb. 21, 1924, Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s Prime Minister, wrote a letter to Poincaré.
“France is endeavoring to create a situation in order to gain what it failed to get during the Allied peace negotiations ... Our economic existence has been gravely endangered, owing not to the inability of Germany to pay ... reparations, but to the acute and persistent dislocation of the markets – occasioned mainly by the uncertainty in the relation between France and I Germany, the continual economic chaos in Germany shown so clearly by the violent fluctuations in the value of currency, and the ultimate uncertainty in the relations between France and ourselves. Thus ... the people in this country regard with anxiety what appears to them the determination of France to ruin Germany, to dominate the Continent without consideration of our reasonable interests and future consequences to European settlement; that they feel apprehensive of the large military and aereal establishments I maintained, not only in Eastern but also in Western France; that they are disturbed by the interest shown by your government in the military organization of the new states in Central Europe ...”
What we are seeing here is not the “decadence” of democracies, but the “decadence” of capitalism. These rats are in a hole blocked at both ends. Will the defenders of democracy tell us what they would have done then, or what they will do if they defeat Germany tomorrow?
The Democracies Against Each Other
The Second Congress of the Comintern in one pregnant passage summed up the inescapable contradictions of post-Versailles European capitalism: “German scientific technique and the very high level of production of German industry, two factors of an extreme importance for the rebirth of European economic life, are paralyzed by the clauses of the Versailles treaty even more than they had been by the war. The entente finds itself in face of a dilemma: to demand payment it must allow Germany to work; to let Germany work it must let Germany live. And to give Germany, ruined, dismembered, bleeding to death, the means of once more making a life for itself, is to render possible an eruption of protest.” This was no mere question of reparations. It involved the whole economic life of Europe.
This division between Britain and France over Germany’s future, rooted in the bankruptcy of European capitalism, continued right up to 1936 and in one sense never ceased. It was on this that Hitler throve.
After Hitler came to power, France turned to Italy. Laval wanted to guarantee Austria, i.e., South-Eastern Europe, with the help of Mussolini, who would receive in return Ethiopia and certain concessions in French Africa. Hitler was to be encouraged to strike at the Soviet Union through the Baltic countries. And Britain? To the devil with Britain. Britain on the other hand aimed at precisely a similar agreement, an understanding with Mussolini and Germany, with France as the vassal state.
When Sir Samuel Hoare invoked the League of Nations against Mussolini, M. Cambon the French ambassador, on the very next day visited the British Foreign Office and asked if sanctions would apply to the invasion of Austria as well. Sir Samuel replied that the British were an idealistic nation, but that times change and Britain could not commit herself. Thus Hitler marched unchallenged into the Rhineland in March 1936.
The bourgeoisie is not homogenous. At various times sections of the French bourgeoisie wanted to fight a preventive war. The British set their face sternly against it. When the Spanish Civil War broke out and Hitler and Mussolini intervened; the much abused Gamelin urged intervention and the checking of the Axis powers: The French have always been acutely conscious of the German army and Britain could have turned the scale in favor of intervention. Britain said no. The British never wanted a Germany destroyed. They wanted a strong Germany, but not only against the Soviet Union, which we all know, but also as a counter-balance to France, and for the sake of the German market. If they could come to terms with Germany, then, dominating Europe, they could challenge America in the world market. Even after Munich, British industry was seeking an entente with German industry. It was only at the last moment that Churchill offered complete union between France and Britain. It was done only because the British felt the cold muzzle of the blitzkrieg on their temples.
The Democracies Against the Workers
The British bourgeoisie feared the domination of the continent by France. But it feared more the proletarian revolution in Europe and the revolution in the colonial countries. The French bourgeoisie, concerned at first about security against Germany, moved with increasing speed to the British policy of “order” at all costs.
To understand the British mentality we must realize that their empire nearly went to pieces in 1918–1920. The Russian Revolution, the revolutions in Central Europe, have overshadowed the convulsive shocks which Britain suffered. The population of Britain is seventy per cent proletarianised. In parts of Lancashire, and Yorkshire, Central England and South Wales, the proletariat is clustered thickly together in towns that are scarcely ever more than five miles from each other. In many great seaport towns, there are hundreds of thousands of sailors and ship-building workers. Instead of a large class of farmers, there is an agricultural proletariat of nearly a million workers, not one of whom is more than twenty miles from an industrial town of some size. When in 1919 the English working class formed councils of action and presented an ultimatum to the British government “Cease intervention in Russia or we shall violently overthrow the government,” the British bourgeoisie received a shock from which it has never recovered. At this very period, with the British workers in a state of ferment that was not conceivable to Englishmen in 1914, Ireland staged a revolution which resulted in the formation of the Irish Free State; in Egypt the nationalist movement broke out with uncontrollable violence. The Indian revolution made its first great attempt to eject the British. British power shook and it was Gandhi with his counter-revolutionary non-violence who came to the rescue of Britain. In the West Indies, in South Africa, in Kenya, in Malta there were risings. Between 1919 and 1921 it seemed that the British Empire might fall to pieces. Read the pre-1939 writings of J.L. Garvin, Editor of the Observer. Openly stated sometimes, and always underlying his argument, is the following thought: the next war means the end of the British Empire. Hence the main preoccupation of the British statesmen were – hostility to the Soviet Union, the fountain-head of revolutionary activity, and the preservation of “order” in Europe. Who more “orderly” than Hitler and Mussolini? Early in 1935 Anthony Eden visited Stalin. The Englishman made but one demand: cessation of Soviet propaganda in the colonies. Stalin of course agreed. The British welcomed the regime of Mussolini, and rejoiced at the coming to power of Hitler.
A mere enumeration of events will show the perils which hung over European capitalism and from which it was delivered by the triumphant Hitlerite counter-revolution in Germany. In February, 1934, the French workers and the Fascists fought bloodily in the streets of Paris. A few months after, the Communists and the Social Democracy formed a united front and the progress of French labor became an avalanche which culminated in the Popular Front victory the seizure of the factories and some four million workers joining the Trade Union movement in three months, a rate of 40,000 a day. At this same period, the Spanish workers and peasants were gathering momentum for the outburst which took place in July 1936. In Catalonia, the key province, bordering on France, the revolution was the most violent and powerful that history has yet seen. In less than seventy-two hours, the economic and social power of the bourgeoisie was destroyed and workers’ power to clinch the victory was to be had for the taking.
Democracies’ Main Enemy
In 1935 in Poland there was fighting on the barricades. There were barricades and pitched fighting on the streets in Amsterdam in 1935. Both engagements ended in drawn battles. The stay-in strikes in France were immediately followed by a general strike in Belgium, the uprising in Spain was immediately followed by a mutiny in the Portuguese fleet. In 1935 as soon as there was a threat of war between Italy and Britain the Egyptian WAFD with 90 of the population behind it forced dominion status from the British government. A few months after a similar rising broke out in French Syria with similar results. In Tunis and Morocco and Algeria there were risings against the government. Palestine blazed with revolt and the whole Arab world sat up to watch the course and result of the Palestinian struggle. In November 1934, in Great Britain itself, during the municipal elections, labor won such sweeping victories as had never been seen before. Constituencies which had been Tory for fifty years became completely Labor. Thus from 1933 on, a British statesman, looking at the map of Europe (with the British proletariat muttering outside) could draw a continuous line from Polish Danzig through Holland, France, Belgium, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine and French Syria, along which a flame of revolt could encircle the whole Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean. Further north, the Scandinavian countries were Social-Democratic, which might be a prelude to anything. The Indian Congress grew to a strength of five million and Gandhi steadily lost his restraining influence in India. Stalin began (publicly) to wash his hands of the revolution but so powerful was the Bolshevik tradition that it took years for people to understand that he meant it.
The British bourgeoisie did not need Hitler’s propaganda to arrive at a pro-Hitler policy. The destruction Europe and the Near East might end in Bolshevism. That is the second reason why Hitler was allowed to grow so that he could ultimately conquer.
For that very reason also, the French bourgeoisie from being a vigorous advocate of “security” became increasingly conscious of the revolutionary threat and ultimately, far more than the British, saw the main enemy at home.
The Popular Front Saved Bourgeois Democracy
The Popular Front Government epitomised the rottenness of bourgeois France. We did not see it then with sufficient clearness. All the more reason to see it now. The defenders of democracy who are prepared now to tell us what should have been done, have plenty to tell. The French bourgeoisie would have been glad for some real advice then. The French bourgeoisie would have needed advice first as to how to prevent the world economic crisis. French industrial production, 100 in 1929, was 76.7 in 1933 and 67 in 1935. The monthly average of bankruptcies, 726 in 1929, was 1,239 in 1935. Foreign trade, 9,030 millions of francs in 1929 was 3,034 francs in 1935, the wholesale price index, 100 in 1929 was 54 in 1935. The official number of unemployed 928 in 1929, was 426,336 in 1935. The budget deficit, 2,638 millions in 1930 was 5,000 millions in 1935. Now, Messrs, democrats, will you state precisely how you would have dealt with that situation? In America you shouted loudly enough for exactly the policy of the Popular Front only you called it the New Deal.
The French bourgeoisie did its best all things considered. The advance-guard of the counter-revolution struck at the workers, in February 1934. The thing would be solved in the Hitlerian manner. The workers resisted – defending their democracy; and the political struggle was launched. The workers thinking that the Communist Party was the party of the revolution followed it. They lifted the Party to a position of importance and influence never previously held by any proletarian party under capitalism. Its membership moved from 30,000 in February, 1934, to 350,000 in 1938. Such influence as the Communist Party did not have was kept by Blum and his Social-Democratic Party. And what did these two aim at? Have Messrs, supporters of democracy forgotten already? Have they forgotten that from start to finish, from the formation of the Popular Front in July 1935 until the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Communist Party and the Social Democracy used all their influence to make the workers moderate their demands, to impress upon them the necessity of working for “national defence?” The bourgeoisie was powerless. But for these “defenders of democracy” and advocates of “national defense,” the French bourgeoisie would have been swept away.
In 1937 after the Senate had refused his request for special powers, Blum told the National Council of the Socialist Party: We had a revolutionary situation and there was good hope of success, but for reasons of an international nature which I need not go into, it was necessary to be moderate. The Popular Front saved French democracy. Such concessions as were made had to be made or the workers would never have left the factories at all. Today, Messrs. democrats join the bourgeoisie and without a blush inform us “It was the fault of the Popular Front.” It was. Stalin, wanting his alliance with France, gave his blessing to French rearmament in the Stalin-Laval communiqué, and through the Stalinists the French revolution was ruined. In that sense the present situation is undoubtedly the fault of the Popular Front. But you should be grateful to it, Messrs. believers in democracy. It saved French democracy for you from 1936 to 1940. Four long years. What more do you want?
It took time to wear down the workers, by constant transference of capital from Paris abroad and back again, by raising prices, by artificial financial panics. The French bourgeoisie could not build tanks or prepare a strategy. It had more urgent matters on hand.
The whole regime was in an insoluble crisis, the crisis of decadent capitalism. If the crisis was not so obvious in Britain it was because in traditional fashion, the Empire, especially after the Ottawa Conference was squeezed still drier. With the result that in Africa, East and West in the West Indies, in Ceylon and in India the class struggle approached the heights of 1918–1921. The end of that chapter is as yet unwritten.
The Democracies Mobilize Economy
The democracies had great resources. German economy in its basic structure, was, as we have seen more amenable to the totalitarian regimentation necessary for modern war than the more liberal economies of Britain and France. These had a thousand tentacles stretching to all parts of the world, particularly the colonies. Totalitarianism meant for them a far greater dislocation of the normal processes of their economy than it meant for German capital. But the resources at the disposal of Hitler’s rivals were immensely greater than his. French industrial production, 48 per cent of Germany’s in 1913, was 66 per cent in 1928. The areas reconstructed after the war were second to none in Europe.
But the governments of France, the constantly changing governments, never had the ability nor the will to regiment industry and trade to the degree required. Another task had to be settled first, the destruction of the working class movement. And that they could not do. The lethargy of a great class of rentiers reinforced their political difficulties. Yet, despite all these difficulties, the movement to statification was unmistakable even before the war – in both France and Britain.
Three months before hostilities began, James Frederick Green summed up his study of the Economic Mobilization of Great Britain as follows: “Great Britain appears to be gradually forced into the type of regimented economy which it is preparing to combat in Europe – but as yet without the accompanying political and social controls. The government is thus confronted with the dilemma of effecting an economic mobilization sufficient to enforce its diplomatic objectives but without resort to the methods of fascist states.”
That was their Achilles heel. For capitalism in crisis there is only one way. Fascism. And imperialist war is the greatest crisis of capitalism. Within their limits they tried. Britain spent 426 millions in 1932 and in 1937 had raised the amount to 1,263 millions, for 1939 it was 1,800 millions. France went from 509 millions to 1,800 millions in 1939. But in 1938 she spent only 731 millions whereas in 1937 she had spent 909 millions. The fierce class conflict had her paralyzed and to our wishful-thinking democrats we must respectfully urge that you do not solve great class-conflicts except by force. When Daladier, with the help of the Stalinists, had exhausted the working class and beaten it down sufficiently, military expenditure moved from 731 millions in 1938 to 1,800 millions in 1939.
The British capitalists, fighting a similar battle, could not mobilize their workers. They had to give every post in the Cabinet of any importance to a Labour member before they could dare to call for the effort the situation demanded.
The Democratic Diplomacy
Allied diplomacy, rooted in the same disorder, blundered continuously. The democratic idealists had it all solved: an alliance with Russia. But we have seen what that meant. We must not forget also that to the French capitalists an inevitable consequence of such an alliance was that the Communists, tools of Stalin, would have assumed commanding positions in every sphere of the national life, industrial, parliamentary, administrative and military, in addition to their almost complete control of the labor movement.
If we leave Britain and France for the moment and consider Belgium, Poland, Switzerland and Czecho-Slovakia, countries bordering on Germany, the democratic diplomatic dilemma becomes still clearer. Leopold at first continued the alliance with France. When he saw Hitler re-enter the Rhineland unopposed, he withdrew and called himself neutral. If Germany did go to the East, he was safe tor some years at least. Meanwhile he would do nothing to offend his powerful neighbor until war actually broke out. To the last he hoped that Germany might make a direct assault on the Maginot line or attack through Switzerland. If Britain and France in 1936 had shown him that they meant business, the confusion about the defense of the border between France and Belgium would never have arisen. Poland asked France tor joint action against Hitler in 1933. France refused. Whereupon Poland sat on an excruciating fence: alliance with Germany and a German victory over Soviet Russia meant that German troops would never leave Polish soil; alliance with Soviet Russia, and Soviet victory meant the Red Army on Polish soil. Poland had 5 million members of oppressed nationalities living on the Soviet border and her social system was almost as dislocated as Tzarist Russia’s in 1914. Poland knew this and France and Britain knew it too. Sections of the Czecho-Slovakian bourgeoisie wanted to fight and the social structure of Czecho-Slovakia was more stable than that of Poland. But the big agrarian interests feared a victorious Red Army as much as did the Polish landlords. Czech economy and German were closely inter-woven. Around Czecho-Slovakia were the rickety structures of the Balkans and Hungary. Which European capitalists wanted to set that dry tinder afire? Hitler alone could dare to risk it. And for him there was no turning back.
Switzerland, in bourgeois mythology, was the democracy of democracies. But during the period of sanctions against Mussolini, Switzerland asked that in view of her special situation in regard to Italy, geographical and otherwise, she be absolved. The request was magnanimously granted.
All these smaller countries took their cue from the vacillations of Britain and France, beside which they had a very healthy desire to have the war fought if possible somewhere else. These were the problems with which the democracies had to deal. They did their best according to their lights. It their lights burned low and gave a feeble gleam in which they could not see their way, they could honestly say that it was not their fault.
Thinking itself safe behind the fleet Britain temporized and appeased. The French, watching the German army, had more misgivings than the British. But in essence now they were united. At the period of Munich, a section of the British cabinet, led by Duff Cooper, representing the views of the army, appalled at the military and strategic consequences if Czecho-Slovakia were lost, challenged appeasement. But Daladier and Bonnet, against the advice of Gamelin, supported Chamberlain and thus assured capitulation.
It is out of such a rich and fertile soil of class conflict, dangers at home and abroad, that grew the tangled weeds of divided counsel, defeatist moods, inadequate preparation which is now reaping its reward. What policy could have saved the French bourgeoisie? To do what and when? The war has stripped it of its past and held it up in all its bloated and diseased nakedness.
The Democratic Morale
What moral preparation could leaders so torn by inner contradictions make for war? The answer is none. How could they mobilize populations to fight in a war which they did not want to fight themselves? How could they create or develop morale of any kind when the difference between what they said and what they did was obvious to all politically-minded persons in the country? They could oppose to Hitler only the slogan of defense of democracy. But the words turned to ashes in their mouths. For the crisis of French economy and the bankruptcy of the system united them only on one policy – the crushing of the workers and the destruction of democratic rights.
The Stalinists and the Social Democracy having the confidence of the French working class had by 1938 tamed it sufficiently for the French bourgeoisie to abandon their rear-guard action of the Popular Front period and attack on the most approved theories of the offensive. The workers were struck at from all sides. The burdens of rearmament were placed upon them, their militants were thrown into jail, and drastic restrictions placed upon their political liberties. And for what reason? In the sacred name of anti-fascism. At the same time the Cagoulards and notorious fascists went free and flourished.
In Britain the Prime Minister and leading members of his cabinet expressly disclaimed any intention of fighting on behalf of any form of government. As the crisis neared, their halting phrases and stiff-jointed obeisances to democracy not only failed to inspire but carried doubt and de-moralization into all sections of the people.
The Democratic Strategy
On France as the continental power would fall the main burden of the first military conflict. A strategy had to be worked out, embracing all aspects of the national life. But bourgeois France, feeling the proletarian pressure more than Britain, was divided into warring groups. Weygand and Reynaud wanted an offensive, but Laval and Bonnet were for appeasement to the end. In the Radical-Socialist party Herriot was for a firm policy, Daladier was for compromise. In the Social Democracy Blum was for a vigorous policy, Paul Faure for appeasement. Laval made the pact with Stalin, but on the way home stopped in Berlin to intrigue with Hitler. Doubtless they all underestimated Germany’s power. But they had underestimated in it 1914 also. Their error in 1940 was the error of having to guide a bankrupt society. They feared victory as much as they feared defeat. From their gangrenous society flowed like pus their ruinous strategy of the defensive.
Today the bourgeois theorists wake up to the fact that the strategy of the defensive was a criminal blunder and in fact always has been. But which country torn as the democracies were torn could even attempt to consider any other strategy but the defensive, in other words, the strategy of temporization, of hesitation, of waiting and seeing, of trying to compromise. Perhaps the most ironic commentary on the French defeat is that the method of breaking the center by a heavy concentration of mechanized forces was insistently urged on the French Government by the French general, de Gaule, as far back as 1934. In 1935 Reynaud published a whole volume on the subject He was ignored. The Germans, intent on victory, worked on the plan for years. They tried it out in the Spanish Civil War. They perfected it in Poland. It was open to the French if they had wanted it. THEY COULDN’t USE IT.
Was there treachery at Sedan? Perhaps, though this writer has seen no conclusive evidence. Did a French general sabotage the sending of tanks to the front? It is possible. Did Laval and Baudouin from the start oppose the war and do all they could to bring it to an end? That they most certainly did. To all those who never wanted to fight, the disaster in Flanders would certainly be the signal for frantic negotiations with the enemy. But in the French revolutionary wars, whole armies with their generals deserted. There were traitors in the Red Army. But revolutionary France and revolutionary Russia were not defeated, because the government knew its mind and had the enthusiastic support of large sections of the people. Blum and the Stalinists fought to save a rotting bourgeois France in 1936. They are the immediate cause of the catastrophe and the heavy travail of Europe today. Had they seized the power in 1936, they would have ensured the success of the Spanish revolution and the initiative would have passed from Hitler.
A revolution in France and another in Spain would have cut off Hitler’s blitzkrieg at its base. The corpse of German proletarian organizations upon which he sits would have stirred under him, and at its first movement every ad-vantage he enjoyed would have trembled in his hands.
III. The Future
The Fraud of Self-Sufficiency
WE have insisted that the superiority of Hitler’s “dynamism” to the “decadence” of the democracies rests on the destruction of the working class movement. This is not a moral question. The existence or disappearance of the workers’ organisations is judged on the historical scale by its effect on the general life of mankind – in this age, the crisis of capitalism. Though by his destruction of the German movement Hitler girded himself the more efficiently for war, by this very means he aggravated unbearably the general crisis of capitalist society and has opened the way to a future in which crises and wars of the past and present will be like the petty storms of inland lakes to the tempests of the open sea.
Unlike those dabblers in Marxism who can neither understand what is in books nor see what is happening around them, Hitler’s economic advisers know that national socialism is as bleak a utopia as Stalin’s socialism in a single country. By his regime of economic self-sufficiency Hitler sought merely reculer pour mieux sauter. The war was fought to bring the whole continent under German domination, not for the benefit of capitalism in general but as the sole way out for German imperialism. The idiocy of the German master-race theory is no more than a propaganda embellishment of the needs of German industry. Europe is doomed to become one vast colony of a victorious Germany. The industries of Britain, Northern France and Czechoslovakia are to be as restricted and subordinated to German imperialism as the industries of India have been to those of Britain. The whole continent is driven back a generation in the imagined interest of the German people. Imagined, for bitter disappointment awaits the fanatical Hitler youth of Germany.
A continent is not sufficient. Capitalism established the world market. It was the basis of progress. It is woven into the lives of more than a billion people. It can be destroyed only by incredible suffering. Hitler is not fool enough to attempt it. All theory apart, for anyone with eyes in his head it is clear that the Nazis, even while they are at war for the domination of Europe, are waging a gloves-off battle for control of Latin-America. Whoever listens to Hitler’s “Europeans to control Europe” is as dumb as those who listened to his “Germans to be controlled by Germany.” The American bourgeoisie has no illusions whatever about Hitler’s continental socialism. It knows what Hitler has done and what Hitler cannot do. What Hitler has done has driven American capitalism still further on its pre-destined road.
U.S. Moves Toward Totalitarianism
The crisis in 1929 pushed the United States, most liberal of capitalist states, violently along the road of statification. The Roosevelt government made the first attempt to control individual capitalists in the interests of capitalism as a whole. The New Deal was the response to the first serious crisis of American capitalism. But the continued depression and the Nazi threat foreshadow still greater crises in the years to come. Roosevelt now aims at the cartelization of a whole continent to meet the German economic warfare, and he does not neglect the “other means” by which the economic warfare will be continued. We have seen the methods Hitler adopted. What else is there for American capitalism to do but batter down the workers’ living standards, regiment industry and labor, and bring the whole continent under its command in the devilish competition with continental Germany. The “new” society has all the vices and none of the virtues of the old. Japan has now adopted the corporate state and the fascist one-party system, thus getting Ad of encumbrances to the better organisation of the “new order” in Asia. Sooner or later, according to the intensity of the internal and external pressure, American bourgeois society will find its way to the same solution. Walter Lippman, that great democrat, complains bitterly that “Washington ... has not yet nerved itself to asking for the authority over capital and labor which such a program requires ... Little has been done with lucidity and courage to liberate the national effort from the endless restrictions and complications enforced by vested interests, pressure groups, political indifference and bureaucratic inertia.” He wants “a labor policy suited to the emergency.” He wants the government to ask for “the necessary authority to commandeer and compel.” (Lippman must restrain himself and have patience until after the election.) Yet for American capitalism the case is indeed urgent. It faces two enemies who may ally themselves.
Thus the war that we face now is a world war for world mastery. It is today that we can fully appreciate the meaning of the passage in the theses of the Third Congress (1921), which said: “The last war has been in one sense the European preface to the genuinely world-wide war which will decide the question of exclusive imperialist domination.” Thus the word is made flesh.
Fascism or Socialism
Capitalism after climbing great heights came to a stand-still and has now slipped from its foundations. Great states crash, communities of millions are torn up by the roots; shocks, catastrophes, sudden reversals and annihilations, drawn-out agonies, events unpredicted and unpredictable follow and will follow each other with bewildering speed. As we look at the film of history it seems that the operator has gone mad. But through it all the general line is clear, the objective hopelessness of the profit system, the statification of production by the imperialist state, the reduction of the living standards of the people, political and social servitude, the creation of “vast state-capitalist military trusts and syndicates,” the struggle for world mastery by “wholesale military decisions of a violent nature.”
How ridiculous is therefore the would-be Marxist who in 1940 discovers that Fascism is a “new” society; or the Marxist, who in the face of a whole society in violent motion, dives into his cupboard, emerges with a spotted flag on a little stick, and waving it with the clumsiness of the renegade, proposes to arrest the march to world catastrophe by – the defense of American democracy. Even rats desert the sinking ship and brave the uncharted sea.
No, Mr. Democrat. To the tremendous forces that are leading us to a total ruin we must oppose forces of like range and scope – the scores of millions of proletarians and the hundreds of millions of colonial peoples. The same mastery of the historical process which enabled Lenin to foretell the precise nature of the colossal transformations of our day enabled him to see also the “civil wars within the country ... national wars, the emancipation of the nationalities crushed by the imperialists ...” The one are as inevitable as the other. It is in those wars that lie the struggle for a new society, not in peering anxiously with a microscope at Fascism, seeking what is not there, nor in supporting the democratic imperialists against the fascists in their common road to ruin. Just as the democratic rights and privileges of bourgeois society followed on the rise in the productive forces under early capitalism, were unthinkable without that expansion, and are now disappearing with capitalism’s decline, so not only the extension but the very preservation of such democratic rights as exist can come only from the release of the productive forces, that is to say, by the struggle for international socialism, in irreconcilable conflict with imperialism in all its shapes and forms.
Stalemate in Europe and compromise, or a victory for Britain do not solve one single contradiction of capitalist society. The crisis grows deeper every day. War is only one manifestation of it. The post war will contain others. Even, remote possibility, a capitalist Britain dominating capitalist Europe, could no more escape ultimate statification and fascism than a victorious Italy escaped it after the last war. And let us not forget: a victorious Britain that dominates Europe will at last face not only Japan but also America on equal terms ...
Bourgeois society is on its way. It can turn back as easily as a rock tumbling down a mountainside can turn back. Fascism or Socialism, that is the choice. And every additional human being who sees that clearly brings the socialist society just so much nearer.
Footnotes
1. Which does not mean that Hitler may not attack Stalin tomorrow.
1. Before the age of nationalist states, treachery was common in war.
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<p class="title">C.L.R James 1941</p>
<h3>The Bolsheviks in the War</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni41_02">The New International</a>, Volume VII, Number 2 (Whole No. 51), February 1941 pp. 30-32, signed J.R. Johnson;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed and Marked up</span>: by Damon Maxwell.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>HERE IS ONE OF THE most valuable books published for many years. (<i>The Bolsheviks and the World War. The Origin of the Third International</i>, by Olga Hess Gankin and H. H. Fisher. 1940. xviii plus 856 pp. Stanford University Press. Calif. $6.00. Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, publication No. 15.) It is a collection of documents dealing with the origin of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1917, with special though not entire reference to international relations and war.</p>
<p>In this comprehensive record one can see from 1903 onward, as in a great work of art, the developing clashes between Bolshevism and Menshevism of all types, from Martov on the extreme left to Kautsky during the war. And in this bourgeois compilation, on every crucial occasion, the Bolsheviks are right. Lenin�s determination to cut the Bolsheviks away organizationally from these plagues is seen as the inescapable result of the political irreconcilability of the two tendencies. Take the conference of the Second International at Stuttgart in 1907. A majority of the Colonial Commission supported a resolution which concluded:</p>
<p class="quote">
For this purpose the delegates of socialist parties should propose to their governments that they conclude an international treaty in order to adopt a colonial statute by which they would protect the rights of the natives and which would be entirely guaranteed by the states which conclude this treaty.</p>
<p>All the betrayals, from 1914 to the present day, are inherent in the above. It was fought down and defeated after a sharp dispute. On militarism there was a still sterner struggle. Bebel, the aged leader of the German Social-Democracy, proposed that in case of a war threat, the workers must exert every effort to stop it. If they failed they must intervene in favor of the war�s early termination. Bebel said frankly that the adoption of fighting methods might prove fatal to the party life � the age-old illusion of moderates. Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Martov (for once) led a drastic opposition. Bebel was beaten but asked that the resolution should express the same thought in less provocative language �Menshevism all over.</p>
<p>Lenin, with his usual incision and daring, at that time already formulated the guiding line of his war policy. It was not a question of “preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.” Peace as a slogan he consistently denounced. Peace, but peace by revolution. He and Rosa Luxemburg tried to organize an illegal fraction in the Second International, directed against the leaders. They failed through lack of support. Here is a typical example of the “conspiratorial” and “wrecking” methods typical of Bolshevism. For our part we can only wish Lenin and Rosa had started earlier and had had more success. Conspiracy itself is no crime. What matters is against whom you conspire and for what.</p>
<p>In December, 1913, the Bolsheviks published their conditions for unification with other groups of the Russian Social-Democracy, then split into a dozen warring groups and factions. The most important was the insistence on full and unreserved recognition of the underground organization. The refusal to compromise on the question of underground work is seen in this volume in a new light. In June, 1914, Vandervelde visited Russia and interviewed Martov on the possibilities of unity. Martov “endeavored to concentrate Vandervelde�s attention,” to use his own words, on the “crux” of the matter. The Russian movement was not working in caves with masks on. They were working under “practically European conditions.” Even the <i>Pravda</i> officials (Bolsheviks) had received Vandervelde “pompously,” arranged interviews by telephone and posed with him for pictures in the office. Vandervelde therefore “should no longer take seriously the talks about our �liquidationism� and will understand the charlatan character of the talks about the underground organization!” Seven weeks after, the first World War fell like a hammer on the Russian proletariat. The Bolsheviks suffered terribly. But they retained at least the nucleus of an illegal organization, the party was trained and disciplined for the hard days that were ahead. Martov�s “European conditions” had vanished, like other Menshevik illusions.</p>
<p>The attempt to prove that Lenin was caught unawares by the war with its inevitable struggle for the socialist revolution is hardly worth serious refutation. One of his colleagues here relates that on the very first day of the war, Lenin was ready with a policy and plans for action against the bourgeoisie. On the very day, or the day after he reached Switzerland from Poland, he wrote his first thesis on the war. The opening lines can never be too often repeated.</p>
<p class="quote">
...The struggle for markets and the looting of countries the intention to deceive, disunite and kill off the proletarians of all countries, by instigating the hired slaves of one nation against the hired slaves of the other for the benefit of the bourgeoisie � such is the only real meaning and purpose of the war.
</p><p>The only way out was socialism. Turn the imperialist war in civil war. For what if not for socialism?</p>
<p>Lenin was “unfair” to Trotsky in his attacks on him during the war. Yet Lenin�s ferocity was due to Trotsky�s estimate of the different groups in Russia. Trotsky wrote that “the last speeches ... of Chkheidze ... and [his] voting undoubtedly represent steps forward toward political precision and revolutionary irreconcilability.” That Lenin could not under any circumstances tolerate. Chkheidze was a leading light of the Organization Committee, a grouping which showed its political precision and revolutionary irreconcilability against the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution from the day after Tsarism fell. How blame Lenin for the apparent vindictiveness of his attacks against Trotsky, who opposed the war as resolutely as Lenin did? Lenin under-stood the Chkheidzes of all shades. Trotsky he personally respected always, but precisely because of Trotsky�s great qualities, his constant efforts at unity with people whom Lenin knew to be rotten made him the special target of Lenin�s attacks. That is Bolshevism. As the revolution approached, Lenin became more and more sharp, more and more doctrinaire. The volume before us quotes Krupskaya: “Never, I think, was Vladimir Ilyitch in more irreconcilable mood than during the last months of 1916 and in the early months of 1917. He was profoundly convinced that the revolution was approaching.” For a short time during this period he wavered in the imminence of his expectation. The revolution itself cut short this fleeting mood of despondency.</p>
<p>But the irreconcilability of Bolshevism, its almost neurotic suspicion of theoretical weakness and deviation as an infallible sign of feebleness or betrayal in practice, went hand in hand with a vigor and a dialectical brilliance in polemic unsurpassed in political history. Lenin�s irreconcilability never consisted of shouting abstract principles and slogans from a comfortable chair. He abounded in exposition, illustration and illumination of principles in the concrete. He took an opponent�s argument and turned it inside out, showing all its roots and ramifications. After a reasonable time he called for decision and action. The time for debate was over. But he had debated. He debated not as an unwilling concession to “democracy” but to elucidate a question.</p>
<p> ... The purpose of the civil war is the seizure of banks, factories, shops, etc., the abolition of all opposition on the part of the bourgeoisie, the extermination of <i>its</i> army. But this aim can be attained <i>neither</i> from a purely military <i>nor</i> economic <i>nor</i> political standpoint without a simultaneous introduction and propagation of democracy among <i>our</i> troops and at <i>our</i> rear � an introduction and propagation which will develop in the course of that war. We tell the masses now (and the masses instinctively feel that we are right in this) : �They deceive you with the great slogans of democracy while leading you into war for the sake of imperialist capitalism. You must lead and you will lead a <i>really</i> democratic war against the bourgeoisie and for the purpose of actually carrying out democracy and socialism.� The present war unites and �fuses� the people into a coalition by means of force and financial dependence. <i>We</i>, in our civil war against the bourgeoisie, will not unite and consolidate the people by means of the power of the ruble, by the power of a club, by violence, but by a <i>voluntary</i> consent, by the consolidation of the toilers against the exploiters. For the bourgeoisie the proclamation of the equality of all nations has become a deception; for us it will be the truth which will facilitate and hasten the attraction to our side of all nations. Without actually organizing the relations between the nations on a <i>democratic basis</i> � and hence without granting freedom of secession � there can be no civil war of the workers and the toiling masses of all nations against the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>We must proceed toward a socialist and consistently democratic organization of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and against opportunism through the utilization of bourgeois democracy. There is no other path. A different �way out� is not a way out. Marxism knows no other way out, just as real life knows none. We must include in this policy free secession and free union among nations, rather than brush them aside or fear that their inclusion might �soil� the �purely� economic tasks.</p>
<p>There are a dozen such passages in any hundred pages of this volume. Much of the book is taken up with detailed reports of the three conferences at Zimmerwald, Kienthal and Stockholm. Lenin and his small band of Bolsheviks were from the start on the extreme left. They did not evolve to that position. At Zimmerwald, he made an attempt to win sup-port for a full revolutionary program from these pioneers in the struggle against the war. He had a moderate success. Then as the suffering began to stir the masses, some of the West European Mensheviks began to step gingerly towards some kind of protest against the carnage. As usual these leaders, organic opportunists, came towards the revolution only to corrupt it. One of them made a violent speech against Lenin at Kienthal. Said Grumbach, “This question reveals the whole of Lenin, together with the spectacles through which he looks at everything. The hunger demonstrations in Germany are supposed to be the beginning of revolutionary mass struggles! He actually dared to write this!... Does Lenin expect to aid the cause of international socialism, the cause of an early peace � which, as a matter of fact, does not interest him at all � by spreading these illusions?” Such are our realists. He bitterly admitted that Lenin and his friends had played an “important” role at Zimmerwald and a “<i>decisive</i>” role at Kienthal. But Lenin could do that only because of his Bolshevik habit of seeing everything through the spectacles of revolution. In 1917, the new alarmed Social-Democrats sought in force to come to the third Zimmerwald conference, to use the prestige of Zimmerwald as a medium for peace feelers. Lenin denounced the conference, a solitary vote against the vote of the whole Russian party. Soon, however, the party, as usual, agreed with him. One of the prominent figures at this conference in 1917, was Angelica Balabanoff. The conference was a failure, and Balabanoff explained why. It was the fault of the workers. “The masses themselves should begin to stir. This would require psychological and objective promises, which today � let us be honest about it � are absent. In Germany there is no visible mass action....” No, the good Angelica was no Bolshevik.</p>
<p>Such was Bolshevism in theory. But what kind of organization could flow from such a theory? There are some people who seriously believe that you can combine the theory of Lenin with the organization of Norman Thomas, that you can hold a party together against the whole weight of bourgeois society and the plausible sophistries of Menshevism, its agent, by allowing everyone to say and do, come and go, as he pleases. It is like putting an air-ace in a donkey-cart and asking him to show some speed.</p>
<p>The editing of the volume is a remarkably capable, and even from the Bolshevik point of view, a strictly honest piece of work. In their comments the authors show a curious tendency. They have entered so thoroughly into the spirit of their task that they write at times like Bolshevik supporters. They speak of one Menshevik group as adopting Marxist principles but carrying out opportunist policies�a judgment made without qualifying statements or quotation marks. They make other comments of permanent wisdom, e.g., that the interminable splits of which this book is one long record were due to the decline of the revolutionary mass movement. How many would-be Bolsheviks have lived for years in the movement and not understood that simple but profound truth! One thing is certain. This book will be studied by the bourgeoisie and by revolutionaries. The persons who will not study it are the liberal critics of Bolshevism. You will find as a rule that the less these “educated” critics know about Marx and Lenin, the bolder and more comprehensive is their criticism.</p>
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C.L.R James 1941
The Bolsheviks in the War
Source: The New International, Volume VII, Number 2 (Whole No. 51), February 1941 pp. 30-32, signed J.R. Johnson;
Transcribed and Marked up: by Damon Maxwell.
HERE IS ONE OF THE most valuable books published for many years. (The Bolsheviks and the World War. The Origin of the Third International, by Olga Hess Gankin and H. H. Fisher. 1940. xviii plus 856 pp. Stanford University Press. Calif. $6.00. Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, publication No. 15.) It is a collection of documents dealing with the origin of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1917, with special though not entire reference to international relations and war.
In this comprehensive record one can see from 1903 onward, as in a great work of art, the developing clashes between Bolshevism and Menshevism of all types, from Martov on the extreme left to Kautsky during the war. And in this bourgeois compilation, on every crucial occasion, the Bolsheviks are right. Lenin�s determination to cut the Bolsheviks away organizationally from these plagues is seen as the inescapable result of the political irreconcilability of the two tendencies. Take the conference of the Second International at Stuttgart in 1907. A majority of the Colonial Commission supported a resolution which concluded:
For this purpose the delegates of socialist parties should propose to their governments that they conclude an international treaty in order to adopt a colonial statute by which they would protect the rights of the natives and which would be entirely guaranteed by the states which conclude this treaty.
All the betrayals, from 1914 to the present day, are inherent in the above. It was fought down and defeated after a sharp dispute. On militarism there was a still sterner struggle. Bebel, the aged leader of the German Social-Democracy, proposed that in case of a war threat, the workers must exert every effort to stop it. If they failed they must intervene in favor of the war�s early termination. Bebel said frankly that the adoption of fighting methods might prove fatal to the party life � the age-old illusion of moderates. Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Martov (for once) led a drastic opposition. Bebel was beaten but asked that the resolution should express the same thought in less provocative language �Menshevism all over.
Lenin, with his usual incision and daring, at that time already formulated the guiding line of his war policy. It was not a question of “preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.” Peace as a slogan he consistently denounced. Peace, but peace by revolution. He and Rosa Luxemburg tried to organize an illegal fraction in the Second International, directed against the leaders. They failed through lack of support. Here is a typical example of the “conspiratorial” and “wrecking” methods typical of Bolshevism. For our part we can only wish Lenin and Rosa had started earlier and had had more success. Conspiracy itself is no crime. What matters is against whom you conspire and for what.
In December, 1913, the Bolsheviks published their conditions for unification with other groups of the Russian Social-Democracy, then split into a dozen warring groups and factions. The most important was the insistence on full and unreserved recognition of the underground organization. The refusal to compromise on the question of underground work is seen in this volume in a new light. In June, 1914, Vandervelde visited Russia and interviewed Martov on the possibilities of unity. Martov “endeavored to concentrate Vandervelde�s attention,” to use his own words, on the “crux” of the matter. The Russian movement was not working in caves with masks on. They were working under “practically European conditions.” Even the Pravda officials (Bolsheviks) had received Vandervelde “pompously,” arranged interviews by telephone and posed with him for pictures in the office. Vandervelde therefore “should no longer take seriously the talks about our �liquidationism� and will understand the charlatan character of the talks about the underground organization!” Seven weeks after, the first World War fell like a hammer on the Russian proletariat. The Bolsheviks suffered terribly. But they retained at least the nucleus of an illegal organization, the party was trained and disciplined for the hard days that were ahead. Martov�s “European conditions” had vanished, like other Menshevik illusions.
The attempt to prove that Lenin was caught unawares by the war with its inevitable struggle for the socialist revolution is hardly worth serious refutation. One of his colleagues here relates that on the very first day of the war, Lenin was ready with a policy and plans for action against the bourgeoisie. On the very day, or the day after he reached Switzerland from Poland, he wrote his first thesis on the war. The opening lines can never be too often repeated.
...The struggle for markets and the looting of countries the intention to deceive, disunite and kill off the proletarians of all countries, by instigating the hired slaves of one nation against the hired slaves of the other for the benefit of the bourgeoisie � such is the only real meaning and purpose of the war.
The only way out was socialism. Turn the imperialist war in civil war. For what if not for socialism?
Lenin was “unfair” to Trotsky in his attacks on him during the war. Yet Lenin�s ferocity was due to Trotsky�s estimate of the different groups in Russia. Trotsky wrote that “the last speeches ... of Chkheidze ... and [his] voting undoubtedly represent steps forward toward political precision and revolutionary irreconcilability.” That Lenin could not under any circumstances tolerate. Chkheidze was a leading light of the Organization Committee, a grouping which showed its political precision and revolutionary irreconcilability against the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution from the day after Tsarism fell. How blame Lenin for the apparent vindictiveness of his attacks against Trotsky, who opposed the war as resolutely as Lenin did? Lenin under-stood the Chkheidzes of all shades. Trotsky he personally respected always, but precisely because of Trotsky�s great qualities, his constant efforts at unity with people whom Lenin knew to be rotten made him the special target of Lenin�s attacks. That is Bolshevism. As the revolution approached, Lenin became more and more sharp, more and more doctrinaire. The volume before us quotes Krupskaya: “Never, I think, was Vladimir Ilyitch in more irreconcilable mood than during the last months of 1916 and in the early months of 1917. He was profoundly convinced that the revolution was approaching.” For a short time during this period he wavered in the imminence of his expectation. The revolution itself cut short this fleeting mood of despondency.
But the irreconcilability of Bolshevism, its almost neurotic suspicion of theoretical weakness and deviation as an infallible sign of feebleness or betrayal in practice, went hand in hand with a vigor and a dialectical brilliance in polemic unsurpassed in political history. Lenin�s irreconcilability never consisted of shouting abstract principles and slogans from a comfortable chair. He abounded in exposition, illustration and illumination of principles in the concrete. He took an opponent�s argument and turned it inside out, showing all its roots and ramifications. After a reasonable time he called for decision and action. The time for debate was over. But he had debated. He debated not as an unwilling concession to “democracy” but to elucidate a question.
... The purpose of the civil war is the seizure of banks, factories, shops, etc., the abolition of all opposition on the part of the bourgeoisie, the extermination of its army. But this aim can be attained neither from a purely military nor economic nor political standpoint without a simultaneous introduction and propagation of democracy among our troops and at our rear � an introduction and propagation which will develop in the course of that war. We tell the masses now (and the masses instinctively feel that we are right in this) : �They deceive you with the great slogans of democracy while leading you into war for the sake of imperialist capitalism. You must lead and you will lead a really democratic war against the bourgeoisie and for the purpose of actually carrying out democracy and socialism.� The present war unites and �fuses� the people into a coalition by means of force and financial dependence. We, in our civil war against the bourgeoisie, will not unite and consolidate the people by means of the power of the ruble, by the power of a club, by violence, but by a voluntary consent, by the consolidation of the toilers against the exploiters. For the bourgeoisie the proclamation of the equality of all nations has become a deception; for us it will be the truth which will facilitate and hasten the attraction to our side of all nations. Without actually organizing the relations between the nations on a democratic basis � and hence without granting freedom of secession � there can be no civil war of the workers and the toiling masses of all nations against the bourgeoisie.
We must proceed toward a socialist and consistently democratic organization of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and against opportunism through the utilization of bourgeois democracy. There is no other path. A different �way out� is not a way out. Marxism knows no other way out, just as real life knows none. We must include in this policy free secession and free union among nations, rather than brush them aside or fear that their inclusion might �soil� the �purely� economic tasks.
There are a dozen such passages in any hundred pages of this volume. Much of the book is taken up with detailed reports of the three conferences at Zimmerwald, Kienthal and Stockholm. Lenin and his small band of Bolsheviks were from the start on the extreme left. They did not evolve to that position. At Zimmerwald, he made an attempt to win sup-port for a full revolutionary program from these pioneers in the struggle against the war. He had a moderate success. Then as the suffering began to stir the masses, some of the West European Mensheviks began to step gingerly towards some kind of protest against the carnage. As usual these leaders, organic opportunists, came towards the revolution only to corrupt it. One of them made a violent speech against Lenin at Kienthal. Said Grumbach, “This question reveals the whole of Lenin, together with the spectacles through which he looks at everything. The hunger demonstrations in Germany are supposed to be the beginning of revolutionary mass struggles! He actually dared to write this!... Does Lenin expect to aid the cause of international socialism, the cause of an early peace � which, as a matter of fact, does not interest him at all � by spreading these illusions?” Such are our realists. He bitterly admitted that Lenin and his friends had played an “important” role at Zimmerwald and a “decisive” role at Kienthal. But Lenin could do that only because of his Bolshevik habit of seeing everything through the spectacles of revolution. In 1917, the new alarmed Social-Democrats sought in force to come to the third Zimmerwald conference, to use the prestige of Zimmerwald as a medium for peace feelers. Lenin denounced the conference, a solitary vote against the vote of the whole Russian party. Soon, however, the party, as usual, agreed with him. One of the prominent figures at this conference in 1917, was Angelica Balabanoff. The conference was a failure, and Balabanoff explained why. It was the fault of the workers. “The masses themselves should begin to stir. This would require psychological and objective promises, which today � let us be honest about it � are absent. In Germany there is no visible mass action....” No, the good Angelica was no Bolshevik.
Such was Bolshevism in theory. But what kind of organization could flow from such a theory? There are some people who seriously believe that you can combine the theory of Lenin with the organization of Norman Thomas, that you can hold a party together against the whole weight of bourgeois society and the plausible sophistries of Menshevism, its agent, by allowing everyone to say and do, come and go, as he pleases. It is like putting an air-ace in a donkey-cart and asking him to show some speed.
The editing of the volume is a remarkably capable, and even from the Bolshevik point of view, a strictly honest piece of work. In their comments the authors show a curious tendency. They have entered so thoroughly into the spirit of their task that they write at times like Bolshevik supporters. They speak of one Menshevik group as adopting Marxist principles but carrying out opportunist policies�a judgment made without qualifying statements or quotation marks. They make other comments of permanent wisdom, e.g., that the interminable splits of which this book is one long record were due to the decline of the revolutionary mass movement. How many would-be Bolsheviks have lived for years in the movement and not understood that simple but profound truth! One thing is certain. This book will be studied by the bourgeoisie and by revolutionaries. The persons who will not study it are the liberal critics of Bolshevism. You will find as a rule that the less these “educated” critics know about Marx and Lenin, the bolder and more comprehensive is their criticism.
C L R James Internet Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h3>The Negro Question</h3>
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<h4>“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx</h4>
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<h1>The Destiny of the Negro</h1>
<h4>An Historical Overview</h4>
<h3>(November/December 1939)</h3>
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<p class="info">Originally published as a series in <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, Vol. III Nos. 89, 91 & 92, 21 November, 1 & 9 December 1939.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (<em>ed.</em>), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 90–99.<br>
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<p class="updat"><strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_89" target="new">Vol. III Nos. 89</a>, 21 November, p. 3.</p>
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<p class="c"><small><strong>J.R. Johnson is giving a course on the <em>Destiny of the Negro</em> at the Marxist School, 135 West 33 Street, New York City, each Tuesday evening for the next six weeks, beginning on Tuesday, November 31. To facilitate the study of Negro history, his column will outline each Saturday the subject of the following Tuesday’s lecture. The series begins below.</strong></small></p>
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<p class="fst">To know where the Negro is going one must know where the Negro comes from. Capitalist history and capitalist science, taken as a whole, are designed to serve the needs of capitalist profit. Their studies of the Negro and his history have aimed at justifying his exploitation and degradation. They have excused the slave trade and slavery and the present position of Negroes as outcasts in capitalist society, on the ground that the Negro in Africa had shown himself incapable of developing civilization, that he lived a savage and barbarous life, and that such elements of culture as Africa showed in the past and shows today were directly due to the influence of Arabs and Europeans. All of this, from beginning to end, is lies.<br>
</p>
<h3>I. Negroes in African Civilization</h3>
<p class="fst">First of all, the capitalist scientist’s attempts to isolate the “pure” Negro from other African peoples is admitted today to be pure rubbish. Though there are broad differentiations, the Negroes in Africa are inextricably mixed. There are people of Hamitic stock who derive either from the Near East or the outermost peninsula of Africa (today British and Italian Somaliland). There are the short-statured Bushmen in the South and the supposedly “pure” Negro is found on the West Coast alone. It is as if a scientist said that the “pure” European was found only on the coast of Portugal. The truth is that even the Egyptians had a strong Negroid strain. There were Negro dynasties in Egypt. Queen Nefertiti, one of the great conquerors and rulers of Egyptian history, was reputedly a Negress. Among the modern Ethiopian ruling class can be seen types, ranging from the purely Semitic through the Mulatto to types indistinguishable from the Negro.</p>
<p>The chief object of these scientists is of course to deprive the Negro of any share in the famous civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia. Today, ingenious Negroes call the Egyptians “black men” and by this means place all Egyptian civilization to the credit of the Negro. Racial theories of this type, whether from white capitalist centers of learning or fanatical Negro nationalists, are neither history nor science, but political propaganda. This much is clear and for the time being sufficient: the Egyptian civilization began where it did and flourished because of favorable climactic and geographical conditions, and the Negroes had a great deal to do with it.</p>
<p>The attempt to deduce from history that Negroes are subhuman continually breaks down. The Bushmen are among the most primitive of peoples. Yet their drawings have been universally hailed as some of the most marvelous examples of artistic skill. And since when have monkeys been given to producing great artists? In South Africa the ruins of Zimbabwe are evidence of a great ancient civilization. Whose? Nobody knows, but numerous professors are racking their brains to prove that, whoever created it, it wasn’t Negroes. Much good may it do them. They will not stop the world revolution that way.</p>
<p>But the greatest stumbling block in the way of the anti-Negro historians are the empires of Ghana, Songhay, Mos, and others, which flourished in the basin of the Niger. People who sneer at the Marxist phrase “bourgeois ideology” simply have no conception of the dishonesty, corruption, and scope of capitalist lies and propaganda.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Ghana Empire</h4>
<p class="fst">For nearly a thousand years (300–1300), between the River Senegal and the Niger flourished the Ghana empire. We do not know how it was founded. Some people say that a Hamitic people from East Africa migrated there. Others say that they came from Syria. What we do know is that this empire at its zenith embraced many millions of people. It produced wool, cotton, silk, velvet; it traded in copper and gold. Many houses in the chief towns were built of stone. At one time its army consisted of 200,000 soldiers. Its schools, its lawyers, its scholars were famous all over the Mediterranean area. And this empire for nearly a thousand years was an empire of black men, of Negroes.</p>
<p>Another famous empire was that of Songhay (600–1500) with its dynasty of Askias. Askia Mohammed I (1493–1528) was not only a great ruler. He surrounded himself with scholars. Timbuktu and Gao were the centers of trade and learning.</p>
<p>The latest edition of the <strong>Encyclopedia Britannica</strong> says of these kingdoms,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Long before the rise of Islam, the peoples of this Northern part of West Africa, consisting largely, as has been seen, of open plains watered by large and navigable rivers, had developed well-organized states, of which the oldest known, Ghana (or Ghanata) is thought to have been founded in the third century AD. Later arose the empire of Melle and the more famous and more powerful Songhoi (Songhoy) empire ... Marking the importance, commercial and political, of these states, large cities were founded.”</p>
<p class="fst">The ideas that Islamic influences founded these states is now exploded, and this is admitted by the Britannica writer. He follows, however, the theory of “pure” and “impure” Negroes. The Negroes on the coast were “pure.” But even these, he notes, founded civilizations: “... the Yoruba, the Ashanti, the Dahomi, and the Beni created powerful and well organized kingdoms.”</p>
<p>The Beni, better know as the Benin, are famous today for their bronze sculpture, of artistic merit and technical skill unsurpassed by any people of ancient or modern times. When after many centuries they were “discovered” in 1891, the impudent imperialists at once attributed these bronzes to “Portuguese” influence. That theory has now joined the other in the waste-paper basket.<br>
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<h4>The High-Water Mark</h4>
<p class="fst">West Africa was the high-water mark. But all over Africa, organized civilizations flourished. The first Portuguese to visit East Africa some five hundred years ago did not remark any noticeable differences between the Africans and themselves; while less than fifty years ago, Emil Torday, the Belgian explorer, discovered in Central Africa the Bushongo people. A wise king, as far back as the seventeenth century, had prohibited all contact with Europeans, and, away in his interior, the tribe had survived. Torday found a free and happy people, living in villages well laid out, the huts beautifully decorated, their sculpture, textiles, and household objects of a rare beauty. Political organization was a perfect democracy. The king had all the honors, the council all the power. Representatives, two of them always women, were both regional and vocational. Today they are degraded savages.</p>
<p>Torday states that before the coming of the Europeans such civilizations, perfectly adapted to their environment, were widespread over Africa. The picture of warring tribes and savage cannibals is all lies.</p>
<p>As late as 1906, Frobenius traveling in the Belgian Congo, could still see the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“And on all this flourishing material, civilization then was abloom; here the bloom on ripe fruit both tender and lustrous; the gestures, manners, and customs of a whole people, from the youngest to the oldest, alike in the families of the princes and the well-to-do, of the slaves, so naturally dignified and refined in the smallest detail. I know no northern race who can bear comparison with such a uniform level of education as is found among the natives.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Slave Trade Destroys Africa</h4>
<p class="fst">It was the slave trade that destroyed Africa, the depredations of Arabs and European imperialists. They ravaged the continent for three centuries. What the travellers of the nineteenth century discovered was the wreck and ruin of what had existed four centuries before, and even then enough remained to disprove the ideas of the subhuman Negro. Africa is a vast continent and many millions of people in varying degrees of civilization have lived there over the centuries. There was much ignorance, barbarism, and superstition, but the history and achievements of Negroes in art, literature, politics, empire-building, until Arab and European imperialism fell upon them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is an incontrovertible refutation of the mountains of lies and slander built up by capitalist apologists in defense of capitalist barbarism. Africans worked in iron countless generations ago and many historians claim that it was they who introduced metal work to Europe and Asia.</p>
<p>Capitalism developing in Europe precipitated the discovery of America and sent its navigators and explorers to Africa. In the sixteenth century began the use of Negro slaves in the plantations of America. British capitalism drew one of the most powerful sources of wealth from the slave trade. The greatness of Liverpool, the second city of Great Britain, was founded on the trade. The wealth of the French bourgeoisie was based upon the slave trade. The rise of modern Europe is inexplicable without a knowledge of the economic ramifications of the slave trade.<br>
</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h3>Bibliography</h3>
<p class="note">For a useful sketch of the early history of Africa see the opening chapters of Carter Woodson, <strong>The Negro in Our History</strong>. For more detailed study the reader will have to consult the writings of Emil Torday, Frobenius and Maurice Delafosse. Admirable material can be found in Nancy Cunard’s <strong>Negro</strong>. For easily obtainable material on slavery and European capitalism see <strong>Africa and the Rise of Capitalism</strong>, by Wilson E. Williams (The Harvard University Studies in the Social Sciences, Harvard University, Washington, D.C.) and the <strong>Black Jacobins</strong> by C.L.R. James, Chapters 1–3, particularly pages 35–41.</p>
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<p class="updat"><strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_91" target="new">Vol. III No. 91</a>, 1 December 1939, p. 3.</p>
<h3>II. Emancipation from Slavery and the Destruction of Feudalism</h3>
<p class="fst">First of all, what is feudalism? That is not easy to answer in a sentence. It is a form of society based on landed property and simple methods of cultivation.</p>
<p>They have a landowning class which rules; at the other end of the social scale you have the serfs, who get a part of their produce to feed themselves and contribute their surplus to the landowning aristocracy. Side by side with the landowning aristocr]<br>
acy is the clergy. The main characteristic of social life in feudal society is the fact that the aristocracy and clergy have great privileges, and the serfs and others have very few or none. This is not a question of custom, but a question of law. (In capitalist society, in theory, all men are equal before the law.) Feudal economy in Europe did not in any way have contact with Africa. It was essentially a subsistence economy; that is to say, it produced what it needed to feed and clothe itself. About the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, there grew up in Europe a new class, the merchants. These were the first real capitalists.<br>
</p>
<h4>Europe’s First Dealings with Africa</h4>
<p class="fst">Soon their business began to be of great importance in the state. With increasing wealth, they gradually changed the economies of certain countries from producing chiefly food and the simple things that the community needed, to the manufacture of goods on a large scale. This particular class was concerned as much with production for trade in other parts of the country and abroad as for use at home. It was this drive for trade, for raw materials, for markets, and for profit, that created the necessity for expansion, and in the fifteenth century finally sent expeditions to America and to Africa. Thus it was the development of capitalism in Europe that brought the millions of Africans into contact with Western civilization.</p>
<p>Capitalism demands above all else landless laborers. In Europe the capitalist class created a class of landless laborers by driving them off the land whenever possible, for if the serf or the peasant had land on which to work or earn his keep for himself, naturally he would not hire himself out to any capitalist for long hours and small pay.</p>
<p>When the capitalists discovered America, they tried to use the Indian as landless laborers. But the Indians died. There was so much land that it was impossible to get landless laborers from among the early colonists. Because of this, the capitalists in Europe and their agents in the colonies brought millions of Negroes as slaves to America and thereby provided the colonies with the necessary labor. By this means capitalism enormously expanded its capacity for making profit.</p>
<p>By means of these vast profits that they made at home and abroad, the capitalists in Britain and France, for example not only built up tremendous trade and business, but with the profits accumulated, they began to organize factories and extend the application of science to industry. The standard of civilization rose, and the power and profits of the capitalists increased also. But the governments of France and Britain still continued to be under the domination of the old feudal nobility. When came much trouble. [<em>sic!</em>]<br>
</p>
<h4>Capitalists Make Their Revolution</h4>
<p class="fst">Trade and factories were more important than land. Yet the rulers of the countries were princes, dukes, lords, bishops, and archbishops. That was all very well when they had the economic power, but now it had passed from them. Not only were they proud and arrogant, but they tried to keep the laws and the government suitable to land ownership when, owing to the shift in the economic basis of the country, the laws and the government should have been organized to help trade and industry. It was no use pointing out to them that they should give way. It took revolutions to do it.</p>
<p>In Britain there were two revolutions. One took place in the seventeenth century and lasted off and on for nearly sixty years. In France, revolution began in 1789, and by the time it was over the power of the aristocracy and the clergy was wiped away completely.</p>
<p>What part did the Negroes play in all this? The capitalists who first profited by slavery were commercial capitalists and the planters in the colonies. These planters were partly capitalist in that they traded their produce far and wide, and partly feudal in that they kept their slaves in a state of subjection comparable to the old serfdom and built up a type of feudal society. But as capitalism developed, these commercial traders and the plantation owners collaborated closely with the aristocracy, and many of them became aristocrats themselves. By the time the industrial capitalists were busy developing their factories, the aristocrats, the planters, and the commercial capitalists formed, roughly speaking, one reactionary group.<br>
</p>
<h4>An End to Slavery</h4>
<p class="fst">Now one of the things that the industrial capitalists wanted to do was to finish with slavery. It was too expensive. Slave production was backward compared with modern methods and more highly developed capitalist production in agriculture. So that you had on one side the industrial capitalists determined to destroy the slave power of the aristocrats, the commercial capitalists, and the planters. It was in this political struggle that Negroes got their chance to fight for their freedom. They played a small part in the English political struggle, a larger part in the French struggle, and a decisive part in the American struggle. This was not accidental. A few figures will show us why.</p>
<p>In 1789 British colonial trade was five million pounds out of an export trade of 27 million. Britain had lost America in 1783 and had few slaves in the West Indies. We can therefore see that slavery was playing a very minor part in British economy. The British Negroes on the whole played little part in the destruction of British feudalism.<br>
</p>
<h4>Negro in the French Revolution</h4>
<p class="fst">In France in 1789 the export trade was 17 million pounds. The colonial trade was 11 million pounds – two thirds of it. The question of abolition was therefore of tremendous importance. It took a prominent part in the revolution. The Negroes fought magnificently and, being thousands of miles away, gained their independence. This is how Haiti came into being.</p>
<p>In America in 1861 this combination of the commercial bourgeoisie and the plantation owners was not a minor part of American economy. It was a major part. The combination was not a colony thousands of miles away. It occupied hundreds of thousands of square miles inside the country. To defeat this combination took the greatest Civil War in history, and the Negro’s share was far greater than it had been in France.</p>
<p>This is the way we must look at history. People who only see black men in general being oppressed by white men in general, and are unable to trace the historical dialectic, do not understand anything and therefore cannot lead. That is the great value of being a genuine Marxist, an adherent of the Fourth International. You can study history and understand where we are today and why and where we are going tomorrow.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h3>Bibliography</h3>
<p class="note"><strong>The Black Jacobins</strong>, by C.L.R. James.</p>
<p class="note"><strong>History of Negro Revolt</strong>, by C.L.R. James.</p>
<p class="note">The series of articles by <a href="../../../../novack/index.htm" target="new">George Novack</a> which is now running in <strong>The New International</strong>. They are the only Marxist study of the pre-Civil War period and they are invaluable.</p>
<p class="note">The relevant chapters of Beard’ <strong>The Rise of American Civilization</strong>.</p>
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<p class="updat"><strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_92" target="new">Vol. III No. 92</a>, 9 December 1939, p. 3.</p>
<h3>III. The Bourgeois Revolutions and Imperialism</h3>
<p class="fst">Let us for a moment review our analysis of the Negro in his contact with Western civilization ... We established that the Negroes in Africa had built high if simple civilizations up to the fourteenth century. It was necessary to emphasize this, to destroy the imperialist – fostered conception of Africa as a land of eternal savagery and barbarism from which it has to some degree been raised by the gentle hand of the European invaders.</p>
<p>European contact with Africa began with the rise of European imperialism. A new continent, America, was discovered and Africa, which had always lain within easy reach of European ships, was penetrated. Commercial capitalism developed the mercantile system, which needed labor in the American tropical plantation. When the Indians proved unsatisfactory, slaves were brought from Africa. On the basis of the wealth created by the slave trade and the colonial trade directly dependent upon it, the commercial capitalists of Europe and America built up from their ranks a new section of the capitalist class, the industrial capitalists. These, whose chief function was the application of large-scale organization and science to industry, came inevitably into conflict with the planters: slave labor was too expensive, too backward for the new methods. This economic conflict was the basis for political conflict. The commercial bourgeoisie and the feudal aristocracy still had the political power their former economic predominance had given them, and for the new rising class of industrial bourgeoisie, to wrest it from them meant a struggle.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Bourgeois Revolution</h4>
<p class="fst">This was a progressive struggle. It took place in great revolutions in France and in America, and in Britain it took not only the threat but the actual beginning of a revolution to break the power of the feudal aristocrats. In all these the Negro played a tremendous part. In America he was given the opportunity of doing this because his emancipation was in the interest of the Northern industrialist bourgeoisie. All these great movements of politics thrust the color question into subordination and unimportance. It is economics and politics, not color, that are decisive in history.</p>
<p>To see what happened after the industrialist bourgeoisie took power, it would be best to follow the course of one country, say Great Britain. The industrialists seized power in 1832. They struck a terrific blow at the landed aristocracy in 1847 by abolishing the “corn laws.” Through these laws the feudal aristocrats had artificially maintained the price of grain by restricting foreign competition with the produce of their fields. Rising with the industrial bourgeoisie was a new class – the industrial working class, the proletariat. And by 1848 the Chartist Movement of the workers was feeling its way towards revolution.</p>
<p>But in this year began a great era of prosperity. So prosperous was the industrial bourgeoisie, thanks to the home market its victory had given it, that it treated the idea of colonies in Africa with scorn. Disraeli wrote in 1866 that the British had all that they wanted in Asia. For, he continued, “what is the use of these colonial deadweights, the West Indian and West Africa colonies? ... Leave the Canadians to govern themselves; recall the African squadrons; give up the settlements on the southeast coast of Africa and we shall make a saving which will at the same time enable us to build ships and have a good budget.” In the year he wrote, only one-tenth or less of Africa was in the hands of European imperialists. They had devastated the continent, but now they wanted the slaves no longer. For a while it almost seemed that Africa would be left in peace.<br>
</p>
<h4>A New Need for Africa</h4>
<p class="fst">But capitalist production lead inevitable to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the corresponding increasing poverty of the masses. The workers cannot buy what they produce. The capitalists must find abroad new markets, sources of new materials, and places to invest their capital.</p>
<p>In 1885 Jules Ferry, the French statesman, used the famous words:</p>
<p class="quoteb">Colonies for rich countries are one of the most lucrative methods of utilizing capital ... I say that France, which is glutted with capital, has a reason for looking on this side of the colonial question ... European consumption is saturated: it is necessary to raise new masses of consumer in other parts of the globe, else we shall put modern society into bankruptcy and prepare for social liquidation with the dawn of the twentieth century ...</p>
<p class="fst">Cecil Rhodes once told a friend, “If you want to free civilization, become an imperialist.” With the glut in the home market, colonies were no longer “deadweight.” While in 1880 only one-tenth of Africa was in the hands of European imperialists; by 1900 less than one-tenth of the land remained in the hands of the African people. That saturation of European consumption to which Ferry referred and the part that Africa played can be shown by the following simple calculation. Great Britain has invested abroad roughly twenty billion dollars. The total investment in Africa from all sources is roughly six billion dollars, and of this almost five billion is in British territory. That is to say, almost one-fourth of British foreign investment is to be found in Africa.</p>
<p>But this process of “saturation” that forced the imperialists to expand to the colonies has now itself spread to the colonies. The increasing accumulation of great wealth in the hands of the few and the increasing poverty of the masses is now not only a European but world phenomenon. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is bankrupt. The war of 1914–1918, the worldwide crisis since 1929, the new world war of 1939 – these are items from the ledger of imperialism. Only the overthrowing of the bankrupt class by a new class, only the triumphant proletarian revolution, can balance the budget of civilization.</p>
<p>And in the same way as the Negro played an important role in the revolution of the industrialists in unseating the feudal aristocracy, so tomorrow the Negroes will play a decisive role in the struggle between finance-capital and the working class. Against his declared intentions, Lincoln was forced to free the slaves. Revolutionary France had to recognize the revolution of the Santo Domingo blacks. In the stress of economic and political conflict, color was forgotten and the rising class took help wherever it could get it. The Negroes in Africa and America, wherever they are the most oppressed of people, are going to strike even more deadly blows for freedom, against the capitalist system of exploitation, in alliance with the white workers of the world.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
“Labor with a White Skin Cannot Emancipate Itself Where Labor with a Black Skin Is Branded” – Karl Marx
The Destiny of the Negro
An Historical Overview
(November/December 1939)
Originally published as a series in Socialist Appeal, Vol. III Nos. 89, 91 & 92, 21 November, 1 & 9 December 1939.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 90–99.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Socialist Appeal, Vol. III Nos. 89, 21 November, p. 3.
J.R. Johnson is giving a course on the Destiny of the Negro at the Marxist School, 135 West 33 Street, New York City, each Tuesday evening for the next six weeks, beginning on Tuesday, November 31. To facilitate the study of Negro history, his column will outline each Saturday the subject of the following Tuesday’s lecture. The series begins below.
To know where the Negro is going one must know where the Negro comes from. Capitalist history and capitalist science, taken as a whole, are designed to serve the needs of capitalist profit. Their studies of the Negro and his history have aimed at justifying his exploitation and degradation. They have excused the slave trade and slavery and the present position of Negroes as outcasts in capitalist society, on the ground that the Negro in Africa had shown himself incapable of developing civilization, that he lived a savage and barbarous life, and that such elements of culture as Africa showed in the past and shows today were directly due to the influence of Arabs and Europeans. All of this, from beginning to end, is lies.
I. Negroes in African Civilization
First of all, the capitalist scientist’s attempts to isolate the “pure” Negro from other African peoples is admitted today to be pure rubbish. Though there are broad differentiations, the Negroes in Africa are inextricably mixed. There are people of Hamitic stock who derive either from the Near East or the outermost peninsula of Africa (today British and Italian Somaliland). There are the short-statured Bushmen in the South and the supposedly “pure” Negro is found on the West Coast alone. It is as if a scientist said that the “pure” European was found only on the coast of Portugal. The truth is that even the Egyptians had a strong Negroid strain. There were Negro dynasties in Egypt. Queen Nefertiti, one of the great conquerors and rulers of Egyptian history, was reputedly a Negress. Among the modern Ethiopian ruling class can be seen types, ranging from the purely Semitic through the Mulatto to types indistinguishable from the Negro.
The chief object of these scientists is of course to deprive the Negro of any share in the famous civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia. Today, ingenious Negroes call the Egyptians “black men” and by this means place all Egyptian civilization to the credit of the Negro. Racial theories of this type, whether from white capitalist centers of learning or fanatical Negro nationalists, are neither history nor science, but political propaganda. This much is clear and for the time being sufficient: the Egyptian civilization began where it did and flourished because of favorable climactic and geographical conditions, and the Negroes had a great deal to do with it.
The attempt to deduce from history that Negroes are subhuman continually breaks down. The Bushmen are among the most primitive of peoples. Yet their drawings have been universally hailed as some of the most marvelous examples of artistic skill. And since when have monkeys been given to producing great artists? In South Africa the ruins of Zimbabwe are evidence of a great ancient civilization. Whose? Nobody knows, but numerous professors are racking their brains to prove that, whoever created it, it wasn’t Negroes. Much good may it do them. They will not stop the world revolution that way.
But the greatest stumbling block in the way of the anti-Negro historians are the empires of Ghana, Songhay, Mos, and others, which flourished in the basin of the Niger. People who sneer at the Marxist phrase “bourgeois ideology” simply have no conception of the dishonesty, corruption, and scope of capitalist lies and propaganda.
The Ghana Empire
For nearly a thousand years (300–1300), between the River Senegal and the Niger flourished the Ghana empire. We do not know how it was founded. Some people say that a Hamitic people from East Africa migrated there. Others say that they came from Syria. What we do know is that this empire at its zenith embraced many millions of people. It produced wool, cotton, silk, velvet; it traded in copper and gold. Many houses in the chief towns were built of stone. At one time its army consisted of 200,000 soldiers. Its schools, its lawyers, its scholars were famous all over the Mediterranean area. And this empire for nearly a thousand years was an empire of black men, of Negroes.
Another famous empire was that of Songhay (600–1500) with its dynasty of Askias. Askia Mohammed I (1493–1528) was not only a great ruler. He surrounded himself with scholars. Timbuktu and Gao were the centers of trade and learning.
The latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica says of these kingdoms,
“Long before the rise of Islam, the peoples of this Northern part of West Africa, consisting largely, as has been seen, of open plains watered by large and navigable rivers, had developed well-organized states, of which the oldest known, Ghana (or Ghanata) is thought to have been founded in the third century AD. Later arose the empire of Melle and the more famous and more powerful Songhoi (Songhoy) empire ... Marking the importance, commercial and political, of these states, large cities were founded.”
The ideas that Islamic influences founded these states is now exploded, and this is admitted by the Britannica writer. He follows, however, the theory of “pure” and “impure” Negroes. The Negroes on the coast were “pure.” But even these, he notes, founded civilizations: “... the Yoruba, the Ashanti, the Dahomi, and the Beni created powerful and well organized kingdoms.”
The Beni, better know as the Benin, are famous today for their bronze sculpture, of artistic merit and technical skill unsurpassed by any people of ancient or modern times. When after many centuries they were “discovered” in 1891, the impudent imperialists at once attributed these bronzes to “Portuguese” influence. That theory has now joined the other in the waste-paper basket.
The High-Water Mark
West Africa was the high-water mark. But all over Africa, organized civilizations flourished. The first Portuguese to visit East Africa some five hundred years ago did not remark any noticeable differences between the Africans and themselves; while less than fifty years ago, Emil Torday, the Belgian explorer, discovered in Central Africa the Bushongo people. A wise king, as far back as the seventeenth century, had prohibited all contact with Europeans, and, away in his interior, the tribe had survived. Torday found a free and happy people, living in villages well laid out, the huts beautifully decorated, their sculpture, textiles, and household objects of a rare beauty. Political organization was a perfect democracy. The king had all the honors, the council all the power. Representatives, two of them always women, were both regional and vocational. Today they are degraded savages.
Torday states that before the coming of the Europeans such civilizations, perfectly adapted to their environment, were widespread over Africa. The picture of warring tribes and savage cannibals is all lies.
As late as 1906, Frobenius traveling in the Belgian Congo, could still see the following:
“And on all this flourishing material, civilization then was abloom; here the bloom on ripe fruit both tender and lustrous; the gestures, manners, and customs of a whole people, from the youngest to the oldest, alike in the families of the princes and the well-to-do, of the slaves, so naturally dignified and refined in the smallest detail. I know no northern race who can bear comparison with such a uniform level of education as is found among the natives.”
Slave Trade Destroys Africa
It was the slave trade that destroyed Africa, the depredations of Arabs and European imperialists. They ravaged the continent for three centuries. What the travellers of the nineteenth century discovered was the wreck and ruin of what had existed four centuries before, and even then enough remained to disprove the ideas of the subhuman Negro. Africa is a vast continent and many millions of people in varying degrees of civilization have lived there over the centuries. There was much ignorance, barbarism, and superstition, but the history and achievements of Negroes in art, literature, politics, empire-building, until Arab and European imperialism fell upon them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is an incontrovertible refutation of the mountains of lies and slander built up by capitalist apologists in defense of capitalist barbarism. Africans worked in iron countless generations ago and many historians claim that it was they who introduced metal work to Europe and Asia.
Capitalism developing in Europe precipitated the discovery of America and sent its navigators and explorers to Africa. In the sixteenth century began the use of Negro slaves in the plantations of America. British capitalism drew one of the most powerful sources of wealth from the slave trade. The greatness of Liverpool, the second city of Great Britain, was founded on the trade. The wealth of the French bourgeoisie was based upon the slave trade. The rise of modern Europe is inexplicable without a knowledge of the economic ramifications of the slave trade.
* * *
Bibliography
For a useful sketch of the early history of Africa see the opening chapters of Carter Woodson, The Negro in Our History. For more detailed study the reader will have to consult the writings of Emil Torday, Frobenius and Maurice Delafosse. Admirable material can be found in Nancy Cunard’s Negro. For easily obtainable material on slavery and European capitalism see Africa and the Rise of Capitalism, by Wilson E. Williams (The Harvard University Studies in the Social Sciences, Harvard University, Washington, D.C.) and the Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, Chapters 1–3, particularly pages 35–41.
Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 91, 1 December 1939, p. 3.
II. Emancipation from Slavery and the Destruction of Feudalism
First of all, what is feudalism? That is not easy to answer in a sentence. It is a form of society based on landed property and simple methods of cultivation.
They have a landowning class which rules; at the other end of the social scale you have the serfs, who get a part of their produce to feed themselves and contribute their surplus to the landowning aristocracy. Side by side with the landowning aristocr]
acy is the clergy. The main characteristic of social life in feudal society is the fact that the aristocracy and clergy have great privileges, and the serfs and others have very few or none. This is not a question of custom, but a question of law. (In capitalist society, in theory, all men are equal before the law.) Feudal economy in Europe did not in any way have contact with Africa. It was essentially a subsistence economy; that is to say, it produced what it needed to feed and clothe itself. About the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, there grew up in Europe a new class, the merchants. These were the first real capitalists.
Europe’s First Dealings with Africa
Soon their business began to be of great importance in the state. With increasing wealth, they gradually changed the economies of certain countries from producing chiefly food and the simple things that the community needed, to the manufacture of goods on a large scale. This particular class was concerned as much with production for trade in other parts of the country and abroad as for use at home. It was this drive for trade, for raw materials, for markets, and for profit, that created the necessity for expansion, and in the fifteenth century finally sent expeditions to America and to Africa. Thus it was the development of capitalism in Europe that brought the millions of Africans into contact with Western civilization.
Capitalism demands above all else landless laborers. In Europe the capitalist class created a class of landless laborers by driving them off the land whenever possible, for if the serf or the peasant had land on which to work or earn his keep for himself, naturally he would not hire himself out to any capitalist for long hours and small pay.
When the capitalists discovered America, they tried to use the Indian as landless laborers. But the Indians died. There was so much land that it was impossible to get landless laborers from among the early colonists. Because of this, the capitalists in Europe and their agents in the colonies brought millions of Negroes as slaves to America and thereby provided the colonies with the necessary labor. By this means capitalism enormously expanded its capacity for making profit.
By means of these vast profits that they made at home and abroad, the capitalists in Britain and France, for example not only built up tremendous trade and business, but with the profits accumulated, they began to organize factories and extend the application of science to industry. The standard of civilization rose, and the power and profits of the capitalists increased also. But the governments of France and Britain still continued to be under the domination of the old feudal nobility. When came much trouble. [sic!]
Capitalists Make Their Revolution
Trade and factories were more important than land. Yet the rulers of the countries were princes, dukes, lords, bishops, and archbishops. That was all very well when they had the economic power, but now it had passed from them. Not only were they proud and arrogant, but they tried to keep the laws and the government suitable to land ownership when, owing to the shift in the economic basis of the country, the laws and the government should have been organized to help trade and industry. It was no use pointing out to them that they should give way. It took revolutions to do it.
In Britain there were two revolutions. One took place in the seventeenth century and lasted off and on for nearly sixty years. In France, revolution began in 1789, and by the time it was over the power of the aristocracy and the clergy was wiped away completely.
What part did the Negroes play in all this? The capitalists who first profited by slavery were commercial capitalists and the planters in the colonies. These planters were partly capitalist in that they traded their produce far and wide, and partly feudal in that they kept their slaves in a state of subjection comparable to the old serfdom and built up a type of feudal society. But as capitalism developed, these commercial traders and the plantation owners collaborated closely with the aristocracy, and many of them became aristocrats themselves. By the time the industrial capitalists were busy developing their factories, the aristocrats, the planters, and the commercial capitalists formed, roughly speaking, one reactionary group.
An End to Slavery
Now one of the things that the industrial capitalists wanted to do was to finish with slavery. It was too expensive. Slave production was backward compared with modern methods and more highly developed capitalist production in agriculture. So that you had on one side the industrial capitalists determined to destroy the slave power of the aristocrats, the commercial capitalists, and the planters. It was in this political struggle that Negroes got their chance to fight for their freedom. They played a small part in the English political struggle, a larger part in the French struggle, and a decisive part in the American struggle. This was not accidental. A few figures will show us why.
In 1789 British colonial trade was five million pounds out of an export trade of 27 million. Britain had lost America in 1783 and had few slaves in the West Indies. We can therefore see that slavery was playing a very minor part in British economy. The British Negroes on the whole played little part in the destruction of British feudalism.
Negro in the French Revolution
In France in 1789 the export trade was 17 million pounds. The colonial trade was 11 million pounds – two thirds of it. The question of abolition was therefore of tremendous importance. It took a prominent part in the revolution. The Negroes fought magnificently and, being thousands of miles away, gained their independence. This is how Haiti came into being.
In America in 1861 this combination of the commercial bourgeoisie and the plantation owners was not a minor part of American economy. It was a major part. The combination was not a colony thousands of miles away. It occupied hundreds of thousands of square miles inside the country. To defeat this combination took the greatest Civil War in history, and the Negro’s share was far greater than it had been in France.
This is the way we must look at history. People who only see black men in general being oppressed by white men in general, and are unable to trace the historical dialectic, do not understand anything and therefore cannot lead. That is the great value of being a genuine Marxist, an adherent of the Fourth International. You can study history and understand where we are today and why and where we are going tomorrow.
* * *
Bibliography
The Black Jacobins, by C.L.R. James.
History of Negro Revolt, by C.L.R. James.
The series of articles by George Novack which is now running in The New International. They are the only Marxist study of the pre-Civil War period and they are invaluable.
The relevant chapters of Beard’ The Rise of American Civilization.
Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 92, 9 December 1939, p. 3.
III. The Bourgeois Revolutions and Imperialism
Let us for a moment review our analysis of the Negro in his contact with Western civilization ... We established that the Negroes in Africa had built high if simple civilizations up to the fourteenth century. It was necessary to emphasize this, to destroy the imperialist – fostered conception of Africa as a land of eternal savagery and barbarism from which it has to some degree been raised by the gentle hand of the European invaders.
European contact with Africa began with the rise of European imperialism. A new continent, America, was discovered and Africa, which had always lain within easy reach of European ships, was penetrated. Commercial capitalism developed the mercantile system, which needed labor in the American tropical plantation. When the Indians proved unsatisfactory, slaves were brought from Africa. On the basis of the wealth created by the slave trade and the colonial trade directly dependent upon it, the commercial capitalists of Europe and America built up from their ranks a new section of the capitalist class, the industrial capitalists. These, whose chief function was the application of large-scale organization and science to industry, came inevitably into conflict with the planters: slave labor was too expensive, too backward for the new methods. This economic conflict was the basis for political conflict. The commercial bourgeoisie and the feudal aristocracy still had the political power their former economic predominance had given them, and for the new rising class of industrial bourgeoisie, to wrest it from them meant a struggle.
The Bourgeois Revolution
This was a progressive struggle. It took place in great revolutions in France and in America, and in Britain it took not only the threat but the actual beginning of a revolution to break the power of the feudal aristocrats. In all these the Negro played a tremendous part. In America he was given the opportunity of doing this because his emancipation was in the interest of the Northern industrialist bourgeoisie. All these great movements of politics thrust the color question into subordination and unimportance. It is economics and politics, not color, that are decisive in history.
To see what happened after the industrialist bourgeoisie took power, it would be best to follow the course of one country, say Great Britain. The industrialists seized power in 1832. They struck a terrific blow at the landed aristocracy in 1847 by abolishing the “corn laws.” Through these laws the feudal aristocrats had artificially maintained the price of grain by restricting foreign competition with the produce of their fields. Rising with the industrial bourgeoisie was a new class – the industrial working class, the proletariat. And by 1848 the Chartist Movement of the workers was feeling its way towards revolution.
But in this year began a great era of prosperity. So prosperous was the industrial bourgeoisie, thanks to the home market its victory had given it, that it treated the idea of colonies in Africa with scorn. Disraeli wrote in 1866 that the British had all that they wanted in Asia. For, he continued, “what is the use of these colonial deadweights, the West Indian and West Africa colonies? ... Leave the Canadians to govern themselves; recall the African squadrons; give up the settlements on the southeast coast of Africa and we shall make a saving which will at the same time enable us to build ships and have a good budget.” In the year he wrote, only one-tenth or less of Africa was in the hands of European imperialists. They had devastated the continent, but now they wanted the slaves no longer. For a while it almost seemed that Africa would be left in peace.
A New Need for Africa
But capitalist production lead inevitable to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the corresponding increasing poverty of the masses. The workers cannot buy what they produce. The capitalists must find abroad new markets, sources of new materials, and places to invest their capital.
In 1885 Jules Ferry, the French statesman, used the famous words:
Colonies for rich countries are one of the most lucrative methods of utilizing capital ... I say that France, which is glutted with capital, has a reason for looking on this side of the colonial question ... European consumption is saturated: it is necessary to raise new masses of consumer in other parts of the globe, else we shall put modern society into bankruptcy and prepare for social liquidation with the dawn of the twentieth century ...
Cecil Rhodes once told a friend, “If you want to free civilization, become an imperialist.” With the glut in the home market, colonies were no longer “deadweight.” While in 1880 only one-tenth of Africa was in the hands of European imperialists; by 1900 less than one-tenth of the land remained in the hands of the African people. That saturation of European consumption to which Ferry referred and the part that Africa played can be shown by the following simple calculation. Great Britain has invested abroad roughly twenty billion dollars. The total investment in Africa from all sources is roughly six billion dollars, and of this almost five billion is in British territory. That is to say, almost one-fourth of British foreign investment is to be found in Africa.
But this process of “saturation” that forced the imperialists to expand to the colonies has now itself spread to the colonies. The increasing accumulation of great wealth in the hands of the few and the increasing poverty of the masses is now not only a European but world phenomenon. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is bankrupt. The war of 1914–1918, the worldwide crisis since 1929, the new world war of 1939 – these are items from the ledger of imperialism. Only the overthrowing of the bankrupt class by a new class, only the triumphant proletarian revolution, can balance the budget of civilization.
And in the same way as the Negro played an important role in the revolution of the industrialists in unseating the feudal aristocracy, so tomorrow the Negroes will play a decisive role in the struggle between finance-capital and the working class. Against his declared intentions, Lincoln was forced to free the slaves. Revolutionary France had to recognize the revolution of the Santo Domingo blacks. In the stress of economic and political conflict, color was forgotten and the rising class took help wherever it could get it. The Negroes in Africa and America, wherever they are the most oppressed of people, are going to strike even more deadly blows for freedom, against the capitalist system of exploitation, in alliance with the white workers of the world.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1973</p>
<h3>Reflections on Pan-Africanism</h3>
<h4>Part I</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">Transcript of speech given on November 20, 1973;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Damon Maxwell.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>A very distinguished writer, George Lamming, a West Indian, makes it a rule to despise what is called “suspense.” He says he has no use for it in his writing and I think that in regard to what I have to say in these two evenings I should get that subject clear and keep you out of any suspense you might have. Tonight I am going to speak about the history of Pan-Africanism up to the independence of the Gold Coast and Ghana, and certain things that grew from it. Tomorrow night I am going to speak about developments after that; then the perspectives of what is taking place in Africa<em>,</em>what we are seeing and what the future is likely to be. So that tonight up to the Independence of the gold Coast and Ghana and certain things that flow from it so that we know where we are. Now much of it will deal with my personal experiences and personal responses to people. There is this book, <b>Africa, Britain’s Third Empire</b> by George Padmore and it is dedicated by Padmore to W.E. Burghardt DuBois, father of Pan-Africanism, scholar, and uncompromising fighter for human rights, Harvard, Fisk, Wilberforce, Fellow of the American Association, International President Pan-African Conference. Now that is the attitude that Padmore had to Dr. DuBois and that is the attitude that all of us had to him. For us he is the originator of the Pan-African movement both in theory and in fact and it is astonishing the number of subjects and the spheres of intellectual organizational activity in which Dr. DuBois was 25 years ahead of all other persons in the United States and a good many elsewhere. When Dr. DuBois died, I know an editor of an American magazine wrote me asking me to write something about it. He told me what the others are going to write and I wrote to him and told him that I wasn’t going to write that at all and I would like him to understand that I would not refer to Dr. DuBois as a most distinguished black man and a most distinguished leader of our people. That is no good. It is lowering the man from what he is.</p>
<p>He is one of the most remarkable persons of the 20th century. In field after field he was 25 years in advance of all the persons who lived with him. Now Padmore dedicated this book to Dr. DuBois and we looked upon him, not as our leader, I wasn’t thinking of him as a leader in those days, but he was a man, whose books we read, all of us who were interested in those matters. And we also read the books of Marcus Garvey<em>. </em>Dr. DuBois had begun historical writing both on the history of Africa and the history of the United States, he had formed the Pan-African Conferences. One after the other, from about 1919 until about 1929 and that was part of his conceptions and of what he wrote regularly in the NAACP paper which he founded. We grew up on that. Padmore and I in the West Indies: we read Garvey’s paper, “The Negro World.” I used to buy Garvey’s paper every Saturday morning in Frederick Street about 10 or 15 yards from the police station. That is important, because the paper was banned by the police, and I am certain that inside the police station a lot of them were reading it, too. too. So we were brought up on Marcus Garvey and his “Negro World.” None of us thought of going to Africa, but we read Garvey and were quite satisfied and pleased with him and we read Dr. DuBois. That educated us. As far as I know that was the only way we got some education on the affairs of black people in the Caribbean. Otherwise we learned what they taught us in the schools. They were very good schools, secondary schools. All they taught us about Africa was how backward they were and how beneficial the British invasion of Africa was and the slave trade was not so bad because it brought backward people in touch with civilization and taught them Christianity. It may not have taught them very much Christianity but at least it got them on the road. And that is what we learned. So it was Garvey in his paper and DuBois in his books and a paper that he published later that changed our whole attitude. George Padmore and I were very friendly. I knew him and I knew his father, his mother. I knew his sisters. His father was a teacher. My father was a teacher. We were boys together. We never talked about Africa. We talked about the West Indies. He went to St. Mary’s college, I went to Queen’s Royal. We would spend vacations together. Neither of us thought about being political leaders of African emancipation. We didn’t think about Africa at all. That was not in our conception. Well, Padmore left Trinidad and went to the United States and there he got in to talk to Dr. DuBois, that is the reason for this dedication. He understood the kind of man he was and the expansion of the intellectual habits of black people and the way they looked upon themselves and the way they looked on the world around them.</p>
<p>He joined the Communist Party. Then the Communist party recognized that he had great ability and took him to Moscow where he became head of the International African Negro movement. All the communists were doing for the African people and people of African descent, Padmore was in charge of. It was a position of tremendous importance. He published a paper called “The Negro Worker” and he was interested in all the political leaders and so forth. I don’t think up to that time any black man had held a position of such importance. I left Trinidad in 1932 and I went to Britain and there I rapidly became a Marxist and began to become a practitioner and finally became one of the persons most prominent in the Trotskyist movement in Britain. I wrote a book of Trotsky’s ideas and I wrote a book on the Revolution in S. Domingo which established the state of Haiti. But I wrote that Trotsky book first. And in Britain about 1934 I was going around looking at everything, seeing everything as much as I could, and I heard of a man called George Padmore, a negro who was a great leader of the communists internationally. And who was having a meeting. I went to the meeting which was held not far from where I lived. And we sat there waiting, about 50 or 60 of us, half white people, half black people. About five to eight this person walked in and he as my old friend from Trinidad, George Padmore. I was quite astonished. I listened to him speaking. He spoke with great authority and the people listened to him. Afterwards I told him let’s go home to the flat and I took him home and we talked till four o’clock in the morning. At that time I was already a Trotskyist and George was connected with Moscow but that never caused any dissatisfaction with me. We understood that we were concerned with the African movement, I felt that I could be a Marxist, a Trotskyist and also be completely devoted to the African colonial movement. So we never quarreled<em>. </em>But something peculiar happened that night.</p>
<p>He said<em>, “</em>You came here in 1932.” I said,<em> “</em>Yes, I came here in March 1932.” He said<em>, “</em> I was here in March, 1932, I came from Moscow looking for black people to take to Moscow to educate and organize in the movement. I needed some people badly. If I had known you were here I would have asked you to go.” “If you had asked me in 1932, I most certainly would have gone without a shadow of doubt!”</p>
<p>Well, George went away and sometime in 1934 or 1935 I formed an organization called the International African Friends of Ethiopia, that was in regard to that Ethiopian war and members of my committee were Jomo Kenyatta, there was another splendid man from West Africa called Wallace Johnson; I hear Wallace is a bit old now, but he was one of the finest politicalists I have known, utterly fearless, stood for his political principles and did not waver. There was Dr. Danville who wasn’t too political but he was a very learned man. He was ready to fight, to join the committee and carry on.</p>
<p>We formed this organization and we did rather well. But one day, sometime in late 1934 or 1935 there was a knock at my door and I went do the door and there was George Padmore. Padmore was an extremely handsome man and very neat and careful in all his ways, he always had his papers in order, himself in order, everything in order. But today he looked a little strange. I had never seen Padmore unshaven. Never. But he looked a little strange. I asked him to sit down and then I asked him what was wrong. I don’t know why I asked him what was wrong but things did not look right. He said<em>, “</em>I’ve left those people you know.” And that was the biggest shock I received since I had gone to Brazil three years before. “I have left those people” meant he had left the Communist Party. And he was the biggest black man in Moscow, dealing with black people and the colonial revolution. So I said<em>, “</em>What happened?” And he told me. He said<em>, “</em>They are changing the line and now they tell me that in future we are going to be soft and not attack strongly the democratic imperialists which are Britain, France and the United States. That the main attack is to be directed upon the Fascist imperialists, Italy, Germany and Japan. And George, we would like you to do this in the propaganda that you are doing and in the articles that you are writing and the paper you are publishing, to follow that line.” And George said<em>, “</em>That is impossible. Germany and Japan have no colonies in Africa. How am I to say the democratic imperialists, such as the United States is the most race ridden territory in the western world. So I am to say that Britain and France who have the colonies in Africa and the United States, can be democratic imperialists and be soft to them but be strong against Japan, Italy and Germany. That is impossible. What do you think of that?” I said<em>, “</em>But George, there is not much you can say about that, that is the line, and when the Communist Party says that is the line, that is the line.” I want to make a remark about a man called Harold Cruse. He has written a book about black intellectuals, I haven’t found very much in the book to interest me. But I noticed him saying that the Jews are responsible for what is taking place or what took place in regard to black people in the United States. That man is crazy. Then the Communist Party took a line. You got it in Germany, in Japan, Italy, Germany and in the United States, in Arabia, in Latin America, in Asia, everywhere. So if the Comm<em>u</em>nist Party in the United States was taking a line in regard to blacks: the line was the Moscow line. No Jews were responsible for that.</p>
<p>That is absolutely wrong, I am sure, a great ignorance of the fundamental features of the world believe in. They told George “That is the line.” “Well<em>,</em>” he said<em>, “</em>I’ll take my own line.” And he left them. And so he came to London and joined the International African Friends of Ethiopia. He was very valuable. But the time came when Ethiopia was very obviously under the control of Italy. For the time being the society didn’t t have very much to do and George Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau. That was the only movement in existence that fought, agitated, and organized for the independence of Africa. That was the Pan-Africanist movement formed in 1935. There was no other that we knew about. DuBois was not doing anything about it except writing now and then. But that movement was the movement for the independence of African people. Garvey was finished about that time. It was a very peculiar movement. There were not many African, not many black people or people of African descent in Britain. There were for the most part about 10 of us, and peculiarly enough, I may talk about that next time, if you ask me, most of us were West Indians. And there we were, talking about the independence of Africa, organizing for the independence of Africa, writing books and getting them published, writing pamphlets and constantly going to meetings, holding meetings. And most of the people who were there, looked upon us as well meaning but politically illiterate West Indians. “Independence of Africa.” What kind of nonsense was that. Of course Britain was going to give Africa Independence but in a 100 years or so. But to talk about something recent like that was really not reasonable. George Padmore founded a paper and I was the editor. But he was the leader of the movement and we never quarreled, I continued with my Trotskyism, and George was head of the movement, a man of political tenacity and a one-sided attitude toward what he was doing. I have not seen his equal anywhere else. I have heard of one or two others. But he was the most dedicated, the most devoted political leader you could think of. And what he was thinking about was the independence of Africa, including the colonial countries. Now to go into what we did. We agitated, we wrote books, we wrote pamphlets, we had meetings, etc.</p>
<p>Now I want to speak about two people. I will speak about Jomo Kenyatta. At the time, and even today, he was not very bright. But he was a devoted African nationalist. You could depend on Kenyatta at any time. If anything came up that was concerned with African nationalism against the nationalist imperialists, Kenyatta could be depended upon. He could understand, he could not understand, he always voted against. And such men are valued, I assure you. There were one or two other members of the organization of whom I should speak. One was Padmore’s wife, Dorothy. She was an English woman<em>,</em> an educated person<em>,</em> she knew both French and German and was very familiar with Marxism, and history and so forth. And she was tireless in the support of George. Not only in support of the work he had to do, helping with typing, etc., but the number of people who filled up the house and who Dorothy fed, talked to, educated them. That was her work. She died the other day and nobody has ever said a word about her. I am writing some memoirs of George Padmore and I intend to spend a page or two on Dorothy and what she did. The other person was a man now living in Kenya, called Dr. Makkonnen. This was not a doctor who could write a prescription for me. His name was not really Makkonnen but that was a name that he assumed after the Ethiopian business and whether he is a doctor of medicine or a doctor of philosophy, I don’t know, but he was a member of our organisation and “Mak” was absolutely tireless and did everything required. He was a very valuable man. If we wanted a meeting, we talked about the meeting, about the hall and everything and then said<em>, “</em>’Mak’ what about it?” and “Mak” would arrange everything. ‘Mak’ would get the hall, ‘Mak’ would get the pamphlets<em>, ‘</em>Mak’ would do everything. And after everything was in order<em>, ‘</em>Mak’ seemed happy to sit in the front and hear me or Padmore on the platform. And I remember seeing his face<em>,</em> smiling, happy that we were doing well. We rented a big building in Grove, upstairs about 8 to 10 rooms. We paid the rent. How, I don’t know, believe me. If I heard today that ‘Mak’ had some means of making money that could not be distinguished by the police I wouldn’t say no because ‘Mak’ got the money. We were never thrown out. We always had money for what we wanted to do and ‘Mak’ brought it. Some of us brought some money, but ‘Mak’ could be depended upon in a crisis. When the rent was due<em>, ‘</em>Mak’ would say<em>, “</em>I’ll see what I can do.” and he always was able to do it. I used to suffer from stomach ulcers and ‘Mak’ would look at me and say<em>, “</em>You are not looking well<em>,</em> I know what you need.” And he would cook some fish for me in the West Indian style. And it put me right. And that is the kind of person ‘Mak’ was. He is today in Kenya. I don’t know if he is doing very well. He worked with Nkrumah in Ghana. He was an absolutely indispensible person. And these are two personalities, Dorothy Padmore, George’s wife, and Makkonnen, the organizer, who were absolutely necessary and indispensable for our organization. But we were alone. There were only eight or ten or us. There were no people. But we kept on writing. We published books. I published two or three. George published two or three. We published a number of pamphlets and we published this paper I was editor of until I left. But everybody knew us, we were at every meeting, we passed resolutions and so forth. But something happened which lifted the organization to an important place that it didn’t suspect. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill met together and made a statement that after the war the colonial territories of Britain would be given independence. Mr. Roosevelt didn’t have any colonies because where the United States was in charge they didn’t call it a colony, they called it a territory. So the Virgin Islands were a territory and that was different. So they signed the statement. There was an organization in Britain, a very militant organization called WASU, west African Students Union, and I used to go down there and speak quite a lot. And WASU decided to ask Mr. Churchill, formally and officially, if when he talked about independence for the colonies, he meant West Africa. So Mr. Churchill said Yes, he meant West Africa. But he sent Major Atlee down to make them understand that when he said immediately he meant immediately for everybody, but not immediately for Africa, that would take a little time. So there was a great disturbance. People began to say<em>, “</em>Why don’t you mean what you say?” So after the war the British decided that they would get a lot of Africans from Africa and they got a whole lot of them and I will read you something that was said about them afterwards. They brought them from Africa to Oxford for a conference to explain to them that immediate independence referred to independence immediately but not quite at once. It will take a little time. So they had this conference at Oxford. And there was Padmore in England with his poor organization. And a lot of these Africans were living alone in England, paid for by the British Government, fed and organized by the British government.</p>
<p>So Padmore decided to hold a conference in Manchester. He invited them all up and they came. By himself he could never have had that conference. If he didn’t have that organization he couldn’t have held that conference. So he had dozens of them up to Manchester and there was a very famous conference. At that conference there was Kenyatta, there was Nkrumah, and there was laid down at this conference the policy which Nkrumah carried out afterward in the Gold Coast. Now I have to tell you how Nkrumah got in touch with Padmore and how that organization came to have these two men together. I was in the United States in 1941 and a member of my political organization came to me and told me:</p>
<p class="indentb">“There is a young African here and he says be would like to see you.” I said<em>, “</em>Well, why should he say he would like to see me.” “Well, I told him about you and he has read your book and I told him I could take him to see you and he said his name is Francis Nkrumah.”</p>
<p>So Nkrumah turned up, very neat, very graceful, very assured, he always has been, and we got together and we got to be friendly. And he spent two years with us. We used to go down to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he would come up to New York and spend some time with us. We were very close until in 1943 he said he was going to England to study law and I wrote a letter, a letter that is famous in our annals. I said<em>, “</em>Dear George, there is a young African coming to England to study law. He is not very bright, but nevertheless he is determined to throw the imperialists out of Africa. Do what you can for him.” George met him at Waterlee station and there began that combination. Now, why did I say that he was not very bright? Nkrumah used to talk about surplus value, capital instead of commodities. He had picked up these from some superficial quarters. He did not understand them really. About two years afterwards I saw Nkrumah and had read an article that he had written on Imperialism. He had learned from Padmore’s extensive library and all sorts of papers and clippings. It was fully organized particularly in regard to the colonial policies of the African powers.</p>
<p>And Nkrumah was able to learn and was educated a great deal by Padmore. In addition to that, Nkrumah brought much creative energy and knowledge of Africa and instinctive political development which fortified Padmore and the two of them became a tremendous power together in the movement. Well in 1947, Nkrumah went back to Ghana and there I am going to speak of two things in regard to the development of colonial Africa, I will leave South Africa for next time. But I am going to speak first of all tonight of the Gold Coast and on the other side Kenya. Nkrumah went to the Gold Coast and when he landed he said he wasn’t sure if they would let him land or not, But the man who was in charge, he said, “Hello, glad to see you.” He said he had been active in Britain and in France where people knew him. When he went there he knew no one, nobody had any idea of him, he had to begin from the bottom. But Nkrumah began and the struggle in the Gold Coast was a political struggle of the western type. Because the Gold Coast has got three areas. There is the coast itself which is very western, everybody speaks English although he may speak a native language. Then there is Ashanti and then beyond Ashanti there is another modern area in the north. And Nkrumah went there and began to organize on the coast and he built a movement. Now the Convention Party was a party of the African intellectual, the African elite. In all these colonial territories there is always a native elite and the more backward the territory the more elitist the elite. These people were there to form a party and they had sent for Nkrumah to come to organize their Convention Party. They were busy with law and medicine and so forth. So in Nkrumah they wanted someone to organize the party, they weren’t going to leave it to anyone to organize a political party and Nkrumah came and he organized the party and what he did is something I will refer to, so please do not let me forget this. He built a party from the ground up. Nkrumah went all over the Gold Coast, to the country people and in the towns, building the party, let people know that a political party was for self government. Everybody in the Gold Coast was for self government, everybody. Nkrumah added one more word, “now” – “Self Government Now.” And that upset everyone, because the idea of “Self Government Now” meant that you were going straight at it. Self Government sometime or another meant that you could perhaps make a manoeuvre and Nkrumah didn’t negotiate – he mobilized the population for Self Government <b>now</b>. Now I have to tell you something about what happened to the Gold Coast people, unfortunately, it is very difficult for me to speak about the African revolution in the way that they ought to be spoken about. One thing that I have to tell you is that Nkrumah went to jail and he won an election. I think the vote was 23<em>,</em>000 against 700. Yes, Nkrumah received 22<em>,</em>780 out of a total of 23<em>,</em>132 votes. So that convinced even the British that he had some support. Now, what are you going to do, how are you going to govern the country. They had to take him out of jail and make a leader of him because they couldn’t govern the country otherwise. The same thing happened with Jomo Kenyatta. They put Kenyatta in jail, they put him away for six years and when they took him out they told him he was not to come near Nairobi. He was kept outside, but they had him in because they couldn’t govern. When a population decides that they don’t want you to govern then you cannot govern them anymore – it is absolutely impossible. That is what they found. These populations may not be able to read but once they get something in their heads... The British people made one big mistake and they won’t do that again. They would take somebody they wanted to get rid of and put him in jail. They should have made him political leader and their representative. Then he would have disgraced himself soon enough. But once they put him in jail, then the public says, “That is my choice.” So they took Nkrumah out of jail and made him leader of the government.</p>
<p>Now I want to tell you they put Kenyatta in jail, they had to take him out; they put Nkrumah in jail, they had to take him out. I am emphasizing that because it shows the tremendous influence that the mass of the population had on the winning of independence. You can’t read that in books and it is very difficult to write it but you will have to bear it in mind. It will sound as if all the politics is going on above and the mass of the population simply acquiesced. Well, that was not so – the mass of the population was making its presence felt. And there is one notable example of that.</p>
<p>It took place at Saltpond, Ghana, sometime in 1949. Nkrumah had gone there in 1947 and he had built up the party, the Convention Party. He was the secretary of the Convention Party. But he had his own people in the party. He had built up a youth movement. So there was a conference at Saltpond and there was a conference that met to decide what would happen to Nkrumah and what was going to happen to the youth movement. Well, they were uncertain, there was a lot of back and forth at the conference and, in addition to the hundreds of delegates, there were thousands of people outside who were coming to hear what was going on because it interested them. So they wanted to dismiss Nkrumah from the post of secretary and an old chief said no, he didn’t think that should be done. They should appoint a committee to go and talk it over and see what should be done, and they appointed a committee, consisting of a chief and an educated African, named Ginn, as far as I remember, and they went and discussed. And Nkrumah agreed more or less to a policy which would enable him to remain in as secretary but he was not to have the influence over the general movement that he had had. And Nkrumah agreed. It seemed to him that there was nothing else to be done. He went to the conference and there the people inside the conference started to make opposition and to make proposals and to object and the people outside, Ginn told me this himself and Nkrumah told me afterwards, called Nkrumah out – they had heard what was going on. Nkrumah came out. And they told him, “You resign; You leave those people in there.” And Nkrumah wrote the resignation on the back of one of the persons who bent before him on a piece of paper given to him and he sent it in to them and said, “I am not coming back.” That is the way that the Convention People’s Party began. Because he did not want to get away entirely from ‘convention’ so they had the ‘convention’ and he formed the Convention People’s Party. And that was Nkrumah’s party. That was the way the party was formed. I want you to understand, not only did the people have a tremendous influence on the attitude that the government had to the political leaders as can be seen in that they had to be taken from jail to rule, but they actually intervened in political affairs and on the great occasion which was the formation of the CPP they called Nkrumah to come out of there, leave those people<em>,</em> send in your resignation, and he wrote it that and sent it in. Let us not forget that the African people played a role, a role that they are still playing. So Nkrumah had this political party, the CPP, he had the youth, he had a lot of young people with him, they were called the Verandah Boys because they were not supposed to have beds inside with all sorts of mosquito nets and so forth, but they slept on the verandah or they went outside in the yard. Now they started to negotiate with the government and they decided they wanted to have a meeting to decide on the constitution, an assembly. So the Governor said you cannot have a constitutional assembly, we are going to appoint some Africans who will tell you the kind of constitution you can have. And Nkrumah said, “No,” we will decide about a constitutional assembly. “You don’t have to have a constitutional assembly, I will hold a constitutional assembly.” And he held his own constitutional assembly. There were at the time something like 70 organizations on the Gold Coast, political organizations, aborigine organizations, cricket organizations, whist organizations, all sorts of organizations. All 70 of them came to the assembly except for one. And Nkrumah said, “Everybody is for us, the Governor doesn’t know what to say.” But at the same time the trade unions were carrying on a strike for trade union rights and Nkrumah invited them to the assembly, they passed all the resolutions and he called for positive action. Positive action was his name for what we knew as a general strike. The whole country faced the government, everything stopped dead. The trade union movement, the civil service, everybody. So the Governor had only one policy to do – he put them in jail, put the leaders in jail. However, he left out some and they were busy organizing. And then the municipal election took place and the CPP got 58,858 votes and the supporters got 5,570. Now in eastern Europe they have elections, they put up one candidate and he gets 98% of the votes. He hasn’t defeated anybody. I am waiting for the day when one gets 110%. But this is a genuine victory, 58,000 votes against 5,000 and Nkrumah himself got 22,780 out of a total or 23,000 votes cast, So the British government was persuaded that it had to do something and the only thing it knew was to take Nkrumah out of jail and make him head of government business. And that was in 1953. Now from 1953 until 1957, Nkrumah and Clark, and when Nkrumah got independence in 1957 he dismissed Clark and sent him back, but before he sent him back he made a speech. He said, “If I am to write what took place between 1953 when I came out of prison and the present time when we have independence I doubt if I would find any publisher able to publish it.” Because there was real fighting and intrigue, to squash him, to beat him down, but he managed to survive and come out victorious. And there is a story about that. Because George Padmore and his wife, Dorothy, told me and made it clear to Francis that he should have gone to independence almost at once, I know that, and in 1957 I asked him, “Well, what do you think about it?” He said, “Well, frankly, I don’t know. I could have gone to independence without a doubt. Nobody could have stopped me. They couldn’t have done anything, but I was uncertain of what would happen because I thought that the commissioners of police and the men in charge of the various areas, they would all have gone, and the government would have collapsed and up to now I don’t know whether I did right or wrong.” I didn’t tell him anything because you don’t go around telling people who have different situations to decide and up to some years later they don’t know whether they decided right or wrong. But I think that he made a mistake and part of the degeneration of his government was due to that period of ‘53 to ‘58 when he manoeuvered with the British government and the ministers lost the revolutionary drive which had got them into power and which they could have carried on. Padmore insisted that they should go on, but he said “no,” and they didn’t. I don’t think they would have collapsed. I only found that out afterwards, because in Guinea, the French wrecked the whole country when they left, in the beginning when they became independent there was nothing to speak of in Guinea, but they managed to hold on together. And Nkrumah would have held on and his government would not have degenerated the way it did. But it was independent in 1957. And I am going to spend sometime speaking about Kenya, but would like to say something here. That Nkrumah became independent in the Gold Coast under the name of Ghana in 1957, and he and Padmore and I sat down and talked. We had been talking a lot about independence for Africa but if anyone had told us that by 1967 there would have been, at least 30 new African states and there would have been at least 100 million African people who would have gained political independence, we would have said – “That is a dangerous man. He has been sent by the British government to stimulate the people to act in such a way as to smash them down because it is madness to believe that you will have 30 new African states within ten years. What kind of nonsense is that? But he would have been right. We would have been wrong. Because by 1967 there were over 30 new African states and 100 million people had become politically free. This went with a speed and a range that I don’t know with any other political organization. What happened in Africa between ‘57 and ‘67 was not to be believed. It was far beyond all we thought possible. It just happened like that, one after another they went. So we have to remember that in a country like the Gold Coast it took a certain form, a certain political form. Nkrumah built a political party, he had a newspaper, he had political organizers, he challenged the government, he called a general strike, he was put in prison, he won an election and came out with the enormous figures by which he defeated his opponent.. That was a definite political struggle. When we go to the other side of Africa, we have something entirely different and this will give you the two different types of political independence that were won in Africa. I want to go over to Kenya. Now Kenya was quite different from the Gold Coast. People like to tell you that the African fighting for his independence had always fought for land. That was not true. In West Africa, Nkrumah did not fight for land because the whites did not own land in West Africa. It was a political struggle for political independence, to get rid of the imperialists. But that was not the same kind of struggle that took place in Kenya. In Kenya you had some highlands and up there the climate was good and was not too different from the European climate, the territory was good and you could plant coffee. You had a political power that taught you that the Africans were not intelligent enough to plant coffee properly so you prohibited him and you concentrated the coffee on your land. And there was a built-in European section of the population, the only European section of an African population, an acceptance of Africa, which is something new. The white man in South Africa feels that he is part of that, he has lived there for hundreds of years, he is fond of the language and he believes he is part of the landscape, he is part of the territory. But nowhere else in Africa were any white settlers able to establish themselves except in Kenya on the highlands where the white people established themselves. They came from Britain. After World War I some of them who had fought in the war and had helped Britain were rewarded and given land in Kenya. Some South Africans came up from South Africa and established themselves on the plateaus and you had a white population in Kenya. Well, this went on for some time and the Kenya people were taught Christianity, a few of them were taught democracy. Some of them went abroad to be educated, not many but one by one. And they came back. And the result was that white people were firmly established in Kenya which has been British only since the beginning of the 20th century. So by 1950 Kenya, then, presented a spectacle very different from any other colony in Africa. There was this white population constantly increasing and they were saying that they ought to be free of the British Colonial Office, they ought to be given independence because they could govern themselves. These Africans could in time, a generation or two, by degrees, they could do it. And everything looked fine. And everybody agreed that that was what it ought to be except the African himself. And after a time, about 1950, they broke away, they could not do it as it was done in the Gold Coast. They formed an army and they went into the forest and raided from outside and those who were outside got together and would strike political blows when they could. They struck political blows at the whites, but they struck more political blows at the blacks who were supporting the regime, who were the Loyalists. So this civil war took place. There was never any civil war in Ghana. But there was a definite civil war in Kenya. Generals China, Kimathi and the rest of them had their armies in the forests and they fought the British troops. And the British sent out regiment after regiment properly armed, with helicopters, airplanes, etc., bombing their people and they fought a battle to the finish. And what is to be noted is that the black army in the forest was defeated. After a number of years they could not go on anymore. They were unable to have communication with each other and the British forces in the country didn’t have control. It was very difficult to have control of people who are in the forest. But they were unable to take action in the way that they wanted. Furthermore, the British caught some 50,000 Kenyan people and put them in concentration camps and began to examine their health because they found that they were deficient, some form of insanity, and they put them in there together and they got a lot of doctors, neurologists, psychologists, to examine them because the Africans could not understand that the British were there for the benefit of the Africans themselves. They put them together, they had defeated them in the forests and they had 50,000 of them put away in concentration camps being examined by psychologists and neurologists because of this insanity – their incapacity to understand the British were there actually for their benefit and they should be glad. The Africans could not see it. The British used to promise some of them, “If you agree that the thing is as we say it is, we will let you go.” Some went out and when they got home the disease got them again. But there were some who were worse and could not be cured at all and they would remain. So this is what happened. The British found that they had put them in prison outside the forest, they had practically defeated the army but they couldn’t govern the country. What to do?</p>
<p>Now there took place a series of events which I don’t have time to show you in detail, maybe someone will do it for me. The Colonial Secretary would form a constitution, they would discuss the constitution in Kenya and in the British House of Commons and then in the House of Lords, that this is the proper constitution by which the Kenyan people should be governed. They would send it to Kenya, the Kenyan people would say<em>, “</em>No.” Well, they would consider the question. They would make another constitution, the Kenyan people would say, “No.” They kept on making these constitution s, the Kenyan people kept rejecting them until, ultimately, they had to give them independence. And that was the end of the attempt of the whites in Kenya to establish the white settlers group in Kenya, the only attempt they have been able to manage. There are whites all about who have the power still and we will come to that tomorrow. But this attempt to form some part of the population who are white was defeated. It was defeated not as in the Gold Coast by political means – it was impossible to have a political demonstration. These fellows were in charge of everything, they had won everything, they had locked up the fighters, they had defeated the army, they had caught them, they had killed them, and yet they couldn’t govern. Independence was won in Kenya by a civil way. Independence was won in Ghana by political struggles which bought Nkrumah out of jai l ultimately. Now I have one thing to show you. I have a letter here by Mr. Creech-Jones. Now it appears, in 1963 I think, that I may have written or somebody may have written an article speaking about the Manchester Conference and what the Manchester Conference did. Because it was from the Manchester Conference that Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and various others went back to Africa and began the struggles for independence which ended as they did. So I want you to read Mr. Creech-Jones’ letter, understand what happened in Kenya, it was a civil war to the end. That Nkrumah was put into jail with the other leaders and it was after this tremendous vote that the British took him out and for five years they fought him until he finally gained independence. So Mr. Creech-Jones’ letter is worthwhile. He said:</p>
<p class="indentb">“I was a member of the post-war Labor Cabinet and therefore was Interested in your leading article on African Nationalism on August 24. The great political revolution overseas, except in the case of India, has little place in the memoirs of my former Cabinet colleagues, and Padmore’s record of the Manchester African Congress of October<em>,</em>1945 may give the Conference greater significance than the Labor Government gave it. The Labor Government gave it no significance at all, absolutely none.</p>
<p>Now he goes on to say, and this is typical of what is taking place today:</p>
<p class="indentb">“But, for the record, it is well to point out that at the beginning of the Second World War the Colonial Office was studying the Royal Commissions’ Report on the West Indies, the Hailey Survey of Africa<em>,</em> the problem of colonial development and welfare, and the Palestine issue. At the beginning of the war they were thinking about it. During the war, too, it worked, with a depleted staff, on colonial post-war staffing, higher education, and certain constitutional work, in addition to the colonial contribution to the war effort.”</p>
<p>Now you realize what happened in the Gold Coast and what happened in Kenya was typical of what took place all over the British colonial territory. Creech-Jones is lying with a straight face. When the Labour Government took office there had been for some years a Party Executive Committee concerned with Imperial and colonial matters. And since 1933 to 1940 the Fabian Colonial Bureau had been at work shaping a constructive policy for the colonies. A constructive policy to put colonial leaders in jail.</p>
<p class="indentb">“It did not require the impetus of the Pan-African Congress or the demand for Indian freedom to induce the Labour Ministers at the Colonial Office in 1945 to delve ahead with political, social and economic changes in the colonies.”</p>
<p>Now that is a terrific lie. The Labour Government comes, into power in 1945. 1947 Nkrumah goes there, 1951 Nkrumah goes to jail, Kenya fights a civil war. And General Kimathi is caught and shot and General China remains and today is free but everybody calls him General Chanu. And this fellow says that it did not require the impetus of the Pan-African Congress or the demand for Indian freedom to induce the Labour Ministers at the Colonial office in 1945 to drive ahead with political, social, and economic changes in the colonies. This is absolutely untrue. </p>
<p>And that is what they write and that is what they teach the young people in Britain today and what they teach young Africans if the politicians are not sharp enough.. “We already had plans and projects for consultation with the colonial governments.” Most untrue. “We hardly noticed in shaping policy the Manchester Congress.” They hardly noticed it, they never noticed it until the people of the Gold Coast and the people of Kenya made them understand that those who had formed the Manchester Conference were in Africa waiting to form a new Africa. That is when they noticed it. And listen to this! “Though the individual members of the Congress were soon to matter in their own respective countries (as if that only happened by accident) it was our liberal thought and constructive ideas which shaped Labour’s activity in the Colonial Office.” Every sentence is a lie. “Time was ripe for change as a result of the impact of way, the new international spirit and the spread of nationalism. Public interest, however, was still at a low ebb because of the preoccupation at home with the national economy and the restoration of peace conditions.” Public interest was not at a low ebb in Kenya, there was a civil war. It was not at a low ebb in the Gold Coast, Nkrumah had to be put in jail and win an election by 23,000 votes to 700. And he said: “Public interest is at a low ebb.” And that is why in Britain they were not concerned with the Manchester conference. We went for it nevertheless. You know you have to be a minister to be able to lie like that. We went forward, nevertheless, with the devolution of authority from London and the giving of greater responsibl1ity to the colonies. They gave greater responsibility to Kenya and Kenya rejected it constantly. So in the end they had to give up altogether. “Now, thus began the crowded plans for progress in the colonies. In spite of all limited resources of men, materials and finance we launched a revolution of change.” The only revolution of change in the British government was the one that Mr. MacMilllan launched. He went to South Africa and talked about the wind of change.” “We launched a revolution of change from which the delegates from Manchester were able in their own countries late-on carry out rapid development.” That is a lie. Now I have to spend some time on one minister. He was the colonial minister who did these things. He was one of the leaders of the Conservative Party – McLeod. Some years ago he was speaking at Cambridge University and was able to say something which he had wanted to say for some time and which needed saying. He said:</p>
<p class="indentb">“Some people say that we gave the Africans independence early, and some say that we hadn’t trained them sufficiently in order to give them independence. But I want to say, I was the minister responsible, and we had to give it to them because we either had to give it to them or shoot them down. And we couldn’t shoot down all the people so we gave them independence.”</p>
<p>But this fellow was saying how the Labour Party had initiated change and as a result those persons at the Machester Conference had gone home and gained power in their respective countries because they had carried out the policy of the Labour Party. That was not so. They gained power in their territories because they had carried out the policies of the Manchester Conference and to this day George Padmore is known as the founder of African independence, and that is a title that he deserves. And I have said it and will say it again, that such names as Lord Lugard and Marshal Lyautey, the Frenchmen, and such like are being heard less and less in Africa and above all you are hearing more and more the name of George Padmore who organized and initiated the Manchester Conference from which sprang the peoples who led Africa, to independence within a few years.</p>
<h4>Part II </h4>
<hr class="end"><p class="information">Transcript of speech given on November 21, 1973.</p><hr class="end">
<p>In some respects the descent has been equally as rapid or perhaps more rapid than the ascent of political independence. That we have to examine and I will give you some ideas about this and that. I could deal with what has appeared in Africa, the Arusha Declaration, related documents and ideas, and the stand that has recently been taken by President Kaunda of Zambia, and show that we understand what Nyerere is doing and follow him along. I will begin with a paragraph from the Black Jacobins (p. 265). so that you can understand that is the spirit in which we worked, the spirit which was embodied in the Manchester conference, the spirit in which everyone who left the conference, including those who organized it, went to Africa to do their business. This was what we had in mind and this was written in 1938. Nothing had appeared then. It speaks about Toussaint sending millions of francs to the United States in order to prepare for an expedition to Africa where he could make millions of Africans “free and French.”</p>
<p>And I asked, “What spirit was it that moved him? Ideas do not fall from heaven. The great revolution had propelled him out of his humble joys and obscure destiny, and the trumpets of its heroic period rang over in his ears. In him, born a slave and the leader of the slaves, the concrete realizations of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the womb of ideas and the springs of power, which overflowed their narrow environment and embraced the whole of the world. But for the revolution, this extraordinary man and his band of gifted associates would have lived their lives as slaves, serving the commonplace creatures who owned them, standing barefooted and in rags to watch inflated little governors and mediocre officials from Europe pass by<em>,</em> as many a talented African stands in Africa today.”</p>
<p>Now that was written in 1938 and that is the way we approached the situation. And what is very curious is that there were very few people thinking in those days. There were very few Africans who were thinking in those days. And I remember at a meeting George Padmore saying, without hostility or bitterness, that many times the work that he and we were trying to do was opposed by many of the very people who were seeking to unloose from the chains which held them. So that is the spirit in which we approached it. And last night I told you that the rapidity with which some 30 or more African states became independent after 1957 was something which none of us suspected or would have believed. We would have thought it dangerous if somebody had put that idea forward. But in 1963, while on the one hand these tremendous developments were taking place, the African states began to descend, and I am going to read for you some statements from 1963, 1964 and 1965. I wouldn’t bother with 1966 and 1967 although they are worth it.</p>
<p>1963, January 13: Assassination of President Olympio of Togo by the military. August 12-15: Overthrow of President Youlou of Congo (Brazzaville) October 19-28: General strike and demonstrations against President Maga of Dahomey, coup d’�tat led by Colonel Soglo. December 3: Attempted military coup in Niger failed to overthrow President Diori.</p>
<p>Now that is month after month, that is what has been happening every year from 1963. I will read 1964. It is a moderate year. Moderate in disasters. Only 4. January 12: Popular armed uprising, overthrow of the government of Zanzibar. January 20-24: Military mutinies in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. February 18: Military group overthrew President Leon M’Ba of Gabon. November 22: Imperialist attack on Stanleyville and temporary defeat of popular forces. Same thing in 1965. Same thing in 1966. Same thing in 1967. 1967 perhaps is worse. January 13, January 24, March 22. March 24, April 17, December 16, 17, 22. That is the state of Africa since 1963. And I can tell you something about 1968 in which my reaction was very positive. I was in Makerere and everybody was telling me<em>, “</em>Well, you know people in Kenya you know so and so, it is very easy to go there. You will fly and in a few minutes you can go to Nairobi.” So I said I wasn’t going. They found that strange because I knew people there. I said that was why I was not going. And I wouldn’t go and the reason why I wouldn’t go is what happened recently. I was expecting that. A lot of people were expecting it but it would matter to me because if I went there the reporters would all come and the reporters are a great nuisance, especially if they know you, or if you know anybody. They will have met me “Oh, Mr. James, you know Mr. So and So, you know so and so, well, what do you think of what is happening?” And if I told them what I was thinking about what was happening they would have told me to get on the plane and go away at once. So I didn’t go. And what has happened is no surprise to me. For that matter it is no surprise to people in West Africa, and East Africa, they had been expecting it. Kenya was a powder keg and they are not finished yet. I was fairly familiar with the situation in France and I said<em>, “</em>Well, you can’t do much if there are only a few of you.” And I left France alone. I said I would gather material and fellow it closely because things will begin when that old man is dead. But the French people didn’t wait for the old man to be dead. They put him out while he was very much alive. So I looked at the situation and I was very much inclined to say the people in Kenya will wait until another old man is dead. But they haven’t waited. The Kenyatta government had to suspend the elections and suppress the opposition – always a bad sign. So I am trying to show you that this list of disasters and military coups and degeneration is something that has been characteristic of Africa from 1963 to the present day. Kenya is the latest of the uprising and declining. The state of all the African states is one of the features of the last ten years as the rise of the states to political independence was one of the features of the previous ten years. We have to deal with that and we will spend some time on it. Now first of all, there is nothing wrong with the African people. I begin from there. Where Dr. DuBois used to say that all the magnificent things he had done had originated from the fact that he thought the black man, the African, was a man of ordinary human intelligence and responses and would make an ordinary response to an ordinary situation and vice versa. He says that in everything, there was nothing else in his attitude that made him change and discover so many remarkable things in so many fields. And we must begin by noting that the African people had been under slavery for some two or three hundred years and then under colonialism for another hundred years. You don’t get out of that and slip into a normal society in ten years time. One has to began from there. This transference from a society dominated by certain sections of the population into a modern society with a development, etc. We have examples of it through the centuries. In England it culminated in the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Now I believe Oliver was a great man, but the fact remained he couldn’t help it and it ended in military dictatorship. In France a few years after 1789, it ended in the military dictatorship of Napoleon. In Russia it ended in the dictatorship of a man who in the end called himself Marshal Stalin. In China it was a military dictatorship from the beginning. In Cuba, which is a revolution which I very much respect, it was a military dictatorship that fought the revolution. So when you see these things taking place in Africa, there are no tears about the unfortunate Africans, they do not know, they do not understand. What is taking place in Africa is a normal development and in my opinion, in some respects, it is a very creditable and helpful development because those who won power and won independence thought, obviously, that they were in for some time. What has happened is that the people soon showed that they were expecting something from independence which these people were not giving. And the result was that it was very easy to overthrow them. But I have made my opinion clear and I have been watching this African situation closely for the last 30 years. If those military dictatorships do not satisfy the desires that have been raised in the population, they will be overthrown. Africa faces a difficult period but one can hope that the people who won independence will in time bring some sort of political stability. They are not going to the military dictatorships, because they are military dictatorships. The point is, to govern Africa today you have to govern a people whom the British imperialists did not have to govern. After the people of Kenya has fought for their independence and the people of West Africa had fought for their independence and these victories had been won everywhere, the people who now have to be governed are very different from the docile people who it appeared the British and the French were ruling over. This was something entirely new and that they have not been able to manage it within a few years is no surprise to me. I have written before that it would have been remarkable if they had settled down immediately. Everybody is saying “Hooray,” now that Busia is in power in Ghana and is going to put a stop to corruption – I wish it were so, but we will see. I don’t mean that Busia is corrupt, not at all, but to stop the corruption, that is a political matter. And we have to see why these states have done the way that they have. Now let us look at the average African state. You must remember that the British and the French attempted, crudely, but they have managed it pretty well. The British did not allow an African state to develop. When they saw that the situation was ripe, they said to the French, well, they said<em>, “</em>You come and rule and take over this government.” And they sent the Princess, or the Princess Royal or the Duke or somebody with his little piece of paper and he said<em>, “</em>Well, here is independence, here is a wonderful new flag.” They played God Save the King and the new national anthem and everything is new and this fellow is in charge. But be is in charge of a British imperialist colonial <em>t </em>government which was constructed for British imperialist purposes and not for the purpose of governing an African population. So the thing started that way. I have listened to Dr. Banda on television and speaking to the people. He speaks in English and somebody translates. And the governments of all these territories are imperialistic European-type governments. These fellows have just come in and are seeking to administer, black people are administering, the old imperialistic government, the laws that they make, parlimentary procedure, that is what they are doing. And it is not working. They have to work out something of their own. What is the old African state from which independence was gained? There was the colonial government, a government, is extremely important in any underdeveloped country. I mean the government has power beyond belief. In. Britain, there is Oxford, there is Cambridge, there is Eton, there is Harrow, there are a whole lot of schools, a whole lot of universities. The government gives the money and it pays some fees for students. But those scholastic establishments are independent. Even in the United States, these establishments are independent. For the university is a good one for begging for money, not only from the government, but from all sorts of people. But in an underdeveloped country this is not so. Any kind of secondary school, any kind of university college, any kind of teacher, if it is the government that establishes it, then the government pays. So that the government is in charge of everything. No other modern government has the power that the most democratic, liberal-minded of governments in an underdeveloped country has. They rule everything. And some body comes in to establish this kind of business, he has to ask the government for authority. In the old days, you didn’t have to ask the government so much, the British government let you go, but today every single aspect of social, political or educational life is governed by those who are in charge of the government. Which makes this struggle for the government such a fierce business Now who are the people who are interested in the struggle for government. They are descendents from the pre-independence days, some people, the director of this, the minister of that, he used to be a white man but he usually had a lot of black people around him and they were educated at the university college or an independent school, because the British and the French government needed educated black people because they couldn’t fill up the organization of the country with a lot of white people<em>. </em>These remained. Black people in the civil service, black people in the police force, not in the highest places but once you had independence with a tremendous fight and the British chose the one who was most effective, more revolutionary, and said, “You govern.” And he came in and took over the whole government. What he didn’t take over were the banks, the business firms, the organizations, etc. To this day, in many of these territories in Kenya, they have taken over nothing. In Kenya they have got that land back, the land that they fought about, that land on the plateau. But for the rest the people who rule in Kenya are typical of the new rulers in Africa. They have all the legal power, they may have a different name, etc., but that is all. They succeed to this type of government, they have some civil servants for the most part they have the police, they have the people who educate and so forth and they have some schools. But the mass of the population is not involved. The government is the same type of government that the British or French had from which the population is removed. So that in all these African countries you have an entirely new population, a population that has been stimulated to tremendous action and that meets a government that is very much like the old government except the people administering it are black. Because the old government had prestige, it could run to the British and ask for some money, it could run to the United States and ask for something, it could bring the Queen and have a big celebration and the Queen could say “Rise up and so and so.” But this government has no prestige. All they can do is beg for money and beg for people to start some industry. Now what industries could they start? Sometimes a local businessman will show some business acumen – he will start some beer. Beer seems to be something that the colonials can manage without difficulty. They go further. They make some gin. Then there is another fellow who will get about a hundred young kids together and he will make some shirts. But what he will demand is that if the shirts that come into the country cost about two or three dollars each, he will demand that his shirts, since he is giving employment to a hundred local people, he wants to sell his for three dollars and he wants an embargo put on the shirts that are coming in. He becomes a supporter of the government if the government puts an embargo on the other shirts and doesn’t let them come in. That is the kind of thing that is going on. Any serious change in the industrial structure of the country, there is none. But there is one serious change that takes place. Formerly, about ten years ago, the prices of the single commodities which most of these countries in Africa depend upon were at a certain height. Today they are far below. In fact, every African financier will tell you that if they had given them the prices which they had reason to expect would continue from 1954, 1955, ‘56, before independence began, they wouldn’t want any aid. Let them keep their aid. Just give us the prices which we should get and which we were getting when we were not independent, and we would be quite happy. We wouldn’t be doing too well, but we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in and we wouldn’t heed what you call aid; you are giving us aid, a small amount, and then taking away from us a substantial amount of commodities and so forth. Secondly, these countries want to advance themselves. They have to buy all sorts of mechanical and highly developed goods and the prices are going up. The advanced countries say “We can’t help it, the workers say we want another year of schooling, we want fringe benefits, and we have to raise the prices.” So the prices of the commodities are going down and the prices of the goods they need are going up and they have an old style government, which is an imperialist colonial government which they have to run and they are in constant trouble. Those governments are falling to pieces. There is something else that is taking place that is very important. There is the development of education and the development of education is the education of people who have certain qualifications and capacities to help advance the country. But the model of that education is the secondary education of the advanced countries. I am a product of that education and people who know Africa tell me that in the African schools, they are taught by people who are European educated, have a European outlook, who receive the same salaries the Europeans have. They are separated from the population by the very kind of education that they are getting. When they are sent abroad and they come back, they are worse than they were. So you have two sections of the population. You have some people who are carrying on this ancient government, who are being educated away from the population, who have the same difficulties, even greater difficulties, that the colonial governments had and who are separate from the population which now demands what the population obviously didn’t demand in the old days where there was the colonial system. That is the situation that we are in. And if you see that clearly, there is no reason to doubt that they are going down, and will continue to go down. That is a fact. Now there is something that is going on that shows you the scare these governments are in. They know that the people who put them in power, or whose indirect actions resulted in their being in power, don’t like the system that exists. When you were carrying on an activity under the colonial system you could always point to them and say they are responsible. And their system was the capitalist system. Every single African who opposed and wanted to establish political independence somehow talked about the capitalist system which was the source of capitalistic exploitation in the colonies. But when he comes into power, what about this capitalist system well, he can’t touch it. So he does something which is very strange. He paints it up as much as he can in red and he calls it African Socialism. It is the same system, I give you one example. There is a statement on African Socialism by an African government. “African Socialism must be flexible because the problem it will confront and the aspirations and desires of the people will change all the time, often quickly and substantially.” An irreproachable statement. A rigid doctrinaire system will have little chance for survival, everybody can agree. Now this is what the African Already knew. This was an official document. Number one, make progress toward ultimate objective. Two, solve more immediate problems with efficiency. Now since the days of Adam and Eve was there any government which was not involved with making progress toward ultimate objectives and solving all immediate problems with efficiency?</p>
<p>This is characteristic of African Socialism. And one by one they are falling to pieces. They can’t manage the situations that they face. And I saw that situation very clearly some years ago and I was very concerned about it. I didn’t know what to do. I could see it. I will tell you of my experience. I was in Makerere a year or two ago and I spoke on television and there I said quite comfortably and easily what I have written many times and what we have always said, that the African states were going from precipice to precipice and it didn’t seem as if there was anything which would stop them. So I said that and one Kenyan there said<em>, “</em>no.” So I told him<em>, “</em>Now look, you are where you are because the Kenyan people came out and they put you there and if you want to improve the situation in Kenya you will have to find them and they will send it further.” Next day things were changed. I was walking about in town and people came up and spoke to me, told me that they had heard me talk. Then I heard that people had called the television station and demanded that I come on again. All of them know that that is what has been happening to African state after African state. But no one has said so. And here I have come and said it and they heard it on television and all of them know that it is so. Now that is the situation. They call it African Socialism and it is a complete mess, there is no holding it together at all. There is no holding any African state together. But a year or two ago I read in a paper the Arusha Declaration. I read it and I read one or two of the things about it and I said to myself this is remarkable. Anyway, I have known come other remarkable political declarations which ended in remarkable disasters. I have to go to Tanzania, or people I know have to go to Tanzania and see what is taking place and report, to me. Otherwise, I have nothing to say<em>. </em>And I kept my mouth shut. The opportunity arrived for me to go to Tanzania. I spent eight or ten days there. I talked to a lot of people, I travelled about a lot I had an interview with Nyerere and I am satisfied that what they are doing is something entirely new, not only for Africa but in the political systems of the world that we have known. Nothing like it has appeared since Lenin died in 1924. And I am going to spend quite a bit of time talking about Tanzania. And when you look at the situation in Tanzania you will see that Nyerere has understood what has been the cause of the collapse of the other African states and knew that if he didn’t put blocks in the road of that he was going to go the same way. This is the reason why this has taken place. </p>
<p>Now the Arusha Declaration, Part V. He talks about the leadership. Now in 1964 there took place a military revolt in Tanzania, in Uganda and in Kenya. And the governments were not overthrown because Mr. MacMillan, having given his “Wind of Change” speech in South Africa seemed to be aware of changes. So when this thing happened, these fellows said<em>, “</em>Mr. MacMillan, we have just won independence from you and would like your soldiers to save our government,” and that is why they are there today. Nyerere is very much ashamed of it, but he said, because his people told him, “We can’t be dependent upon the fact that you can remain. You had better go.” He ran away and for two, three or four days could not be seen. But he realized what had happened and has introduced policies which strike at all the weaknesses of the colonial African state, all the weaknesses that have remained and we are going to go into that in some detail. Now first of all he nationalised them. He called them in one morning and said<em>, “</em>Boys, you are nationalized. We will discuss the details of how much we pay you later but you are nationalised.” That is one of the things I regret very much that I wasn’t there, to see. But this nationalization was not what we thought it was 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t know what is your opinion of the nature the East African and the East European states, but it is quite obvious today that nationalization of the economy can take place with the most disastrous results in regards to development of the population. And today we have seen in Peru that a right wing military dictatorship has nationalised American property and land, all of them controlled by the Americans. They have done that because it was needed and if they didn’t do it they were giving strength to the communist left wing the trade union people. So that the national right wing military dictatorship nationalize not only the local economy but parts of the economy that belonged to the Americans. That is a very serious business. So that although Nyerere has nationalized, and that is very good, he knows that it is not sufficient. The rest of what Nyerere has done are the important things. The most important in my opinion is the leadership. Now I have told you that the people who have succeeded to the leadership are members of the civil service, one or two doctors, lawyers, and people who are committed to the European method of thought, European education, European social organization, etc., and they are running the business in a manner that the Europeans, they felt, would have run it if they had remained and they were getting into more and more difficulties because of the difficult situation they faced and the temper of the new populations. So Nyerere has known that you will watch that everything he says doesn’t only come from a clever brain, but he is someone who is aware of what happened in Africa, in the African states, and knows that unless he takes the necessary steps it will happen to him.</p>
<p>Number One: “Every TANU and Government leader must be either a Peasant or a Worker.” Now that makes 15% of government people in every country absolutely excluded from the government. He does not want any business men in there at all. You must be either a peasant or a worker. And surely nobody associated with the practices of capitalism or feudalism. Now that could cause a revolution in 90% of the countries that exist in the world today. Number Two: “No TANU or Government leader should hold shares in any Company.” And if they propose that in the Caribbean, of course, there would be a revolution at once. In Britain and these other places, the ministers, when they are defeated in the political system, the Tories come in or the Labour Party comes in, when they go out they get shares and places in companies and so forth and they hold some of those places and receive money at times when they are actually members<em>. </em>Nyerere has seen that sort of thing going on in African states and he says that is going to ruin us because it is a small section of the population that does this. So he says we don’t want that at all. He goes on to say “No TANU or Government leader should hold Directorships in any privately owned enterprises.” These are very drastic statements. Now “No TANU or Government leader should own houses which he rents to others.” That might seem an ordinary statement. What happens is this. This fellow becomes a Minister of the Government, or well established in the parliament or whatever they have and he goes to the bank and says “I want to borrow ten or fifteen thousand pounds.” They give it to him. He goes to the local concrete people, and good carpenters, and so forth and he says “I want to build a house.” And they build him a fine house. And he knows a lot of people who want housing, so he rents this house, and with the money he can pay back the bank. So he has a source of income there. Having built one, he goes out, borrows some more money builds another. So these fellows can have 4 or 5 houses and after five years they are drawing rents all the time. That is what Nyerere is putting an end to. “No TANU or Government leader should own houses which he rents to others.” That is not a general statement, it is a particular statement in that it is the way these fellows behave all over Africa and which makes the competition for government positions so terrific. Because you have the opportunity to do all these things. Then point number six: “For the purposes of this Resolution, the term ‘leader’ should comprise the following (now look whom they call leaders): Members of the TANU National Executive Committee; Ministers, Members of Parliament, Senior Officials of Organizations affiliated to TANU<em>,.</em>.. all those appointed or elected under any clause of the TANU Constitution, councillors and Civil Servants in the high and middle cadres.” In other words, anybody who is any kind of political leader in the government or in any kind of organization connected with the government is prohibited from taking part in all these things that ministers and their friends usually take part in. And in this context ‘leader’ means a man, a man and his wife; or a woman and her husband.” So the people there are no longer representatives of the old style of people who ruled, whether they are white, or black – they have cleared that up completely. That is the Arusha Declaration. It is not an article, it is not a speech, it is a statement of position by the government and that is what the people have to learn to do. Now it isn’t easy to manage. This is an extremely difficult thing, but all the young people and those in the universities, etc., are being brought up with this as government policy, and Nyerere really hopes that in time a new generation will come up which will govern itself by these objectives he has given to them, a new perspective, and the other African states had none but to carry on as best they could. Now he talks about education and the new generation. Nov, the great source of corruption in these governments is education, and the education you get, according to the European or American system, and then you join the government and all of you become a separate class. And it really says quite clearly that one class of people in the state can exploit the other class. The people in the towns, the educated classes. Now, there are the few who go to secondary schools, are taken many miles away from their houses. They take you away to the secondary schools. You live in an enclave, You have to get their permission to go into the town for recreation but do not relate the work of town or country to your real life which is lived in the school compound. Later a few people go to the university. If they are lucky enough to enter Dar-es-Salaam University College they live in comfortable quarters, eat well, and study hard for their degree. When they have been successful in obtaining it they know immediately that they will receive a salary of something like 660 pounds per annum. This is what they have been aiming for. It is what they have been encouraged to aim for. They may also have the desire to serve the community but their idea of service is related to status and the salary which a university education is expected to confer upon its recipient. Those are the sources of the corruption of the African population and the African states. And Nyerere is determined to break that up. He says the salary and the status become a right automatically conferred by the degree. You have to know the colonial situation to know the importance of this, because the large majority of the population are illiterate. And those who get the education s it in the seats of power and really control everything and are separate from the rest of the population. And they have so much power and there is so much to be got. That is why they fight so desperately for it. And that is why Nyerere has been that he has to finish with that. And then he goes on to say, “It is wrong to criticize the young people for these attitudes. The new university graduate has spent the larger part of his life separated and apart from the masses of Tanzania.” That is gospel truth. In the Caribbean it is the same. His parents may be poor but he has never fully shared that poverty. The moment you go into secondary education you are at once removed and you live a different life and your aim is at something that separates you from the population, which substantially is an illiterate backward population. So, he says, his parents may be poor but he has never shared that poverty, he does not know what it is like to live as a poor peasant. He would be more at home in the world of the educated than he is among his own parents. Only during vacations has he spent time at home and even then he would often find that his parents and relatives support his own conception of his difference and regard it as wrong that he should live and work as the ordinary person that he really is. In one or two novels they have singled out certain persons as characteristic of certain types, but a clear analytical statement of the situation in a colonial country – I have not seen it anywhere. This is what happens. In the Caribbean it is happening and in African territories it is worse because the population is illiterate and backward and they are being educated to hold important positions in the government and they become a special class. And as Nyerere says<em>, “</em>They are exploiting the people.” And he wants to put an end to that. He says<em>, “</em>The third point is that our present system encourages the pupils in the idea that all knowledge which is worthwhile is acquired from books or from educated people. The knowledge and wisdom of old people is despised and they themselves regard it as being ignorant and of no account.” And he is trying to break up that situation. The real source of corruption in these colonies is the secondary school and those who enter higher education, for they form automatically a section of society which can only exploit the mass of the population. They are in such a situation that in order to help they must get paid for it. And whether or not their own parents give them this impression of status, etc. That is what he is against. This is why in regard to the secondary schools he says, “Thus when this scheme is in operation, the secondary school has got to make its own money.” He says<em>, “</em>They have to go and clear their own bush to build their own schools.” And when you hear as African say that they have to clear their own bush you know there is real bush in Africa. In Britain you have 15 or 20 elm trees, they put a fence round it and call it a forest. But Nyerere says, “You have to clear your own bush, you have to plant, you have to make money, and don’t expect any money from the government. The secondary school has got to make its own money, draw its profits and then decide what it is going to do.” He says, “Thus when this scheme is in operation, the revenue side of school accounts would not read as it does at present – grant from government., grant from voluntary agency or other charity. They would read – income from sale of cotton, value of the food grown and consumed, value of labour done by pupils on new building, repairs, equipment, etc. Government subvention, nil. Grant from government nothing.” You would be startled if you were told that you were going to secondary school and you have to go out and make some money and determine how the school will go by the amount of money you made. I have not read this anywhere. Rousseau is the man who has made the conception of the modern individual, but nowhere have I read in any place at all that the secondary school must become a school in which people make their own money and learn the kind of work and activity which is carried on by the mass of population. Otherwise, they will certainly be separated from them and will not be able to teach them what is required, because they are going to live an agricultural life for as far as they could see and these students must not learn what is required by the professional classes and must not learn what separates them from the rest of the population, the very education that they practise, the schools that they make: What they do in the schools must prepare them to educate the mass of the population. Otherwise this separation will take place and the whole thing will fall apart. I think that the most important thing that I can’t tell you about Nyerere is this. On the slopes of the Cavarando there <em>are </em>some African families who have done pretty well. They have done what the British and the Americans and the Germans taught them – you have a piece of land, you have to work at it, you have to sell, you have to save your money up, then you employ some labour. And these fellows are very successful, the land is good, there is a lot of water and they have done extremely well. And what Nyerere says is that those people, we can’t be hard on them, but we don’t want the rest of the population to do what they have done because everybody told them, “That is what is required,” And they are now employing some labour, making some money, spreading their good, becoming more and more expansive in regard to the land, etc. He says, we don’t want that. He says, what we have to aim at is the extension and development of the old African family because the African lived in the old days, and to some extent and in many places still lives, an extended, cooperative form of life. He says that is what we have to do. If we follow the habits of the people in western Europe and so forth and try to build up that we will wreck this country and we will never be able to put it in any kind of order. And it is very important to know that two of the greatest politicians of the 20th century had the same idea.</p>
<p>Gandhi mobilized the peasant and if he had not been able to mobilize the peasant the British would have been in India up to today. It was the mobilization of the peasant, those millions of people who have been removed from politics for so many centuries, that was the greatest shock. The British couldn’t hold them in order. There were too many people involved. And then Gandhi used to say, “We have to take the peasant for what he is<em>.</em>” The peasant wears just a little shirt or something – Gandhi wore one! The peasant did not like any of them to deal with cows, but they got milk from the goat – Gandhi kept his goat and he milked the goat. The peasant wove the cloth he wore – Gandhi wove his own cloth. And he made it clear to everybody, and the peasant included, that their way of life was to be the foundation of the way of life. He made it absolutely clear, he said “Don’t attempt to make these Indian peasants into peasants as in the advanced countries, as in Europe, etc. Number one, you can’t do it, and in any case, take them for what they are.” A second man who had very clear ideas about the peasant was Lenin. Lenin believed that the Russian peasant could only be changed if the Russian economy was assisted by the economy of the advanced countries who had become socialistic, because otherwise they <em>are </em>what they <em>are </em>and <em>we </em>can’t leave them. So the two of them, different types of men were very clear as to what was to be done with the peasants. And I could show you how close Nyerere is to Lenin’s proposal. Now, that is the situation. That is what he is doing. He has not only nationalized, he has changed the political system completely, the social construction of people who are going to administer and take charge. He has made that into something new and altogether he is breaking up the aid system, the system which they have inherited, and which black people are trying to run and which is causing nothing but complete failure. Now I knew these fellows, I knew their limitations. </p>
<p>Fanon is much more severe, he made it perfectly clear that nothing could be settled in those African states unless the revolution was continued not only against the imperialists but against those who are going to succeed. That is what his book says. He says the revolution must go on. You cannot go on in this way and that is what Nyerere is doing. He is creating the elements of a new society. Some people complain to me and say<em>, “</em>Don’t you prefer that it should come from below?” I say, “Sure it would be better if it would come from below, but it has come, and we should take it as it is.” They have difficulties, sure they have difficulties but he has done splendidly. And Kaunda had followed him and I will read Kaunda.</p>
<p class="indentb">“Now during the hazardous road to political independence we recognized the fact that Africa was going to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest battleground, for this century’s ideological battle. As is well know, the present day ideological differences are based on certain economic and political theories and practices. Putting it very simply, one would say, it was a question of who owned or controlled the means of creating and distributing the wealth in any given nation.”</p>
<p>This is a key point, now follow what he is saying. For if the distribution of wealth is not done properly, it might lead to the creation of classes in society and the much valued humanist approach that is traditional and inherent in our African society would have suffered a final blow. What he is saying is what Nyerere has been saying, the old African cooperative family structure is what we have to develop. We must not develop into some peasants who have done well and some who have not, or the whole structure is going to fall apart. It is very strange that very rapidly these African politicians, have seen it, they have to build on what is African, They have to build on the basic structure that these people have had for thousands of years. They cannot try to develop a peasant on the economic structure of western civilization. That is sure to cause trouble and they cannot do it properly. This is something new that has appeared and I found in Africa that people are watching them. And I was told by many people, “We don’t know whether Nyerere will succeed, but if Nyerere is successful, the other African states will follow because they don’t know where they are going, they are drifting along and if this is successful, they will go with it.”</p>
<p>This is what the situation is. Now, he says, if this thing happened to the world as a whole and Africa in particular, we would be all the poorer for it, for we would then have the “haves” and the “have nots.” That is what they are trying to prevent. They are trying to prevent a society building up the type of relation that exists in the advanced countries. They are not aiming at repetition of western society, they are hoping to build on the African basis and on what they have. Politically they would be creating room for opposing parties based on the oppressed and the oppressor concept which again would not be in keeping with the society described above, a society in which the chief, as an elected or appointed leader of the people, held national property like land in trust for the people and was fully aware that he was responsible to them. He knew, too, that continuing to be the head depended on his people’s will. Now there has been a lot of mischief caused by a lot of lies and nonsense. Lord Lugard went to East Africa and he made a lot of mischief in Kenya through something that we call “Dual Mandate.” It is one of the most glaring pieces of hypocrisy and nonsense that you could find in any historical development. There was no dual mandate. What he called a dual mandate was, the central government was the British government, but it was dual because the chief was allowed to govern the people in what was known as the traditional way. What happened was that the chief was a servant of the British government. It was not dual mandate. There was no mandate that the British government had and a mandate that the chief had. If the chief didn’t do what the British government wanted, that was the end of him. And that was very different from the old position of the chief. The old position of the chief in many African states was that he had to listen to what the people said, he had to satisfy them. If he didn’t satisfy them, they killed him and put his brother in his place. Some of these chief families remained for hundreds of years. They had to listen to the population, listen to the people, and if they were not satisfactory the people got together and said we have to get rid of that fellow. And they got rid of him and decided that his brother would take charge, his sister’s husband or whoever. But they got rid of him, finished up with him. He couldn’t go on. And he knew that was waiting if he didn’t go on properly. So many of these chiefs did pretty well and people insisted that was a form of democracy. That is what Nyerere and TANU are beginning to find out, to restore, the African family, and to understand that this special group of people who are educated, who become bureaucrats, they are the ones who must be separated, they must be educated so as to become part of the population and bring the knowledge that they have as part of the population which the majority of the people constitute. Now I hope you understand what a serious and important thing that is. Nothing like that has ever taken place in Africa anywhere. Nkrumah, it seemed at the beginning, hoped to do something of the kind, but he didn’t make these drastic changes in the economic and social structure that Nyerere has made, and it is my belief, I have talked to Nyerere, that he did it because he realized that unless these fundamental changes were made and the old structures and the ideas that the British and the French had left behind, unless these were completely cleared out and the people given another perspective, the degeneration of the African state was bound to continue. Now I am going to conclude by telling you what I showed to Nyerere and he said he didn’t know it. Now Lenin had to deal with a state, there were many distinguished writers, there were many learned people in Russia, but the fact remained that in Russia the majority of the population was a very backward people, backward and illiterate. Now a man came to London about three or four years ago and he told George Lamming that he wanted to see me, he was an American citizen, he was living in Ghana. He told me he wanted to edit a paper that would be of the standard of the Lebanon Economist, a very good paper, a reactionary as all of them are, but fairly good. So I told him yes. And I told him I don’t want to write for your paper, it is a government paper, and what I write they will not like. And he said that was not so, that Nkrumah had told him they had absolute freedom, I said<em>, “</em>Yes, absolute freedom for Nkrumah, but not for people like me.” So I went away, he came back again and he took me to lunch and he had some people around and said, “Well, Mr. James we want you, we have been told that you are the finest of the writers on Africa and colonial territories, we want you on our paper.” I told him, “Now look, I am not going to write about Africa, but I will write about Lenin and what he was saying about Russia which was in a situation, the first of the underdeveloped countries that had to make the transition to the modern society.” He said<em>, “</em>All right.” And I wrote and didn’t mention Africa once. They read it and said they didn’t want it. Because I stated there what Lenin was stating in the last years. And I think I will give you some idea of it and you will see how closely Nyerere’s ideas approximate to what Lenin was saying. Lenin wrote some articles, at least two or three, in the last months of his life, and one of them is an article on cooperation. And there he says, his last words to the party and people of Russia and I am going to read them to you. “Two main tasks confront us which constitute the epoch.” There is not misunderstanding. In that sentence of six or seven words he is talking about what is essential to the w hole development. Now what arc these two main tasks. I will give you fifty chances, you will never be able to say what it was he said. He says<em>,</em> “The first is to reconstruct our apparatus which is utterly useless.” That is the Bolshevik leader. He says “We have to reconstruct the government which is utterly useless and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch.” He used to say in his last years<em>, “</em>This Soviet government that everybody is talking about, it’s a Bolshevik government, it is led by Bolsheviks, it preaches materialism, it’s Marxist, but that is the same old Czarist government. It hasn’t changed.” And when I was in Nigeria, I said<em>, “</em>Well, I haven’t come here to tell you things about the Nigerian government but let us look at the Ivory Coast, let us look at Ghana, would you agree that it is the same old imperialistic government?” And everyone agreed that it was. If I had gone to the Ivory Coast I would have asked them about Nigeria. But Lenin says, we have had five or six years of the Russian revolution, but this government that we have is the same old, old Czarist government. To change a government is a very difficult thing. Lenin says that is the first thing we have to do. “Which is utterly useless and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch during the five years of struggle we did not and could not make any serious alterations in it.” That is after six years of the Russian revolution; He says the government is the same old Czarist government. And Nyerere has realized that the government that he has is the same old imperialist colonial government and he is seeking to break it up. And he realizes that they cannot run it as well as the imperialists did. That is the situation. And the second point of Lenin’s. Last time, I gave you fifty guesses, this time I give you a thousand. Lenin says, we have the peasants, the worst thing is to change that government, and the second thing is to conduct educational work among the peasants. When I showed it to Nyerere he said he hadn’t read it anywhere. But I could recognize what he was going. There are all sorts of passages which show that Lenin was aware of what was necessary, they had to break up that system and it is a very difficult thing to break up an old system. And if you try to run it you can’t run it as well as the people who made it, who made it for themselves and knew what they were doing. And they are trying in African state, after African state to have black African people run what is essentially the old system with the worst economic possibilities. That is why they are in the mess they are in and that is why we must understand the seriousness and the radical approach which Nyerere has shown ... Now my last word here is my African friend with his African socialism. African socialism must be flexible, it must make progress toward its main objectives. What Nyerere says is that African socialism must break up all the remnants of the system that we have inherited and institute something new. And then this young man goes on to say, “Valid as Marx’s description was, it bears little similarity to Kenya today.” On colonialism and so forth, they make it very clear that Marxism is something that Marx had to say about the advanced countries, it had no relation whatever to the colonial territories now that they have become independent. The only relation they had to Marxism was to call themselves Socialism. But I was able to show that Nyerere has, in discovering the necessity of breaking up this system which he has inherited from the old imperialists, has discovered the same thing that Lenin after six years was telling the Russians.</p>
<p>Less Argument about words! We still have too much of this sort of thing. More variety in practical experience and more study of this experience! Under certain conditions the exemplary organization of local work, even on a small scale, is of far greater national importance than many branches of the central state work. And these are precisely the conditions we are in at the present moment in regard to peasant farming in general, and in regard to the exchange of the surplus products of agricultures for the manufacture of industry in particular.</p>
<p>Exemplary organization on this respect, even a single volost, is of far greater national importance than the ‘exemplary’ improvement of the central apparatus of any People’s Commissariat: for three and a half years to such an extent that it has managed to acquire a certain amount of harmful inertness; we cannot improve it quickly to any extent, we do not know how to do it. Assistance in the more radical improvement of it, a new flow of fresh forces, assistance in the successful struggle against bureaucracy, in the struggle to overcome this harmful inertness, must come from localities, from the lower ranks, with the exemplary organization of a small ‘whole,’ precisely a ‘whole’, i.e. not on one farm, not one branch of economy, not one enterprise, but the <b>sum total</b> of economic exchange, even if only a small locality.</p>
<p>Those of us who are doomed to remain on work at the center will continue the tasks of improving the apparatus and purging it of bureaucracy, even if in modest and immediately achievable dimensions. But the greatest assistance in this task is coming, and will come, from the localities.”</p>
<p>I hope I have made clear the tremendous attempt which is being made. There are difficulties as there are in Cuba. But there is one of the most important features of political development in the world today, not only for the underdeveloped countries but, I am positive, I have examined it, the advanced countries<em>,</em> in their systems of education in particular, have a lot to learn from what is taking place in Tanzania.</p>
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C.L.R. James 1973
Reflections on Pan-Africanism
Part I
Transcript of speech given on November 20, 1973;
Transcribed: by Damon Maxwell.
A very distinguished writer, George Lamming, a West Indian, makes it a rule to despise what is called “suspense.” He says he has no use for it in his writing and I think that in regard to what I have to say in these two evenings I should get that subject clear and keep you out of any suspense you might have. Tonight I am going to speak about the history of Pan-Africanism up to the independence of the Gold Coast and Ghana, and certain things that grew from it. Tomorrow night I am going to speak about developments after that; then the perspectives of what is taking place in Africa,what we are seeing and what the future is likely to be. So that tonight up to the Independence of the gold Coast and Ghana and certain things that flow from it so that we know where we are. Now much of it will deal with my personal experiences and personal responses to people. There is this book, Africa, Britain’s Third Empire by George Padmore and it is dedicated by Padmore to W.E. Burghardt DuBois, father of Pan-Africanism, scholar, and uncompromising fighter for human rights, Harvard, Fisk, Wilberforce, Fellow of the American Association, International President Pan-African Conference. Now that is the attitude that Padmore had to Dr. DuBois and that is the attitude that all of us had to him. For us he is the originator of the Pan-African movement both in theory and in fact and it is astonishing the number of subjects and the spheres of intellectual organizational activity in which Dr. DuBois was 25 years ahead of all other persons in the United States and a good many elsewhere. When Dr. DuBois died, I know an editor of an American magazine wrote me asking me to write something about it. He told me what the others are going to write and I wrote to him and told him that I wasn’t going to write that at all and I would like him to understand that I would not refer to Dr. DuBois as a most distinguished black man and a most distinguished leader of our people. That is no good. It is lowering the man from what he is.
He is one of the most remarkable persons of the 20th century. In field after field he was 25 years in advance of all the persons who lived with him. Now Padmore dedicated this book to Dr. DuBois and we looked upon him, not as our leader, I wasn’t thinking of him as a leader in those days, but he was a man, whose books we read, all of us who were interested in those matters. And we also read the books of Marcus Garvey. Dr. DuBois had begun historical writing both on the history of Africa and the history of the United States, he had formed the Pan-African Conferences. One after the other, from about 1919 until about 1929 and that was part of his conceptions and of what he wrote regularly in the NAACP paper which he founded. We grew up on that. Padmore and I in the West Indies: we read Garvey’s paper, “The Negro World.” I used to buy Garvey’s paper every Saturday morning in Frederick Street about 10 or 15 yards from the police station. That is important, because the paper was banned by the police, and I am certain that inside the police station a lot of them were reading it, too. too. So we were brought up on Marcus Garvey and his “Negro World.” None of us thought of going to Africa, but we read Garvey and were quite satisfied and pleased with him and we read Dr. DuBois. That educated us. As far as I know that was the only way we got some education on the affairs of black people in the Caribbean. Otherwise we learned what they taught us in the schools. They were very good schools, secondary schools. All they taught us about Africa was how backward they were and how beneficial the British invasion of Africa was and the slave trade was not so bad because it brought backward people in touch with civilization and taught them Christianity. It may not have taught them very much Christianity but at least it got them on the road. And that is what we learned. So it was Garvey in his paper and DuBois in his books and a paper that he published later that changed our whole attitude. George Padmore and I were very friendly. I knew him and I knew his father, his mother. I knew his sisters. His father was a teacher. My father was a teacher. We were boys together. We never talked about Africa. We talked about the West Indies. He went to St. Mary’s college, I went to Queen’s Royal. We would spend vacations together. Neither of us thought about being political leaders of African emancipation. We didn’t think about Africa at all. That was not in our conception. Well, Padmore left Trinidad and went to the United States and there he got in to talk to Dr. DuBois, that is the reason for this dedication. He understood the kind of man he was and the expansion of the intellectual habits of black people and the way they looked upon themselves and the way they looked on the world around them.
He joined the Communist Party. Then the Communist party recognized that he had great ability and took him to Moscow where he became head of the International African Negro movement. All the communists were doing for the African people and people of African descent, Padmore was in charge of. It was a position of tremendous importance. He published a paper called “The Negro Worker” and he was interested in all the political leaders and so forth. I don’t think up to that time any black man had held a position of such importance. I left Trinidad in 1932 and I went to Britain and there I rapidly became a Marxist and began to become a practitioner and finally became one of the persons most prominent in the Trotskyist movement in Britain. I wrote a book of Trotsky’s ideas and I wrote a book on the Revolution in S. Domingo which established the state of Haiti. But I wrote that Trotsky book first. And in Britain about 1934 I was going around looking at everything, seeing everything as much as I could, and I heard of a man called George Padmore, a negro who was a great leader of the communists internationally. And who was having a meeting. I went to the meeting which was held not far from where I lived. And we sat there waiting, about 50 or 60 of us, half white people, half black people. About five to eight this person walked in and he as my old friend from Trinidad, George Padmore. I was quite astonished. I listened to him speaking. He spoke with great authority and the people listened to him. Afterwards I told him let’s go home to the flat and I took him home and we talked till four o’clock in the morning. At that time I was already a Trotskyist and George was connected with Moscow but that never caused any dissatisfaction with me. We understood that we were concerned with the African movement, I felt that I could be a Marxist, a Trotskyist and also be completely devoted to the African colonial movement. So we never quarreled. But something peculiar happened that night.
He said, “You came here in 1932.” I said, “Yes, I came here in March 1932.” He said, “ I was here in March, 1932, I came from Moscow looking for black people to take to Moscow to educate and organize in the movement. I needed some people badly. If I had known you were here I would have asked you to go.” “If you had asked me in 1932, I most certainly would have gone without a shadow of doubt!”
Well, George went away and sometime in 1934 or 1935 I formed an organization called the International African Friends of Ethiopia, that was in regard to that Ethiopian war and members of my committee were Jomo Kenyatta, there was another splendid man from West Africa called Wallace Johnson; I hear Wallace is a bit old now, but he was one of the finest politicalists I have known, utterly fearless, stood for his political principles and did not waver. There was Dr. Danville who wasn’t too political but he was a very learned man. He was ready to fight, to join the committee and carry on.
We formed this organization and we did rather well. But one day, sometime in late 1934 or 1935 there was a knock at my door and I went do the door and there was George Padmore. Padmore was an extremely handsome man and very neat and careful in all his ways, he always had his papers in order, himself in order, everything in order. But today he looked a little strange. I had never seen Padmore unshaven. Never. But he looked a little strange. I asked him to sit down and then I asked him what was wrong. I don’t know why I asked him what was wrong but things did not look right. He said, “I’ve left those people you know.” And that was the biggest shock I received since I had gone to Brazil three years before. “I have left those people” meant he had left the Communist Party. And he was the biggest black man in Moscow, dealing with black people and the colonial revolution. So I said, “What happened?” And he told me. He said, “They are changing the line and now they tell me that in future we are going to be soft and not attack strongly the democratic imperialists which are Britain, France and the United States. That the main attack is to be directed upon the Fascist imperialists, Italy, Germany and Japan. And George, we would like you to do this in the propaganda that you are doing and in the articles that you are writing and the paper you are publishing, to follow that line.” And George said, “That is impossible. Germany and Japan have no colonies in Africa. How am I to say the democratic imperialists, such as the United States is the most race ridden territory in the western world. So I am to say that Britain and France who have the colonies in Africa and the United States, can be democratic imperialists and be soft to them but be strong against Japan, Italy and Germany. That is impossible. What do you think of that?” I said, “But George, there is not much you can say about that, that is the line, and when the Communist Party says that is the line, that is the line.” I want to make a remark about a man called Harold Cruse. He has written a book about black intellectuals, I haven’t found very much in the book to interest me. But I noticed him saying that the Jews are responsible for what is taking place or what took place in regard to black people in the United States. That man is crazy. Then the Communist Party took a line. You got it in Germany, in Japan, Italy, Germany and in the United States, in Arabia, in Latin America, in Asia, everywhere. So if the Communist Party in the United States was taking a line in regard to blacks: the line was the Moscow line. No Jews were responsible for that.
That is absolutely wrong, I am sure, a great ignorance of the fundamental features of the world believe in. They told George “That is the line.” “Well,” he said, “I’ll take my own line.” And he left them. And so he came to London and joined the International African Friends of Ethiopia. He was very valuable. But the time came when Ethiopia was very obviously under the control of Italy. For the time being the society didn’t t have very much to do and George Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau. That was the only movement in existence that fought, agitated, and organized for the independence of Africa. That was the Pan-Africanist movement formed in 1935. There was no other that we knew about. DuBois was not doing anything about it except writing now and then. But that movement was the movement for the independence of African people. Garvey was finished about that time. It was a very peculiar movement. There were not many African, not many black people or people of African descent in Britain. There were for the most part about 10 of us, and peculiarly enough, I may talk about that next time, if you ask me, most of us were West Indians. And there we were, talking about the independence of Africa, organizing for the independence of Africa, writing books and getting them published, writing pamphlets and constantly going to meetings, holding meetings. And most of the people who were there, looked upon us as well meaning but politically illiterate West Indians. “Independence of Africa.” What kind of nonsense was that. Of course Britain was going to give Africa Independence but in a 100 years or so. But to talk about something recent like that was really not reasonable. George Padmore founded a paper and I was the editor. But he was the leader of the movement and we never quarreled, I continued with my Trotskyism, and George was head of the movement, a man of political tenacity and a one-sided attitude toward what he was doing. I have not seen his equal anywhere else. I have heard of one or two others. But he was the most dedicated, the most devoted political leader you could think of. And what he was thinking about was the independence of Africa, including the colonial countries. Now to go into what we did. We agitated, we wrote books, we wrote pamphlets, we had meetings, etc.
Now I want to speak about two people. I will speak about Jomo Kenyatta. At the time, and even today, he was not very bright. But he was a devoted African nationalist. You could depend on Kenyatta at any time. If anything came up that was concerned with African nationalism against the nationalist imperialists, Kenyatta could be depended upon. He could understand, he could not understand, he always voted against. And such men are valued, I assure you. There were one or two other members of the organization of whom I should speak. One was Padmore’s wife, Dorothy. She was an English woman, an educated person, she knew both French and German and was very familiar with Marxism, and history and so forth. And she was tireless in the support of George. Not only in support of the work he had to do, helping with typing, etc., but the number of people who filled up the house and who Dorothy fed, talked to, educated them. That was her work. She died the other day and nobody has ever said a word about her. I am writing some memoirs of George Padmore and I intend to spend a page or two on Dorothy and what she did. The other person was a man now living in Kenya, called Dr. Makkonnen. This was not a doctor who could write a prescription for me. His name was not really Makkonnen but that was a name that he assumed after the Ethiopian business and whether he is a doctor of medicine or a doctor of philosophy, I don’t know, but he was a member of our organisation and “Mak” was absolutely tireless and did everything required. He was a very valuable man. If we wanted a meeting, we talked about the meeting, about the hall and everything and then said, “’Mak’ what about it?” and “Mak” would arrange everything. ‘Mak’ would get the hall, ‘Mak’ would get the pamphlets, ‘Mak’ would do everything. And after everything was in order, ‘Mak’ seemed happy to sit in the front and hear me or Padmore on the platform. And I remember seeing his face, smiling, happy that we were doing well. We rented a big building in Grove, upstairs about 8 to 10 rooms. We paid the rent. How, I don’t know, believe me. If I heard today that ‘Mak’ had some means of making money that could not be distinguished by the police I wouldn’t say no because ‘Mak’ got the money. We were never thrown out. We always had money for what we wanted to do and ‘Mak’ brought it. Some of us brought some money, but ‘Mak’ could be depended upon in a crisis. When the rent was due, ‘Mak’ would say, “I’ll see what I can do.” and he always was able to do it. I used to suffer from stomach ulcers and ‘Mak’ would look at me and say, “You are not looking well, I know what you need.” And he would cook some fish for me in the West Indian style. And it put me right. And that is the kind of person ‘Mak’ was. He is today in Kenya. I don’t know if he is doing very well. He worked with Nkrumah in Ghana. He was an absolutely indispensible person. And these are two personalities, Dorothy Padmore, George’s wife, and Makkonnen, the organizer, who were absolutely necessary and indispensable for our organization. But we were alone. There were only eight or ten or us. There were no people. But we kept on writing. We published books. I published two or three. George published two or three. We published a number of pamphlets and we published this paper I was editor of until I left. But everybody knew us, we were at every meeting, we passed resolutions and so forth. But something happened which lifted the organization to an important place that it didn’t suspect. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill met together and made a statement that after the war the colonial territories of Britain would be given independence. Mr. Roosevelt didn’t have any colonies because where the United States was in charge they didn’t call it a colony, they called it a territory. So the Virgin Islands were a territory and that was different. So they signed the statement. There was an organization in Britain, a very militant organization called WASU, west African Students Union, and I used to go down there and speak quite a lot. And WASU decided to ask Mr. Churchill, formally and officially, if when he talked about independence for the colonies, he meant West Africa. So Mr. Churchill said Yes, he meant West Africa. But he sent Major Atlee down to make them understand that when he said immediately he meant immediately for everybody, but not immediately for Africa, that would take a little time. So there was a great disturbance. People began to say, “Why don’t you mean what you say?” So after the war the British decided that they would get a lot of Africans from Africa and they got a whole lot of them and I will read you something that was said about them afterwards. They brought them from Africa to Oxford for a conference to explain to them that immediate independence referred to independence immediately but not quite at once. It will take a little time. So they had this conference at Oxford. And there was Padmore in England with his poor organization. And a lot of these Africans were living alone in England, paid for by the British Government, fed and organized by the British government.
So Padmore decided to hold a conference in Manchester. He invited them all up and they came. By himself he could never have had that conference. If he didn’t have that organization he couldn’t have held that conference. So he had dozens of them up to Manchester and there was a very famous conference. At that conference there was Kenyatta, there was Nkrumah, and there was laid down at this conference the policy which Nkrumah carried out afterward in the Gold Coast. Now I have to tell you how Nkrumah got in touch with Padmore and how that organization came to have these two men together. I was in the United States in 1941 and a member of my political organization came to me and told me:
“There is a young African here and he says be would like to see you.” I said, “Well, why should he say he would like to see me.” “Well, I told him about you and he has read your book and I told him I could take him to see you and he said his name is Francis Nkrumah.”
So Nkrumah turned up, very neat, very graceful, very assured, he always has been, and we got together and we got to be friendly. And he spent two years with us. We used to go down to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he would come up to New York and spend some time with us. We were very close until in 1943 he said he was going to England to study law and I wrote a letter, a letter that is famous in our annals. I said, “Dear George, there is a young African coming to England to study law. He is not very bright, but nevertheless he is determined to throw the imperialists out of Africa. Do what you can for him.” George met him at Waterlee station and there began that combination. Now, why did I say that he was not very bright? Nkrumah used to talk about surplus value, capital instead of commodities. He had picked up these from some superficial quarters. He did not understand them really. About two years afterwards I saw Nkrumah and had read an article that he had written on Imperialism. He had learned from Padmore’s extensive library and all sorts of papers and clippings. It was fully organized particularly in regard to the colonial policies of the African powers.
And Nkrumah was able to learn and was educated a great deal by Padmore. In addition to that, Nkrumah brought much creative energy and knowledge of Africa and instinctive political development which fortified Padmore and the two of them became a tremendous power together in the movement. Well in 1947, Nkrumah went back to Ghana and there I am going to speak of two things in regard to the development of colonial Africa, I will leave South Africa for next time. But I am going to speak first of all tonight of the Gold Coast and on the other side Kenya. Nkrumah went to the Gold Coast and when he landed he said he wasn’t sure if they would let him land or not, But the man who was in charge, he said, “Hello, glad to see you.” He said he had been active in Britain and in France where people knew him. When he went there he knew no one, nobody had any idea of him, he had to begin from the bottom. But Nkrumah began and the struggle in the Gold Coast was a political struggle of the western type. Because the Gold Coast has got three areas. There is the coast itself which is very western, everybody speaks English although he may speak a native language. Then there is Ashanti and then beyond Ashanti there is another modern area in the north. And Nkrumah went there and began to organize on the coast and he built a movement. Now the Convention Party was a party of the African intellectual, the African elite. In all these colonial territories there is always a native elite and the more backward the territory the more elitist the elite. These people were there to form a party and they had sent for Nkrumah to come to organize their Convention Party. They were busy with law and medicine and so forth. So in Nkrumah they wanted someone to organize the party, they weren’t going to leave it to anyone to organize a political party and Nkrumah came and he organized the party and what he did is something I will refer to, so please do not let me forget this. He built a party from the ground up. Nkrumah went all over the Gold Coast, to the country people and in the towns, building the party, let people know that a political party was for self government. Everybody in the Gold Coast was for self government, everybody. Nkrumah added one more word, “now” – “Self Government Now.” And that upset everyone, because the idea of “Self Government Now” meant that you were going straight at it. Self Government sometime or another meant that you could perhaps make a manoeuvre and Nkrumah didn’t negotiate – he mobilized the population for Self Government now. Now I have to tell you something about what happened to the Gold Coast people, unfortunately, it is very difficult for me to speak about the African revolution in the way that they ought to be spoken about. One thing that I have to tell you is that Nkrumah went to jail and he won an election. I think the vote was 23,000 against 700. Yes, Nkrumah received 22,780 out of a total of 23,132 votes. So that convinced even the British that he had some support. Now, what are you going to do, how are you going to govern the country. They had to take him out of jail and make a leader of him because they couldn’t govern the country otherwise. The same thing happened with Jomo Kenyatta. They put Kenyatta in jail, they put him away for six years and when they took him out they told him he was not to come near Nairobi. He was kept outside, but they had him in because they couldn’t govern. When a population decides that they don’t want you to govern then you cannot govern them anymore – it is absolutely impossible. That is what they found. These populations may not be able to read but once they get something in their heads... The British people made one big mistake and they won’t do that again. They would take somebody they wanted to get rid of and put him in jail. They should have made him political leader and their representative. Then he would have disgraced himself soon enough. But once they put him in jail, then the public says, “That is my choice.” So they took Nkrumah out of jail and made him leader of the government.
Now I want to tell you they put Kenyatta in jail, they had to take him out; they put Nkrumah in jail, they had to take him out. I am emphasizing that because it shows the tremendous influence that the mass of the population had on the winning of independence. You can’t read that in books and it is very difficult to write it but you will have to bear it in mind. It will sound as if all the politics is going on above and the mass of the population simply acquiesced. Well, that was not so – the mass of the population was making its presence felt. And there is one notable example of that.
It took place at Saltpond, Ghana, sometime in 1949. Nkrumah had gone there in 1947 and he had built up the party, the Convention Party. He was the secretary of the Convention Party. But he had his own people in the party. He had built up a youth movement. So there was a conference at Saltpond and there was a conference that met to decide what would happen to Nkrumah and what was going to happen to the youth movement. Well, they were uncertain, there was a lot of back and forth at the conference and, in addition to the hundreds of delegates, there were thousands of people outside who were coming to hear what was going on because it interested them. So they wanted to dismiss Nkrumah from the post of secretary and an old chief said no, he didn’t think that should be done. They should appoint a committee to go and talk it over and see what should be done, and they appointed a committee, consisting of a chief and an educated African, named Ginn, as far as I remember, and they went and discussed. And Nkrumah agreed more or less to a policy which would enable him to remain in as secretary but he was not to have the influence over the general movement that he had had. And Nkrumah agreed. It seemed to him that there was nothing else to be done. He went to the conference and there the people inside the conference started to make opposition and to make proposals and to object and the people outside, Ginn told me this himself and Nkrumah told me afterwards, called Nkrumah out – they had heard what was going on. Nkrumah came out. And they told him, “You resign; You leave those people in there.” And Nkrumah wrote the resignation on the back of one of the persons who bent before him on a piece of paper given to him and he sent it in to them and said, “I am not coming back.” That is the way that the Convention People’s Party began. Because he did not want to get away entirely from ‘convention’ so they had the ‘convention’ and he formed the Convention People’s Party. And that was Nkrumah’s party. That was the way the party was formed. I want you to understand, not only did the people have a tremendous influence on the attitude that the government had to the political leaders as can be seen in that they had to be taken from jail to rule, but they actually intervened in political affairs and on the great occasion which was the formation of the CPP they called Nkrumah to come out of there, leave those people, send in your resignation, and he wrote it that and sent it in. Let us not forget that the African people played a role, a role that they are still playing. So Nkrumah had this political party, the CPP, he had the youth, he had a lot of young people with him, they were called the Verandah Boys because they were not supposed to have beds inside with all sorts of mosquito nets and so forth, but they slept on the verandah or they went outside in the yard. Now they started to negotiate with the government and they decided they wanted to have a meeting to decide on the constitution, an assembly. So the Governor said you cannot have a constitutional assembly, we are going to appoint some Africans who will tell you the kind of constitution you can have. And Nkrumah said, “No,” we will decide about a constitutional assembly. “You don’t have to have a constitutional assembly, I will hold a constitutional assembly.” And he held his own constitutional assembly. There were at the time something like 70 organizations on the Gold Coast, political organizations, aborigine organizations, cricket organizations, whist organizations, all sorts of organizations. All 70 of them came to the assembly except for one. And Nkrumah said, “Everybody is for us, the Governor doesn’t know what to say.” But at the same time the trade unions were carrying on a strike for trade union rights and Nkrumah invited them to the assembly, they passed all the resolutions and he called for positive action. Positive action was his name for what we knew as a general strike. The whole country faced the government, everything stopped dead. The trade union movement, the civil service, everybody. So the Governor had only one policy to do – he put them in jail, put the leaders in jail. However, he left out some and they were busy organizing. And then the municipal election took place and the CPP got 58,858 votes and the supporters got 5,570. Now in eastern Europe they have elections, they put up one candidate and he gets 98% of the votes. He hasn’t defeated anybody. I am waiting for the day when one gets 110%. But this is a genuine victory, 58,000 votes against 5,000 and Nkrumah himself got 22,780 out of a total or 23,000 votes cast, So the British government was persuaded that it had to do something and the only thing it knew was to take Nkrumah out of jail and make him head of government business. And that was in 1953. Now from 1953 until 1957, Nkrumah and Clark, and when Nkrumah got independence in 1957 he dismissed Clark and sent him back, but before he sent him back he made a speech. He said, “If I am to write what took place between 1953 when I came out of prison and the present time when we have independence I doubt if I would find any publisher able to publish it.” Because there was real fighting and intrigue, to squash him, to beat him down, but he managed to survive and come out victorious. And there is a story about that. Because George Padmore and his wife, Dorothy, told me and made it clear to Francis that he should have gone to independence almost at once, I know that, and in 1957 I asked him, “Well, what do you think about it?” He said, “Well, frankly, I don’t know. I could have gone to independence without a doubt. Nobody could have stopped me. They couldn’t have done anything, but I was uncertain of what would happen because I thought that the commissioners of police and the men in charge of the various areas, they would all have gone, and the government would have collapsed and up to now I don’t know whether I did right or wrong.” I didn’t tell him anything because you don’t go around telling people who have different situations to decide and up to some years later they don’t know whether they decided right or wrong. But I think that he made a mistake and part of the degeneration of his government was due to that period of ‘53 to ‘58 when he manoeuvered with the British government and the ministers lost the revolutionary drive which had got them into power and which they could have carried on. Padmore insisted that they should go on, but he said “no,” and they didn’t. I don’t think they would have collapsed. I only found that out afterwards, because in Guinea, the French wrecked the whole country when they left, in the beginning when they became independent there was nothing to speak of in Guinea, but they managed to hold on together. And Nkrumah would have held on and his government would not have degenerated the way it did. But it was independent in 1957. And I am going to spend sometime speaking about Kenya, but would like to say something here. That Nkrumah became independent in the Gold Coast under the name of Ghana in 1957, and he and Padmore and I sat down and talked. We had been talking a lot about independence for Africa but if anyone had told us that by 1967 there would have been, at least 30 new African states and there would have been at least 100 million African people who would have gained political independence, we would have said – “That is a dangerous man. He has been sent by the British government to stimulate the people to act in such a way as to smash them down because it is madness to believe that you will have 30 new African states within ten years. What kind of nonsense is that? But he would have been right. We would have been wrong. Because by 1967 there were over 30 new African states and 100 million people had become politically free. This went with a speed and a range that I don’t know with any other political organization. What happened in Africa between ‘57 and ‘67 was not to be believed. It was far beyond all we thought possible. It just happened like that, one after another they went. So we have to remember that in a country like the Gold Coast it took a certain form, a certain political form. Nkrumah built a political party, he had a newspaper, he had political organizers, he challenged the government, he called a general strike, he was put in prison, he won an election and came out with the enormous figures by which he defeated his opponent.. That was a definite political struggle. When we go to the other side of Africa, we have something entirely different and this will give you the two different types of political independence that were won in Africa. I want to go over to Kenya. Now Kenya was quite different from the Gold Coast. People like to tell you that the African fighting for his independence had always fought for land. That was not true. In West Africa, Nkrumah did not fight for land because the whites did not own land in West Africa. It was a political struggle for political independence, to get rid of the imperialists. But that was not the same kind of struggle that took place in Kenya. In Kenya you had some highlands and up there the climate was good and was not too different from the European climate, the territory was good and you could plant coffee. You had a political power that taught you that the Africans were not intelligent enough to plant coffee properly so you prohibited him and you concentrated the coffee on your land. And there was a built-in European section of the population, the only European section of an African population, an acceptance of Africa, which is something new. The white man in South Africa feels that he is part of that, he has lived there for hundreds of years, he is fond of the language and he believes he is part of the landscape, he is part of the territory. But nowhere else in Africa were any white settlers able to establish themselves except in Kenya on the highlands where the white people established themselves. They came from Britain. After World War I some of them who had fought in the war and had helped Britain were rewarded and given land in Kenya. Some South Africans came up from South Africa and established themselves on the plateaus and you had a white population in Kenya. Well, this went on for some time and the Kenya people were taught Christianity, a few of them were taught democracy. Some of them went abroad to be educated, not many but one by one. And they came back. And the result was that white people were firmly established in Kenya which has been British only since the beginning of the 20th century. So by 1950 Kenya, then, presented a spectacle very different from any other colony in Africa. There was this white population constantly increasing and they were saying that they ought to be free of the British Colonial Office, they ought to be given independence because they could govern themselves. These Africans could in time, a generation or two, by degrees, they could do it. And everything looked fine. And everybody agreed that that was what it ought to be except the African himself. And after a time, about 1950, they broke away, they could not do it as it was done in the Gold Coast. They formed an army and they went into the forest and raided from outside and those who were outside got together and would strike political blows when they could. They struck political blows at the whites, but they struck more political blows at the blacks who were supporting the regime, who were the Loyalists. So this civil war took place. There was never any civil war in Ghana. But there was a definite civil war in Kenya. Generals China, Kimathi and the rest of them had their armies in the forests and they fought the British troops. And the British sent out regiment after regiment properly armed, with helicopters, airplanes, etc., bombing their people and they fought a battle to the finish. And what is to be noted is that the black army in the forest was defeated. After a number of years they could not go on anymore. They were unable to have communication with each other and the British forces in the country didn’t have control. It was very difficult to have control of people who are in the forest. But they were unable to take action in the way that they wanted. Furthermore, the British caught some 50,000 Kenyan people and put them in concentration camps and began to examine their health because they found that they were deficient, some form of insanity, and they put them in there together and they got a lot of doctors, neurologists, psychologists, to examine them because the Africans could not understand that the British were there for the benefit of the Africans themselves. They put them together, they had defeated them in the forests and they had 50,000 of them put away in concentration camps being examined by psychologists and neurologists because of this insanity – their incapacity to understand the British were there actually for their benefit and they should be glad. The Africans could not see it. The British used to promise some of them, “If you agree that the thing is as we say it is, we will let you go.” Some went out and when they got home the disease got them again. But there were some who were worse and could not be cured at all and they would remain. So this is what happened. The British found that they had put them in prison outside the forest, they had practically defeated the army but they couldn’t govern the country. What to do?
Now there took place a series of events which I don’t have time to show you in detail, maybe someone will do it for me. The Colonial Secretary would form a constitution, they would discuss the constitution in Kenya and in the British House of Commons and then in the House of Lords, that this is the proper constitution by which the Kenyan people should be governed. They would send it to Kenya, the Kenyan people would say, “No.” Well, they would consider the question. They would make another constitution, the Kenyan people would say, “No.” They kept on making these constitution s, the Kenyan people kept rejecting them until, ultimately, they had to give them independence. And that was the end of the attempt of the whites in Kenya to establish the white settlers group in Kenya, the only attempt they have been able to manage. There are whites all about who have the power still and we will come to that tomorrow. But this attempt to form some part of the population who are white was defeated. It was defeated not as in the Gold Coast by political means – it was impossible to have a political demonstration. These fellows were in charge of everything, they had won everything, they had locked up the fighters, they had defeated the army, they had caught them, they had killed them, and yet they couldn’t govern. Independence was won in Kenya by a civil way. Independence was won in Ghana by political struggles which bought Nkrumah out of jai l ultimately. Now I have one thing to show you. I have a letter here by Mr. Creech-Jones. Now it appears, in 1963 I think, that I may have written or somebody may have written an article speaking about the Manchester Conference and what the Manchester Conference did. Because it was from the Manchester Conference that Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and various others went back to Africa and began the struggles for independence which ended as they did. So I want you to read Mr. Creech-Jones’ letter, understand what happened in Kenya, it was a civil war to the end. That Nkrumah was put into jail with the other leaders and it was after this tremendous vote that the British took him out and for five years they fought him until he finally gained independence. So Mr. Creech-Jones’ letter is worthwhile. He said:
“I was a member of the post-war Labor Cabinet and therefore was Interested in your leading article on African Nationalism on August 24. The great political revolution overseas, except in the case of India, has little place in the memoirs of my former Cabinet colleagues, and Padmore’s record of the Manchester African Congress of October,1945 may give the Conference greater significance than the Labor Government gave it. The Labor Government gave it no significance at all, absolutely none.
Now he goes on to say, and this is typical of what is taking place today:
“But, for the record, it is well to point out that at the beginning of the Second World War the Colonial Office was studying the Royal Commissions’ Report on the West Indies, the Hailey Survey of Africa, the problem of colonial development and welfare, and the Palestine issue. At the beginning of the war they were thinking about it. During the war, too, it worked, with a depleted staff, on colonial post-war staffing, higher education, and certain constitutional work, in addition to the colonial contribution to the war effort.”
Now you realize what happened in the Gold Coast and what happened in Kenya was typical of what took place all over the British colonial territory. Creech-Jones is lying with a straight face. When the Labour Government took office there had been for some years a Party Executive Committee concerned with Imperial and colonial matters. And since 1933 to 1940 the Fabian Colonial Bureau had been at work shaping a constructive policy for the colonies. A constructive policy to put colonial leaders in jail.
“It did not require the impetus of the Pan-African Congress or the demand for Indian freedom to induce the Labour Ministers at the Colonial Office in 1945 to delve ahead with political, social and economic changes in the colonies.”
Now that is a terrific lie. The Labour Government comes, into power in 1945. 1947 Nkrumah goes there, 1951 Nkrumah goes to jail, Kenya fights a civil war. And General Kimathi is caught and shot and General China remains and today is free but everybody calls him General Chanu. And this fellow says that it did not require the impetus of the Pan-African Congress or the demand for Indian freedom to induce the Labour Ministers at the Colonial office in 1945 to drive ahead with political, social, and economic changes in the colonies. This is absolutely untrue.
And that is what they write and that is what they teach the young people in Britain today and what they teach young Africans if the politicians are not sharp enough.. “We already had plans and projects for consultation with the colonial governments.” Most untrue. “We hardly noticed in shaping policy the Manchester Congress.” They hardly noticed it, they never noticed it until the people of the Gold Coast and the people of Kenya made them understand that those who had formed the Manchester Conference were in Africa waiting to form a new Africa. That is when they noticed it. And listen to this! “Though the individual members of the Congress were soon to matter in their own respective countries (as if that only happened by accident) it was our liberal thought and constructive ideas which shaped Labour’s activity in the Colonial Office.” Every sentence is a lie. “Time was ripe for change as a result of the impact of way, the new international spirit and the spread of nationalism. Public interest, however, was still at a low ebb because of the preoccupation at home with the national economy and the restoration of peace conditions.” Public interest was not at a low ebb in Kenya, there was a civil war. It was not at a low ebb in the Gold Coast, Nkrumah had to be put in jail and win an election by 23,000 votes to 700. And he said: “Public interest is at a low ebb.” And that is why in Britain they were not concerned with the Manchester conference. We went for it nevertheless. You know you have to be a minister to be able to lie like that. We went forward, nevertheless, with the devolution of authority from London and the giving of greater responsibl1ity to the colonies. They gave greater responsibility to Kenya and Kenya rejected it constantly. So in the end they had to give up altogether. “Now, thus began the crowded plans for progress in the colonies. In spite of all limited resources of men, materials and finance we launched a revolution of change.” The only revolution of change in the British government was the one that Mr. MacMilllan launched. He went to South Africa and talked about the wind of change.” “We launched a revolution of change from which the delegates from Manchester were able in their own countries late-on carry out rapid development.” That is a lie. Now I have to spend some time on one minister. He was the colonial minister who did these things. He was one of the leaders of the Conservative Party – McLeod. Some years ago he was speaking at Cambridge University and was able to say something which he had wanted to say for some time and which needed saying. He said:
“Some people say that we gave the Africans independence early, and some say that we hadn’t trained them sufficiently in order to give them independence. But I want to say, I was the minister responsible, and we had to give it to them because we either had to give it to them or shoot them down. And we couldn’t shoot down all the people so we gave them independence.”
But this fellow was saying how the Labour Party had initiated change and as a result those persons at the Machester Conference had gone home and gained power in their respective countries because they had carried out the policy of the Labour Party. That was not so. They gained power in their territories because they had carried out the policies of the Manchester Conference and to this day George Padmore is known as the founder of African independence, and that is a title that he deserves. And I have said it and will say it again, that such names as Lord Lugard and Marshal Lyautey, the Frenchmen, and such like are being heard less and less in Africa and above all you are hearing more and more the name of George Padmore who organized and initiated the Manchester Conference from which sprang the peoples who led Africa, to independence within a few years.
Part II
Transcript of speech given on November 21, 1973.
In some respects the descent has been equally as rapid or perhaps more rapid than the ascent of political independence. That we have to examine and I will give you some ideas about this and that. I could deal with what has appeared in Africa, the Arusha Declaration, related documents and ideas, and the stand that has recently been taken by President Kaunda of Zambia, and show that we understand what Nyerere is doing and follow him along. I will begin with a paragraph from the Black Jacobins (p. 265). so that you can understand that is the spirit in which we worked, the spirit which was embodied in the Manchester conference, the spirit in which everyone who left the conference, including those who organized it, went to Africa to do their business. This was what we had in mind and this was written in 1938. Nothing had appeared then. It speaks about Toussaint sending millions of francs to the United States in order to prepare for an expedition to Africa where he could make millions of Africans “free and French.”
And I asked, “What spirit was it that moved him? Ideas do not fall from heaven. The great revolution had propelled him out of his humble joys and obscure destiny, and the trumpets of its heroic period rang over in his ears. In him, born a slave and the leader of the slaves, the concrete realizations of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the womb of ideas and the springs of power, which overflowed their narrow environment and embraced the whole of the world. But for the revolution, this extraordinary man and his band of gifted associates would have lived their lives as slaves, serving the commonplace creatures who owned them, standing barefooted and in rags to watch inflated little governors and mediocre officials from Europe pass by, as many a talented African stands in Africa today.”
Now that was written in 1938 and that is the way we approached the situation. And what is very curious is that there were very few people thinking in those days. There were very few Africans who were thinking in those days. And I remember at a meeting George Padmore saying, without hostility or bitterness, that many times the work that he and we were trying to do was opposed by many of the very people who were seeking to unloose from the chains which held them. So that is the spirit in which we approached it. And last night I told you that the rapidity with which some 30 or more African states became independent after 1957 was something which none of us suspected or would have believed. We would have thought it dangerous if somebody had put that idea forward. But in 1963, while on the one hand these tremendous developments were taking place, the African states began to descend, and I am going to read for you some statements from 1963, 1964 and 1965. I wouldn’t bother with 1966 and 1967 although they are worth it.
1963, January 13: Assassination of President Olympio of Togo by the military. August 12-15: Overthrow of President Youlou of Congo (Brazzaville) October 19-28: General strike and demonstrations against President Maga of Dahomey, coup d’�tat led by Colonel Soglo. December 3: Attempted military coup in Niger failed to overthrow President Diori.
Now that is month after month, that is what has been happening every year from 1963. I will read 1964. It is a moderate year. Moderate in disasters. Only 4. January 12: Popular armed uprising, overthrow of the government of Zanzibar. January 20-24: Military mutinies in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. February 18: Military group overthrew President Leon M’Ba of Gabon. November 22: Imperialist attack on Stanleyville and temporary defeat of popular forces. Same thing in 1965. Same thing in 1966. Same thing in 1967. 1967 perhaps is worse. January 13, January 24, March 22. March 24, April 17, December 16, 17, 22. That is the state of Africa since 1963. And I can tell you something about 1968 in which my reaction was very positive. I was in Makerere and everybody was telling me, “Well, you know people in Kenya you know so and so, it is very easy to go there. You will fly and in a few minutes you can go to Nairobi.” So I said I wasn’t going. They found that strange because I knew people there. I said that was why I was not going. And I wouldn’t go and the reason why I wouldn’t go is what happened recently. I was expecting that. A lot of people were expecting it but it would matter to me because if I went there the reporters would all come and the reporters are a great nuisance, especially if they know you, or if you know anybody. They will have met me “Oh, Mr. James, you know Mr. So and So, you know so and so, well, what do you think of what is happening?” And if I told them what I was thinking about what was happening they would have told me to get on the plane and go away at once. So I didn’t go. And what has happened is no surprise to me. For that matter it is no surprise to people in West Africa, and East Africa, they had been expecting it. Kenya was a powder keg and they are not finished yet. I was fairly familiar with the situation in France and I said, “Well, you can’t do much if there are only a few of you.” And I left France alone. I said I would gather material and fellow it closely because things will begin when that old man is dead. But the French people didn’t wait for the old man to be dead. They put him out while he was very much alive. So I looked at the situation and I was very much inclined to say the people in Kenya will wait until another old man is dead. But they haven’t waited. The Kenyatta government had to suspend the elections and suppress the opposition – always a bad sign. So I am trying to show you that this list of disasters and military coups and degeneration is something that has been characteristic of Africa from 1963 to the present day. Kenya is the latest of the uprising and declining. The state of all the African states is one of the features of the last ten years as the rise of the states to political independence was one of the features of the previous ten years. We have to deal with that and we will spend some time on it. Now first of all, there is nothing wrong with the African people. I begin from there. Where Dr. DuBois used to say that all the magnificent things he had done had originated from the fact that he thought the black man, the African, was a man of ordinary human intelligence and responses and would make an ordinary response to an ordinary situation and vice versa. He says that in everything, there was nothing else in his attitude that made him change and discover so many remarkable things in so many fields. And we must begin by noting that the African people had been under slavery for some two or three hundred years and then under colonialism for another hundred years. You don’t get out of that and slip into a normal society in ten years time. One has to began from there. This transference from a society dominated by certain sections of the population into a modern society with a development, etc. We have examples of it through the centuries. In England it culminated in the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Now I believe Oliver was a great man, but the fact remained he couldn’t help it and it ended in military dictatorship. In France a few years after 1789, it ended in the military dictatorship of Napoleon. In Russia it ended in the dictatorship of a man who in the end called himself Marshal Stalin. In China it was a military dictatorship from the beginning. In Cuba, which is a revolution which I very much respect, it was a military dictatorship that fought the revolution. So when you see these things taking place in Africa, there are no tears about the unfortunate Africans, they do not know, they do not understand. What is taking place in Africa is a normal development and in my opinion, in some respects, it is a very creditable and helpful development because those who won power and won independence thought, obviously, that they were in for some time. What has happened is that the people soon showed that they were expecting something from independence which these people were not giving. And the result was that it was very easy to overthrow them. But I have made my opinion clear and I have been watching this African situation closely for the last 30 years. If those military dictatorships do not satisfy the desires that have been raised in the population, they will be overthrown. Africa faces a difficult period but one can hope that the people who won independence will in time bring some sort of political stability. They are not going to the military dictatorships, because they are military dictatorships. The point is, to govern Africa today you have to govern a people whom the British imperialists did not have to govern. After the people of Kenya has fought for their independence and the people of West Africa had fought for their independence and these victories had been won everywhere, the people who now have to be governed are very different from the docile people who it appeared the British and the French were ruling over. This was something entirely new and that they have not been able to manage it within a few years is no surprise to me. I have written before that it would have been remarkable if they had settled down immediately. Everybody is saying “Hooray,” now that Busia is in power in Ghana and is going to put a stop to corruption – I wish it were so, but we will see. I don’t mean that Busia is corrupt, not at all, but to stop the corruption, that is a political matter. And we have to see why these states have done the way that they have. Now let us look at the average African state. You must remember that the British and the French attempted, crudely, but they have managed it pretty well. The British did not allow an African state to develop. When they saw that the situation was ripe, they said to the French, well, they said, “You come and rule and take over this government.” And they sent the Princess, or the Princess Royal or the Duke or somebody with his little piece of paper and he said, “Well, here is independence, here is a wonderful new flag.” They played God Save the King and the new national anthem and everything is new and this fellow is in charge. But be is in charge of a British imperialist colonial t government which was constructed for British imperialist purposes and not for the purpose of governing an African population. So the thing started that way. I have listened to Dr. Banda on television and speaking to the people. He speaks in English and somebody translates. And the governments of all these territories are imperialistic European-type governments. These fellows have just come in and are seeking to administer, black people are administering, the old imperialistic government, the laws that they make, parlimentary procedure, that is what they are doing. And it is not working. They have to work out something of their own. What is the old African state from which independence was gained? There was the colonial government, a government, is extremely important in any underdeveloped country. I mean the government has power beyond belief. In. Britain, there is Oxford, there is Cambridge, there is Eton, there is Harrow, there are a whole lot of schools, a whole lot of universities. The government gives the money and it pays some fees for students. But those scholastic establishments are independent. Even in the United States, these establishments are independent. For the university is a good one for begging for money, not only from the government, but from all sorts of people. But in an underdeveloped country this is not so. Any kind of secondary school, any kind of university college, any kind of teacher, if it is the government that establishes it, then the government pays. So that the government is in charge of everything. No other modern government has the power that the most democratic, liberal-minded of governments in an underdeveloped country has. They rule everything. And some body comes in to establish this kind of business, he has to ask the government for authority. In the old days, you didn’t have to ask the government so much, the British government let you go, but today every single aspect of social, political or educational life is governed by those who are in charge of the government. Which makes this struggle for the government such a fierce business Now who are the people who are interested in the struggle for government. They are descendents from the pre-independence days, some people, the director of this, the minister of that, he used to be a white man but he usually had a lot of black people around him and they were educated at the university college or an independent school, because the British and the French government needed educated black people because they couldn’t fill up the organization of the country with a lot of white people. These remained. Black people in the civil service, black people in the police force, not in the highest places but once you had independence with a tremendous fight and the British chose the one who was most effective, more revolutionary, and said, “You govern.” And he came in and took over the whole government. What he didn’t take over were the banks, the business firms, the organizations, etc. To this day, in many of these territories in Kenya, they have taken over nothing. In Kenya they have got that land back, the land that they fought about, that land on the plateau. But for the rest the people who rule in Kenya are typical of the new rulers in Africa. They have all the legal power, they may have a different name, etc., but that is all. They succeed to this type of government, they have some civil servants for the most part they have the police, they have the people who educate and so forth and they have some schools. But the mass of the population is not involved. The government is the same type of government that the British or French had from which the population is removed. So that in all these African countries you have an entirely new population, a population that has been stimulated to tremendous action and that meets a government that is very much like the old government except the people administering it are black. Because the old government had prestige, it could run to the British and ask for some money, it could run to the United States and ask for something, it could bring the Queen and have a big celebration and the Queen could say “Rise up and so and so.” But this government has no prestige. All they can do is beg for money and beg for people to start some industry. Now what industries could they start? Sometimes a local businessman will show some business acumen – he will start some beer. Beer seems to be something that the colonials can manage without difficulty. They go further. They make some gin. Then there is another fellow who will get about a hundred young kids together and he will make some shirts. But what he will demand is that if the shirts that come into the country cost about two or three dollars each, he will demand that his shirts, since he is giving employment to a hundred local people, he wants to sell his for three dollars and he wants an embargo put on the shirts that are coming in. He becomes a supporter of the government if the government puts an embargo on the other shirts and doesn’t let them come in. That is the kind of thing that is going on. Any serious change in the industrial structure of the country, there is none. But there is one serious change that takes place. Formerly, about ten years ago, the prices of the single commodities which most of these countries in Africa depend upon were at a certain height. Today they are far below. In fact, every African financier will tell you that if they had given them the prices which they had reason to expect would continue from 1954, 1955, ‘56, before independence began, they wouldn’t want any aid. Let them keep their aid. Just give us the prices which we should get and which we were getting when we were not independent, and we would be quite happy. We wouldn’t be doing too well, but we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in and we wouldn’t heed what you call aid; you are giving us aid, a small amount, and then taking away from us a substantial amount of commodities and so forth. Secondly, these countries want to advance themselves. They have to buy all sorts of mechanical and highly developed goods and the prices are going up. The advanced countries say “We can’t help it, the workers say we want another year of schooling, we want fringe benefits, and we have to raise the prices.” So the prices of the commodities are going down and the prices of the goods they need are going up and they have an old style government, which is an imperialist colonial government which they have to run and they are in constant trouble. Those governments are falling to pieces. There is something else that is taking place that is very important. There is the development of education and the development of education is the education of people who have certain qualifications and capacities to help advance the country. But the model of that education is the secondary education of the advanced countries. I am a product of that education and people who know Africa tell me that in the African schools, they are taught by people who are European educated, have a European outlook, who receive the same salaries the Europeans have. They are separated from the population by the very kind of education that they are getting. When they are sent abroad and they come back, they are worse than they were. So you have two sections of the population. You have some people who are carrying on this ancient government, who are being educated away from the population, who have the same difficulties, even greater difficulties, that the colonial governments had and who are separate from the population which now demands what the population obviously didn’t demand in the old days where there was the colonial system. That is the situation that we are in. And if you see that clearly, there is no reason to doubt that they are going down, and will continue to go down. That is a fact. Now there is something that is going on that shows you the scare these governments are in. They know that the people who put them in power, or whose indirect actions resulted in their being in power, don’t like the system that exists. When you were carrying on an activity under the colonial system you could always point to them and say they are responsible. And their system was the capitalist system. Every single African who opposed and wanted to establish political independence somehow talked about the capitalist system which was the source of capitalistic exploitation in the colonies. But when he comes into power, what about this capitalist system well, he can’t touch it. So he does something which is very strange. He paints it up as much as he can in red and he calls it African Socialism. It is the same system, I give you one example. There is a statement on African Socialism by an African government. “African Socialism must be flexible because the problem it will confront and the aspirations and desires of the people will change all the time, often quickly and substantially.” An irreproachable statement. A rigid doctrinaire system will have little chance for survival, everybody can agree. Now this is what the African Already knew. This was an official document. Number one, make progress toward ultimate objective. Two, solve more immediate problems with efficiency. Now since the days of Adam and Eve was there any government which was not involved with making progress toward ultimate objectives and solving all immediate problems with efficiency?
This is characteristic of African Socialism. And one by one they are falling to pieces. They can’t manage the situations that they face. And I saw that situation very clearly some years ago and I was very concerned about it. I didn’t know what to do. I could see it. I will tell you of my experience. I was in Makerere a year or two ago and I spoke on television and there I said quite comfortably and easily what I have written many times and what we have always said, that the African states were going from precipice to precipice and it didn’t seem as if there was anything which would stop them. So I said that and one Kenyan there said, “no.” So I told him, “Now look, you are where you are because the Kenyan people came out and they put you there and if you want to improve the situation in Kenya you will have to find them and they will send it further.” Next day things were changed. I was walking about in town and people came up and spoke to me, told me that they had heard me talk. Then I heard that people had called the television station and demanded that I come on again. All of them know that that is what has been happening to African state after African state. But no one has said so. And here I have come and said it and they heard it on television and all of them know that it is so. Now that is the situation. They call it African Socialism and it is a complete mess, there is no holding it together at all. There is no holding any African state together. But a year or two ago I read in a paper the Arusha Declaration. I read it and I read one or two of the things about it and I said to myself this is remarkable. Anyway, I have known come other remarkable political declarations which ended in remarkable disasters. I have to go to Tanzania, or people I know have to go to Tanzania and see what is taking place and report, to me. Otherwise, I have nothing to say. And I kept my mouth shut. The opportunity arrived for me to go to Tanzania. I spent eight or ten days there. I talked to a lot of people, I travelled about a lot I had an interview with Nyerere and I am satisfied that what they are doing is something entirely new, not only for Africa but in the political systems of the world that we have known. Nothing like it has appeared since Lenin died in 1924. And I am going to spend quite a bit of time talking about Tanzania. And when you look at the situation in Tanzania you will see that Nyerere has understood what has been the cause of the collapse of the other African states and knew that if he didn’t put blocks in the road of that he was going to go the same way. This is the reason why this has taken place.
Now the Arusha Declaration, Part V. He talks about the leadership. Now in 1964 there took place a military revolt in Tanzania, in Uganda and in Kenya. And the governments were not overthrown because Mr. MacMillan, having given his “Wind of Change” speech in South Africa seemed to be aware of changes. So when this thing happened, these fellows said, “Mr. MacMillan, we have just won independence from you and would like your soldiers to save our government,” and that is why they are there today. Nyerere is very much ashamed of it, but he said, because his people told him, “We can’t be dependent upon the fact that you can remain. You had better go.” He ran away and for two, three or four days could not be seen. But he realized what had happened and has introduced policies which strike at all the weaknesses of the colonial African state, all the weaknesses that have remained and we are going to go into that in some detail. Now first of all he nationalised them. He called them in one morning and said, “Boys, you are nationalized. We will discuss the details of how much we pay you later but you are nationalised.” That is one of the things I regret very much that I wasn’t there, to see. But this nationalization was not what we thought it was 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t know what is your opinion of the nature the East African and the East European states, but it is quite obvious today that nationalization of the economy can take place with the most disastrous results in regards to development of the population. And today we have seen in Peru that a right wing military dictatorship has nationalised American property and land, all of them controlled by the Americans. They have done that because it was needed and if they didn’t do it they were giving strength to the communist left wing the trade union people. So that the national right wing military dictatorship nationalize not only the local economy but parts of the economy that belonged to the Americans. That is a very serious business. So that although Nyerere has nationalized, and that is very good, he knows that it is not sufficient. The rest of what Nyerere has done are the important things. The most important in my opinion is the leadership. Now I have told you that the people who have succeeded to the leadership are members of the civil service, one or two doctors, lawyers, and people who are committed to the European method of thought, European education, European social organization, etc., and they are running the business in a manner that the Europeans, they felt, would have run it if they had remained and they were getting into more and more difficulties because of the difficult situation they faced and the temper of the new populations. So Nyerere has known that you will watch that everything he says doesn’t only come from a clever brain, but he is someone who is aware of what happened in Africa, in the African states, and knows that unless he takes the necessary steps it will happen to him.
Number One: “Every TANU and Government leader must be either a Peasant or a Worker.” Now that makes 15% of government people in every country absolutely excluded from the government. He does not want any business men in there at all. You must be either a peasant or a worker. And surely nobody associated with the practices of capitalism or feudalism. Now that could cause a revolution in 90% of the countries that exist in the world today. Number Two: “No TANU or Government leader should hold shares in any Company.” And if they propose that in the Caribbean, of course, there would be a revolution at once. In Britain and these other places, the ministers, when they are defeated in the political system, the Tories come in or the Labour Party comes in, when they go out they get shares and places in companies and so forth and they hold some of those places and receive money at times when they are actually members. Nyerere has seen that sort of thing going on in African states and he says that is going to ruin us because it is a small section of the population that does this. So he says we don’t want that at all. He goes on to say “No TANU or Government leader should hold Directorships in any privately owned enterprises.” These are very drastic statements. Now “No TANU or Government leader should own houses which he rents to others.” That might seem an ordinary statement. What happens is this. This fellow becomes a Minister of the Government, or well established in the parliament or whatever they have and he goes to the bank and says “I want to borrow ten or fifteen thousand pounds.” They give it to him. He goes to the local concrete people, and good carpenters, and so forth and he says “I want to build a house.” And they build him a fine house. And he knows a lot of people who want housing, so he rents this house, and with the money he can pay back the bank. So he has a source of income there. Having built one, he goes out, borrows some more money builds another. So these fellows can have 4 or 5 houses and after five years they are drawing rents all the time. That is what Nyerere is putting an end to. “No TANU or Government leader should own houses which he rents to others.” That is not a general statement, it is a particular statement in that it is the way these fellows behave all over Africa and which makes the competition for government positions so terrific. Because you have the opportunity to do all these things. Then point number six: “For the purposes of this Resolution, the term ‘leader’ should comprise the following (now look whom they call leaders): Members of the TANU National Executive Committee; Ministers, Members of Parliament, Senior Officials of Organizations affiliated to TANU,... all those appointed or elected under any clause of the TANU Constitution, councillors and Civil Servants in the high and middle cadres.” In other words, anybody who is any kind of political leader in the government or in any kind of organization connected with the government is prohibited from taking part in all these things that ministers and their friends usually take part in. And in this context ‘leader’ means a man, a man and his wife; or a woman and her husband.” So the people there are no longer representatives of the old style of people who ruled, whether they are white, or black – they have cleared that up completely. That is the Arusha Declaration. It is not an article, it is not a speech, it is a statement of position by the government and that is what the people have to learn to do. Now it isn’t easy to manage. This is an extremely difficult thing, but all the young people and those in the universities, etc., are being brought up with this as government policy, and Nyerere really hopes that in time a new generation will come up which will govern itself by these objectives he has given to them, a new perspective, and the other African states had none but to carry on as best they could. Now he talks about education and the new generation. Nov, the great source of corruption in these governments is education, and the education you get, according to the European or American system, and then you join the government and all of you become a separate class. And it really says quite clearly that one class of people in the state can exploit the other class. The people in the towns, the educated classes. Now, there are the few who go to secondary schools, are taken many miles away from their houses. They take you away to the secondary schools. You live in an enclave, You have to get their permission to go into the town for recreation but do not relate the work of town or country to your real life which is lived in the school compound. Later a few people go to the university. If they are lucky enough to enter Dar-es-Salaam University College they live in comfortable quarters, eat well, and study hard for their degree. When they have been successful in obtaining it they know immediately that they will receive a salary of something like 660 pounds per annum. This is what they have been aiming for. It is what they have been encouraged to aim for. They may also have the desire to serve the community but their idea of service is related to status and the salary which a university education is expected to confer upon its recipient. Those are the sources of the corruption of the African population and the African states. And Nyerere is determined to break that up. He says the salary and the status become a right automatically conferred by the degree. You have to know the colonial situation to know the importance of this, because the large majority of the population are illiterate. And those who get the education s it in the seats of power and really control everything and are separate from the rest of the population. And they have so much power and there is so much to be got. That is why they fight so desperately for it. And that is why Nyerere has been that he has to finish with that. And then he goes on to say, “It is wrong to criticize the young people for these attitudes. The new university graduate has spent the larger part of his life separated and apart from the masses of Tanzania.” That is gospel truth. In the Caribbean it is the same. His parents may be poor but he has never fully shared that poverty. The moment you go into secondary education you are at once removed and you live a different life and your aim is at something that separates you from the population, which substantially is an illiterate backward population. So, he says, his parents may be poor but he has never shared that poverty, he does not know what it is like to live as a poor peasant. He would be more at home in the world of the educated than he is among his own parents. Only during vacations has he spent time at home and even then he would often find that his parents and relatives support his own conception of his difference and regard it as wrong that he should live and work as the ordinary person that he really is. In one or two novels they have singled out certain persons as characteristic of certain types, but a clear analytical statement of the situation in a colonial country – I have not seen it anywhere. This is what happens. In the Caribbean it is happening and in African territories it is worse because the population is illiterate and backward and they are being educated to hold important positions in the government and they become a special class. And as Nyerere says, “They are exploiting the people.” And he wants to put an end to that. He says, “The third point is that our present system encourages the pupils in the idea that all knowledge which is worthwhile is acquired from books or from educated people. The knowledge and wisdom of old people is despised and they themselves regard it as being ignorant and of no account.” And he is trying to break up that situation. The real source of corruption in these colonies is the secondary school and those who enter higher education, for they form automatically a section of society which can only exploit the mass of the population. They are in such a situation that in order to help they must get paid for it. And whether or not their own parents give them this impression of status, etc. That is what he is against. This is why in regard to the secondary schools he says, “Thus when this scheme is in operation, the secondary school has got to make its own money.” He says, “They have to go and clear their own bush to build their own schools.” And when you hear as African say that they have to clear their own bush you know there is real bush in Africa. In Britain you have 15 or 20 elm trees, they put a fence round it and call it a forest. But Nyerere says, “You have to clear your own bush, you have to plant, you have to make money, and don’t expect any money from the government. The secondary school has got to make its own money, draw its profits and then decide what it is going to do.” He says, “Thus when this scheme is in operation, the revenue side of school accounts would not read as it does at present – grant from government., grant from voluntary agency or other charity. They would read – income from sale of cotton, value of the food grown and consumed, value of labour done by pupils on new building, repairs, equipment, etc. Government subvention, nil. Grant from government nothing.” You would be startled if you were told that you were going to secondary school and you have to go out and make some money and determine how the school will go by the amount of money you made. I have not read this anywhere. Rousseau is the man who has made the conception of the modern individual, but nowhere have I read in any place at all that the secondary school must become a school in which people make their own money and learn the kind of work and activity which is carried on by the mass of population. Otherwise, they will certainly be separated from them and will not be able to teach them what is required, because they are going to live an agricultural life for as far as they could see and these students must not learn what is required by the professional classes and must not learn what separates them from the rest of the population, the very education that they practise, the schools that they make: What they do in the schools must prepare them to educate the mass of the population. Otherwise this separation will take place and the whole thing will fall apart. I think that the most important thing that I can’t tell you about Nyerere is this. On the slopes of the Cavarando there are some African families who have done pretty well. They have done what the British and the Americans and the Germans taught them – you have a piece of land, you have to work at it, you have to sell, you have to save your money up, then you employ some labour. And these fellows are very successful, the land is good, there is a lot of water and they have done extremely well. And what Nyerere says is that those people, we can’t be hard on them, but we don’t want the rest of the population to do what they have done because everybody told them, “That is what is required,” And they are now employing some labour, making some money, spreading their good, becoming more and more expansive in regard to the land, etc. He says, we don’t want that. He says, what we have to aim at is the extension and development of the old African family because the African lived in the old days, and to some extent and in many places still lives, an extended, cooperative form of life. He says that is what we have to do. If we follow the habits of the people in western Europe and so forth and try to build up that we will wreck this country and we will never be able to put it in any kind of order. And it is very important to know that two of the greatest politicians of the 20th century had the same idea.
Gandhi mobilized the peasant and if he had not been able to mobilize the peasant the British would have been in India up to today. It was the mobilization of the peasant, those millions of people who have been removed from politics for so many centuries, that was the greatest shock. The British couldn’t hold them in order. There were too many people involved. And then Gandhi used to say, “We have to take the peasant for what he is.” The peasant wears just a little shirt or something – Gandhi wore one! The peasant did not like any of them to deal with cows, but they got milk from the goat – Gandhi kept his goat and he milked the goat. The peasant wove the cloth he wore – Gandhi wove his own cloth. And he made it clear to everybody, and the peasant included, that their way of life was to be the foundation of the way of life. He made it absolutely clear, he said “Don’t attempt to make these Indian peasants into peasants as in the advanced countries, as in Europe, etc. Number one, you can’t do it, and in any case, take them for what they are.” A second man who had very clear ideas about the peasant was Lenin. Lenin believed that the Russian peasant could only be changed if the Russian economy was assisted by the economy of the advanced countries who had become socialistic, because otherwise they are what they are and we can’t leave them. So the two of them, different types of men were very clear as to what was to be done with the peasants. And I could show you how close Nyerere is to Lenin’s proposal. Now, that is the situation. That is what he is doing. He has not only nationalized, he has changed the political system completely, the social construction of people who are going to administer and take charge. He has made that into something new and altogether he is breaking up the aid system, the system which they have inherited, and which black people are trying to run and which is causing nothing but complete failure. Now I knew these fellows, I knew their limitations.
Fanon is much more severe, he made it perfectly clear that nothing could be settled in those African states unless the revolution was continued not only against the imperialists but against those who are going to succeed. That is what his book says. He says the revolution must go on. You cannot go on in this way and that is what Nyerere is doing. He is creating the elements of a new society. Some people complain to me and say, “Don’t you prefer that it should come from below?” I say, “Sure it would be better if it would come from below, but it has come, and we should take it as it is.” They have difficulties, sure they have difficulties but he has done splendidly. And Kaunda had followed him and I will read Kaunda.
“Now during the hazardous road to political independence we recognized the fact that Africa was going to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest battleground, for this century’s ideological battle. As is well know, the present day ideological differences are based on certain economic and political theories and practices. Putting it very simply, one would say, it was a question of who owned or controlled the means of creating and distributing the wealth in any given nation.”
This is a key point, now follow what he is saying. For if the distribution of wealth is not done properly, it might lead to the creation of classes in society and the much valued humanist approach that is traditional and inherent in our African society would have suffered a final blow. What he is saying is what Nyerere has been saying, the old African cooperative family structure is what we have to develop. We must not develop into some peasants who have done well and some who have not, or the whole structure is going to fall apart. It is very strange that very rapidly these African politicians, have seen it, they have to build on what is African, They have to build on the basic structure that these people have had for thousands of years. They cannot try to develop a peasant on the economic structure of western civilization. That is sure to cause trouble and they cannot do it properly. This is something new that has appeared and I found in Africa that people are watching them. And I was told by many people, “We don’t know whether Nyerere will succeed, but if Nyerere is successful, the other African states will follow because they don’t know where they are going, they are drifting along and if this is successful, they will go with it.”
This is what the situation is. Now, he says, if this thing happened to the world as a whole and Africa in particular, we would be all the poorer for it, for we would then have the “haves” and the “have nots.” That is what they are trying to prevent. They are trying to prevent a society building up the type of relation that exists in the advanced countries. They are not aiming at repetition of western society, they are hoping to build on the African basis and on what they have. Politically they would be creating room for opposing parties based on the oppressed and the oppressor concept which again would not be in keeping with the society described above, a society in which the chief, as an elected or appointed leader of the people, held national property like land in trust for the people and was fully aware that he was responsible to them. He knew, too, that continuing to be the head depended on his people’s will. Now there has been a lot of mischief caused by a lot of lies and nonsense. Lord Lugard went to East Africa and he made a lot of mischief in Kenya through something that we call “Dual Mandate.” It is one of the most glaring pieces of hypocrisy and nonsense that you could find in any historical development. There was no dual mandate. What he called a dual mandate was, the central government was the British government, but it was dual because the chief was allowed to govern the people in what was known as the traditional way. What happened was that the chief was a servant of the British government. It was not dual mandate. There was no mandate that the British government had and a mandate that the chief had. If the chief didn’t do what the British government wanted, that was the end of him. And that was very different from the old position of the chief. The old position of the chief in many African states was that he had to listen to what the people said, he had to satisfy them. If he didn’t satisfy them, they killed him and put his brother in his place. Some of these chief families remained for hundreds of years. They had to listen to the population, listen to the people, and if they were not satisfactory the people got together and said we have to get rid of that fellow. And they got rid of him and decided that his brother would take charge, his sister’s husband or whoever. But they got rid of him, finished up with him. He couldn’t go on. And he knew that was waiting if he didn’t go on properly. So many of these chiefs did pretty well and people insisted that was a form of democracy. That is what Nyerere and TANU are beginning to find out, to restore, the African family, and to understand that this special group of people who are educated, who become bureaucrats, they are the ones who must be separated, they must be educated so as to become part of the population and bring the knowledge that they have as part of the population which the majority of the people constitute. Now I hope you understand what a serious and important thing that is. Nothing like that has ever taken place in Africa anywhere. Nkrumah, it seemed at the beginning, hoped to do something of the kind, but he didn’t make these drastic changes in the economic and social structure that Nyerere has made, and it is my belief, I have talked to Nyerere, that he did it because he realized that unless these fundamental changes were made and the old structures and the ideas that the British and the French had left behind, unless these were completely cleared out and the people given another perspective, the degeneration of the African state was bound to continue. Now I am going to conclude by telling you what I showed to Nyerere and he said he didn’t know it. Now Lenin had to deal with a state, there were many distinguished writers, there were many learned people in Russia, but the fact remained that in Russia the majority of the population was a very backward people, backward and illiterate. Now a man came to London about three or four years ago and he told George Lamming that he wanted to see me, he was an American citizen, he was living in Ghana. He told me he wanted to edit a paper that would be of the standard of the Lebanon Economist, a very good paper, a reactionary as all of them are, but fairly good. So I told him yes. And I told him I don’t want to write for your paper, it is a government paper, and what I write they will not like. And he said that was not so, that Nkrumah had told him they had absolute freedom, I said, “Yes, absolute freedom for Nkrumah, but not for people like me.” So I went away, he came back again and he took me to lunch and he had some people around and said, “Well, Mr. James we want you, we have been told that you are the finest of the writers on Africa and colonial territories, we want you on our paper.” I told him, “Now look, I am not going to write about Africa, but I will write about Lenin and what he was saying about Russia which was in a situation, the first of the underdeveloped countries that had to make the transition to the modern society.” He said, “All right.” And I wrote and didn’t mention Africa once. They read it and said they didn’t want it. Because I stated there what Lenin was stating in the last years. And I think I will give you some idea of it and you will see how closely Nyerere’s ideas approximate to what Lenin was saying. Lenin wrote some articles, at least two or three, in the last months of his life, and one of them is an article on cooperation. And there he says, his last words to the party and people of Russia and I am going to read them to you. “Two main tasks confront us which constitute the epoch.” There is not misunderstanding. In that sentence of six or seven words he is talking about what is essential to the w hole development. Now what arc these two main tasks. I will give you fifty chances, you will never be able to say what it was he said. He says, “The first is to reconstruct our apparatus which is utterly useless.” That is the Bolshevik leader. He says “We have to reconstruct the government which is utterly useless and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch.” He used to say in his last years, “This Soviet government that everybody is talking about, it’s a Bolshevik government, it is led by Bolsheviks, it preaches materialism, it’s Marxist, but that is the same old Czarist government. It hasn’t changed.” And when I was in Nigeria, I said, “Well, I haven’t come here to tell you things about the Nigerian government but let us look at the Ivory Coast, let us look at Ghana, would you agree that it is the same old imperialistic government?” And everyone agreed that it was. If I had gone to the Ivory Coast I would have asked them about Nigeria. But Lenin says, we have had five or six years of the Russian revolution, but this government that we have is the same old, old Czarist government. To change a government is a very difficult thing. Lenin says that is the first thing we have to do. “Which is utterly useless and which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch during the five years of struggle we did not and could not make any serious alterations in it.” That is after six years of the Russian revolution; He says the government is the same old Czarist government. And Nyerere has realized that the government that he has is the same old imperialist colonial government and he is seeking to break it up. And he realizes that they cannot run it as well as the imperialists did. That is the situation. And the second point of Lenin’s. Last time, I gave you fifty guesses, this time I give you a thousand. Lenin says, we have the peasants, the worst thing is to change that government, and the second thing is to conduct educational work among the peasants. When I showed it to Nyerere he said he hadn’t read it anywhere. But I could recognize what he was going. There are all sorts of passages which show that Lenin was aware of what was necessary, they had to break up that system and it is a very difficult thing to break up an old system. And if you try to run it you can’t run it as well as the people who made it, who made it for themselves and knew what they were doing. And they are trying in African state, after African state to have black African people run what is essentially the old system with the worst economic possibilities. That is why they are in the mess they are in and that is why we must understand the seriousness and the radical approach which Nyerere has shown ... Now my last word here is my African friend with his African socialism. African socialism must be flexible, it must make progress toward its main objectives. What Nyerere says is that African socialism must break up all the remnants of the system that we have inherited and institute something new. And then this young man goes on to say, “Valid as Marx’s description was, it bears little similarity to Kenya today.” On colonialism and so forth, they make it very clear that Marxism is something that Marx had to say about the advanced countries, it had no relation whatever to the colonial territories now that they have become independent. The only relation they had to Marxism was to call themselves Socialism. But I was able to show that Nyerere has, in discovering the necessity of breaking up this system which he has inherited from the old imperialists, has discovered the same thing that Lenin after six years was telling the Russians.
Less Argument about words! We still have too much of this sort of thing. More variety in practical experience and more study of this experience! Under certain conditions the exemplary organization of local work, even on a small scale, is of far greater national importance than many branches of the central state work. And these are precisely the conditions we are in at the present moment in regard to peasant farming in general, and in regard to the exchange of the surplus products of agricultures for the manufacture of industry in particular.
Exemplary organization on this respect, even a single volost, is of far greater national importance than the ‘exemplary’ improvement of the central apparatus of any People’s Commissariat: for three and a half years to such an extent that it has managed to acquire a certain amount of harmful inertness; we cannot improve it quickly to any extent, we do not know how to do it. Assistance in the more radical improvement of it, a new flow of fresh forces, assistance in the successful struggle against bureaucracy, in the struggle to overcome this harmful inertness, must come from localities, from the lower ranks, with the exemplary organization of a small ‘whole,’ precisely a ‘whole’, i.e. not on one farm, not one branch of economy, not one enterprise, but the sum total of economic exchange, even if only a small locality.
Those of us who are doomed to remain on work at the center will continue the tasks of improving the apparatus and purging it of bureaucracy, even if in modest and immediately achievable dimensions. But the greatest assistance in this task is coming, and will come, from the localities.”
I hope I have made clear the tremendous attempt which is being made. There are difficulties as there are in Cuba. But there is one of the most important features of political development in the world today, not only for the underdeveloped countries but, I am positive, I have examined it, the advanced countries, in their systems of education in particular, have a lot to learn from what is taking place in Tanzania.
C.L.R. James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(23 December 1939)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/index.htm#sa03_94" target="new">Vol. III No. 94</a>, 23 December 1939, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Ethiopia 1935, Finland 1939. What is being done for
“brave little Finland,” and what was not done for
Ethiopia, is causing some bitter reflections among Negroes. P.L.
Prattis, <strong>Pittsburg Courier</strong> columnist, expresses a widespread
sentiment in the issue of December 16th.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“England is reported sending
airplanes and other equipment to Finland. Did she send any to
Ethiopia? ... The United States is eager to play a hand. Recall our
ambassador from Russia, our indignant leadership demands. All right.
Recall the ambassador. Let us do anything we can to show our
disapproval of Russia. But what did we do about the Ethiopians? Did
anybody demand that we recall our ambassador to Italy? Did anybody
become concerned enough to urge that we try to help Ethiopia? Indeed
not!”</em></p>
<p class="fst">This is his conclusion. And he began:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“However hopeful dark people may
try to be, things are happening every day to show us just how
hopeless is our cause and plight. Nobody cares a great deal about us.
That doesn’t mean just in the United States nor does it mean
dark people in the United States alone. It means that in the entire
world in which we live the folk with dark skin aren’t
considered. Maybe this obvious, but sometimes things happen that make
you feel it all the more keenly. If you are looking out over the
world, incidents, tragic incidents, occur which get you down.”<br>
</em></p>
<h4>No Time For Tears!</h4>
<p class="fst">Mr. Prattis’s tears do not deserve even the loan of a
dirty handkerchief. Negroes have shed many tears in the past, with
good cause, but if in 1939 they are going to shed new tears whenever
they have new proof of the treachery of what Mr. Prattis calls
“England” and “the United States,” then they
had better all trek to the Grand Canyon and sit in a row on both
sides. There they can appoint Prattis tear-master and cry to their
hearts’ content without the risk of causing floods.</p>
<p>What infinite stupidity is this! Who expects England
to be friendly to an African state? England is the greatest oppressor
of Negroes that history has known. Today England is chief jailer over
sixty million blacks in Africa. Of the twenty billion British dollars
invested overseas, five billion are invested in Africa. That is the
only interest England has in Africa.</p>
<p>Come nearer home. Let Prattis dry his tear-filled
eyes and look about him. Doesn’t he read bis own article, his
own paper? Has he read the history of the Negro people in America?
Presumably, before he started to cry so much he used to. Did Abe
Lincoln love Negroes or hate slave owners? Prattis knows. And yet he
comes weeping and wailing because the United States government didn’t
help Ethiopia and now helps “poor little Finland.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Aesop Knew the Answer</h4>
<p class="fst">Let Mr. Prattis buy a copy of Aesop’s fables.
There are many copies for children, with large print, which he will
be able to read despite his present infirmity. On page 1 he will
decipher the following fable:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Once upon a time there were lots of
lambs and a few tigers. Every day each tiger would eat a lamb, and
sometimes the tigers would fight with each other as to who should
have a fat, juicy lamb. One day one of the tigers ate a little black
lamb. Whereupon another little black lamb (his name was Prattis)
called all the other black lambs together and, his eyes streaming
with tears, said, ‘Isn’t it a shame? Those tigers over
there allowed this bad tiger to eat up this poor black lamb. It is
because he is black. Boo-hoo.’”</p>
<p class="fst">England and France, by which we mean British
imperialism and French imperialism, stood by and watched Italian
imperialism rape Ethiopia. Why? Simply because it is the nature of
imperialism to gorge its appetites on all colonial countries. What
they were quarreling about was not whether the little black lamb
should be eaten, but who should get the choice parts.</p>
<p>In 1936 a great revolution of the workers and
peasants burst in Spain. Germany and Italy pounced on Spain, to help
Franco and gain concessions for themselves. And what did the other
imperialist tigers do? Chamberlain, the British Tory, declared for
non-intervention. So did Blum, the French labor leader. Roosevelt,
the New Dealer, clapped an embargo on arms to Spain. Stalin, the
bureaucrat and murderer of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks, sold some arms
to Spain—but on the condition that the workers and peasants
would not abolish landlords and capitalists. You have only to look at
a map to see how dangerous it was for British and French imperialism
to have German and Italian imperialism dominant in Spain. But the
“democratic” imperialists were prepared to allow even
that, rather than give arms to the workers and peasants, who might
conquer Franco and transform “democratic” Spain into
socialist Spain.<br>
</p>
<h4>Not a Color Question</h4>
<p class="fst">Then Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia.
Suppose someone had said, “It is because the Czechs are white.”
Wouldn’t Prattis have laughed at him as an idiot?</p>
<p>But by this time Germany was becoming too strong. So
that these tigers, who didn’t lift a finger for “Poor
little Ethiopia,” or “Poor little Spain,” or “Poor
little Czechoslovakia,” are now weeping almost as much as
Prattis over “Poor little Finland.” Back of this there is
another more fundamental cause. All imperialists (Hitler included)
hate Stalin. So when they yell "Poor little Finland,” what
they mean is “Down with Russia.” But one way or the
other, it is all a matter of imperialist power.</p>
<p>And any Negro who seeks to defend Finland against
Russia, along with Roosevelt, Hoover, Mussolini, and the rest, is
making himself the ignorant tool of imperialism. That is the truth.
And all the tears of Mr. Prattis will not wash out a word of it. The
moment you begin to look at world politics from the point of view of
black against white, you end up either in the imperialist camp of
loot and slaughter or the Prattis camp of tears and despair.</p>
<p>There is a third camp. Turn your back on imperialist
politics. Follow the road to the socialist revolution. A long road? A
hard road? Yes. But is there any other road? The workers and peasants
in Czechoslovakia, in Spain, in Ethiopia, looked for help to the
imperialists. And where are they today?</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
(23 December 1939)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 94, 23 December 1939, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Ethiopia 1935, Finland 1939. What is being done for
“brave little Finland,” and what was not done for
Ethiopia, is causing some bitter reflections among Negroes. P.L.
Prattis, Pittsburg Courier columnist, expresses a widespread
sentiment in the issue of December 16th.
“England is reported sending
airplanes and other equipment to Finland. Did she send any to
Ethiopia? ... The United States is eager to play a hand. Recall our
ambassador from Russia, our indignant leadership demands. All right.
Recall the ambassador. Let us do anything we can to show our
disapproval of Russia. But what did we do about the Ethiopians? Did
anybody demand that we recall our ambassador to Italy? Did anybody
become concerned enough to urge that we try to help Ethiopia? Indeed
not!”
This is his conclusion. And he began:
“However hopeful dark people may
try to be, things are happening every day to show us just how
hopeless is our cause and plight. Nobody cares a great deal about us.
That doesn’t mean just in the United States nor does it mean
dark people in the United States alone. It means that in the entire
world in which we live the folk with dark skin aren’t
considered. Maybe this obvious, but sometimes things happen that make
you feel it all the more keenly. If you are looking out over the
world, incidents, tragic incidents, occur which get you down.”
No Time For Tears!
Mr. Prattis’s tears do not deserve even the loan of a
dirty handkerchief. Negroes have shed many tears in the past, with
good cause, but if in 1939 they are going to shed new tears whenever
they have new proof of the treachery of what Mr. Prattis calls
“England” and “the United States,” then they
had better all trek to the Grand Canyon and sit in a row on both
sides. There they can appoint Prattis tear-master and cry to their
hearts’ content without the risk of causing floods.
What infinite stupidity is this! Who expects England
to be friendly to an African state? England is the greatest oppressor
of Negroes that history has known. Today England is chief jailer over
sixty million blacks in Africa. Of the twenty billion British dollars
invested overseas, five billion are invested in Africa. That is the
only interest England has in Africa.
Come nearer home. Let Prattis dry his tear-filled
eyes and look about him. Doesn’t he read bis own article, his
own paper? Has he read the history of the Negro people in America?
Presumably, before he started to cry so much he used to. Did Abe
Lincoln love Negroes or hate slave owners? Prattis knows. And yet he
comes weeping and wailing because the United States government didn’t
help Ethiopia and now helps “poor little Finland.”
Aesop Knew the Answer
Let Mr. Prattis buy a copy of Aesop’s fables.
There are many copies for children, with large print, which he will
be able to read despite his present infirmity. On page 1 he will
decipher the following fable:
“Once upon a time there were lots of
lambs and a few tigers. Every day each tiger would eat a lamb, and
sometimes the tigers would fight with each other as to who should
have a fat, juicy lamb. One day one of the tigers ate a little black
lamb. Whereupon another little black lamb (his name was Prattis)
called all the other black lambs together and, his eyes streaming
with tears, said, ‘Isn’t it a shame? Those tigers over
there allowed this bad tiger to eat up this poor black lamb. It is
because he is black. Boo-hoo.’”
England and France, by which we mean British
imperialism and French imperialism, stood by and watched Italian
imperialism rape Ethiopia. Why? Simply because it is the nature of
imperialism to gorge its appetites on all colonial countries. What
they were quarreling about was not whether the little black lamb
should be eaten, but who should get the choice parts.
In 1936 a great revolution of the workers and
peasants burst in Spain. Germany and Italy pounced on Spain, to help
Franco and gain concessions for themselves. And what did the other
imperialist tigers do? Chamberlain, the British Tory, declared for
non-intervention. So did Blum, the French labor leader. Roosevelt,
the New Dealer, clapped an embargo on arms to Spain. Stalin, the
bureaucrat and murderer of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks, sold some arms
to Spain—but on the condition that the workers and peasants
would not abolish landlords and capitalists. You have only to look at
a map to see how dangerous it was for British and French imperialism
to have German and Italian imperialism dominant in Spain. But the
“democratic” imperialists were prepared to allow even
that, rather than give arms to the workers and peasants, who might
conquer Franco and transform “democratic” Spain into
socialist Spain.
Not a Color Question
Then Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia.
Suppose someone had said, “It is because the Czechs are white.”
Wouldn’t Prattis have laughed at him as an idiot?
But by this time Germany was becoming too strong. So
that these tigers, who didn’t lift a finger for “Poor
little Ethiopia,” or “Poor little Spain,” or “Poor
little Czechoslovakia,” are now weeping almost as much as
Prattis over “Poor little Finland.” Back of this there is
another more fundamental cause. All imperialists (Hitler included)
hate Stalin. So when they yell "Poor little Finland,” what
they mean is “Down with Russia.” But one way or the
other, it is all a matter of imperialist power.
And any Negro who seeks to defend Finland against
Russia, along with Roosevelt, Hoover, Mussolini, and the rest, is
making himself the ignorant tool of imperialism. That is the truth.
And all the tears of Mr. Prattis will not wash out a word of it. The
moment you begin to look at world politics from the point of view of
black against white, you end up either in the imperialist camp of
loot and slaughter or the Prattis camp of tears and despair.
There is a third camp. Turn your back on imperialist
politics. Follow the road to the socialist revolution. A long road? A
hard road? Yes. But is there any other road? The workers and peasants
in Czechoslovakia, in Spain, in Ethiopia, looked for help to the
imperialists. And where are they today?
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Judas Pickens Takes the Stump for War Bonds</h1>
<h3>(26 May 1941)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>The Negro’s Fight</em>, <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1941/index.htm#la05_21" target="new">Vol. 5 No. 21</a>, 26 May 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Defend democracy! Defend democracy! Buy Savings Stamps to defend democracy! Get ready to go into the army in a Jim-Crow battalion to do and die for democracy; get ready to go into the navy and peel potatoes for while sailors (because that’s all you are good for) – the better to defend democracy. Our liberties are in danger!</p>
<p>Roosevelt, Marshall Field, Wallace, LaGuardia, Willkie, the whole boss press, all are trying to drown the common sense of the worker by shouting these slogans, or whispering them, as need be.</p>
<p>But the Negro is tough. He says, “I want to fight for democracy here. I have heard these tales before. I don’t believe them. You are lying to me.” The bosses therefore, as the war gets nearer, torn on the heat. The latest bit of heat is Mr. William Pickens.<br>
</p>
<h4>Pickens Gets a New Job</h4>
<p class="fst">Pickens is a Negro who went to Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, or all three – it doesn’t matter. He is an official of the NAACP and has travelled all over the country, investigating lynchings. raising funds, lecturing, agitating, organizing. He is one of the best known Negro social workers in the country. Pickens knows everybody who is somebody. Everybody who is somebody knows Pickens.</p>
<p>Now Roosevelt wants to sell the war to the Negroes. He wants them to support it. He wants them to take the Jim-Crow scraps he offers them – all for the sake of democracy. He doesn’t want them to raise demands. He wants them to buy War Savings Stamps. It takes a thief to catch a thief, so Franklin D. Roosevelt thinks it is best to take Negroes to catch Negroes. He sends for Pickens to come to Washington and gives him a job to sell War Stamps to Negroes ($6,000 a year, $120 a week).</p>
<p>Naturally, Pickens takes it. Pickens thinks that this country is not perfect, but it is a democracy because HE can get a job for $120 a week. He is prepared to die for this democracy, at least to tell other people to die for it.. So the Negroes can look out for Pickens coming round and writing and speaking and selling them to war, the imperialist war, for profits and trade and land.</p>
<p>The curious thing is that Pickens supported Willkie in the last election. Many Negro politicians worked hard for Roosevelt. Now they are raising blue hell. They say that one of them should have got that nice fat job, and not a Willkie Negro. But Roosevelt knows that to sell the Negroes this war is a hard job. Pickens is the best man to do this Judas job. So he gives him the $120 a week to fool the Negroes.<br>
</p>
<h4>Do Not Be Fooled</h4>
<p class="fst">The millions of sharecroppers, starving and exploited, the Negro workers struggling to get jobs and into unions, kicked around day in and day out by American capitalism, these are the people Pickens will try to fool for Roosevelt’s war. Some of you who read this may one day be at a meeting where Pickens or one of his agents is filling the room with lies about why the Negro should defend Jim-Crow democracy.</p>
<p>Think it over, brother, and see if it wouldn’t be worth our while to ask for five minutes in order to explain to the Negroes there exactly why Judas Pickens is doing Roosevelt’s dirty work.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Judas Pickens Takes the Stump for War Bonds
(26 May 1941)
The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 21, 26 May 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Defend democracy! Defend democracy! Buy Savings Stamps to defend democracy! Get ready to go into the army in a Jim-Crow battalion to do and die for democracy; get ready to go into the navy and peel potatoes for while sailors (because that’s all you are good for) – the better to defend democracy. Our liberties are in danger!
Roosevelt, Marshall Field, Wallace, LaGuardia, Willkie, the whole boss press, all are trying to drown the common sense of the worker by shouting these slogans, or whispering them, as need be.
But the Negro is tough. He says, “I want to fight for democracy here. I have heard these tales before. I don’t believe them. You are lying to me.” The bosses therefore, as the war gets nearer, torn on the heat. The latest bit of heat is Mr. William Pickens.
Pickens Gets a New Job
Pickens is a Negro who went to Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, or all three – it doesn’t matter. He is an official of the NAACP and has travelled all over the country, investigating lynchings. raising funds, lecturing, agitating, organizing. He is one of the best known Negro social workers in the country. Pickens knows everybody who is somebody. Everybody who is somebody knows Pickens.
Now Roosevelt wants to sell the war to the Negroes. He wants them to support it. He wants them to take the Jim-Crow scraps he offers them – all for the sake of democracy. He doesn’t want them to raise demands. He wants them to buy War Savings Stamps. It takes a thief to catch a thief, so Franklin D. Roosevelt thinks it is best to take Negroes to catch Negroes. He sends for Pickens to come to Washington and gives him a job to sell War Stamps to Negroes ($6,000 a year, $120 a week).
Naturally, Pickens takes it. Pickens thinks that this country is not perfect, but it is a democracy because HE can get a job for $120 a week. He is prepared to die for this democracy, at least to tell other people to die for it.. So the Negroes can look out for Pickens coming round and writing and speaking and selling them to war, the imperialist war, for profits and trade and land.
The curious thing is that Pickens supported Willkie in the last election. Many Negro politicians worked hard for Roosevelt. Now they are raising blue hell. They say that one of them should have got that nice fat job, and not a Willkie Negro. But Roosevelt knows that to sell the Negroes this war is a hard job. Pickens is the best man to do this Judas job. So he gives him the $120 a week to fool the Negroes.
Do Not Be Fooled
The millions of sharecroppers, starving and exploited, the Negro workers struggling to get jobs and into unions, kicked around day in and day out by American capitalism, these are the people Pickens will try to fool for Roosevelt’s war. Some of you who read this may one day be at a meeting where Pickens or one of his agents is filling the room with lies about why the Negro should defend Jim-Crow democracy.
Think it over, brother, and see if it wouldn’t be worth our while to ask for five minutes in order to explain to the Negroes there exactly why Judas Pickens is doing Roosevelt’s dirty work.
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<p> </p>
<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>Balance Sheet of the War</h1>
<h3>(June 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_23" target="new">Vol. IX No. 23</a>, 4 June 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">During recent weeks, in connection with the celebration of May Day, labor’s day, there has been much thought given to the position of labor.</p>
<p>How have the Negroes fared during this period? How do they stand today as compared, for instance, with their position in May of 1940. The answer can be unequivocally given: <em>unmistakable progress has been made.</em> There has been substantial progress in the integration of Negroes into industry. True, it has been the result of the needs of the capitalist war machine. But the fact is that Negroes are a part of the labor force as never before. They have had steady wages. They have been able to learn skills. Despite the handicap of late entry and the prejudices of white workers, Negroes have been up-graded in many plants. Thus their claims to equality in production have received token recognition.<br>
</p>
<h4>Education in Industry</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>The mere presence of so many hundreds of thousands of Negroes in industry has resulted in a great education of the Negroes themselves. They have been forced to recognize mare clearly than ever the solidarity of labor, black and white, Jew and Gentile. Hundreds of thousands of Negroes and their families have been helped to think in terms, not of black and white, but of employer and laborer, in terms of class and not of race.</em></p>
<p>As the climax to this process, they have had the inestimable benefit of union education. Despite the strikes against employment and upgrading of Negroes, the record of the CIO, in particular, on the Negro question in the unions is undoubtedly the brightest page in the history of race relations in this country.</p>
<p>The penetration of large numbers of Negroes into industry and the unions, the experiences gained, the publicity in the Negro press, have resulted in a great increase of pro-CIO sentiment, among Negroes <em>whether [they] are members of unions or not</em>. This social and political consequence of the mass entry into production is a gain whose full significance will appear as the political life of the country sharpens and clarifies itself.</p>
<p><em>With this must be coupled the education of the white workers too. Under the stress of the class struggle in the process of production, guided by the firm leadership of, for example, the UAW, white workers have been compelled to face the Negro question in the factories and to take a position on it.</em></p>
<p>The progress made can be gauged by the fact that during the fighting and rioting in Detroit the workers in the factories stood firm. They recognized the threat to the union arid with them, black and white, the union came first. This was not only of first importance for the unions. It was of the first importance for the Negroes as well. Because if the unions had divided on this question, then the floodgates would have been loosened and the immediate consequences for all Negroes in Detroit would have been much worse than even what actually took place.</p>
<p>At the same time, the last five years have seen an intensification of the struggle between American capitalist society as a whole and the oppressed Negro people. The strains and stresses of the war have intensified all the antagonisms of capitalist society. The result has been a sharpening of racial tensions and of racial conflict. It is not necessary to recapitulate incidents here and now. It is sufficient to say that the vigorous offensive of the Negroes has resulted in nationwide concern with the position of the Negro people in the United States.</p>
<p>Roosevelt gave the first official response when the threat of a march on Washington was countered by the formation of the ineffectual FEFC. Since then the process has continued.<br>
</p>
<h4>Negro Struggles</h4>
<p class="fst">Its highest point has been the Ives-Quinn bill, which aims at abolishing discrimination on account of race in New York State. No bill can abolish racial discrimination in capitalist society. Yet the overwhelming support given to the bill is evidence of the recognition on all sides that the claims of the Negro people for equality can no longer be ignored. Foremost among those who were roused to action in New York were the local CIO and AFL unions.</p>
<p class="c"><strong><a href="tenth2.htm">(To be continued)</a></strong></p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
Balance Sheet of the War
(June 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 23, 4 June 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
During recent weeks, in connection with the celebration of May Day, labor’s day, there has been much thought given to the position of labor.
How have the Negroes fared during this period? How do they stand today as compared, for instance, with their position in May of 1940. The answer can be unequivocally given: unmistakable progress has been made. There has been substantial progress in the integration of Negroes into industry. True, it has been the result of the needs of the capitalist war machine. But the fact is that Negroes are a part of the labor force as never before. They have had steady wages. They have been able to learn skills. Despite the handicap of late entry and the prejudices of white workers, Negroes have been up-graded in many plants. Thus their claims to equality in production have received token recognition.
Education in Industry
The mere presence of so many hundreds of thousands of Negroes in industry has resulted in a great education of the Negroes themselves. They have been forced to recognize mare clearly than ever the solidarity of labor, black and white, Jew and Gentile. Hundreds of thousands of Negroes and their families have been helped to think in terms, not of black and white, but of employer and laborer, in terms of class and not of race.
As the climax to this process, they have had the inestimable benefit of union education. Despite the strikes against employment and upgrading of Negroes, the record of the CIO, in particular, on the Negro question in the unions is undoubtedly the brightest page in the history of race relations in this country.
The penetration of large numbers of Negroes into industry and the unions, the experiences gained, the publicity in the Negro press, have resulted in a great increase of pro-CIO sentiment, among Negroes whether [they] are members of unions or not. This social and political consequence of the mass entry into production is a gain whose full significance will appear as the political life of the country sharpens and clarifies itself.
With this must be coupled the education of the white workers too. Under the stress of the class struggle in the process of production, guided by the firm leadership of, for example, the UAW, white workers have been compelled to face the Negro question in the factories and to take a position on it.
The progress made can be gauged by the fact that during the fighting and rioting in Detroit the workers in the factories stood firm. They recognized the threat to the union arid with them, black and white, the union came first. This was not only of first importance for the unions. It was of the first importance for the Negroes as well. Because if the unions had divided on this question, then the floodgates would have been loosened and the immediate consequences for all Negroes in Detroit would have been much worse than even what actually took place.
At the same time, the last five years have seen an intensification of the struggle between American capitalist society as a whole and the oppressed Negro people. The strains and stresses of the war have intensified all the antagonisms of capitalist society. The result has been a sharpening of racial tensions and of racial conflict. It is not necessary to recapitulate incidents here and now. It is sufficient to say that the vigorous offensive of the Negroes has resulted in nationwide concern with the position of the Negro people in the United States.
Roosevelt gave the first official response when the threat of a march on Washington was countered by the formation of the ineffectual FEFC. Since then the process has continued.
Negro Struggles
Its highest point has been the Ives-Quinn bill, which aims at abolishing discrimination on account of race in New York State. No bill can abolish racial discrimination in capitalist society. Yet the overwhelming support given to the bill is evidence of the recognition on all sides that the claims of the Negro people for equality can no longer be ignored. Foremost among those who were roused to action in New York were the local CIO and AFL unions.
(To be continued)
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(3 February 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_05" target="new">Vol. IV No. 5</a>, 3 February 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">First of all, <a href="../01/negroq4.html" target="new">as we showed last week</a>, lynching has nothing to do
with the protection of white “womanhood.” Let us once
more nail that lie. Some months ago the refusal of Miami Negroes to
be frightened away from the polls by the Ku Klux Klan made national
headlines in all the Negro papers and even had some attention in the
capitalist press. It was only afterwards that we learnt what had
frightened off the Klan. The Negroes sat in their houses waiting for
the Klan with loaded Winchesters across their laps. Backed by this
not-to-be-despised argument, American “democracy” won a
small victory.</p>
<p>Now a similar situation is developing in Greenville, South
Carolina. Both sides are primed for civil war. The Klan is determined
that the Negroes shall not vote. The Negroes are determined that they
shall. They are carrying on a campaign for registration in the city
elections. James A. Briar, 69 year-old head of the local National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, considered chiefly
responsible for the agitation, has been arrested for illegal
possession of a gun. This time Briar is defending not only
“democracy” but his life. The Klan visited his house a
few times in recent weeks, but he was always out. According to the
N.Y. <strong>Amsterdam News</strong> (December 23, 1939), the Klan raided the
Negro area and “have beaten up men, stripped and humiliated
women and destroyed some property.”</p>
<p>This conflict has been going on for months. How does it affect the
Negro? Enter your Southern scientist: “Here is a situation
where the Negro’s uncontrollable lust for white women shows
itself.” William Anderson, 19 years old, president of the local
NAACP Youth Council and very active in the registration campaign, was
“framed” some time ago for disorderly conduct and breach
of the peace charges by the “authorities,” “who
insisted he had tried to date a white girl in town.” There you
have the kernel of lynching in the South. The “authorities”
bring a case. The mob is less subtle. It tears the victim to pieces.</p>
<p>It is a principle of propaganda today to smear your enemy with the
crimes of which you yourself are guilty. Hitler is a past master at
the art, Stalin its greatest exponent, living or dead. The South acts
on the same principle. The Southern gentlemen pester the Negro women
with their attentions. They accuse the Negro of this, their own
besetting sin.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who Are the Savages?</h4>
<p class="fst">Who are the “savages” in this lynching business? In
his recent book, <strong>The Black Man in White America</strong>, John G. Van
Deusen, Professor of American History and Government in Hobart
College, details some of the practices of the lynch mobs.</p>
<p>In Mississippi a Negro woman had five splinters run into her body
and was then slowly burned alive by white men – because the mob
had failed to capture her husband. A Texas mob burned a Negro in a
courthouse vault. A Georgian mob beat an insane man to death in a
hospital. A Tennessee mob tied a fifteen-year-old boy to a train.
Mobs in Tennessee and Georgia disemboweled pregnant women. In
Louisiana they sewed a man in a sack, weighted it with stone, and
threw him into a lake. In Mississippi they buried a man up to his
neck, placed a steel cage over his head, and loosed a bull dog into
the cage. A Mississippi mob bored corkscrews into the flesh of Luther
Holbert and his wife, in arms, legs, and body, and then pulled them
out, the spirals pulling with them big pieces of raw quivering flesh
every time. Henry Lowry was burned to death over a slow fire in 1921.
“Inch by inch the Negro was fairly cooked to death.” Nine
months later men, women and children in Hubbard, Texas, roasted a
Negro to death and, to increase his pain, jabbed sticks into his
mouth, nose and ears. In 1937 a mob at Duck Hill, Mississippi,
tortured two Negroes with a blow torch before shooting them.
“Occasionally fingers, toes and ears have been cut off the
living wretch and distributed for souvenirs. Photographs are quickly
sold out.”<br>
</p>
<p>And the “authorities”?</p>
<p>Huey Long did not think it worth while to bother himself about an
investigation. It wouldn’t “do the dead nigga no good.”
When a Negro association sent a telegram to Governor Bilbo protesting
against a lynching, Bilbo replied, “Go to hell.” Cole
Blease, Governor of South Carolina, said to a leader of a mob, “I
will turn you loose when charged with lynching a Negro who is accused
of assault on a white woman.” On another occasion, when
campaigning for election to the Senate, Blease found himself at
Union, S.C., where not long before a lynching had taken place. He
marked the occasion feelingly: “Whenever the Constitution comes
between men and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I
say to hell with the Constitution.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Only A Stage”</h4>
<p class="fst">These gentlemen make “moderate” speeches about states’
rights in Congress. But that is not the language and the arguments
they use to their own constituents. Let the last word be with
Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, the great
crusader for human rights against Hitler and other enemies of
“democracy.” What has he to say about lynching? Zero.
Exactly that. Not a word of rebuke to the filibusterers who year
after year have killed the bill. And why? Because Roosevelt knows
that lynching is no accidental phenomenon. It is rooted not only in
the history but in the whole economic and social system of the South.
These Southern politicians are not defending white “womanhood.”
They are defending Southern property, power and privilege.</p>
<p>And Franklin Roosevelt is defending Southern property, power and
privilege too. So that if Southern property, power and privilege need
to keep this two-edged sword between black and white poor in the
South, Franklin D. keeps his mouth shut. If he and his New Dealers
could put an end to lynching without disrupting the social and
economic bases of capitalism, they would. But first things come
first. They leave lynching Where it is as a means of preserving the
system. We, however, will not leave lynching where it is. We support
the attack on it in Congress. But that is only a stage in the fight.
It has to be torn up by the roots, and the roots are in the
capitalist system.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="updat">Last updated on 16 July 2018</p>
</body> |
MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
(3 February 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 5, 3 February 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
First of all, as we showed last week, lynching has nothing to do
with the protection of white “womanhood.” Let us once
more nail that lie. Some months ago the refusal of Miami Negroes to
be frightened away from the polls by the Ku Klux Klan made national
headlines in all the Negro papers and even had some attention in the
capitalist press. It was only afterwards that we learnt what had
frightened off the Klan. The Negroes sat in their houses waiting for
the Klan with loaded Winchesters across their laps. Backed by this
not-to-be-despised argument, American “democracy” won a
small victory.
Now a similar situation is developing in Greenville, South
Carolina. Both sides are primed for civil war. The Klan is determined
that the Negroes shall not vote. The Negroes are determined that they
shall. They are carrying on a campaign for registration in the city
elections. James A. Briar, 69 year-old head of the local National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, considered chiefly
responsible for the agitation, has been arrested for illegal
possession of a gun. This time Briar is defending not only
“democracy” but his life. The Klan visited his house a
few times in recent weeks, but he was always out. According to the
N.Y. Amsterdam News (December 23, 1939), the Klan raided the
Negro area and “have beaten up men, stripped and humiliated
women and destroyed some property.”
This conflict has been going on for months. How does it affect the
Negro? Enter your Southern scientist: “Here is a situation
where the Negro’s uncontrollable lust for white women shows
itself.” William Anderson, 19 years old, president of the local
NAACP Youth Council and very active in the registration campaign, was
“framed” some time ago for disorderly conduct and breach
of the peace charges by the “authorities,” “who
insisted he had tried to date a white girl in town.” There you
have the kernel of lynching in the South. The “authorities”
bring a case. The mob is less subtle. It tears the victim to pieces.
It is a principle of propaganda today to smear your enemy with the
crimes of which you yourself are guilty. Hitler is a past master at
the art, Stalin its greatest exponent, living or dead. The South acts
on the same principle. The Southern gentlemen pester the Negro women
with their attentions. They accuse the Negro of this, their own
besetting sin.
Who Are the Savages?
Who are the “savages” in this lynching business? In
his recent book, The Black Man in White America, John G. Van
Deusen, Professor of American History and Government in Hobart
College, details some of the practices of the lynch mobs.
In Mississippi a Negro woman had five splinters run into her body
and was then slowly burned alive by white men – because the mob
had failed to capture her husband. A Texas mob burned a Negro in a
courthouse vault. A Georgian mob beat an insane man to death in a
hospital. A Tennessee mob tied a fifteen-year-old boy to a train.
Mobs in Tennessee and Georgia disemboweled pregnant women. In
Louisiana they sewed a man in a sack, weighted it with stone, and
threw him into a lake. In Mississippi they buried a man up to his
neck, placed a steel cage over his head, and loosed a bull dog into
the cage. A Mississippi mob bored corkscrews into the flesh of Luther
Holbert and his wife, in arms, legs, and body, and then pulled them
out, the spirals pulling with them big pieces of raw quivering flesh
every time. Henry Lowry was burned to death over a slow fire in 1921.
“Inch by inch the Negro was fairly cooked to death.” Nine
months later men, women and children in Hubbard, Texas, roasted a
Negro to death and, to increase his pain, jabbed sticks into his
mouth, nose and ears. In 1937 a mob at Duck Hill, Mississippi,
tortured two Negroes with a blow torch before shooting them.
“Occasionally fingers, toes and ears have been cut off the
living wretch and distributed for souvenirs. Photographs are quickly
sold out.”
And the “authorities”?
Huey Long did not think it worth while to bother himself about an
investigation. It wouldn’t “do the dead nigga no good.”
When a Negro association sent a telegram to Governor Bilbo protesting
against a lynching, Bilbo replied, “Go to hell.” Cole
Blease, Governor of South Carolina, said to a leader of a mob, “I
will turn you loose when charged with lynching a Negro who is accused
of assault on a white woman.” On another occasion, when
campaigning for election to the Senate, Blease found himself at
Union, S.C., where not long before a lynching had taken place. He
marked the occasion feelingly: “Whenever the Constitution comes
between men and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I
say to hell with the Constitution.”
“Only A Stage”
These gentlemen make “moderate” speeches about states’
rights in Congress. But that is not the language and the arguments
they use to their own constituents. Let the last word be with
Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, the great
crusader for human rights against Hitler and other enemies of
“democracy.” What has he to say about lynching? Zero.
Exactly that. Not a word of rebuke to the filibusterers who year
after year have killed the bill. And why? Because Roosevelt knows
that lynching is no accidental phenomenon. It is rooted not only in
the history but in the whole economic and social system of the South.
These Southern politicians are not defending white “womanhood.”
They are defending Southern property, power and privilege.
And Franklin Roosevelt is defending Southern property, power and
privilege too. So that if Southern property, power and privilege need
to keep this two-edged sword between black and white poor in the
South, Franklin D. keeps his mouth shut. If he and his New Dealers
could put an end to lynching without disrupting the social and
economic bases of capitalism, they would. But first things come
first. They leave lynching Where it is as a means of preserving the
system. We, however, will not leave lynching where it is. We support
the attack on it in Congress. But that is only a stage in the fight.
It has to be torn up by the roots, and the roots are in the
capitalist system.
Top of the page
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|
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>The Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(27 January 1940)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_04" target="new">Vol. IV No. 4</a>, 27 January 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The Anti-Lynch Bill will now go before the Senate. The S.W.P. must
tirelessly work, by itself and with all other organizations, in order
to bring all possible pressure upon the Senate to pass it. The
working class movement must make this cause its own. It is the
working class that will check and finally put an end to lynching.
Only an idiot can fail to see that if the capitalist class wanted to
put an end to it, it would have taken adequate steps long ago.</p>
<p>The Southern landowners and their satellites try to make out that
lynching is the only safeguard for the “purity” of their
women from Negro assault. Lie No. 1. Of four thousand cases of
lynching during the last fifty years, in only one-fifth were the
Negroes even charged with any sort of assault on white women. And how
flimsy most of their charges were, the Scottsboro case proves.</p>
<p>But these very advocates of lynching, for that is what they are
who oppose the anti-lynching bill, are the same odious hypocrites who
will tell you how the Southern slave-owners went off to war and left
their wives and children in the safekeeping of faithful slaves. So
that, according to these theoreticians, the Negro’s appetite
for white women began with Lincoln’s proclamation of the
abolition of slavery. This is high science. But slavery has been
abolished in other parts of the world. Where in any part of America,
North and South and the West Indian islands, has any sort of lynch
law been found necessary to protect white womanhood? Nowhere.</p>
<p>In the West Indies, where slavery has been abolished for one
hundred years, there is not, as far as we know, one single case, not
one, of assault upon a white woman by a Negro. Sir Harry Johnston,
the great traveler, has put on record what is common knowledge, that
the women of the comparatively small white population in the West
Indies walk anywhere at any time among the Negro people with the
utmost safety. And this Englishman states that a white woman can walk
in the remote parts of the West Indies with far more safety than she
can on some of the downs and the quieter country places of Great
Britain.<br>
</p>
<h4>Do Glands Change in the South?</h4>
<p class="fst">And the Negro in the North and West and East of America? What
transformation in his glands takes place that allows him to meet any
number of women in the parks and lonely places on the outskirts of
New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and not give vent to the
uncontrollable lusts which are supposed to dominate him in the South?</p>
<p>No, let us once and for all chase from civilized society this
monstrous myth, and wherever we speak, not only meet the question if
it is raised, but bring it out into the open and show it up for the
lying fraud that it is. No man knew more about Africa than Sir Harry
Johnston. This was his conclusion on Negroes and white women:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is, I am convinced, a deliberate tendency in
the Southern States to exaggerate the desire of the Negro for a
sexual union with white women ... A few exceptional Negroes in West
and South Africa, and in America, are attracted towards a white
consort, but almost invariably for honest and pure-minded reasons,
because of some intellectual affinity or sympathy. The mass of the
race, if left free to choose, would prefer to mate with women of its
own type. When cases have occurred in the history of South Africa,
South-West, East and Central Africa, of some great Negro uprising,
and the wives and daughters of officials, missionaries and settlers
have been temporarily at the mercy of a Negro army, or in the power
of a Negro chief, how extremely rare are the proved cases of any
sexual abuse arising from this circumstance! How infinitely rarer
than the prostitution of Negro women following on some great conquest
of the whites or of their black or yellow allies! I know that the
contrary has been freely alleged and falsely stated in histories of
African events; but when the facts have been really investigated, it
is little else than astonishing that the Negro has either had too
great a racial sense of decency, or too little liking for the white
women (I believe it to be the former rather than the latter) to
outrage the unhappy white women and girls temporarily in his power
...”<br>
</p>
<h4>Lynching Not a Sex Question</h4>
<p class="fst">Among very highly developed urban people, particularly writers,
artists, revolutionaries, intellectuals, stage-people, one finds a
tendency towards interracial sexual relationships, but it is
precisely among the large masses of workers or farmers that such
tendencies are absent. When rapes do occur, they are the result of
artificially stimulated mass hysteria working on the embittered
imagination of a few subnormal, individuals. <em>When they do occur</em>
– because over and over again, white women in the South, when
their illicit relations with Negroes are discovered, either through
fear or external pressure, raise the cry of Rape.</p>
<p>Lynching is not a sexual question, but a social and political
question. Marxists have not only to <em>know</em> that themselves. They
must propagate it with as much assiduousness and energy as the
Southerners propagate their lies about the Negro’s desire for
white women.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
The Negro Question
(27 January 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 4, 27 January 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The Anti-Lynch Bill will now go before the Senate. The S.W.P. must
tirelessly work, by itself and with all other organizations, in order
to bring all possible pressure upon the Senate to pass it. The
working class movement must make this cause its own. It is the
working class that will check and finally put an end to lynching.
Only an idiot can fail to see that if the capitalist class wanted to
put an end to it, it would have taken adequate steps long ago.
The Southern landowners and their satellites try to make out that
lynching is the only safeguard for the “purity” of their
women from Negro assault. Lie No. 1. Of four thousand cases of
lynching during the last fifty years, in only one-fifth were the
Negroes even charged with any sort of assault on white women. And how
flimsy most of their charges were, the Scottsboro case proves.
But these very advocates of lynching, for that is what they are
who oppose the anti-lynching bill, are the same odious hypocrites who
will tell you how the Southern slave-owners went off to war and left
their wives and children in the safekeeping of faithful slaves. So
that, according to these theoreticians, the Negro’s appetite
for white women began with Lincoln’s proclamation of the
abolition of slavery. This is high science. But slavery has been
abolished in other parts of the world. Where in any part of America,
North and South and the West Indian islands, has any sort of lynch
law been found necessary to protect white womanhood? Nowhere.
In the West Indies, where slavery has been abolished for one
hundred years, there is not, as far as we know, one single case, not
one, of assault upon a white woman by a Negro. Sir Harry Johnston,
the great traveler, has put on record what is common knowledge, that
the women of the comparatively small white population in the West
Indies walk anywhere at any time among the Negro people with the
utmost safety. And this Englishman states that a white woman can walk
in the remote parts of the West Indies with far more safety than she
can on some of the downs and the quieter country places of Great
Britain.
Do Glands Change in the South?
And the Negro in the North and West and East of America? What
transformation in his glands takes place that allows him to meet any
number of women in the parks and lonely places on the outskirts of
New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and not give vent to the
uncontrollable lusts which are supposed to dominate him in the South?
No, let us once and for all chase from civilized society this
monstrous myth, and wherever we speak, not only meet the question if
it is raised, but bring it out into the open and show it up for the
lying fraud that it is. No man knew more about Africa than Sir Harry
Johnston. This was his conclusion on Negroes and white women:
“There is, I am convinced, a deliberate tendency in
the Southern States to exaggerate the desire of the Negro for a
sexual union with white women ... A few exceptional Negroes in West
and South Africa, and in America, are attracted towards a white
consort, but almost invariably for honest and pure-minded reasons,
because of some intellectual affinity or sympathy. The mass of the
race, if left free to choose, would prefer to mate with women of its
own type. When cases have occurred in the history of South Africa,
South-West, East and Central Africa, of some great Negro uprising,
and the wives and daughters of officials, missionaries and settlers
have been temporarily at the mercy of a Negro army, or in the power
of a Negro chief, how extremely rare are the proved cases of any
sexual abuse arising from this circumstance! How infinitely rarer
than the prostitution of Negro women following on some great conquest
of the whites or of their black or yellow allies! I know that the
contrary has been freely alleged and falsely stated in histories of
African events; but when the facts have been really investigated, it
is little else than astonishing that the Negro has either had too
great a racial sense of decency, or too little liking for the white
women (I believe it to be the former rather than the latter) to
outrage the unhappy white women and girls temporarily in his power
...”
Lynching Not a Sex Question
Among very highly developed urban people, particularly writers,
artists, revolutionaries, intellectuals, stage-people, one finds a
tendency towards interracial sexual relationships, but it is
precisely among the large masses of workers or farmers that such
tendencies are absent. When rapes do occur, they are the result of
artificially stimulated mass hysteria working on the embittered
imagination of a few subnormal, individuals. When they do occur
– because over and over again, white women in the South, when
their illicit relations with Negroes are discovered, either through
fear or external pressure, raise the cry of Rape.
Lynching is not a sexual question, but a social and political
question. Marxists have not only to know that themselves. They
must propagate it with as much assiduousness and energy as the
Southerners propagate their lies about the Negro’s desire for
white women.
Top of the page
Last updated on 16 July 2018
|
./articles/Meyer-J.-(C.L.R.-James)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.james-clr.works.1946.04.stalinism1 | <body bgcolor="#FFFFF0" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" vlink="#3300FF" alink="#FF0000">
<p class="toplink"><a id="top" href="../../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">C.L.R. James</a></p>
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>First in a Series of Articles</h4>
<h1>The Stalinist Menace to World Labor</h1>
<h2>(1 April 1946)</h2>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_13" target="new">Vol. X No. 13</a>, 1 April 1946, p. 3-M.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Stalinism is now a word more or less familiar to substantial numbers of American workers. It represents to them the Communist Party of the United States, its fellow parties the world over, all associated with the now mighty empire of Russia.</p>
<p>First of all, let us look at the more obvious material facts.</p>
<p>In Russia the Stalinist bureaucracy rules over 200 million people. Trotsky to his dying day insisted on calling this bureaucracy a caste. A class, he said, fulfills a certain role in production. Workers, capitalists, farmers, all play a special role in producing commodities. The petty bourgeoisie, small shopkeepers, functionaries in offices, etc., also play a role in the economic system. But the labor bureaucrats are not a class. They are a caste. They perform an organizational, administrative social function which is only remotely if at all connected with the actual productive and distributive process. The Stalinist bureaucracy, so ran Trotsky’s argument, was a caste, an unusual, an exceptional, an unprecedented caste, but nevertheless a caste.</p>
<p>The theory did not die with Trotsky. The Socialist Workers Party (Cannonites) and a majority of the Fourth Internationalists all over the world still hold it.<br>
</p>
<h4>What the Bureaucracy Looks Like</h4>
<p class="fst">Let us admit for the moment that the Stalinist bureaucracy is not a class. The facts, however, are there:</p>
<p><em>It has complete control of the economy of the country. It runs it, apportions labor, regulates as best it can the flow of wealth to different departments of production. It fixes wages, distributes the surplus, manages the foreign trade, decides where new plants should be opened and where old ones should be closed. Place on it the label caste. Take oft the label and write class instead. What, today, is changed thereby?</em></p>
<p>The Stalinist bureaucracy organizes, controls, directs a mighty army. It controls a secret police force of two million men. It appoints and removes its ambassadors abroad. It makes wars and declares peace. It performs all the functions of government, exercises all the privileges, bears all the responsibilities, exactly as if it were a class that had a history of five centuries behind it. No. Comrade Trotsky was wrong. He maintained a distinction which was not only meaningless but harmful.</p>
<p>Trotsky, be it noted, was not a sentimentalist, seeing Russia through the eyes of an old Russian revolutionary. Nor was he unaware of the realities of Stalinist Russia. Not at all. He recognized the enormous theoretical difficulties he would face if he abandoned his theory. That cannot be discussed here. But the final proof of the weakness, the impossibility, of maintaining Trotsky’s theory is this. To remove that bureaucracy today would require a revolution greater in scope than the October Revolution. Now what kind of caste is this that is more powerfully established as a government than the old combination of landlords, bureaucrats and capitalists who ruled Russia up to 1914?</p>
<p>Previously, this question was, in the minds of the average American worker, confined to Russia. But now two problems or, more precisely, three problems are being posed.<br>
</p>
<h4>An International Reactionary Force</h4>
<ol>
<li>This Russian society has loomed up as a deadly and direct rival to United States imperialism. The air is filled with the fear of war. What is this Russian state and why does war between it and the United States appear as inevitable as war between Britain and Germany in the old days?<br>
</li>
<li>The Russian type of state is no longer confined to Russia or territories directly annexed by Russia. It is obvious that Poland and Yugoslavia are, to put it moderately, heading as fast as they can toward regimes modeled on Russia rather than the traditional European form. <em>The question there is by no means settled.</em> But the struggle is on.<br>
<br>
The Russians, in the part of Germany which they occupy, are obviously laying the foundation of the type of regime which they have at home. They do not do so openly, but every step that they take shows their ultimate aim.<br>
<br>
On the other side of the world, in Manchuria and Northern China, they have the same aims. They adapt their policy to the local circumstances, but a blind man can see what they will do if they can.<br>
</li>
<li>In the countries of Western Europe, Communist Parties devoted to Russian aims and following Russian policy wield such political power as has rarely been exercised by any parties except those of a ruling class itself. In France the Communist Party has the decisive control of the united French trade unions, nearly six million strong. The party itself has over a million members.<br>
<br>
In Italy the Communist Party has 1,700,000 members.<br>
<br>
Just to complete the general picture, Communist organizations in Greece have the large majority of the population behind them. These organizations, here, as elsewhere, are fanatical followers of the Stalinist line.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Taking the situation as a whole therefore the Stalinist state and its ramifications represent without a shadow of doubt the most powerful organized social and political force in the world today. Its strength comes from its unification and the resulting cohesion.<br>
</p>
<h4>Toward Understanding Stalinism</h4>
<p class="fst">The American worker therefore must realize:</p>
<ol>
<li>That the Stalinists whom he meets in his factory or in his union may be few; their party in the United States may not be very powerful; but that they are part of a worldwide organization of enormous actual power. To underestimate them by judging them solely by their strength in the United States would be a terrible mistake.<br>
</li>
<li><em>The problem of the Stalinists being a world problem, to fight them here requires first of all a clear understanding of what their Moscow general staff aims at today and tomorrow. This is world politics in the most profound sense of the term. The American worker seeking to probe this question to the roots must be prepared to grapple with the whole world scene. The days for preoccupation with purely national problems are past. The worker too must see the world as “one world.” This I propose to take up in this series of articles. But one thing must be established, and established without any sort of misunderstanding. The antagonism between the U.S. government and the Stalinist regime is one thing. That antagonism the U.S. government extends to the Communist Parties all over the world.</em></li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">But the antagonism of the working class movement to Stalinism is something fundamentally different. The U.S. government opposes Stalinism because Stalinism is now its rival for world mastery. A class-conscious revolutionary opposes Stalinism because it betrays revolutionary struggle and, as far as it can, manipulates the working-class movement for its imperialist ends. Thus while American capital and American labor are both threatened by Stalinism, that makes for no solidarity between American capital and American labor on this issue. The class line is as sharp here as elsewhere.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="updat">Last updated on 19 January 2019</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
First in a Series of Articles
The Stalinist Menace to World Labor
(1 April 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. X No. 13, 1 April 1946, p. 3-M.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Stalinism is now a word more or less familiar to substantial numbers of American workers. It represents to them the Communist Party of the United States, its fellow parties the world over, all associated with the now mighty empire of Russia.
First of all, let us look at the more obvious material facts.
In Russia the Stalinist bureaucracy rules over 200 million people. Trotsky to his dying day insisted on calling this bureaucracy a caste. A class, he said, fulfills a certain role in production. Workers, capitalists, farmers, all play a special role in producing commodities. The petty bourgeoisie, small shopkeepers, functionaries in offices, etc., also play a role in the economic system. But the labor bureaucrats are not a class. They are a caste. They perform an organizational, administrative social function which is only remotely if at all connected with the actual productive and distributive process. The Stalinist bureaucracy, so ran Trotsky’s argument, was a caste, an unusual, an exceptional, an unprecedented caste, but nevertheless a caste.
The theory did not die with Trotsky. The Socialist Workers Party (Cannonites) and a majority of the Fourth Internationalists all over the world still hold it.
What the Bureaucracy Looks Like
Let us admit for the moment that the Stalinist bureaucracy is not a class. The facts, however, are there:
It has complete control of the economy of the country. It runs it, apportions labor, regulates as best it can the flow of wealth to different departments of production. It fixes wages, distributes the surplus, manages the foreign trade, decides where new plants should be opened and where old ones should be closed. Place on it the label caste. Take oft the label and write class instead. What, today, is changed thereby?
The Stalinist bureaucracy organizes, controls, directs a mighty army. It controls a secret police force of two million men. It appoints and removes its ambassadors abroad. It makes wars and declares peace. It performs all the functions of government, exercises all the privileges, bears all the responsibilities, exactly as if it were a class that had a history of five centuries behind it. No. Comrade Trotsky was wrong. He maintained a distinction which was not only meaningless but harmful.
Trotsky, be it noted, was not a sentimentalist, seeing Russia through the eyes of an old Russian revolutionary. Nor was he unaware of the realities of Stalinist Russia. Not at all. He recognized the enormous theoretical difficulties he would face if he abandoned his theory. That cannot be discussed here. But the final proof of the weakness, the impossibility, of maintaining Trotsky’s theory is this. To remove that bureaucracy today would require a revolution greater in scope than the October Revolution. Now what kind of caste is this that is more powerfully established as a government than the old combination of landlords, bureaucrats and capitalists who ruled Russia up to 1914?
Previously, this question was, in the minds of the average American worker, confined to Russia. But now two problems or, more precisely, three problems are being posed.
An International Reactionary Force
This Russian society has loomed up as a deadly and direct rival to United States imperialism. The air is filled with the fear of war. What is this Russian state and why does war between it and the United States appear as inevitable as war between Britain and Germany in the old days?
The Russian type of state is no longer confined to Russia or territories directly annexed by Russia. It is obvious that Poland and Yugoslavia are, to put it moderately, heading as fast as they can toward regimes modeled on Russia rather than the traditional European form. The question there is by no means settled. But the struggle is on.
The Russians, in the part of Germany which they occupy, are obviously laying the foundation of the type of regime which they have at home. They do not do so openly, but every step that they take shows their ultimate aim.
On the other side of the world, in Manchuria and Northern China, they have the same aims. They adapt their policy to the local circumstances, but a blind man can see what they will do if they can.
In the countries of Western Europe, Communist Parties devoted to Russian aims and following Russian policy wield such political power as has rarely been exercised by any parties except those of a ruling class itself. In France the Communist Party has the decisive control of the united French trade unions, nearly six million strong. The party itself has over a million members.
In Italy the Communist Party has 1,700,000 members.
Just to complete the general picture, Communist organizations in Greece have the large majority of the population behind them. These organizations, here, as elsewhere, are fanatical followers of the Stalinist line.
Taking the situation as a whole therefore the Stalinist state and its ramifications represent without a shadow of doubt the most powerful organized social and political force in the world today. Its strength comes from its unification and the resulting cohesion.
Toward Understanding Stalinism
The American worker therefore must realize:
That the Stalinists whom he meets in his factory or in his union may be few; their party in the United States may not be very powerful; but that they are part of a worldwide organization of enormous actual power. To underestimate them by judging them solely by their strength in the United States would be a terrible mistake.
The problem of the Stalinists being a world problem, to fight them here requires first of all a clear understanding of what their Moscow general staff aims at today and tomorrow. This is world politics in the most profound sense of the term. The American worker seeking to probe this question to the roots must be prepared to grapple with the whole world scene. The days for preoccupation with purely national problems are past. The worker too must see the world as “one world.” This I propose to take up in this series of articles. But one thing must be established, and established without any sort of misunderstanding. The antagonism between the U.S. government and the Stalinist regime is one thing. That antagonism the U.S. government extends to the Communist Parties all over the world.
But the antagonism of the working class movement to Stalinism is something fundamentally different. The U.S. government opposes Stalinism because Stalinism is now its rival for world mastery. A class-conscious revolutionary opposes Stalinism because it betrays revolutionary struggle and, as far as it can, manipulates the working-class movement for its imperialist ends. Thus while American capital and American labor are both threatened by Stalinism, that makes for no solidarity between American capital and American labor on this issue. The class line is as sharp here as elsewhere.
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Last updated on 19 January 2019
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./articles/Meyer-J.-(C.L.R.-James)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.james-clr.works.1958.06.federation | <body>
<p class="title">CLR James 1958</p>
<h1>Lecture on Federation</h1>
<h4>(West Indies and British Guiana)</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <strong>Lecture on Federation, (West Indies and British Guiana)</strong><br>
<span class="info">Delivered:</span> June 1958 at Queen’s College<br>
<span class="info">Printed:</span>at the “Argosy” Co., Ltd., Bel Air Park, East Coast, Demarara [Guyana]<br>
by C.L.R. James 25 pp.;<br>
<span class="info"> Transcribed & marked up:</span> by Damon Maxwell for the <strong>Marxist Internet Archive</strong>. </p>
<hr class="end">
<h3>Foreword</h3>
<p class="fst">Introducing this lecture in printed form to the West Indian public and particularly to my fellow Guianese is an unusual honour.</p>
<p>Mr. C.L.R. James is undoubtedly one of the distinguished West Indians of our time. His patriotism is beyond question and with another West Indian, George Padmore, now Adviser on African affairs to the Prime Minister of Ghana, he has had a profound influence on the movement for colonial freedom throughout the British Empire, if not the world.</p>
<p>Mr. James, who is now secretary to the West Indian Federal Labour Party, has distinguished himself in the fields of Literature, History and Political Theory and brings to his new field of activities in his native West Indies a maturity and experience which may be equalled but hardly surpassed.</p>
<p>A special invitee to the opening of the first Federal Parliament in Trinidad last April, he took the opportunity of visiting British Guiana, and his public lectures on “Federation”, “Literature and the Common Man”, “Political Institutions in the advanced and underdeveloped countries and the relations between them” were a source of controversy and education for many Guianese. Many of the latter for the first time recognised the possibilities and scope of our national movement and its intimate relation to that in the Caribbean in particular and the colonial world in general.</p>
<p>When this lecture here embodied was delivered at Queen’s College, Federation had just been born. It has grown stronger since that time and promises to give political form to West Indian aspirations and nationhood.</p>
<p>You may not agree with every conclusion of the lecturer, but his main ones are incontrovertible. Reading this book I am sure will be a scintillating experience. I take pride in presenting it to you in the name of the People’s National Congress as some small evidence of our appreciation of its author’s worth and our undying loyalty to the cause of West Indian Independence.</p>
<p class="fst">L.F.S. BURNHAM,<br>
Political Leader,<br>
People’s National Congress. <br>
Georgetown,<br>
March 1959.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">Mr. Chairman and Friends,</p>
<p class="fst">I must begin by noting one or two criticisms that have been made not only about Federation but about my presence in British Guiana. It has been said that I, a stranger, have no right to come here to discuss with the people of British Guiana the question of Federation. I am not in the least offended by the remark. My welcome in many quarters has been very warm, even enthusiastic, and I think I detect in the critic’s remarks not so much an objection to my presence here, as a means of indicating in a disguised manner his opposition to Federation.</p>
<p>It shows the strength of the case for Federation that those who are opposed to it distract themselves, to find ways and means by which they can indicate their opposition without coming out openly and saying so. After all. Federation proposes unity, a unity between the British West Indies, which have federated themselves, and British Guiana. What conception does anyone have of Federation or of discussions about Federation when he objects to one member of the proposed unity discussing with other members. Where does he expect us to meet? On neutral ground? In the sea midway between British Guiana and Trinidad? Such criticism is absurd. I have noticed that Mr. Gajraj, who acted as observer for British Guiana on some of the discussions which took place between representatives of the various islands, has stated in the Legislative Council that although he was only an observer at these discussions he was given every opportunity to express his views and to register his opinions. I believe that is the only way in which the matter can be safely settled. I believe that Messrs. Burnham and Carter in inviting me here and Mr. Gajraj in taking the chair at the last meeting, acted in the true spirit of Federation itself, no matter what may be the legislative position at the present time. I do not think we should worry very much about that kind of criticism. That sort of attitude has never been present where I have lived in recent years, in London. </p>
<h4>West Indians in England</h4>
<p>As you know I was invited to attend the celebrations surrounding the inauguration of the Federal Parliament in Trinidad. This invitation came from the Governor-General of The West Indies. I cannot consider that the invitation was due to any personal merit of my own. I think it rather due to the fact that the Federal Government and the Governor-General recognised the pioneer work that has been done by West Indians in London at a time when to advocate self-government was almost equivalent to treason. But what is treason in one period is often respectable twenty years afterwards. I want here to associate with that work the name of an illustrious West Indian, George Padmore. I refer to this among other reasons because it has a bearing on what I have to say this evening. At that time most of us West Indians lived in London, which was for long one of the great centres of imperialism. But being one of the great centres of imperialism, it follows that now it is one of the great centres of the passing of colonialism. To London came and have come through the years a steady stream of colonials, newly emancipated, half-emancipated, demanding emancipation, about to be emancipated, all types. We the West Indians in London meet them, discuss with them, take part in their political meetings and demonstrations. They take part in ours. We thus get a total view of the whole movement which it is difficult to get elsewhere. We are also in the political centre of Britain. We are able to follow closely the actions (and reaction) of imperialism in its parliament and other state institutions, in its political parties, in its great organs of the Press and other means of communication. After a time we begin to understand better the attitudes of the British people themselves to imperialism and colonialism.</p>
<p>We are not very far from Paris, another great centre of imperialism. We have more or less constant communication with colonials of the French Empire.</p>
<p>Thus we are in a position to see the general trends of development, to mark the stages, to see each problem as part of a whole. This is the point of view that I shall be placing before you this evening. Doubtless you on the spot experience and see much that escapes us who live abroad. There will be a time for questions, when you will be able to raise some of these points and I shall deal with them to the extent that I am able. But I believe that what I shall have to say is for the reasons that I have given, valid and valuable.</p>
<h4>A Low Level</h4>
<p>Now in Europe and the United States we discussed Federation for years before World War n and I cannot remember a single occasion in which it ever crossed our minds or the issue was raised that British Guiana would not join the Federation. We always took that for granted. The Trade Commission in London includes British Guiana and British Honduras. The West Indian Students’ Union includes British Guiana and British Honduras. The West Indies cricket teams always include British Guiana. You were always one of us. But after the war, and especially during recent years, there began to be sounded a note which has grown in intensity. We heard that the East Indians in British Guiana were opposed to Federation and these were the reasons given. They had a numerical majority over the other races, they hoped to establish an Indian domination of the colony; Federation would bring thousands of Africans (or people of African descent) from the smaller islands to British Guiana, These knew how to work land and how to build up from small beginnings. They would place the Indians in British Guiana in an inferior position. Therefore the Indians were against Federation.</p>
<p>We heard also that the African population of British Guiana was now eager for Federation particularly for the reason that it would bring this reinforcement from the smaller islands, once more establish African numerical superiority, and so check the East Indians. Since I have come to the West Indies, and particularly since I have come to British Guiana, I have heard these arguments constantly repeated. That is to reduce the great issue of Federation to a very low level.</p>
<p>Worse still, in British Guiana racial rivalry and even racial tension have thrust themselves into the Federation discussion.</p>
<p>There is undoubtedly racial tension, racial rivalry in British Guiana (also in Trinidad). To what degree it has reached, what are the likely consequences, whether it will increase and go to extremes of one kind or another, that I do not know. I do not know British Guiana sufficiently to express an opinion which would be of value or carry any weight. But I believe I have something to say which would assist all parties to view the situation in a balanced perspective.</p>
<h4>Two Stages of Nationalism</h4>
<p>It has been observed that when a colonial country is approaching national independence, there are two distinct phases. First, all the progressive elements in the country begin by supporting the national independence movement. Then when this is well under way you have the second stage. Each section of the nationalist movement begins to interpret the coming freedom in terms of its own interests, its own perspectives, its own desires. Thus the accentuation of racial rivalry at this time is not peculiar to British Guiana or to Trinidad. It takes place everywhere during the period of intense political excitement due to the national awakening. This political excitement, however, carries with it certain dangers. It is those I wish to warn you against, and we have an example, of worldwide historical significance, in what has happened to the former British colony of India.</p>
<p>It is an established fact that before Indian independence in 1947, tens of millions of Hindu and Moslem workers and peasants lived side by side in peace without conflict. It is an equally established fact that since the independence great numbers of these continue to do so. Yet in the days before World War n there sprang up the movement for a Moslem state which finally succeeded and resulted in the formation of Pakistan. I do not wish to say that there were not honest and sincere elements in the movement. But in it there were three types against whom I want to warn you here in British Guiana�fanatical racialists, scheming and ambitious politicians, and businessmen anxious to corner for themselves a section of industrial and commercial possibilities. The movement succeeded. Pakistan was formed.</p>
<p>What is the result to-day after less than twelve years? The party which led the struggle for the national independence has never been able to get more than a few seats in the legislative assemblies. The people have no use for it.</p>
<p>More important. In East Bengal, Hindus and Moslems have decided that they do not any longer want communal elections, that is to say separate Hindu lists and Moslem lists. They now vote as one people. </p>
<p>Finally I am reliably informed that there are now elements in East Bengal who want to form a third state. East Bengal to join with West Bengal to form a Bengal state. But West Bengal is a part of India. In other words they are ready to throw aside the Hindu�Moslem differences which in a moment of exceptional political excitement prompted them to support the formation of a Moslem state. Many, however, believe that this talk of a third state is only a shame-faced way of admitting that they wish once more to be a part of India and regret that they allowed themselves to be rushed into the formation of a new state. And this before twelve years have passed. We have seen a similar move in Ghana by the Ashantis. Prime Minister Nkrumah was able to keep it in check. I suggest then that you see the undoubted racial tension in British Guiana as a part of the inevitable political upheavals always associated with a national struggle. It has to be watched, it may run to extremes, but all should be on guard against that trio I mentioned earlier – fanatical racialists, scheming and ambitious politicians and greedy businessmen. They can help to lead the people into courses which, a few years later, when the excitement has died down, the people can bitterly regret.</p>
<h4>Defensive Arguments For Federation</h4>
<p>Under this pressure many pro-Federationists have been driven into a defensive position. They feel, for example, compelled to advocate Federation on the ground that it will provide a market for the surplus rice of British Guiana. Now this question of the sale of rice, and the price that the West Indies will pay for British Guiana rice, is undoubtedly a very important one and may indeed play a great role between British Guiana and the Federation. But in my view it is wrong and very misleading to base the whole great issue of Federation on a market for rice. British Guiana has been selling rice to the West Indies for years without being federated. Again under pressure from the anti-Federationists, some Federationists proceed to argue that if the British Guiana plan of economic development is to succeed it will need a market larger than the half million local population. Federation offers a way out. They tie themselves into knots over freedom of movement of people from island to island. And finally, the greatest obstacle of all, the Great Barrier Reef � the fact that British Guiana had been offered only six seats in the Federal Parliament.</p>
<p>Now we absolutely have to get these problems in their proper perspective. <strong>All of them are matters of bargaining and negotiation</strong>. It is so in the West Indies and it is so in every country including the most advanced countries in the world to-day. Do not pay too much attention to the speeches of politicians before a conference or to their speeches when the conference is over. They utter beautiful sentiments (often with an eye to what The Opposition at home will say) and as soon as that is over and the doors are closed, they take off their jackets, roll up their sleeves and get down to business. Take Customs Union. One politician representing Jamaica (let us say) will declare that Jamaica is for complete Customs Union but owing to special circumstances Jamaica must exclude 35 per cent of its production from such a union. Another politician (say from Barbados) will say that this is absolutely impermissible, but he is ready to allow Jamaica 25 per cent. They argue for days. Then I can imagine Sir Grantley Adams in the chair (having kept quiet most of the time) proposing a compromise: “You say 35 per cent; you say 25 per cent; I propose 30 per cent.”� Jamaica representative says, “No,32 per cent.” Finally, they agree on 31 per cent for five years only� after that they will see.</p>
<p>That is the way it goes. <strong>Always</strong>. I want to emphasize that, because otherwise these problems are elevated into insuperable obstacles. In Europe they have been working for years on creating a common market (I shall refer to this later). The other day I was much amused to read that the agreements were in danger, over the question of what ? The nature of ham. Some claimed that ham was dairy produce, others claimed that it was manufactured goods� ham was something you had to make. Obviously, if ham was dairy produce, it came under one set of customs duties, taxes, etc.; if ham on the other hand was classified as manufactured goods it would come under another set of customs dues, etc. They argued, they quarrelled, they threatened, but they came to an agreement in the end.</p>
<p>It is the same among us. Take the question of freedom of movement of populations. To listen to some of the anti-Federationists you would believe .that half the people of the West Indies are sitting by the seashore with their bags packed, just waiting for the news that British Guiana has joined the Federation, to descend on it like a swarm of locusts. It is not so. (Some people in Trinidad have the same fears.) It is not so, it cannot be so. What has actually happened is this. Two years ago, representatives of the islands met to discuss this very question of freedom of movement between the islands. Trinidad allowed entry to some fifty types of persons who had formerly been excluded. But the important decision was that for five years each territory could make its own laws as to how many it would admit and under what conditions. After the five years were up, each territory would still have the right to make its own laws about admission of immigrants, only now these laws would have to be ratified by the Federal Parliament. That is the way all these problems can and will be settled.</p>
<p>No such problem can be a serious obstacle to Federation. The idea that all the islands would gang up together to force unreasonable and oppressive conditions on British Guiana is out of the question�for one thing it would be political stupidity.</p>
<p>I have dealt with these problems in order that they should be kept in perspective and not allowed to obscure the fundamental issues.</p>
<h4>Federation in 1958</h4>
<p>What are these fundamental issues ? Every generation has its own ideas of Federation, usually an idea that is related to the particular ideas of that particular day.
I was reading recently in a lecture on Federation by Dr. Eric Williams that in 1876 a colonial official advocated Federation, among other grounds, because it would facilitate freedom of movement for lunatics, for lepers, for criminals and for policemen. What particular ideas of the day this particular kind of Federation was related to I do not know. It is interesting but not important.</p>
<p>Then there was Dr. Meikle. When I was a small boy living in Arima in Trinidad, before World War I, I knew Dr. Meikle, a tall, quiet man. He had very advanced ideas for his time, his book on Federation is a good book and holds a place in our history. But his conception of Federation cannot be ours.</p>
<p>My own conception of Federation before World War II is not the same that I have to-day. To-day, 1958, in the second half of the twentieth century, this is how I see Federation. <strong>Federation is the means and the only means whereby the West Indies and British Guiana can accomplish the transition from colonialism to national independence, can create the basis of a new nation; and by reorganising the economic system and the national life, give us our place in the modern community of nations</strong>.</p>
<p>The only conception of Federation which I think worthy of consideration, the only conception which I believe can make Federation a success in the age in which we live, is the conception that sees Federation as the West Indian method of taking part in that general reorganisation of industrial production, commercial relations and political systems which is the outstanding feature of our world. Federation for the West Indies is the means by which it will claim independence, modernize itself and although small in numbers, be able to take its place as one of the modern communities living a modern civilized existence. Without Federation, I do not think this can be done. It <strong>has</strong> to be done or the consequences for these islands would be dreadful. I see Federation therefore (and I am not alone) as the process by which the West Indies, in common with the rest of the world, seeks to leave one stage of its existence which has lasted for some 300 years, and move into a new sphere, with all the privileges, the responsibilities, the difficulties, and the opportunities which the transitional stage of existence offers to all who are able to take part in it.</p>
<p>That is what Federation means and it will mean that or it will mean nothing. This is my conception of West Indian Federation at this stage of History, and everything that I say will revolve around this. The times we live in are a time of transition, the world we live in, the world in which we have lived for three centuries as colonial possessions of imperialist powers, is falling apart. The chief imperialist powers, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Holland and Belgium, are all states of Western Europe. The important thing, the thing that is new about them, the thing that concerns us is that they are no longer world powers. The world in which they ruled and shaped our destinies according to their will, imposed upon us their ideas of the economics and the politics that they thought suitable for us, that world is gone. We shall enter as a free people into a world that we never knew and which our masters never knew until recently. If they were merely losing their colonies and <strong>continuing as before</strong> that would be one thing not only for them but for us. What is happening is something entirely different, and, as I believe that most of the shortcomings in our thinking of our future spring from an inadequate grasp of this central fact, I shall spend some time on it. </p>
<h4>Rise and Decline</h4>
<p>The period in which our masters ruled as imperialist states has a definite beginning and, historically speaking, is not very long. It is only 300 years. It begins at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It began to come to an end with World War I.</p>
<p>I shall deal briefly with four aspects�their economic foundations, their political institutions, their foreign relations and their social thought. These more or less constitute the whole and I shall use that classification again when we come to the West Indies Federation.</p>
<p>The beginning of their history as imperialist states is marked by a new economic system � the system of wage-labour. Before that time workers were attached to the land or worked as artisans in the guilds. Wage-labour, workers divorced from the means of production and working only for wages, marked the beginning of an economic development such as the world had never seen before. This was capitalism. It nourished and was nourished by imperialism. What is the situation to-day?</p>
<p>The wage-labourers of the imperialist powers have organised themselves into massive trade unions. Labour Parties, Communist Parties. They have declared openly that they intend to transform the capitalist economy into a socialist economy. One result you can see in England. The Labour Party nationalises the steel industry. The Tory Party denationalises the steel industry. The Labour Party declares that when it comes into power it will renationalise the steel industry. That is not any form of economy � it is chaos. To-day the economies of these imperialist powers are not classic wage-labour; they are not socialism. They are bastard systems, neither one thing nor the other, in continuous crisis and disorder, not knowing which way they are going. The economic power which sustained the imperialist domination is gone.</p>
<p>Politically it is the same. These powers came into existence and were able to thrive on imperialist exploitation because they established the national, independent state. Previously they were ruled by royal families, dynasties with real power, who were tied up with one another in marriages, alliances, petty wars, etc. The famous Hundred Years War between England and France was little more than a series of raids by the British across the Channel seeking loot. For long periods the Pope exercised not only religious, but political domination over large areas of Europe. The national state put an end to that. Whoever might rule, the state was now independent, devoted exclusively to the national interest, independent of all other states.</p>
<p>Today that independence is gone. China and India which, fifteen years ago were a semi-colonial and a colonial state, to-day have more independence than Britain, France or any other of the imperialist states of Western Europe. You remember no doubt the brutality with which the Moscow regime under Mr. Krushchev crushed the uprising of the Hungarian workers in the Hungarian Revolution. But we should remember too that at about much the same time Sir Anthony Eden and the French Prime Minister thought that they could indulge in some old fashioned imperialism by staging a raid on Egypt. This did not suit the foreign policy of the United States. President Eisenhower told them to get out and to get out at once. And they got out fast enough. The European imperialist states, which formerly conducted their own affairs and the affairs of their vast empires, to-day as far as foreign policy is concerned, are no more than satellites of the United States.</p>
<h4>War For The World</h4>
<p>Closely connected with the independence of the state is the question of foreign relations. Some of your students will have read, and may still be reading in your history books, all sorts of fanciful reasons as to why this or that European war was fought. In nearly every case the reasons given are a lot of nonsense. I think it safe to say that ever since the religious wars of the middle of the seventeenth century, nearly every great war between the European powers has been fought over the colonial question. Either they were fighting to get colonial territory, or to prevent a rival getting colonial territory, or they were seeking to occupy strategic positions on the road to colonial territories. This is their history right up to the War of 1914 covering some 250 years. Their armies, their navies, their strategic conceptions, even their conceptions of themselves, were governed and shaped by these necessities of empire. To-day that is finished. The only war, the only serious war that we face is the war for world domination, not for colonial territory; and the powers of Western Europe are pawns of the United States in its conflict with Russia for world domination. These two are going to fight for domination of all the land, and all the seas, and of the air above, and now for outer space. They are trying to reach the moon and if they do get there they will fight as bitterly over moon domination as they are fighting over world domination. We can do very little about that. But wars for colonial territories are finished, and with that is finished the particular relation that existed between imperialist powers and colonies on a world scale.</p>
<p>And that I may say is the reason why the colonial countries (ourselves included) are gaining our freedom with such comparative ease. If these powers had the economic basis, the political independence and the world-wide domination which they exercised for so many centuries, you can be sure that they would not have tolerated these demands for independence and the attitude of the colonial peoples to-day. </p>
<h4>The Totalitarian Challenge</h4>
<p>There is another reason for the decline and decay of these powers as imperialist powers. The national unity is broken and they no’ longer have confidence in themselves. There are many millions of people in these European states who are hostile to imperialism and wish nothing better than to be rid of the burdens and the strains of colonialism.</p>
<p>And finally social thought. In the days of their power these European states undoubtedly laid the basis for and helped to develop democratic political institutions. By the end of the nineteenth century, democracy was at least an ideal, and on a world scale nations were judged by the extent to which they had achieved it or were in process of doing so. Not only in social thought but in art, literature and other important phases of civilization, the imperialist powers undoubtedly made some splendid achievements. But all that to-day is gone. Over the last forty years we have seen the rise of a new system, the system of totalitarianism. To-day almost a billion people are living under this new system. It is the sworn enemy of democracy. It has its adherents in the very heart of the democratic regime itself, as in France where there are 140 Communist Deputies in the French Parliament. For some time it seemed as if the Russian system did offer a way out of the present world crisis.</p>
<p>But over the last years there has been evidence that Russia is as much a prey to economic disorder, rebellion among its subjects and permanent political crisis as is the Western World. So that democracy is not only challenged, but is challenged by a new system which more and more shows that it too offers no way out. The result is a complete moral and political crisis in the imperialist powers. There is no perspective by which the individual can orient himself either to the state or to other individuals.</p>
<p>That is the condition of the imperialist powers to-day. The connection between them and their former colonies is being broken. But the connection is not one between states which have their former power and colonies which are newly independent. No. We are becoming free in a world of chaos and disorder. That imposes enormous difficulties upon us, and in order to understand ourselves and our relations with what are still the advanced countries of Western Europe, we have to get the new relation clear <strong>and bear it constantly in mind</strong>. </p>
<h4>Federation as the Way Out</h4>
<p>The first point is that these powers recognize what has happened to them. They know that they are in a different world. We too must recognize that we are in a new world. And the first thing that we must do is to see the method by which they are attempting to meet the challenge of the changed conditions. I can sum up their method in one word� Federation.</p>
<p>First, there was Benelux. This was the recognition by Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg that, small countries as they were, it was necessary for them to unite in order to meet the changed conditions. Benelux is the name given to their organisation for customs union and special arrangements in regard to market, movement of populations, etc.</p>
<p>Secondly, there is the arrangement among the iron and steel producers of Western Europe to unify their production on a continental scale. These iron and steel producers of Europe have fought each other bitterly for centuries. They are divided by all sorts of national prejudices and national peculiarities of production But they have systematically struggled for unity until they have arrived at some common ground. What is the word for that? The only word is�Federation. Still more important. The European countries as a whole have worked for years and now have established the basis of a European Common Market. They hope that it will be complete in twelve years. By that time they hope that production and distribution will be as free among the countries of Europe as it is among the different states of the United States of America. What is the only word for this? Federation.</p>
<p>I have been asked by certain anti-Federationists: if those people can unite economically without actually federating, why can t British Guiana do the same with the West Indies ? The answer will give them more than they bargained for. It is this: those countries cannot federate because of language differences, methods of production, of social organisation, and of government which have separated them from each other for centuries, including many bitter wars. It is a tragedy for them that their past history and their social and political organisations prevent them from uniting in a more complete Federation. Substantial numbers of them bitterly regret that these barriers exist. It is to our advantage, it is our good fortune that we have no such difficulties. There are many people in Europe who profoundly wish that it was as easy for Western Europe to federate as for example it is for the West Indies to federate with British Guiana. </p>
<h4>Franco-African Federation</h4>
<p>The changed conditions of the modern world have produced the most fantastic idea of a Federation that I have ever read or heard of anywhere. France has as you know many millions of colonial subjects in Africa. These people, like the rest of the colonial world, have already reached the stage where they are no longer prepared to accept colonial status. Yet some of them are not anxious to break what they consider the valuable connection with metropolitan France. France on the other hand has been thrown out of Indo-China, has been thrown out of Tunis, has been thrown out of Morocco, and will most certainly be thrown out of Algeria. Without African colonies, France faces the prospect of being an insignificant territory on the coast of Europe. Yet it is dear that freedom for the African colonies cannot be long delayed Out of this situation has arisen the proposal for a Franco-African Confederation in which Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Senegal, all the French African colonies will participate in a Federation with France on the basis of complete equality. Now African civilization, despite the fact that it has been so brutally maltreated by imperialism, still preserves great virtues of its own. But nevertheless the African civilization is profoundly different from the highly sophisticated civilization of metropolitan France. Yet the fact remains that there is this movement on each side to attempt to work out what would undoubtedly be the strangest Federation that history has ever known. </p>
<h4>Reorganisation of Economies</h4>
<p>The second method they are using is a desperate attempt to reorganise their economies. These formerly proud and powerful states are now continuously dependent upon all sorts of aid, economic, financial, military, from the United States. We want aid, yes. But without the United States they would have collapsed long ago. And also they seek to reconstruct the economy. Take Great Britain. The British realised that they were falling behind, had fallen behind. They therefore took a jump ahead. They saw atomic energy as the key to the industrial future, and they planned and have succeeded in being foremost in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.</p>
<p>I want to make one thing clear. European Common Market, Franco-African Federation, use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes as the salvation of the British economy, these conceptions and plans are challenged. I do not want to go into that at all except to say that those who challenge them do not challenge the principles of Federation and reorganisation of the economy: they say that these imperialist states <strong>cannot carry them out successfully</strong>. To discuss that would take us too far. It is enough that the principles themselves are challenged by nobody, are agreed upon by everybody. Does <strong>anybody</strong> seriously propose that British Guiana can reorganise its economy on its own, by going it alone? Isn’t it a commonplace that loans, plans and technical assistance are far easier to get and far easier to handle by larger, integrated territories than by small isolated ones ? Who denies it? Nobody. To do so would make him a laughing stock. It is expansion and development that raise the level and perspective of the whole society, not counting how many Africans and how many Indians. That way, all will be struggling at the same low level in a world that at every step would be leaving us further and further behind.</p>
<h4>Discarding The Colonial Economy</h4>
<p>It is not only the countries in Western Europe that are doing it. Mr. Nehru is establishing a steel industry in India at tremendous cost. The Germans are building a steel mill for India. The Russians are building another. The English are building one and I think the Americans one. Some people I know with knowledge and experience of steel have challenged the value of this enormous expenditure and the general dislocation of the economy which it will cost. And India undoubtedly has been in great trouble with its foreign exchange over the steel mills and similar expenditures. I have no doubt that the economists and the engineers have calculated the costs and advantages, that is, as far as they are able. But to-day there are no purely economic questions. Freedom from colonialism is not merely a legal independence, the right to run up a national flag and to compose and sing a national anthem. It is necessary also to break down the economic colonial systems under which the colonial areas have been compelled to live for centuries as hinterlands, sources of raw material, backyards to the industries of the advanced countries. Independence is independence, but when you continue to live in territories which still bear the shape of the old colonial territories, it is extremely difficult to free yourself from the colonial <strong>mentality</strong>. And most of the best colonial statesmen are determined to put an end to that. Despite the fact that they cannot hope in a decade or two to reach anywhere near to the level of the advanced countries, they are taking the necessary steps which will enable not only foreigners but their own populations to see that they have laid the basis of a balanced economy, and of an economy which is not a hinterland, a mere periphery, to the great centres of civilization. That is what the colonial areas are doing. That is what the West Indies will have to do. And I suggest that it can be done only by Federation and it is certain that British Guiana will be able to gain very, very few inches indeed if it attempts to do it by itself.</p>
<p>It is not only Mr. Nehru who is doing that. There is Colonel Nasser. The whole Middle East situation has been turned upside-down because of Colonel Nasser’s determination to put a dam in Egypt and to lay some visible, obvious symbol of the modernization of Egypt. These men have no illusions that they will modernise their country in one step. But they know they have to make some dramatic step in order for it to be understood that colonialism is left behind, not only in form, but in the economic and social conditions in which the people live.</p>
<p>The same motive animates Nkrumah who has stated that his greatest aim at the present time is to establish the Volta Dam. It is a huge project which will cause the transference of thousands of people, the destruction of ancient villages, the reorganisation of hundreds of square miles, in order to bring the modern world right into Ghana so that everyone will be able to see that the transition from colonialism, not only to freedom, but to modernization has been made.</p>
<p>I say that this is the task, that is what Federation means in the middle of the twentieth century, whatever it meant in 1912. That is why we believe that British Guiana should come in with the other islands for their own benefit and also for the benefit of British Guiana. I have heard a few arguments which seem to believe that there was an attempt to lure British Guiana into the Federation for some purposes unknown. It is nothing of the kind. Now it is true that the West Indian Federation is not a very exciting Federation, nor did it come into the world with vigorous screams as a healthy baby should. But nevertheless it has got one advantage. It is the only Federation I know which has come into existence with the specific charge (at the head of all its tasks) to unify, diversify and develop the economy. That is what the Federation is for. In that it bears the stamp of the age in which we live. I cannot conceive of these tasks which are being carried out in the other colonial territories, to whatever degree their economic resources allow, I cannot conceive of these tasks being carried out except by means of a Federation. They will be difficult enough under any circumstances.</p>
<p>I want you to understand that this is not a question of an ideal. This is not a question of something we <strong>ought</strong> to have. It is not something which we can choose to have, or take up according to the way we feel at any particular moment. In my opinion (and in the opinion of others who think the same but do not speak openly about it as I do), these countries, unless they develop themselves along the lines that other new colonial countries are doing, are bound to experience tremendous difficulties, not only economic but social and political. </p>
<h4>Why We Are Compelled To Reorganise</h4>
<p>Democracy is not a tree that seems to thrive very easily in the tropical soils of Latin-America. When you look at Latin-America over the last 130 years of its freedom, the picture is one of almost continual political instability. When you look at the curve of the West Indian islands, the picture is not too different. Look at Cuba. Look at Haiti. Look at Santo Domingo. There you have one of the cruellest dictatorships in these parts. When I was a small boy in Trinidad and Castro and Gomez were fighting it out in Venezuela, it used to be said that this instability was due to the poverty of the people of Venezuela. To-day, there is no longer poverty. Four hundred million dollars a year, I think, is the sum that Venezuela gets from oil royalties. The political disorders have increased in scope with the increase of wealth.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for this. One of them is the absence of a stable middle-class which has got solid economic roots ‘in the country, touching on the one hand the upper ranks of the working class and on the other hand, the ruling classes. None of these countries have such a class and it makes democracy a problem.</p>
<p>It is a problem in these Latin-American countries as a whole and it is my opinion that it is doubly a problem in the British and French West Indies where the populations are in some respects the most peculiar in all the colonial territories. I do not know of any population that has the specific historical qualities of the populations of the British West Indies. In Indo-China, in India, in Ceylon, in Ghana, in Africa, the native populations have got a background and a basis of civilisation which are their own. They have a native language, they have a native religion, they have a native culture. These exist to a substantial degree and from this culture they make the transition or they are making the transition to the modern world. Anthropologists to-day are discovering more and more the values of these civilizations. They were ridiculed simply by the ignorance and arrogance of the imperialist powers. These people have got this basis and they move from this to something else.</p>
<p>The populations in the British West Indies have no native civilisation at all. People dance Bongo and Shango and all this is very artistic and very good. But these have no serious effects upon their general attitude to the world. These populations are essentially Westernised and they have been Westernised for centuries. The percentage of literacy is extremely high. In little islands like Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica and even in your own British Guiana, the population is so concentrated that with the development of motor transport, nobody is very far from the centre of things. There is an immense concentration of knowledge, learning and information. People live modern lives. They read modern cheap newspapers, they listen to the radio, they go to the movies. The modern world is pressing upon them from every side giving rise to modern desires and aspirations. There is no national background to mitigate or even to influence the impact of these ideas upon the social personality of these islands. The result is that you have what I call a �500 a year mentality among the masses of the West Indian countries. The difficulty is that the territories in which they live have a cash per capita income of only about �50 a year. The difference between the mentality, the desires, the needs, which are the result of the kind of life the people live, and the limited resources of the economy is a very serious one. It is not only an economic question. It is developing and in a few years can become the source of the gravest political disorders. It is no use blinding our eyes to that. At Inaugural Celebrations we make hopeful speeches and everybody applauds. We hope for the best. But when that is over you must look at things with a certain realism. When the British flag goes down and the national flag goes up and there will be no more cruisers and soldiers to come, and all authority depends upon what is native and rests upon the attitude of the people, then these islands are going to test for themselves how far it is possible for them to achieve the democracy which has evaded so many other territories in these parts.</p>
<p>Now I am not an economic commission and I don’t want to pretend for a second to tackle its problems. It is sufficient for me to emphasize that the organisers and the planners of the economy of the Federation must have a clear conception of what they are organising and planning, and why. They must know and the people must know and constantly bear in mind the world in which we live.</p>
<h4>Technical Institutions</h4>
<p>This evening, however, I wish to draw your attention to two points only in connection with economic reconstruction. The first is the matter of technical and scientific institutions. The second it the matter of technical <strong>personnel</strong> from Britain and other countries abroad. First, technical and scientific institutions. <strong>We have to get rid of the colonial mentality</strong>. Scientific discoveries and processes are making industry less and less tied to specific sources of raw material and climate. That tendency will doubtlessly increase. We have to develop our own institutions. To a limited degree, for we are not and for a long time will not be one of the industrially advanced areas of the world. But we have to develop our own institutions outside of the conception that we are merely West Indian. The Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture is in Trinidad. It is not a West Indian institution. It is an institution that serves the needs of people concerned with tropical agriculture the world over. I hope, I look forward to seeing the West Indian University in Jamaica become a centre” not only of general studies but of specialised learning which will serve to advance and add to the accumulation of knowledge which is taking place all over the civilised world.</p>
<p>I believe that, to the extent of our limited resources, some of the institutions that we; are planning and will plan must be conceived in terms of our playing a role in the general scientific advance of modern society and not be confined to the limited interests of a purely West Indian perspective. The West Indian people need to see such institutions. The people outside need to know that such institutions are being developed in the former colonial territories of the West Indies. Can British Guiana do this by going it alone ? It will be difficult enough under any circumstances. But it is not only an economic but a social and a political necessity. </p>
<h4>
New Human Relations</h4>
<p>The question of personnel from abroad to give us “technical assistance is more immediate. We are sending our boys and girls away to learn and they are doing very well. But we must make up our minds to the fact that for a long time we shall need technical assistance from abroad in our efforts to modernise ourselves. We are breaking the old connections between us and the advanced countries. We have to finish away with the old type of colonial official and the old type of technical assistant who came here to rule and to command people whom he considered his inferiors. <strong>But if we are breaking the old connections we have to establish new ones</strong>. To-day in England and in Europe there are many young men and women who have a very different attitude towards us than their parents had. Much of the arrogance and sense of superiority have been stripped away from them by the troubles and trials through which Europe has passed over the last years. Many of them have been through the war and have learnt to judge men as men. Numbers of them have a sense of guilt and of shame now that the realities of imperialism and colonialism have been exposed. They are anxious to do what they can to help restore some historical balance in the accounts of imperialism and the colonial peoples. Finally, they want to do a good job. They want to be paid but they want to feel that their work is helping people who need it and that in any case it will not be destroyed by some atomic or hydrogen bomb. (With the advent of Sputnik, I don’t know that anywhere to-day is safe. But that is by the way.) I know many of these people. <strong>We are breaking the old connections, we have to establish new ones</strong>. These people come to work but they are looking at us. We have to show them that though limited in our material resources, we are in thought at any rate and in aspiration citizens of the modern world. Some of them I am sure will be ready to identify themselves with us completely. We should be on the lookout to welcome them. I have met one or two in Trinidad and in British Guiana since I have come here. They have ideas that are far more advanced than the ideas of many West Indians in high places who still suffer from the colonial mentality to an astonishing degree. Above all, let us not repel them by showing them when they come that we are governed by the same narrow nationalist and particularist conceptions which have caused so much mischief in Europe and elsewhere, and which some of them are running away from. We need all the help that we can get and help of this particular kind is precious and is far from being a purely economic question. This also is a social and political necessity. Industrial expansion is not merely a question of material forces but of human relations. There are other issues of infinitely greater scope, but this evening I confine myself to these two. </p>
<h4>Dr. Jagan and Federation</h4>
<p>I want now to pass from economic relations to the political sphere. I can assure you that I will not, in dealing with these, spend so long as I did on the economic question. Otherwise we shall not be able to get away from here at all. However, in regard to the political issues I have to come a little closer to home. I have to deal with Dr. Jagan. Now I have to treat Dr. Jagan’s views with a certain respect. First of all, he is the head of the majority party of this country.</p>
<p>It is very important at this time in particular that the authorities of the country based upon local elections should be treated with a certain respect. The old authority is going. The new authority is not yet firmly established. It is necessary as I say to treat its representatives always with respect. (If you do not like them, then remove them.) The second thing is that Dr. Jagan is no petty racialist, not at all. I am unalterably opposed to the political philosophy which he accepts. I am unalterably opposed to its methods. I have told him so in person. And therefore there is no reason why I should not say so in public. He has not hidden his views, there is no reason for me to hide mine. But in regard to his aims for British Guiana, and for the West Indies as a whole, they are those of an enlightened modern person. He is not counting up how many Indians and how many Africans and how many acres of land, and basing the future of British Guiana on that. Some of his supporters might be doing that, but his general view is not that at all However there are one or two aspects of Dr. Jagan’s attitude which demand serious examination.</p>
<h4>To Plebiscite or Not to Plebiscite</h4>
<p>The first of them is this question of the plebiscite. Now I read a day or two ago in the accounts of the debate m the Legislature (You will help me, Mr. Chairman, if I am wrong.) that Mr. Stephen Campbell said he had been here 60 years, he said he was against self-government and he said that if there was a plebiscite, he was sure that the majority of the people in British Guiana would vote against it. Now that would be an excellent type of plebiscite. He begins by saying, “I am against and I ask you to vote and show that you are against too.” Maybe he is totally wrong but that is not what is at issue here. I am thinking of a certain type of political activity, the <strong>method</strong> of the plebiscite or referendum.</p>
<p>Now if Dr. Jagan says that there must be a Plebiscite to decide Federation here, all I have to say is this: Trinidad didn’t need a plebiscite, Barbados didn’t need one. Jamaica didn’t need one, none of the other islands needed one. Yet Dr. Jagan says that for certain special internal reasons British Guiana needs one. That is a matter for Messrs. Carter and Burnham and the others to discuss Mr. Burnham says it is a lot of nonsense, but I cannot say that. If I did I would be told: you are a stranger, you do not know the country, and I am not going to put myself in any position where that attack can be made against me. But there is one thing which I know of all Plebiscites in whatever country they are. And that is this: <strong>the political leader must say precisely where he stands and ask the people to decide on clear political positions</strong>. A plebiscite must <strong>not</strong> say: “On this issue I have no opinion exactly. I don’t know whether it is good or bad and therefore we must have a plebiscite and I leave you to decide.” That would be absolutely intolerable and a complete abdication of the responsibilities of political leadership in a critical situation. That I hope is clear. I do not know how Dr. Jagan is going to develop his ideas on the plebiscite. I want insist hat you haven’t to know British Guiana to know what is a proper plebiscite and what is a plebiscite that is most improper. I want to add this: the question of the plebiscite or the question of Federation is not an abstract question or a political question which can be left hanging in the air too long. Racial rivalry is involved. To what extent I do not know, and I have given reasons for not coming to extreme conclusions about it. But it undoubtedly exists. It also exists in Trinidad. The only way to meet such a difficulty is to present arguments and distinctive political positions so that the rivalry, the emotionalism, are met with reason and ideas. You counter one thing with the other and you place reasonable clear-cut decisions before the people to decide. But if you do not do that, if you say that on this issue the people must decide, then what you are doing is to give the racial rivalries free play. And then they can run to extremes which they could not possibly have run to if they had been met in the first place by the proper political actions of responsible political parties and leading individuals. The question of a plebiscite is not a theoretical question. It is not a question of letting the people decide”. In the last analysis, the people have to decide everything in a democracy. But no one ever holds an election in which everybody walks around and tells the people, “Well choose some people.” No, people come forward in political parties and they say, “This is our programme, this is what we wish to do and I .am the person to be chosen. I and my colleagues are able to carry out this policy.” They offer the people <strong>definite choices</strong>. But what is now taking place is that Dr. Jagan and his political associates say in effect, “We came forward to you to ask you to elect us to the leadership of the country. We are ready to tell you how to fight the British Government on the question of the Constitution. We are able to tell you how much money is needed to develop the country and how much we should borrow in order to develop an economic plan. We are able to tell you how much should go for education and what should be the type of education. We not only know these things, but we are able to denounce and expose in argument those who dare to oppose us. We are able to undertake the government of the country on a national and international scale. We are ready to become independent and have Dominion Status. But on the all-important question of Federation, here we confess we have no definite opinion. We leave it to you to decide.”</p>
<p>No, it wouldn’t do. Plebiscite or no plebiscite is an internal affair. But <strong>the kind</strong> of plebiscite is a strictly political matter on which anybody can take position without having put a foot in British Guiana. I have given you my view and I hope you bear it in mind to deal with persons who hide behind the idea of a plebiscite to avoid taking a definite decision. You know, it is a very hard thing .for an honest intelligent man at this stage to say, “I am against Federation. And that’s why they say, “James has no right to come here as a stranger to talk about Federation.” What he’s saying is , that he is against but he doesn’t want to say it so openly That’s why he say, “It is necessary to have a plebiscite for the people to decide.” What he is really saying is “I am against, but I haven’t the nerve to say so.” I am not saying Dr. Jagan is that way at all. I’m speaking of the ideas that he puts forward. His ideas have to be examined. A leader is responsible not only for what he says but for what interpretation his followers give to what he says. All sorts of reasons are given by people who, in face of the massive arguments that have existed over so many years and which have been so intensified in recent years, have not got the nerve and the courage to come forward and say plainly, “We are against.” They seek all sorts of ways and means by which they give the impression without committing themselves. Don’t let them get away with that. </p>
<h4>West Indian Leaders Let Down B.G.</h4>
<p>The second political question is one on which Dr. Jagan undoubtedly has a certain amount of right on his side. He says that the West Indian leaders have not supported British Guiana in its struggles with the British Government over the Constitution. So far he is absolutely correct. If West Indian political leaders claim that British Guiana is a part of the Federation and all that is needed is the legal step, if they feel as they undoubtedly feel that we are al one people, then any attack upon the liberties of the people of British Guiana, the taking away of the Constitution, should have been met by the united forces of the West Indian people. The Federation should have begun there and then. They have not done it. They have got themselves entangled in and confused by Dr. Jagan’s political beliefs. I believe that Dr. Jagan has a serious responsibility to express and clarify his political ideas to the people of the West Indies. When he says he is not going to make any confessions to the Colonial Office, in my opinion he is absolutely right. I don’t see why he should make any explanations to them. I certainly wouldn’t and I wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything which I wouldn’t do. But he owes it to <strong>the West Indian people</strong> to make al his political ideas clear. Not to do that is to make a mockery of democracy.</p>
<p>The West Indian leaders have kept away. They have left British Guiana more or less to itself. Dr. Jagan says that is what they have done. He has a sense of grievance which is justified, | I have told the West Indian leaders my opinion on this matter. . have repeated it to them in private. I shall continue to repeat it in public. But you can’t continue to do only that. It is necessary to take some steps forward. I believe that if Dr. Jagan were to declare (and his declaration would just clinch it) that he is ready to enter the Federation, the attitude of the West Indian leaders, whatever reasons they may have had for it in the past, will have to undergo a change. Dr Jagan will come with outstretched hands. “Well, here I am, boys, I have joined you, I am one of you now. We are all one <strong>except on the matter of the Constitution</strong>. All of you have internal self-government. Here I am. Are you willing to join with me in order to request internal self-government for British Guiana?” I believe his position would be unassailable, and whatever weakness and feebleness there was, the West Indian leadership would have to begin the struggle for a West Indian attitude to the problem of British Guiana there and then. But if on the other hand he says, “No Federation without Dominion status,” Federation then becomes something which you are bargaining about. “To get Dominion Status we are prepared to give <strong>you</strong> Federation.” Those may not be the ideas that Dr. Jagan has. But a political leader is not only responsible for what he says, but for the interpretations which intelligent people can read into his words. And “No Federation without Dominion Status” places Federation in a light which I think is harmful to the very idea of Federation. </p>
<h4>A Constituent Assembly</h4>
<p>The final point in regard to the political ideas is this. Dr. Jagan in my opinion has the opportunity not only of assisting the people of British Guiana but of assisting the whole of the West Indies by going into the Federation and demanding, not in two years or one year, but immediately, on behalf of the people of the West Indies, a <strong>Constituent Assembly</strong>, by which the Dominion Status will be made concrete. The best way is by means of a Constituent Assembly. This is the only proposal I have made in West Indian politics. It is the only one I intend to make and I am ready to give all the services I am able to give in order to get this idea accepted from end to end of the West Indies and British Guiana. A Constituent Assembly means (allow me to go into it in some detail) an election, most probably according to proportional representation. That is to say, no party is going to be allowed to win all five seats in Georgetown. You elect on a national scale. All the votes are going to be added up nationally and the seats are going to be divided according to the number of votes each party has. In this way you are certain to have representation of every type of political thought in the country because that is needed when a constitution is being discussed. The Constituent Assembly then discusses various constitutions. After two or three months it comes to some conclusions and then the constitution which gains the majority of votes is taken back to the people for ratification. They say whether they approve of it or not, not voting by parties but by each individual giving his opinion. It is possible that they may reject it and say to the Constituent Assembly: “You go and make another one.” That is their right because this is something in which the whole nation has to express itself. It is the beginning of its national existence. After the constitution has been decided upon, men an election takes place in the ordinary way according to parties, the legislative chamber is constituted and politics continues under the new conditions.</p>
<p>I state that a Constituent Assembly is the only possible means <strong>now</strong> by which the masses of the people in the West Indies may be brought to participate and take their role in the establishment of a Federal Constitution not only for a Federation but for an independent West Indies. The last Constitution came like a thief in the night. Some people went abroad and some experts wrote and then suddenly the people were told, “This is the Federal Constitution.” It is no wonder that they were not particularly interested and have not been enthusiastic to this day although they are generally in favour of the Federation.</p>
<p>I propose a Constituent Assembly as a means whereby all parties in the West Indies, including British Guiana, will be able to take part in the formation of the Constitution and the establishment of the new state. I take the liberty of saying to Dr. Jagan and to his supporters: does this not meet both the demand for Federation and for Dominion Status at the same time ? I put the idea forward. It has met with some approval in various places. I know there are politicians in the West Indies who are very sympathetic to it. I hope that you will discuss it among yourselves and perhaps a movement in favour of it will start among you. That however is for you and your political leaders. </p>
<h4>Foreign Relations of British Guiana</h4>
<p>There are only two points remaining and I will be brief on each of them. There is the question of the foreign relations of the state. You know, I have a sympathy for those people who think of British Guiana as having a continental destiny. I have a sympathy for them. But I believe they are lacking in political sense. At any rate they do not commit the abysmal folly of thinking in terms of British Guiana going it alone. There is no reason why British Guiana, placed as it is on the South American Continent, should not be able to form associations of one kind or another with the other two Guianas. I understand some people there already have made overtures There is absolutely no reason why something of that kind should not take place. No question of loyalty to any metropolitan country is involved. Today Great Britain is a member of the Commonwealth. It is also a prominent leader in the Sterling area. Canada, which is a member of the Commonwealth, is not a member of the Sterling area. It is a member of the Dollar area. Holland, which is not a member of the Commonwealth, is I believe a member of the Sterling area. Great Britain, which is a member of the Commonwealth, and a member of the Sterling area, is now seeking to join the European Common Market. All these permutations and combinations are perfectly feasible in the modern world. There is absolutely no reason at all why British Guiana should not be able to form some sort of association with the other two Guianas and go even further. Methods of communication are developing so rapidly that Brazil and Venezuela, moving in one direction, British Guiana, moving in another, in a few years might even be able to form associations which at the present time are not within the compass of our ideas. There is no reason why British Guiana should not take advantage of its situation to be able in time to pioneer in these directions. There is every reason why it should. There is only one . thing to be noted. If it attempts to do this by itself, it is going like a1 babe in the woods and the Latin American woods are very big and, very dark. It can attempt these connections only if it is firmly associated with the West Indian islands, with people who speak the same language, who have more or less the same type of historical experience, who have had the same European association. That is the <strong>natural</strong> unity. Upon that basis, while on the one hand Jamaica and these others can make their experiments for association with Cuba and Haiti, at that end of the curve, British Guiana can pioneer into these areas at this end. But always upon the basis at both ends of a solid unity which is the result of a natural historical evolution. That is what I think the foreign relations of a country like British Guiana should be. </p>
<h4>Selvon</h4>
<p>My last word is in regard to social thought which as I have said includes artistic as well as political ideas. I have said economic conditions, political conditions, foreign relations and social thought. In reality they are one. They are not to be separated. But you cannot speak about everything at the same time, so for the sake of convenience I divided them. In regard to this I want as a final word to draw one or two things to your attention, one or two points relating to literature in the West Indies. I shall take two writers now before the public in the West Indies and in England. One is Selvon. The other is Naipaul. They are Indians and that is why I choose them. Selvon first. I was lunching in London a year ago with Dr. Williams and Mr. John Lehmann, the editor of “The London Magazine”. Dr. Williams was discussing with Mr. Lehmann ways and means of developing literary and artistic talent in the West Indies. Selvon’s name happened to come up and I said that I didn’t think that his work had the vital quality that some other West Indian writers had. (Williams, I think, differed with me.) Mr. Lehmann said he didn’t agree, he was very much interested in Selvon. My remark had been made because Mr. Lehmann had been writing enthusiastically about Selvon. I said, “Well, that is my view, but one thing I have noted: Selvon has a remarkable ear for dialogue. He catches the rhythms and cadences of West Indian speech and he is able to reproduce them in his writing.” Then Mr. Lehmann said something which I have never forgotten and which I want you to remember. He said, “That is precisely why I am so much interested in Selvon. I am very much interested in what the colonial writers are going to do to the English language”.</p>
<p>Now here is this Englishman recognising that with increasing freedom and increasing capacity for self-expression we and the other colonial peoples, particularly those who have no other language but English, or use English as their literary language, our writing is going to affect the form and content of the English language. He is not afraid of it. The English language has a history and a literature�it is one of the great languages and literatures of the world�which can stand the individual turns which colonial writers will give to it. The language and the literature will even benefit by it. It is a point that I had missed entirely. Now Selvon is Indian, but if I am not mistaken he is part African too. One of the books of his that I have read dealt chiefly with the Indian population of Trinidad and contained a great deal of English dialogue as spoken by the poorer class of Indians. But the <strong>Evening Standard</strong> of London not so long ago published with great fanfare some stories by Selvon describing the lives of West Indians in England. And the most noticeable thing about those stories, and what I believe chiefly attracted the English reader, was the way the West Indians spoke. Selvon is equally at home with the Indian population and the African population of the West Indies. In other words he is a West Indian. Are we going to close ourselves in narrow compartments, whereby we shall be limiting our writers and our artists to the free expression of only one aspect of our community ? Writers, and artists of all kinds, are of particular importance at this transitional stage of our development. They interpret us to ourselves and interpret us to the world abroad which is anxious to know about us. These highly gifted people are able in a few thousand words to illuminate aspects of our social and personal lives which otherwise would have taken us years and great pain and trouble to find out. We have to give them all the help we can, create the conditions in which they can best perform their work for our society. Above all we must beware of limiting them in any way. In doing so we limit ourselves.</p>
<h4>Naipaul</h4>
<p>The second writer I wish to take is Naipaul. He also is an Indian from Trinidad and there is no question in anybody’s mind about his literary quality. He is obviously a born man of letters. Naipaul has written a novel called <strong>The Mystic Masseur</strong>. This novel is very funny indeed. Naipaul describes an Indian politician. First of all he used to massage people. Then he thought he would like to write books. He bought encyclopaedias and copied out a lot of information in order to publish books of his own on subjects which he knew nothing about. He decided to go into politics, he was elected a member of the Legislative Council and his political career is as absurd as the early part of his life. Naipaul makes no bones about showing up this politician as a charlatan and an ignoramus. This politician, please note, is an Indian and obviously Naipaul describes him because as an Indian himself he is most familiar with the Indian community. But as you read the book you see that when Naipaul makes reference to African politicians he has no more respect for them than he has for his Indian hero. And when you finish the book, I at least am left with the impression that Naipaul has an attitude which is ready to pour ridicule on politicians of all kinds, Indian, African, colonial or European. I have no objection (and I hope that Messrs. Burnham and Carter have none) to seeing politicians held up to the light by a brilliant and satirical pen. It should do them some good. </p>
<h4>Freedom For The Artist</h4>
<p>Now it would be terrible if Naipaul were prevented from writing freely about Indians because by doing so he would be giving ammunition to African people or people of other races to attack the people of his own race. Or for that matter if a young African writer were prevented from writing freely about Africans for thereby he would be harming the cause of the Africans in the eyes of the Indians, etc. <strong>You know what I mean</strong>. We have not got that kind of thing among us at present. Both these young men have written freely. Very soon now the young novelists of British Guiana are going to be bursting out. Let us see to it that we maintain that freedom of conditions which will enable our young writers to develop freely. You should invite Naipaul here. I am a little concerned because he is really so clever that he may be adopted by the English literary world. I think you should bring him here so that he could renew his contacts with the native roots. And I do not mean that the Indians of British Guiana should bring him here. I mean those people in British Guiana who are interested in literature. I am not going to refer to other West Indian writers. Personally I believe that George Lamming the Barbadian is the best of them so far There are others. I have preferred this evening to concentrate on these two.</p>
<p>In conclusion let me say this. I have spoken as a member of the West Indian Federation, thinking of the interest, the goodwill and the solidarity of the West Indian people. Please believe that I have been thinking in the same way of the interest, goodwill and solidarity of the people of British Guiana.</p>
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CLR James 1958
Lecture on Federation
(West Indies and British Guiana)
Source: Lecture on Federation, (West Indies and British Guiana)
Delivered: June 1958 at Queen’s College
Printed:at the “Argosy” Co., Ltd., Bel Air Park, East Coast, Demarara [Guyana]
by C.L.R. James 25 pp.;
Transcribed & marked up: by Damon Maxwell for the Marxist Internet Archive.
Foreword
Introducing this lecture in printed form to the West Indian public and particularly to my fellow Guianese is an unusual honour.
Mr. C.L.R. James is undoubtedly one of the distinguished West Indians of our time. His patriotism is beyond question and with another West Indian, George Padmore, now Adviser on African affairs to the Prime Minister of Ghana, he has had a profound influence on the movement for colonial freedom throughout the British Empire, if not the world.
Mr. James, who is now secretary to the West Indian Federal Labour Party, has distinguished himself in the fields of Literature, History and Political Theory and brings to his new field of activities in his native West Indies a maturity and experience which may be equalled but hardly surpassed.
A special invitee to the opening of the first Federal Parliament in Trinidad last April, he took the opportunity of visiting British Guiana, and his public lectures on “Federation”, “Literature and the Common Man”, “Political Institutions in the advanced and underdeveloped countries and the relations between them” were a source of controversy and education for many Guianese. Many of the latter for the first time recognised the possibilities and scope of our national movement and its intimate relation to that in the Caribbean in particular and the colonial world in general.
When this lecture here embodied was delivered at Queen’s College, Federation had just been born. It has grown stronger since that time and promises to give political form to West Indian aspirations and nationhood.
You may not agree with every conclusion of the lecturer, but his main ones are incontrovertible. Reading this book I am sure will be a scintillating experience. I take pride in presenting it to you in the name of the People’s National Congress as some small evidence of our appreciation of its author’s worth and our undying loyalty to the cause of West Indian Independence.
L.F.S. BURNHAM,
Political Leader,
People’s National Congress.
Georgetown,
March 1959.
Mr. Chairman and Friends,
I must begin by noting one or two criticisms that have been made not only about Federation but about my presence in British Guiana. It has been said that I, a stranger, have no right to come here to discuss with the people of British Guiana the question of Federation. I am not in the least offended by the remark. My welcome in many quarters has been very warm, even enthusiastic, and I think I detect in the critic’s remarks not so much an objection to my presence here, as a means of indicating in a disguised manner his opposition to Federation.
It shows the strength of the case for Federation that those who are opposed to it distract themselves, to find ways and means by which they can indicate their opposition without coming out openly and saying so. After all. Federation proposes unity, a unity between the British West Indies, which have federated themselves, and British Guiana. What conception does anyone have of Federation or of discussions about Federation when he objects to one member of the proposed unity discussing with other members. Where does he expect us to meet? On neutral ground? In the sea midway between British Guiana and Trinidad? Such criticism is absurd. I have noticed that Mr. Gajraj, who acted as observer for British Guiana on some of the discussions which took place between representatives of the various islands, has stated in the Legislative Council that although he was only an observer at these discussions he was given every opportunity to express his views and to register his opinions. I believe that is the only way in which the matter can be safely settled. I believe that Messrs. Burnham and Carter in inviting me here and Mr. Gajraj in taking the chair at the last meeting, acted in the true spirit of Federation itself, no matter what may be the legislative position at the present time. I do not think we should worry very much about that kind of criticism. That sort of attitude has never been present where I have lived in recent years, in London.
West Indians in England
As you know I was invited to attend the celebrations surrounding the inauguration of the Federal Parliament in Trinidad. This invitation came from the Governor-General of The West Indies. I cannot consider that the invitation was due to any personal merit of my own. I think it rather due to the fact that the Federal Government and the Governor-General recognised the pioneer work that has been done by West Indians in London at a time when to advocate self-government was almost equivalent to treason. But what is treason in one period is often respectable twenty years afterwards. I want here to associate with that work the name of an illustrious West Indian, George Padmore. I refer to this among other reasons because it has a bearing on what I have to say this evening. At that time most of us West Indians lived in London, which was for long one of the great centres of imperialism. But being one of the great centres of imperialism, it follows that now it is one of the great centres of the passing of colonialism. To London came and have come through the years a steady stream of colonials, newly emancipated, half-emancipated, demanding emancipation, about to be emancipated, all types. We the West Indians in London meet them, discuss with them, take part in their political meetings and demonstrations. They take part in ours. We thus get a total view of the whole movement which it is difficult to get elsewhere. We are also in the political centre of Britain. We are able to follow closely the actions (and reaction) of imperialism in its parliament and other state institutions, in its political parties, in its great organs of the Press and other means of communication. After a time we begin to understand better the attitudes of the British people themselves to imperialism and colonialism.
We are not very far from Paris, another great centre of imperialism. We have more or less constant communication with colonials of the French Empire.
Thus we are in a position to see the general trends of development, to mark the stages, to see each problem as part of a whole. This is the point of view that I shall be placing before you this evening. Doubtless you on the spot experience and see much that escapes us who live abroad. There will be a time for questions, when you will be able to raise some of these points and I shall deal with them to the extent that I am able. But I believe that what I shall have to say is for the reasons that I have given, valid and valuable.
A Low Level
Now in Europe and the United States we discussed Federation for years before World War n and I cannot remember a single occasion in which it ever crossed our minds or the issue was raised that British Guiana would not join the Federation. We always took that for granted. The Trade Commission in London includes British Guiana and British Honduras. The West Indian Students’ Union includes British Guiana and British Honduras. The West Indies cricket teams always include British Guiana. You were always one of us. But after the war, and especially during recent years, there began to be sounded a note which has grown in intensity. We heard that the East Indians in British Guiana were opposed to Federation and these were the reasons given. They had a numerical majority over the other races, they hoped to establish an Indian domination of the colony; Federation would bring thousands of Africans (or people of African descent) from the smaller islands to British Guiana, These knew how to work land and how to build up from small beginnings. They would place the Indians in British Guiana in an inferior position. Therefore the Indians were against Federation.
We heard also that the African population of British Guiana was now eager for Federation particularly for the reason that it would bring this reinforcement from the smaller islands, once more establish African numerical superiority, and so check the East Indians. Since I have come to the West Indies, and particularly since I have come to British Guiana, I have heard these arguments constantly repeated. That is to reduce the great issue of Federation to a very low level.
Worse still, in British Guiana racial rivalry and even racial tension have thrust themselves into the Federation discussion.
There is undoubtedly racial tension, racial rivalry in British Guiana (also in Trinidad). To what degree it has reached, what are the likely consequences, whether it will increase and go to extremes of one kind or another, that I do not know. I do not know British Guiana sufficiently to express an opinion which would be of value or carry any weight. But I believe I have something to say which would assist all parties to view the situation in a balanced perspective.
Two Stages of Nationalism
It has been observed that when a colonial country is approaching national independence, there are two distinct phases. First, all the progressive elements in the country begin by supporting the national independence movement. Then when this is well under way you have the second stage. Each section of the nationalist movement begins to interpret the coming freedom in terms of its own interests, its own perspectives, its own desires. Thus the accentuation of racial rivalry at this time is not peculiar to British Guiana or to Trinidad. It takes place everywhere during the period of intense political excitement due to the national awakening. This political excitement, however, carries with it certain dangers. It is those I wish to warn you against, and we have an example, of worldwide historical significance, in what has happened to the former British colony of India.
It is an established fact that before Indian independence in 1947, tens of millions of Hindu and Moslem workers and peasants lived side by side in peace without conflict. It is an equally established fact that since the independence great numbers of these continue to do so. Yet in the days before World War n there sprang up the movement for a Moslem state which finally succeeded and resulted in the formation of Pakistan. I do not wish to say that there were not honest and sincere elements in the movement. But in it there were three types against whom I want to warn you here in British Guiana�fanatical racialists, scheming and ambitious politicians, and businessmen anxious to corner for themselves a section of industrial and commercial possibilities. The movement succeeded. Pakistan was formed.
What is the result to-day after less than twelve years? The party which led the struggle for the national independence has never been able to get more than a few seats in the legislative assemblies. The people have no use for it.
More important. In East Bengal, Hindus and Moslems have decided that they do not any longer want communal elections, that is to say separate Hindu lists and Moslem lists. They now vote as one people.
Finally I am reliably informed that there are now elements in East Bengal who want to form a third state. East Bengal to join with West Bengal to form a Bengal state. But West Bengal is a part of India. In other words they are ready to throw aside the Hindu�Moslem differences which in a moment of exceptional political excitement prompted them to support the formation of a Moslem state. Many, however, believe that this talk of a third state is only a shame-faced way of admitting that they wish once more to be a part of India and regret that they allowed themselves to be rushed into the formation of a new state. And this before twelve years have passed. We have seen a similar move in Ghana by the Ashantis. Prime Minister Nkrumah was able to keep it in check. I suggest then that you see the undoubted racial tension in British Guiana as a part of the inevitable political upheavals always associated with a national struggle. It has to be watched, it may run to extremes, but all should be on guard against that trio I mentioned earlier – fanatical racialists, scheming and ambitious politicians and greedy businessmen. They can help to lead the people into courses which, a few years later, when the excitement has died down, the people can bitterly regret.
Defensive Arguments For Federation
Under this pressure many pro-Federationists have been driven into a defensive position. They feel, for example, compelled to advocate Federation on the ground that it will provide a market for the surplus rice of British Guiana. Now this question of the sale of rice, and the price that the West Indies will pay for British Guiana rice, is undoubtedly a very important one and may indeed play a great role between British Guiana and the Federation. But in my view it is wrong and very misleading to base the whole great issue of Federation on a market for rice. British Guiana has been selling rice to the West Indies for years without being federated. Again under pressure from the anti-Federationists, some Federationists proceed to argue that if the British Guiana plan of economic development is to succeed it will need a market larger than the half million local population. Federation offers a way out. They tie themselves into knots over freedom of movement of people from island to island. And finally, the greatest obstacle of all, the Great Barrier Reef � the fact that British Guiana had been offered only six seats in the Federal Parliament.
Now we absolutely have to get these problems in their proper perspective. All of them are matters of bargaining and negotiation. It is so in the West Indies and it is so in every country including the most advanced countries in the world to-day. Do not pay too much attention to the speeches of politicians before a conference or to their speeches when the conference is over. They utter beautiful sentiments (often with an eye to what The Opposition at home will say) and as soon as that is over and the doors are closed, they take off their jackets, roll up their sleeves and get down to business. Take Customs Union. One politician representing Jamaica (let us say) will declare that Jamaica is for complete Customs Union but owing to special circumstances Jamaica must exclude 35 per cent of its production from such a union. Another politician (say from Barbados) will say that this is absolutely impermissible, but he is ready to allow Jamaica 25 per cent. They argue for days. Then I can imagine Sir Grantley Adams in the chair (having kept quiet most of the time) proposing a compromise: “You say 35 per cent; you say 25 per cent; I propose 30 per cent.”� Jamaica representative says, “No,32 per cent.” Finally, they agree on 31 per cent for five years only� after that they will see.
That is the way it goes. Always. I want to emphasize that, because otherwise these problems are elevated into insuperable obstacles. In Europe they have been working for years on creating a common market (I shall refer to this later). The other day I was much amused to read that the agreements were in danger, over the question of what ? The nature of ham. Some claimed that ham was dairy produce, others claimed that it was manufactured goods� ham was something you had to make. Obviously, if ham was dairy produce, it came under one set of customs duties, taxes, etc.; if ham on the other hand was classified as manufactured goods it would come under another set of customs dues, etc. They argued, they quarrelled, they threatened, but they came to an agreement in the end.
It is the same among us. Take the question of freedom of movement of populations. To listen to some of the anti-Federationists you would believe .that half the people of the West Indies are sitting by the seashore with their bags packed, just waiting for the news that British Guiana has joined the Federation, to descend on it like a swarm of locusts. It is not so. (Some people in Trinidad have the same fears.) It is not so, it cannot be so. What has actually happened is this. Two years ago, representatives of the islands met to discuss this very question of freedom of movement between the islands. Trinidad allowed entry to some fifty types of persons who had formerly been excluded. But the important decision was that for five years each territory could make its own laws as to how many it would admit and under what conditions. After the five years were up, each territory would still have the right to make its own laws about admission of immigrants, only now these laws would have to be ratified by the Federal Parliament. That is the way all these problems can and will be settled.
No such problem can be a serious obstacle to Federation. The idea that all the islands would gang up together to force unreasonable and oppressive conditions on British Guiana is out of the question�for one thing it would be political stupidity.
I have dealt with these problems in order that they should be kept in perspective and not allowed to obscure the fundamental issues.
Federation in 1958
What are these fundamental issues ? Every generation has its own ideas of Federation, usually an idea that is related to the particular ideas of that particular day.
I was reading recently in a lecture on Federation by Dr. Eric Williams that in 1876 a colonial official advocated Federation, among other grounds, because it would facilitate freedom of movement for lunatics, for lepers, for criminals and for policemen. What particular ideas of the day this particular kind of Federation was related to I do not know. It is interesting but not important.
Then there was Dr. Meikle. When I was a small boy living in Arima in Trinidad, before World War I, I knew Dr. Meikle, a tall, quiet man. He had very advanced ideas for his time, his book on Federation is a good book and holds a place in our history. But his conception of Federation cannot be ours.
My own conception of Federation before World War II is not the same that I have to-day. To-day, 1958, in the second half of the twentieth century, this is how I see Federation. Federation is the means and the only means whereby the West Indies and British Guiana can accomplish the transition from colonialism to national independence, can create the basis of a new nation; and by reorganising the economic system and the national life, give us our place in the modern community of nations.
The only conception of Federation which I think worthy of consideration, the only conception which I believe can make Federation a success in the age in which we live, is the conception that sees Federation as the West Indian method of taking part in that general reorganisation of industrial production, commercial relations and political systems which is the outstanding feature of our world. Federation for the West Indies is the means by which it will claim independence, modernize itself and although small in numbers, be able to take its place as one of the modern communities living a modern civilized existence. Without Federation, I do not think this can be done. It has to be done or the consequences for these islands would be dreadful. I see Federation therefore (and I am not alone) as the process by which the West Indies, in common with the rest of the world, seeks to leave one stage of its existence which has lasted for some 300 years, and move into a new sphere, with all the privileges, the responsibilities, the difficulties, and the opportunities which the transitional stage of existence offers to all who are able to take part in it.
That is what Federation means and it will mean that or it will mean nothing. This is my conception of West Indian Federation at this stage of History, and everything that I say will revolve around this. The times we live in are a time of transition, the world we live in, the world in which we have lived for three centuries as colonial possessions of imperialist powers, is falling apart. The chief imperialist powers, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Holland and Belgium, are all states of Western Europe. The important thing, the thing that is new about them, the thing that concerns us is that they are no longer world powers. The world in which they ruled and shaped our destinies according to their will, imposed upon us their ideas of the economics and the politics that they thought suitable for us, that world is gone. We shall enter as a free people into a world that we never knew and which our masters never knew until recently. If they were merely losing their colonies and continuing as before that would be one thing not only for them but for us. What is happening is something entirely different, and, as I believe that most of the shortcomings in our thinking of our future spring from an inadequate grasp of this central fact, I shall spend some time on it.
Rise and Decline
The period in which our masters ruled as imperialist states has a definite beginning and, historically speaking, is not very long. It is only 300 years. It begins at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It began to come to an end with World War I.
I shall deal briefly with four aspects�their economic foundations, their political institutions, their foreign relations and their social thought. These more or less constitute the whole and I shall use that classification again when we come to the West Indies Federation.
The beginning of their history as imperialist states is marked by a new economic system � the system of wage-labour. Before that time workers were attached to the land or worked as artisans in the guilds. Wage-labour, workers divorced from the means of production and working only for wages, marked the beginning of an economic development such as the world had never seen before. This was capitalism. It nourished and was nourished by imperialism. What is the situation to-day?
The wage-labourers of the imperialist powers have organised themselves into massive trade unions. Labour Parties, Communist Parties. They have declared openly that they intend to transform the capitalist economy into a socialist economy. One result you can see in England. The Labour Party nationalises the steel industry. The Tory Party denationalises the steel industry. The Labour Party declares that when it comes into power it will renationalise the steel industry. That is not any form of economy � it is chaos. To-day the economies of these imperialist powers are not classic wage-labour; they are not socialism. They are bastard systems, neither one thing nor the other, in continuous crisis and disorder, not knowing which way they are going. The economic power which sustained the imperialist domination is gone.
Politically it is the same. These powers came into existence and were able to thrive on imperialist exploitation because they established the national, independent state. Previously they were ruled by royal families, dynasties with real power, who were tied up with one another in marriages, alliances, petty wars, etc. The famous Hundred Years War between England and France was little more than a series of raids by the British across the Channel seeking loot. For long periods the Pope exercised not only religious, but political domination over large areas of Europe. The national state put an end to that. Whoever might rule, the state was now independent, devoted exclusively to the national interest, independent of all other states.
Today that independence is gone. China and India which, fifteen years ago were a semi-colonial and a colonial state, to-day have more independence than Britain, France or any other of the imperialist states of Western Europe. You remember no doubt the brutality with which the Moscow regime under Mr. Krushchev crushed the uprising of the Hungarian workers in the Hungarian Revolution. But we should remember too that at about much the same time Sir Anthony Eden and the French Prime Minister thought that they could indulge in some old fashioned imperialism by staging a raid on Egypt. This did not suit the foreign policy of the United States. President Eisenhower told them to get out and to get out at once. And they got out fast enough. The European imperialist states, which formerly conducted their own affairs and the affairs of their vast empires, to-day as far as foreign policy is concerned, are no more than satellites of the United States.
War For The World
Closely connected with the independence of the state is the question of foreign relations. Some of your students will have read, and may still be reading in your history books, all sorts of fanciful reasons as to why this or that European war was fought. In nearly every case the reasons given are a lot of nonsense. I think it safe to say that ever since the religious wars of the middle of the seventeenth century, nearly every great war between the European powers has been fought over the colonial question. Either they were fighting to get colonial territory, or to prevent a rival getting colonial territory, or they were seeking to occupy strategic positions on the road to colonial territories. This is their history right up to the War of 1914 covering some 250 years. Their armies, their navies, their strategic conceptions, even their conceptions of themselves, were governed and shaped by these necessities of empire. To-day that is finished. The only war, the only serious war that we face is the war for world domination, not for colonial territory; and the powers of Western Europe are pawns of the United States in its conflict with Russia for world domination. These two are going to fight for domination of all the land, and all the seas, and of the air above, and now for outer space. They are trying to reach the moon and if they do get there they will fight as bitterly over moon domination as they are fighting over world domination. We can do very little about that. But wars for colonial territories are finished, and with that is finished the particular relation that existed between imperialist powers and colonies on a world scale.
And that I may say is the reason why the colonial countries (ourselves included) are gaining our freedom with such comparative ease. If these powers had the economic basis, the political independence and the world-wide domination which they exercised for so many centuries, you can be sure that they would not have tolerated these demands for independence and the attitude of the colonial peoples to-day.
The Totalitarian Challenge
There is another reason for the decline and decay of these powers as imperialist powers. The national unity is broken and they no’ longer have confidence in themselves. There are many millions of people in these European states who are hostile to imperialism and wish nothing better than to be rid of the burdens and the strains of colonialism.
And finally social thought. In the days of their power these European states undoubtedly laid the basis for and helped to develop democratic political institutions. By the end of the nineteenth century, democracy was at least an ideal, and on a world scale nations were judged by the extent to which they had achieved it or were in process of doing so. Not only in social thought but in art, literature and other important phases of civilization, the imperialist powers undoubtedly made some splendid achievements. But all that to-day is gone. Over the last forty years we have seen the rise of a new system, the system of totalitarianism. To-day almost a billion people are living under this new system. It is the sworn enemy of democracy. It has its adherents in the very heart of the democratic regime itself, as in France where there are 140 Communist Deputies in the French Parliament. For some time it seemed as if the Russian system did offer a way out of the present world crisis.
But over the last years there has been evidence that Russia is as much a prey to economic disorder, rebellion among its subjects and permanent political crisis as is the Western World. So that democracy is not only challenged, but is challenged by a new system which more and more shows that it too offers no way out. The result is a complete moral and political crisis in the imperialist powers. There is no perspective by which the individual can orient himself either to the state or to other individuals.
That is the condition of the imperialist powers to-day. The connection between them and their former colonies is being broken. But the connection is not one between states which have their former power and colonies which are newly independent. No. We are becoming free in a world of chaos and disorder. That imposes enormous difficulties upon us, and in order to understand ourselves and our relations with what are still the advanced countries of Western Europe, we have to get the new relation clear and bear it constantly in mind.
Federation as the Way Out
The first point is that these powers recognize what has happened to them. They know that they are in a different world. We too must recognize that we are in a new world. And the first thing that we must do is to see the method by which they are attempting to meet the challenge of the changed conditions. I can sum up their method in one word� Federation.
First, there was Benelux. This was the recognition by Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg that, small countries as they were, it was necessary for them to unite in order to meet the changed conditions. Benelux is the name given to their organisation for customs union and special arrangements in regard to market, movement of populations, etc.
Secondly, there is the arrangement among the iron and steel producers of Western Europe to unify their production on a continental scale. These iron and steel producers of Europe have fought each other bitterly for centuries. They are divided by all sorts of national prejudices and national peculiarities of production But they have systematically struggled for unity until they have arrived at some common ground. What is the word for that? The only word is�Federation. Still more important. The European countries as a whole have worked for years and now have established the basis of a European Common Market. They hope that it will be complete in twelve years. By that time they hope that production and distribution will be as free among the countries of Europe as it is among the different states of the United States of America. What is the only word for this? Federation.
I have been asked by certain anti-Federationists: if those people can unite economically without actually federating, why can t British Guiana do the same with the West Indies ? The answer will give them more than they bargained for. It is this: those countries cannot federate because of language differences, methods of production, of social organisation, and of government which have separated them from each other for centuries, including many bitter wars. It is a tragedy for them that their past history and their social and political organisations prevent them from uniting in a more complete Federation. Substantial numbers of them bitterly regret that these barriers exist. It is to our advantage, it is our good fortune that we have no such difficulties. There are many people in Europe who profoundly wish that it was as easy for Western Europe to federate as for example it is for the West Indies to federate with British Guiana.
Franco-African Federation
The changed conditions of the modern world have produced the most fantastic idea of a Federation that I have ever read or heard of anywhere. France has as you know many millions of colonial subjects in Africa. These people, like the rest of the colonial world, have already reached the stage where they are no longer prepared to accept colonial status. Yet some of them are not anxious to break what they consider the valuable connection with metropolitan France. France on the other hand has been thrown out of Indo-China, has been thrown out of Tunis, has been thrown out of Morocco, and will most certainly be thrown out of Algeria. Without African colonies, France faces the prospect of being an insignificant territory on the coast of Europe. Yet it is dear that freedom for the African colonies cannot be long delayed Out of this situation has arisen the proposal for a Franco-African Confederation in which Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Senegal, all the French African colonies will participate in a Federation with France on the basis of complete equality. Now African civilization, despite the fact that it has been so brutally maltreated by imperialism, still preserves great virtues of its own. But nevertheless the African civilization is profoundly different from the highly sophisticated civilization of metropolitan France. Yet the fact remains that there is this movement on each side to attempt to work out what would undoubtedly be the strangest Federation that history has ever known.
Reorganisation of Economies
The second method they are using is a desperate attempt to reorganise their economies. These formerly proud and powerful states are now continuously dependent upon all sorts of aid, economic, financial, military, from the United States. We want aid, yes. But without the United States they would have collapsed long ago. And also they seek to reconstruct the economy. Take Great Britain. The British realised that they were falling behind, had fallen behind. They therefore took a jump ahead. They saw atomic energy as the key to the industrial future, and they planned and have succeeded in being foremost in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
I want to make one thing clear. European Common Market, Franco-African Federation, use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes as the salvation of the British economy, these conceptions and plans are challenged. I do not want to go into that at all except to say that those who challenge them do not challenge the principles of Federation and reorganisation of the economy: they say that these imperialist states cannot carry them out successfully. To discuss that would take us too far. It is enough that the principles themselves are challenged by nobody, are agreed upon by everybody. Does anybody seriously propose that British Guiana can reorganise its economy on its own, by going it alone? Isn’t it a commonplace that loans, plans and technical assistance are far easier to get and far easier to handle by larger, integrated territories than by small isolated ones ? Who denies it? Nobody. To do so would make him a laughing stock. It is expansion and development that raise the level and perspective of the whole society, not counting how many Africans and how many Indians. That way, all will be struggling at the same low level in a world that at every step would be leaving us further and further behind.
Discarding The Colonial Economy
It is not only the countries in Western Europe that are doing it. Mr. Nehru is establishing a steel industry in India at tremendous cost. The Germans are building a steel mill for India. The Russians are building another. The English are building one and I think the Americans one. Some people I know with knowledge and experience of steel have challenged the value of this enormous expenditure and the general dislocation of the economy which it will cost. And India undoubtedly has been in great trouble with its foreign exchange over the steel mills and similar expenditures. I have no doubt that the economists and the engineers have calculated the costs and advantages, that is, as far as they are able. But to-day there are no purely economic questions. Freedom from colonialism is not merely a legal independence, the right to run up a national flag and to compose and sing a national anthem. It is necessary also to break down the economic colonial systems under which the colonial areas have been compelled to live for centuries as hinterlands, sources of raw material, backyards to the industries of the advanced countries. Independence is independence, but when you continue to live in territories which still bear the shape of the old colonial territories, it is extremely difficult to free yourself from the colonial mentality. And most of the best colonial statesmen are determined to put an end to that. Despite the fact that they cannot hope in a decade or two to reach anywhere near to the level of the advanced countries, they are taking the necessary steps which will enable not only foreigners but their own populations to see that they have laid the basis of a balanced economy, and of an economy which is not a hinterland, a mere periphery, to the great centres of civilization. That is what the colonial areas are doing. That is what the West Indies will have to do. And I suggest that it can be done only by Federation and it is certain that British Guiana will be able to gain very, very few inches indeed if it attempts to do it by itself.
It is not only Mr. Nehru who is doing that. There is Colonel Nasser. The whole Middle East situation has been turned upside-down because of Colonel Nasser’s determination to put a dam in Egypt and to lay some visible, obvious symbol of the modernization of Egypt. These men have no illusions that they will modernise their country in one step. But they know they have to make some dramatic step in order for it to be understood that colonialism is left behind, not only in form, but in the economic and social conditions in which the people live.
The same motive animates Nkrumah who has stated that his greatest aim at the present time is to establish the Volta Dam. It is a huge project which will cause the transference of thousands of people, the destruction of ancient villages, the reorganisation of hundreds of square miles, in order to bring the modern world right into Ghana so that everyone will be able to see that the transition from colonialism, not only to freedom, but to modernization has been made.
I say that this is the task, that is what Federation means in the middle of the twentieth century, whatever it meant in 1912. That is why we believe that British Guiana should come in with the other islands for their own benefit and also for the benefit of British Guiana. I have heard a few arguments which seem to believe that there was an attempt to lure British Guiana into the Federation for some purposes unknown. It is nothing of the kind. Now it is true that the West Indian Federation is not a very exciting Federation, nor did it come into the world with vigorous screams as a healthy baby should. But nevertheless it has got one advantage. It is the only Federation I know which has come into existence with the specific charge (at the head of all its tasks) to unify, diversify and develop the economy. That is what the Federation is for. In that it bears the stamp of the age in which we live. I cannot conceive of these tasks which are being carried out in the other colonial territories, to whatever degree their economic resources allow, I cannot conceive of these tasks being carried out except by means of a Federation. They will be difficult enough under any circumstances.
I want you to understand that this is not a question of an ideal. This is not a question of something we ought to have. It is not something which we can choose to have, or take up according to the way we feel at any particular moment. In my opinion (and in the opinion of others who think the same but do not speak openly about it as I do), these countries, unless they develop themselves along the lines that other new colonial countries are doing, are bound to experience tremendous difficulties, not only economic but social and political.
Why We Are Compelled To Reorganise
Democracy is not a tree that seems to thrive very easily in the tropical soils of Latin-America. When you look at Latin-America over the last 130 years of its freedom, the picture is one of almost continual political instability. When you look at the curve of the West Indian islands, the picture is not too different. Look at Cuba. Look at Haiti. Look at Santo Domingo. There you have one of the cruellest dictatorships in these parts. When I was a small boy in Trinidad and Castro and Gomez were fighting it out in Venezuela, it used to be said that this instability was due to the poverty of the people of Venezuela. To-day, there is no longer poverty. Four hundred million dollars a year, I think, is the sum that Venezuela gets from oil royalties. The political disorders have increased in scope with the increase of wealth.
There are many reasons for this. One of them is the absence of a stable middle-class which has got solid economic roots ‘in the country, touching on the one hand the upper ranks of the working class and on the other hand, the ruling classes. None of these countries have such a class and it makes democracy a problem.
It is a problem in these Latin-American countries as a whole and it is my opinion that it is doubly a problem in the British and French West Indies where the populations are in some respects the most peculiar in all the colonial territories. I do not know of any population that has the specific historical qualities of the populations of the British West Indies. In Indo-China, in India, in Ceylon, in Ghana, in Africa, the native populations have got a background and a basis of civilisation which are their own. They have a native language, they have a native religion, they have a native culture. These exist to a substantial degree and from this culture they make the transition or they are making the transition to the modern world. Anthropologists to-day are discovering more and more the values of these civilizations. They were ridiculed simply by the ignorance and arrogance of the imperialist powers. These people have got this basis and they move from this to something else.
The populations in the British West Indies have no native civilisation at all. People dance Bongo and Shango and all this is very artistic and very good. But these have no serious effects upon their general attitude to the world. These populations are essentially Westernised and they have been Westernised for centuries. The percentage of literacy is extremely high. In little islands like Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica and even in your own British Guiana, the population is so concentrated that with the development of motor transport, nobody is very far from the centre of things. There is an immense concentration of knowledge, learning and information. People live modern lives. They read modern cheap newspapers, they listen to the radio, they go to the movies. The modern world is pressing upon them from every side giving rise to modern desires and aspirations. There is no national background to mitigate or even to influence the impact of these ideas upon the social personality of these islands. The result is that you have what I call a �500 a year mentality among the masses of the West Indian countries. The difficulty is that the territories in which they live have a cash per capita income of only about �50 a year. The difference between the mentality, the desires, the needs, which are the result of the kind of life the people live, and the limited resources of the economy is a very serious one. It is not only an economic question. It is developing and in a few years can become the source of the gravest political disorders. It is no use blinding our eyes to that. At Inaugural Celebrations we make hopeful speeches and everybody applauds. We hope for the best. But when that is over you must look at things with a certain realism. When the British flag goes down and the national flag goes up and there will be no more cruisers and soldiers to come, and all authority depends upon what is native and rests upon the attitude of the people, then these islands are going to test for themselves how far it is possible for them to achieve the democracy which has evaded so many other territories in these parts.
Now I am not an economic commission and I don’t want to pretend for a second to tackle its problems. It is sufficient for me to emphasize that the organisers and the planners of the economy of the Federation must have a clear conception of what they are organising and planning, and why. They must know and the people must know and constantly bear in mind the world in which we live.
Technical Institutions
This evening, however, I wish to draw your attention to two points only in connection with economic reconstruction. The first is the matter of technical and scientific institutions. The second it the matter of technical personnel from Britain and other countries abroad. First, technical and scientific institutions. We have to get rid of the colonial mentality. Scientific discoveries and processes are making industry less and less tied to specific sources of raw material and climate. That tendency will doubtlessly increase. We have to develop our own institutions. To a limited degree, for we are not and for a long time will not be one of the industrially advanced areas of the world. But we have to develop our own institutions outside of the conception that we are merely West Indian. The Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture is in Trinidad. It is not a West Indian institution. It is an institution that serves the needs of people concerned with tropical agriculture the world over. I hope, I look forward to seeing the West Indian University in Jamaica become a centre” not only of general studies but of specialised learning which will serve to advance and add to the accumulation of knowledge which is taking place all over the civilised world.
I believe that, to the extent of our limited resources, some of the institutions that we; are planning and will plan must be conceived in terms of our playing a role in the general scientific advance of modern society and not be confined to the limited interests of a purely West Indian perspective. The West Indian people need to see such institutions. The people outside need to know that such institutions are being developed in the former colonial territories of the West Indies. Can British Guiana do this by going it alone ? It will be difficult enough under any circumstances. But it is not only an economic but a social and a political necessity.
New Human Relations
The question of personnel from abroad to give us “technical assistance is more immediate. We are sending our boys and girls away to learn and they are doing very well. But we must make up our minds to the fact that for a long time we shall need technical assistance from abroad in our efforts to modernise ourselves. We are breaking the old connections between us and the advanced countries. We have to finish away with the old type of colonial official and the old type of technical assistant who came here to rule and to command people whom he considered his inferiors. But if we are breaking the old connections we have to establish new ones. To-day in England and in Europe there are many young men and women who have a very different attitude towards us than their parents had. Much of the arrogance and sense of superiority have been stripped away from them by the troubles and trials through which Europe has passed over the last years. Many of them have been through the war and have learnt to judge men as men. Numbers of them have a sense of guilt and of shame now that the realities of imperialism and colonialism have been exposed. They are anxious to do what they can to help restore some historical balance in the accounts of imperialism and the colonial peoples. Finally, they want to do a good job. They want to be paid but they want to feel that their work is helping people who need it and that in any case it will not be destroyed by some atomic or hydrogen bomb. (With the advent of Sputnik, I don’t know that anywhere to-day is safe. But that is by the way.) I know many of these people. We are breaking the old connections, we have to establish new ones. These people come to work but they are looking at us. We have to show them that though limited in our material resources, we are in thought at any rate and in aspiration citizens of the modern world. Some of them I am sure will be ready to identify themselves with us completely. We should be on the lookout to welcome them. I have met one or two in Trinidad and in British Guiana since I have come here. They have ideas that are far more advanced than the ideas of many West Indians in high places who still suffer from the colonial mentality to an astonishing degree. Above all, let us not repel them by showing them when they come that we are governed by the same narrow nationalist and particularist conceptions which have caused so much mischief in Europe and elsewhere, and which some of them are running away from. We need all the help that we can get and help of this particular kind is precious and is far from being a purely economic question. This also is a social and political necessity. Industrial expansion is not merely a question of material forces but of human relations. There are other issues of infinitely greater scope, but this evening I confine myself to these two.
Dr. Jagan and Federation
I want now to pass from economic relations to the political sphere. I can assure you that I will not, in dealing with these, spend so long as I did on the economic question. Otherwise we shall not be able to get away from here at all. However, in regard to the political issues I have to come a little closer to home. I have to deal with Dr. Jagan. Now I have to treat Dr. Jagan’s views with a certain respect. First of all, he is the head of the majority party of this country.
It is very important at this time in particular that the authorities of the country based upon local elections should be treated with a certain respect. The old authority is going. The new authority is not yet firmly established. It is necessary as I say to treat its representatives always with respect. (If you do not like them, then remove them.) The second thing is that Dr. Jagan is no petty racialist, not at all. I am unalterably opposed to the political philosophy which he accepts. I am unalterably opposed to its methods. I have told him so in person. And therefore there is no reason why I should not say so in public. He has not hidden his views, there is no reason for me to hide mine. But in regard to his aims for British Guiana, and for the West Indies as a whole, they are those of an enlightened modern person. He is not counting up how many Indians and how many Africans and how many acres of land, and basing the future of British Guiana on that. Some of his supporters might be doing that, but his general view is not that at all However there are one or two aspects of Dr. Jagan’s attitude which demand serious examination.
To Plebiscite or Not to Plebiscite
The first of them is this question of the plebiscite. Now I read a day or two ago in the accounts of the debate m the Legislature (You will help me, Mr. Chairman, if I am wrong.) that Mr. Stephen Campbell said he had been here 60 years, he said he was against self-government and he said that if there was a plebiscite, he was sure that the majority of the people in British Guiana would vote against it. Now that would be an excellent type of plebiscite. He begins by saying, “I am against and I ask you to vote and show that you are against too.” Maybe he is totally wrong but that is not what is at issue here. I am thinking of a certain type of political activity, the method of the plebiscite or referendum.
Now if Dr. Jagan says that there must be a Plebiscite to decide Federation here, all I have to say is this: Trinidad didn’t need a plebiscite, Barbados didn’t need one. Jamaica didn’t need one, none of the other islands needed one. Yet Dr. Jagan says that for certain special internal reasons British Guiana needs one. That is a matter for Messrs. Carter and Burnham and the others to discuss Mr. Burnham says it is a lot of nonsense, but I cannot say that. If I did I would be told: you are a stranger, you do not know the country, and I am not going to put myself in any position where that attack can be made against me. But there is one thing which I know of all Plebiscites in whatever country they are. And that is this: the political leader must say precisely where he stands and ask the people to decide on clear political positions. A plebiscite must not say: “On this issue I have no opinion exactly. I don’t know whether it is good or bad and therefore we must have a plebiscite and I leave you to decide.” That would be absolutely intolerable and a complete abdication of the responsibilities of political leadership in a critical situation. That I hope is clear. I do not know how Dr. Jagan is going to develop his ideas on the plebiscite. I want insist hat you haven’t to know British Guiana to know what is a proper plebiscite and what is a plebiscite that is most improper. I want to add this: the question of the plebiscite or the question of Federation is not an abstract question or a political question which can be left hanging in the air too long. Racial rivalry is involved. To what extent I do not know, and I have given reasons for not coming to extreme conclusions about it. But it undoubtedly exists. It also exists in Trinidad. The only way to meet such a difficulty is to present arguments and distinctive political positions so that the rivalry, the emotionalism, are met with reason and ideas. You counter one thing with the other and you place reasonable clear-cut decisions before the people to decide. But if you do not do that, if you say that on this issue the people must decide, then what you are doing is to give the racial rivalries free play. And then they can run to extremes which they could not possibly have run to if they had been met in the first place by the proper political actions of responsible political parties and leading individuals. The question of a plebiscite is not a theoretical question. It is not a question of letting the people decide”. In the last analysis, the people have to decide everything in a democracy. But no one ever holds an election in which everybody walks around and tells the people, “Well choose some people.” No, people come forward in political parties and they say, “This is our programme, this is what we wish to do and I .am the person to be chosen. I and my colleagues are able to carry out this policy.” They offer the people definite choices. But what is now taking place is that Dr. Jagan and his political associates say in effect, “We came forward to you to ask you to elect us to the leadership of the country. We are ready to tell you how to fight the British Government on the question of the Constitution. We are able to tell you how much money is needed to develop the country and how much we should borrow in order to develop an economic plan. We are able to tell you how much should go for education and what should be the type of education. We not only know these things, but we are able to denounce and expose in argument those who dare to oppose us. We are able to undertake the government of the country on a national and international scale. We are ready to become independent and have Dominion Status. But on the all-important question of Federation, here we confess we have no definite opinion. We leave it to you to decide.”
No, it wouldn’t do. Plebiscite or no plebiscite is an internal affair. But the kind of plebiscite is a strictly political matter on which anybody can take position without having put a foot in British Guiana. I have given you my view and I hope you bear it in mind to deal with persons who hide behind the idea of a plebiscite to avoid taking a definite decision. You know, it is a very hard thing .for an honest intelligent man at this stage to say, “I am against Federation. And that’s why they say, “James has no right to come here as a stranger to talk about Federation.” What he’s saying is , that he is against but he doesn’t want to say it so openly That’s why he say, “It is necessary to have a plebiscite for the people to decide.” What he is really saying is “I am against, but I haven’t the nerve to say so.” I am not saying Dr. Jagan is that way at all. I’m speaking of the ideas that he puts forward. His ideas have to be examined. A leader is responsible not only for what he says but for what interpretation his followers give to what he says. All sorts of reasons are given by people who, in face of the massive arguments that have existed over so many years and which have been so intensified in recent years, have not got the nerve and the courage to come forward and say plainly, “We are against.” They seek all sorts of ways and means by which they give the impression without committing themselves. Don’t let them get away with that.
West Indian Leaders Let Down B.G.
The second political question is one on which Dr. Jagan undoubtedly has a certain amount of right on his side. He says that the West Indian leaders have not supported British Guiana in its struggles with the British Government over the Constitution. So far he is absolutely correct. If West Indian political leaders claim that British Guiana is a part of the Federation and all that is needed is the legal step, if they feel as they undoubtedly feel that we are al one people, then any attack upon the liberties of the people of British Guiana, the taking away of the Constitution, should have been met by the united forces of the West Indian people. The Federation should have begun there and then. They have not done it. They have got themselves entangled in and confused by Dr. Jagan’s political beliefs. I believe that Dr. Jagan has a serious responsibility to express and clarify his political ideas to the people of the West Indies. When he says he is not going to make any confessions to the Colonial Office, in my opinion he is absolutely right. I don’t see why he should make any explanations to them. I certainly wouldn’t and I wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything which I wouldn’t do. But he owes it to the West Indian people to make al his political ideas clear. Not to do that is to make a mockery of democracy.
The West Indian leaders have kept away. They have left British Guiana more or less to itself. Dr. Jagan says that is what they have done. He has a sense of grievance which is justified, | I have told the West Indian leaders my opinion on this matter. . have repeated it to them in private. I shall continue to repeat it in public. But you can’t continue to do only that. It is necessary to take some steps forward. I believe that if Dr. Jagan were to declare (and his declaration would just clinch it) that he is ready to enter the Federation, the attitude of the West Indian leaders, whatever reasons they may have had for it in the past, will have to undergo a change. Dr Jagan will come with outstretched hands. “Well, here I am, boys, I have joined you, I am one of you now. We are all one except on the matter of the Constitution. All of you have internal self-government. Here I am. Are you willing to join with me in order to request internal self-government for British Guiana?” I believe his position would be unassailable, and whatever weakness and feebleness there was, the West Indian leadership would have to begin the struggle for a West Indian attitude to the problem of British Guiana there and then. But if on the other hand he says, “No Federation without Dominion status,” Federation then becomes something which you are bargaining about. “To get Dominion Status we are prepared to give you Federation.” Those may not be the ideas that Dr. Jagan has. But a political leader is not only responsible for what he says, but for the interpretations which intelligent people can read into his words. And “No Federation without Dominion Status” places Federation in a light which I think is harmful to the very idea of Federation.
A Constituent Assembly
The final point in regard to the political ideas is this. Dr. Jagan in my opinion has the opportunity not only of assisting the people of British Guiana but of assisting the whole of the West Indies by going into the Federation and demanding, not in two years or one year, but immediately, on behalf of the people of the West Indies, a Constituent Assembly, by which the Dominion Status will be made concrete. The best way is by means of a Constituent Assembly. This is the only proposal I have made in West Indian politics. It is the only one I intend to make and I am ready to give all the services I am able to give in order to get this idea accepted from end to end of the West Indies and British Guiana. A Constituent Assembly means (allow me to go into it in some detail) an election, most probably according to proportional representation. That is to say, no party is going to be allowed to win all five seats in Georgetown. You elect on a national scale. All the votes are going to be added up nationally and the seats are going to be divided according to the number of votes each party has. In this way you are certain to have representation of every type of political thought in the country because that is needed when a constitution is being discussed. The Constituent Assembly then discusses various constitutions. After two or three months it comes to some conclusions and then the constitution which gains the majority of votes is taken back to the people for ratification. They say whether they approve of it or not, not voting by parties but by each individual giving his opinion. It is possible that they may reject it and say to the Constituent Assembly: “You go and make another one.” That is their right because this is something in which the whole nation has to express itself. It is the beginning of its national existence. After the constitution has been decided upon, men an election takes place in the ordinary way according to parties, the legislative chamber is constituted and politics continues under the new conditions.
I state that a Constituent Assembly is the only possible means now by which the masses of the people in the West Indies may be brought to participate and take their role in the establishment of a Federal Constitution not only for a Federation but for an independent West Indies. The last Constitution came like a thief in the night. Some people went abroad and some experts wrote and then suddenly the people were told, “This is the Federal Constitution.” It is no wonder that they were not particularly interested and have not been enthusiastic to this day although they are generally in favour of the Federation.
I propose a Constituent Assembly as a means whereby all parties in the West Indies, including British Guiana, will be able to take part in the formation of the Constitution and the establishment of the new state. I take the liberty of saying to Dr. Jagan and to his supporters: does this not meet both the demand for Federation and for Dominion Status at the same time ? I put the idea forward. It has met with some approval in various places. I know there are politicians in the West Indies who are very sympathetic to it. I hope that you will discuss it among yourselves and perhaps a movement in favour of it will start among you. That however is for you and your political leaders.
Foreign Relations of British Guiana
There are only two points remaining and I will be brief on each of them. There is the question of the foreign relations of the state. You know, I have a sympathy for those people who think of British Guiana as having a continental destiny. I have a sympathy for them. But I believe they are lacking in political sense. At any rate they do not commit the abysmal folly of thinking in terms of British Guiana going it alone. There is no reason why British Guiana, placed as it is on the South American Continent, should not be able to form associations of one kind or another with the other two Guianas. I understand some people there already have made overtures There is absolutely no reason why something of that kind should not take place. No question of loyalty to any metropolitan country is involved. Today Great Britain is a member of the Commonwealth. It is also a prominent leader in the Sterling area. Canada, which is a member of the Commonwealth, is not a member of the Sterling area. It is a member of the Dollar area. Holland, which is not a member of the Commonwealth, is I believe a member of the Sterling area. Great Britain, which is a member of the Commonwealth, and a member of the Sterling area, is now seeking to join the European Common Market. All these permutations and combinations are perfectly feasible in the modern world. There is absolutely no reason at all why British Guiana should not be able to form some sort of association with the other two Guianas and go even further. Methods of communication are developing so rapidly that Brazil and Venezuela, moving in one direction, British Guiana, moving in another, in a few years might even be able to form associations which at the present time are not within the compass of our ideas. There is no reason why British Guiana should not take advantage of its situation to be able in time to pioneer in these directions. There is every reason why it should. There is only one . thing to be noted. If it attempts to do this by itself, it is going like a1 babe in the woods and the Latin American woods are very big and, very dark. It can attempt these connections only if it is firmly associated with the West Indian islands, with people who speak the same language, who have more or less the same type of historical experience, who have had the same European association. That is the natural unity. Upon that basis, while on the one hand Jamaica and these others can make their experiments for association with Cuba and Haiti, at that end of the curve, British Guiana can pioneer into these areas at this end. But always upon the basis at both ends of a solid unity which is the result of a natural historical evolution. That is what I think the foreign relations of a country like British Guiana should be.
Selvon
My last word is in regard to social thought which as I have said includes artistic as well as political ideas. I have said economic conditions, political conditions, foreign relations and social thought. In reality they are one. They are not to be separated. But you cannot speak about everything at the same time, so for the sake of convenience I divided them. In regard to this I want as a final word to draw one or two things to your attention, one or two points relating to literature in the West Indies. I shall take two writers now before the public in the West Indies and in England. One is Selvon. The other is Naipaul. They are Indians and that is why I choose them. Selvon first. I was lunching in London a year ago with Dr. Williams and Mr. John Lehmann, the editor of “The London Magazine”. Dr. Williams was discussing with Mr. Lehmann ways and means of developing literary and artistic talent in the West Indies. Selvon’s name happened to come up and I said that I didn’t think that his work had the vital quality that some other West Indian writers had. (Williams, I think, differed with me.) Mr. Lehmann said he didn’t agree, he was very much interested in Selvon. My remark had been made because Mr. Lehmann had been writing enthusiastically about Selvon. I said, “Well, that is my view, but one thing I have noted: Selvon has a remarkable ear for dialogue. He catches the rhythms and cadences of West Indian speech and he is able to reproduce them in his writing.” Then Mr. Lehmann said something which I have never forgotten and which I want you to remember. He said, “That is precisely why I am so much interested in Selvon. I am very much interested in what the colonial writers are going to do to the English language”.
Now here is this Englishman recognising that with increasing freedom and increasing capacity for self-expression we and the other colonial peoples, particularly those who have no other language but English, or use English as their literary language, our writing is going to affect the form and content of the English language. He is not afraid of it. The English language has a history and a literature�it is one of the great languages and literatures of the world�which can stand the individual turns which colonial writers will give to it. The language and the literature will even benefit by it. It is a point that I had missed entirely. Now Selvon is Indian, but if I am not mistaken he is part African too. One of the books of his that I have read dealt chiefly with the Indian population of Trinidad and contained a great deal of English dialogue as spoken by the poorer class of Indians. But the Evening Standard of London not so long ago published with great fanfare some stories by Selvon describing the lives of West Indians in England. And the most noticeable thing about those stories, and what I believe chiefly attracted the English reader, was the way the West Indians spoke. Selvon is equally at home with the Indian population and the African population of the West Indies. In other words he is a West Indian. Are we going to close ourselves in narrow compartments, whereby we shall be limiting our writers and our artists to the free expression of only one aspect of our community ? Writers, and artists of all kinds, are of particular importance at this transitional stage of our development. They interpret us to ourselves and interpret us to the world abroad which is anxious to know about us. These highly gifted people are able in a few thousand words to illuminate aspects of our social and personal lives which otherwise would have taken us years and great pain and trouble to find out. We have to give them all the help we can, create the conditions in which they can best perform their work for our society. Above all we must beware of limiting them in any way. In doing so we limit ourselves.
Naipaul
The second writer I wish to take is Naipaul. He also is an Indian from Trinidad and there is no question in anybody’s mind about his literary quality. He is obviously a born man of letters. Naipaul has written a novel called The Mystic Masseur. This novel is very funny indeed. Naipaul describes an Indian politician. First of all he used to massage people. Then he thought he would like to write books. He bought encyclopaedias and copied out a lot of information in order to publish books of his own on subjects which he knew nothing about. He decided to go into politics, he was elected a member of the Legislative Council and his political career is as absurd as the early part of his life. Naipaul makes no bones about showing up this politician as a charlatan and an ignoramus. This politician, please note, is an Indian and obviously Naipaul describes him because as an Indian himself he is most familiar with the Indian community. But as you read the book you see that when Naipaul makes reference to African politicians he has no more respect for them than he has for his Indian hero. And when you finish the book, I at least am left with the impression that Naipaul has an attitude which is ready to pour ridicule on politicians of all kinds, Indian, African, colonial or European. I have no objection (and I hope that Messrs. Burnham and Carter have none) to seeing politicians held up to the light by a brilliant and satirical pen. It should do them some good.
Freedom For The Artist
Now it would be terrible if Naipaul were prevented from writing freely about Indians because by doing so he would be giving ammunition to African people or people of other races to attack the people of his own race. Or for that matter if a young African writer were prevented from writing freely about Africans for thereby he would be harming the cause of the Africans in the eyes of the Indians, etc. You know what I mean. We have not got that kind of thing among us at present. Both these young men have written freely. Very soon now the young novelists of British Guiana are going to be bursting out. Let us see to it that we maintain that freedom of conditions which will enable our young writers to develop freely. You should invite Naipaul here. I am a little concerned because he is really so clever that he may be adopted by the English literary world. I think you should bring him here so that he could renew his contacts with the native roots. And I do not mean that the Indians of British Guiana should bring him here. I mean those people in British Guiana who are interested in literature. I am not going to refer to other West Indian writers. Personally I believe that George Lamming the Barbadian is the best of them so far There are others. I have preferred this evening to concentrate on these two.
In conclusion let me say this. I have spoken as a member of the West Indian Federation, thinking of the interest, the goodwill and the solidarity of the West Indian people. Please believe that I have been thinking in the same way of the interest, goodwill and solidarity of the people of British Guiana.
C. L. R. James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question</h1>
<h3>(June 1939)</h3>
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<p class="info">Originally published in the Socialist Workers Party’s <strong>Internal Bulletin</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1938-45/v01n09-1939-ib.pdf" target="new">No. 9</a>, June 1939, pp. 1–9.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 3–14.<br>
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.<br>
Marked upby <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<h3>I</h3>
<p class="fst">The 14 or 15 million Negroes in the USA represent potentially the most militant section of the population. Economic exploitation and the crudest forms of racial discrimination make this radicalization inevitable. We also have historical proof, first in the part played by the Negroes in the Civil War and in the response to a Marcus Garvey. Superficially, the Negro accepts, but that acceptance does not go very deep down. It is essentially dissimulation and a feeling of impotence, the age-old protective armor of the slave. It has been stated that the CP in organizing the Negroes in the South got such response that it had to check the campaign. The reason given was that owing to the number of Negroes joining and the fewness of the whites, the result would soon be a race-war between the Southern workers and sharecroppers.<br>
</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p class="fst">The Negro responds not only to national but international questions. It is stated that during the Ethiopian crisis, thousands of Negroes were ready to go to Ethiopia as fighters and nurses. Since the trouble in the West Indies, Jamaicans in New York have formed a Jamaica Progressive Association. They drafted a memorandum demanding a democratic constitution for the West Indies, sent a delegate to meet the Royal Commission and to visit Panama and Colon to organize membership of the association.<br>
</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p class="fst">Finally, I am informed that a new spirit is moving among the Negroes, in Harlem and elsewhere today. People who knew the Harlem Negro fifteen years ago and know him today state that the change is incredible. The Negro press today, poor as it is, is an immense advance on what it was five years ago. <strong>The Pittsburgh Courier</strong>, with a circulation of over 100,000 weekly, though a bourgeois paper, bitterly attacks the Roosevelt administration for its failure to deal with the Negro question. The younger generation in particular aims at equality, not to be discriminated against simply because they are black. To sum up then</p>
<ol type="a">
<li>The Negro represents potentially the most revolutionary section of the population.<br>
</li>
<li>He is ready to respond to militant leadership.<br>
</li>
<li>He will respond to political situations abroad which concern him.<br>
</li>
<li>He is today more militant than ever.<br>
</li>
</ol>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p class="fst">The Fourth International movement has neglected the Negro question almost completely. If even the Party personnel were not of a type to do active work among the Negro masses, the Negro question as an integral part of the American revolution can no longer be neglected. The Negro helped materially to win the Civil War and he can make the difference between success and failure in any given revolutionary situation. A Negro department of some sort should be organized (consisting, if need be, entirely of whites) which will deal as comprehensively with the Negro question as the Trade Union Department deals with the Trade Union Question. If the Party thinks the question important enough this will be done. The Party members and sympathizers must be educated to the significance of the Negro question. This is not a question of there being no Negroes in the Party. That has nothing to do with it at all. This work can begin immediately. The main question, however, that of organizing or helping to organize the Negro masses, is one of enormous difficulty for a party like the SWP. The main reasons for this are of course the discrimination against the Negro in industry by both capitalists and workers, the chauvinism of the white workers, and the political backwardness of the American movement. Each of these are fundamental causes inherent in the economic and social structure of the country.</p>
<p>But an already difficult situation has been complicated by the funereal role of the CP, especially during the last few years. It is stated, and there is every reason to believe it, that the possibilities of a rapprochement between blacks and whites on a working class basis are today worse than they were ten years ago. The CP has lost 1,579 or 79% of its Negro membership during the last year in New York State alone. Since that time, there has taken place the split of the Workers Alliance, and New York is slated to be always symptomatic of developments in the Party as a whole. It was not always like this. I am informed that some years ago in Harlem, the Negro who was aware of politics might not join the CP, but he would say that of all the white parties, the CP was the only party which did fight for Negro equality and which tried to stick to its principles. Today that is gone. The chief reason for this is, of course, the new Popular Front turn of the CP. The CP cannot gain the allies it wants if it fights the difficult fight for Negro rights. The CP is now an American party, and the petty bourgeois supporters of democracy who are coming into it have nothing in common with the Negro, who, finding himself an outsider, has simply left the Party. I have had personal experience of the bitterness of ex-members of the CP toward the party, and unfortunately, to all white parties also.</p>
<p>But it is to be noted that the main grievance is political – the activity of the CP on the Ethiopian question. First of all, that Russia sold oil to Italy made a disastrous impression on the blacks. Yet many Negro party members remained. What seems to have been a decisive factor was the activity in regard to Spain and China and its lack of activity in regard to Ethiopia.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Every day it is only Spain, Spain, China, Spain, but nothing done for Ethiopia except one or two meager processions around Harlem.”</p>
<p class="fst">I have the impression that the CP could have gotten away with the Soviet selling of oil if it had carried on a vigorous campaign, collecting money, etc. for the Ethiopian cause. The contrast with Spain has been too glaring, and when the CP entirely neglected the West Indian situation, the Negroes became finally conscious that they were once more the dupes of “another white party.”</p>
<p>The Ethiopian question and the West Indian question are still live questions for the politically minded Negroes. They will judge a Party on the international field by what it does or says on these issues. <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a></p>
<p>Articles, leaflets, and even small meetings in Harlem are not beyond the Party today with a little effort. One party comrade has managed to make himself familiar with the Indian problem, to write articles in the <strong>NI</strong>, and to make valuable contacts. The same could surely be done nearer home.</p>
<p>France at the present time is the key to the world situation. How to awaken interest in the American Negroes on the critical situation in France, obviously of such importance to themselves? Obviously by the struggle for independence of the French colonies and particularly through the Negro organizations in Europe and Africa which are working towards this end. (The French party and with it the Belgian and British parties have their responsibility here.) In France today there are African revolutionary organizations in contact with a similar organization in Britain. The Fourth International must determinately assist in building and strengthening its connections with this work, and the American Party has its part to play in this important means of educating and organizing the Negro movement in America.</p>
<p>The most difficult question is still to be faced. What will the Party aim at in its Negro work? There are certain things that every revolutionary party will do:</p>
<ol type="a">
<li>Fight for the Negroes’ place and rights in the Trade Unions.<br>
</li>
<li>Seek to make as many Negroes as possible members.<br>
</li>
<li>Carry on a merciless struggle against White chauvinism.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">About (c) a word should be said. The CP has been accused of fostering a black chauvinism. There have been exaggerations and absurdities and downright crimes against socialism, e.g. using white women to catch Negroes, but on the whole, the CP attitude of going to lengths in order to make the Negro feel that the CP looked upon him as a man and equal is not to be lightly dismissed. The general aim was correct. The Negro brought up in America or Africa is extremely sensitive to chauvinism of any kind. Lenin knew this and in his thesis to the Second Congress on the <em>Colonial Question</em>, he warned that concessions would have to made to correct this justifiable suspicion on the part of the colonial workers. No principled concession can ever be made. But sensitiveness to “black chauvinism” will gain nothing and will do a great deal of harm. It should be noted that this suspicious attitude is not directed against whites only. Africans, and also to some degree Americans, are often hostile to educated West Indian Negroes who from their British education and the comparative absence of sharp racial discrimination in the West Indies are accused, and justly, of having a “superior” and “white” attitude. Organizations in London predominantly West Indian find it difficult to get African members, and in America, to get American members.</p>
<p>The party will base itself in the everyday needs of the Negroes. It must aim at being a mass organization or it would be useless and mischievous. The dangers of such an organization are obvious. But a recognition of these dangers does not solve two questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>The great masses of Negroes are unorganized and no white party is going to organize them. They will not join the Fourth International. Is it worthwhile to assist in the formation of an organization which will rally Negroes, and, though reformist in character, must from the very nature of its membership develop into a militant organization? The Negro has poured his money into Garvey’s coffers, and now into Father Divine’s, has worked hard and been robbed. Is there a way out for him to fight unless he joins the Fourth International?<br>
</li>
<li>Though I may be wrong here, I think that such an organization is going to be formed whatever we do.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">This question of the Negro organization is one that deserves the closest study. As far as I can see, no white leader or white organization is going to build a mass organization among the Negroes, either in Africa or in America. As recently as 1935, however, the Negroes have shown their capacity for mass political action under one of their own leaders. One, Sufi, a Southern Negro, masquerading as a man from the East, organized a party, picketed shops, and helped to force employers to give one-third of their jobs to Negroes. He was the leading figure in the riots which gained Harlem schools, more colored teachers, recreation grounds, etc. Sufi was a racketeering demagogue and was entangled into an Anti-Semitism which, I am informed, was no part of his creed, such as it was. But he was ready to fight for such things as the Negro understood and he got a strong response. The question, however, is pertinently asked: Why is it that intelligent Negroes with political understanding never attempt to lead Negroes but always leave them to men like Garvey and Sufi?</p>
<p>This, it seems to me, is one of the most important questions on which the party has to come to a decision. It is closely linked to the question of self-determination for American Negroes. Self-determination for the American Negroes is (1) economically reactionary and (2) politically false because no Negroes (except CP stooges) want it. For Negroes it is merely an inverted segregation. Yet it is not to be lightly dismissed without providing for what it aims at: the creation of confidence among the Negroes that revolutionary socialism does honestly and sincerely mean to stand by its promises. As so often with Marxists, the subsidiary psychological factors are not carefully provided for in the planning of political campaigns.</p>
<p>The Negro must be won for socialism. There is no other way out for him in America or elsewhere. But he must be won on the basis of his own experience and his own activity. There is no other way for him to learn, nor for that matter, for any other group of toilers. If he wanted self-determination, then however reactionary it might be in every other respect, it would be the business of the revolutionary party to raise that slogan. If after the revolution, he insisted on carrying out that slogan and forming his own Negro state, the revolutionary party would have to stand by its promises and (similarly to its treatment of large masses of the peasantry) patiently trust to economic development and education to achieve an integration. But the Negro, fortunately for Socialism, does not want self-determination.</p>
<p>Yet Negroes, individually and in the mass, will remain profoundly suspicious of whites. In private and in public, they ask the question: “How are we to know that after the revolution we shall not be treated in the same way?” Many who do not say this think it. The CP Negroes are looked upon as touts for Negro converts in exactly the same way as the Democratic and Republican Parties have touts for Negro votes.</p>
<p>What is the remedy? I propose that there is an obvious way – the organization of a Negro movement. That the Negro masses do certainly want – they will respond to that and therefore they must have it. They will follow such a movement ably and honestly led. They have followed similar movements in the past and are looking for a similar movement now.</p>
<p>The great argument for such a movement is that it has the possibility of setting the Negro masses in motion, the only way in which they will learn the realities of political activity and be brought to realize the necessity of mortal struggle against capitalism. Who opposes such a procedure must have some concrete suggestions for attaining this most important end: bringing Negro masses into the struggle.</p>
<p>What precise aims will such an organization have? What it must not at any cost do is to seek to duplicate existing white organizations so as to result in anything like dual unionism, etc. One of its main tasks will be to demand and struggle for the right of the Negro to full participation in all industries and in all unions. Any Negro organization which fought militantly for such an aim would thereby justify its existence.</p>
<p>There are many urgent issues: the struggle for the Negro right to vote, against social and legal discrimination, against discrimination in schools (and universities), against oppressive rents. The struggle against such things and the task of bringing the white workers to see to a concrete realization of their responsibility in these questions can be best achieved by a combination of the few politically advanced whites backed by a powerful Negro movement. To expect a continuous struggle by the whites on these Negro issues is absurd to lay down as a condition. For what it amounts to – that the Negro cannot struggle against these things unless he forms organizations predominantly white – is sectarian and stupid.</p>
<p>The Negro himself will have the satisfaction of supporting his own movement. The constant domination of whites, whether by the bourgeoisie or in workers’ movements, more and more irks the Negro. That is why he followed a Marcus Garvey in such hundreds of thousands and would not join the CP. The Party’s attitude towards such a movement should therefore be one of frank, sincere, and unwavering support. The white proletariat will have to demonstrate concretely its value to the Negro not once, but many times, before it wins the Negro’s confidence.</p>
<p>The support of this movement by the Party should be frank, sincere, and unwavering. This is not as easy as it sounds. What the Party must avoid at all costs is looking upon such a movement as a recruiting ground for party members, something to be “captured” or manipulated for the aims of the party, or something which it supports spasmodically at the time it needs something in return. The party should frankly and openly endorse such a movement, urge Negroes to join it, assist the movement in every way and, while pointing out the political differences and showing that revolutionary socialism is the ultimate road, work side by side to influence this movement by criticism and activity combined. It is in this way and on the basis of a common struggle, with the party always helping by never seeking to manipulate the movement, that the confidence of the Negro movement be gained by revolutionary socialism, without raising the impracticable slogan of self-determination.</p>
<p>What are the dangers of such a movement? The chief are: (a) the danger that it might be used by reactionary elements such as the Democratic Party or the Communist Party, (b) the danger of encouraging racial chauvinism. A fortunate combination of circumstances reduces these dangers to manageable proportions.</p>
<p>At the present moment, there is a sufficient number of capable Negroes ready and willing to lead such a movement who, while willing to cooperate with white parties, have no racial chauvinism.</p>
<p>While all Negroes will be admitted and racial discrimination against any Negro as a Negro will be fought, it is recognized by all with whom I have discussed this question, that such a movement must be a mass movement based on the demands of Negro workers and peasants. Much will depend on the leadership here. I see no reason, however, to have any doubts on this score. Such a leadership exists at the present time and needs only be mobilized. The Negro’s right to his place in industry and the trade unions must be one of the main planks of the platform and one of the main fields of activity. The prospective leadership, as I see it, will be militantly opposed to the political line and organizational practice of the CP.</p>
<p>Yet this is not sufficient as a political basis. Sooner or later the organization will have to face its attitude towards capitalism. Is it to be a reformist or revolutionary organization? It will not start as a full-fledged revolutionary socialist organization. As Lenin pointed out to the pioneers of communism in Britain immediately after the war, it would be a mistake to flaunt the banner of revolution right at the beginning. The basis of the organization must be the struggle for the day-to-day demands of the Negro. But the American economy is already and will increasingly pose the question to every political organization fascism or communism. Here again the initial leadership will exercise a decisive influence. This is a question which will ultimately be decided by struggle within the organization.</p>
<p>However, many factors are in favor of a victory ultimately for those who support revolutionary socialism, when the Negro masses are ready for it. First there is the question of revolutionary struggle for the Negroes in Africa against imperialism. On this, most politically minded Negroes are agreed. Secondly, the International African Service Bureau, a British organization, issued a <em>Manifesto</em> during the Munich crisis which demands a joint struggle of British workers in Britain and colonials of the Empire for the overthrow of Imperialism. This <em>Manifesto</em> has been warmly welcomed among advanced Negroes in America, and the bureau and its paper, International African Opinion, have already a powerful influence, and this not only on account of its policy, but because it is run by Negroes.</p>
<p>Militant struggle for day-to-day demands must be the basis and constant activity of the movement, but in this period, action on this basis will drive the movement sharply up against the capitalist state and fascists or neo-fascist bands; and the transition to revolutionary socialism will not ultimately be difficult. As soon as this organization has achieved a firm basis, an international conference will most probably be called between the various militant Negro organizations and from my personal knowledge of them and their personnel, there is a probability that Socialism may be adopted. Such are the possibilities at the present time. And it is fortunate that they are so favorable. But it must be insisted upon that support of a Negro mass movement must not be conditional upon whether it is or soon will be socialist or not. It is the awakening and bringing into political activity of the large mass of Negroes which is the main consideration, and to this the party must give its frank, sincere, and unwavering support. The rest depends on the development of the whole international situation, the struggle of revolutionary parties, e.g. the growth of the SWP and the individuals who will constitute the leadership.</p>
<p>On the specific danger of racial chauvinism, I shall say little; in my view, it is for the movement of the kind projected a minor question. No movement which proclaims the Negro’s right to his place in the trade unions can be deeply penetrated with chauvinism. The Negroes who are likely to lead this movement see the dangers of chauvinism as clearly as the whites do. In America, where the Negroes are in a definite minority, serious fear of black chauvinism on the part of white revolutionaries seems to me not only unnecessary but dangerous. In the concrete instance, black chauvinism is a progressive force, it is the expression of a desire for equality of an oppressed and deeply humiliated people. The persistent refusal to have “self-determination” is evidence of the limitation of black chauvinism in America. Any excessive sensitiveness to black chauvinism by the white revolutionaries is the surest way to create hostilities and suspicion among the black people.</p>
<p>Such, in outline, it seems to me, should be the attitude of the party towards such an organization. It should actively assist the formation of such a movement. In any case, I have little doubt that such a movement is going to be formed sooner or later. But the party also has its own responsibility to the Negro question. The following are a few observations, based on a necessarily limited knowledge of the American situation, learned chiefly by discussion with Negro Socialists or near-Socialists.</p>
<ol type="a">
<li>Earlier I stated that the Party must form a section devoted entirely to the Negro question. This is urgent work, whether a Negro organization is formed or not. Our great weapon at the present moment is Marxism by which we illuminate every grave social and political problem of the day. The Party’s first task, therefore, is to do what no organization, white or Negro, can do completely unless it is based on the principles of Marxism, study the Negro question in relation to the national and international situation.<br>
</li>
<li>The Negro Committee should embark on an unremitting study of the Negro question, and immediately make arrangements for the publication of articles regularly in the <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong> and the <strong>New International</strong>. The <strong>Appeal</strong> should have a weekly column devoted to the Negro question. It will not be difficult to get regular information if contact is kept with Negroes. Not only accounts of lynchings, specific discriminations in industry, etc., but the presentation and analysis of various economic and social statistics issued, with special reference to the Negro, the colonial struggle in Africa, etc. This must now be a prominent and permanent section of the party’s work, for Party members as well as Negro contacts.<br>
<br>
Particularly urgent for the <strong>New International</strong> is an article or series of articles written from the inside and exposing the dealings of the American Communist Party with the Negro. The political line, the activities of Ford, Richard Moore, and Co., would be shown up, and their political corruption and degeneration traced in relation to the decline of the Comintern. The Negroes must be shown why the CP policy to the Negro has been what it has been at different times and why. The bureaucratic “promotion” and “demotion” of Negroes must be shown as a direct reflection of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution. A series of articles and a pamphlet relating the CP political and organizational policy towards Negroes with the zigzags of the Comintern would be of inestimable value. This should be done as a first task.<br>
</li>
<li>The numerous Negro organizations in Harlem and elsewhere must be contacted. This should be done very carefully, for the CP policy of “penetration” or “capturing from within” and generally of being concerned chiefly with bringing the organization under its influence, and not with helping in the Negro struggle, has borne bitter fruit, and the attitude towards any white is likely to be “What have you come here to get?” That the party should encourage the formation of a Negro mass movement does not mean that it will in any way cease activity to gain membership among Negroes. What is to be avoided is the impression that it is interested in Negro activity solely for the purpose of getting members or influence, and not for the purpose of assisting Negro struggles. That would be a grave crime not only against Negroes but against the socialist movement. Yet the party will openly and frankly seek membership. It seems, however, that here certain dangers are to be avoided.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The NAACP, the Urban League, and other Negro organizations, weekly forums, etc., carry on a certain amount of activity. Mere condemnation of these as bourgeois is worse than useless. At present, in most areas, the party’s appeal to most Negroes would chiefly be to those who are attracted by its superior understanding and analysis of the Negro question and the world situation. But these Negroes, when won, must not be immediately abstracted from their milieu and plunged into the struggle against Stalinism, etc. One of their main tasks at the present stage is to remain among the Negroes in their areas in the local organizations, carrying on an active fight for the party’s ideas in a manner carefully adapted to their hearers’ point of view. Broadly speaking, among whites there is a differentiation; revolutionaries circle around revolutionary organizations, and the petty bourgeois democrats belong to the various petty bourgeois organizations. Among Negroes, especially in the provinces, it is not so. All types, instinctive revolutionaries and conservatives, can be found at the local Negro forums, YMCA etc. even though these meetings often begin with prayers. There is a vast field here for the winning of Negro members to the party if the party press and literature give them a weapon which they can use.</p>
<p>But at the same time, the party must beware of looking upon Negro work as to be done necessarily by Negroes. The clearance of the long road to socialist equality must begin at once. Certain white comrades can now begin to become experts on the Negro question. The method is easy to define, hard to carry out. It means a regular reading of the Negro press, Negro literature, regular attendance at Negro meetings, etc. The arguments for socialism are to be directed against the latest pronouncements of Kelly, Miller, Mordecai, Johnson, George, Schulyer, the local Negro representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties, not against Stalin, Daladiuer, and Chiang Kai-Sheck. And to attempt to do propaganda among Negroes on any other basis than attack, debate, exposition, etc. concerned with the writers, press etc. read by the Negroes, is to speak a language alien to them. This is of particular importance in areas where the Party is small. (For the moment I exclude organizations of the Negro unemployed etc. which would more properly be the problem of the Trade Union Section). A close attention by one or two white comrades to the discussion, literature, etc. of the various Negro groups in their community must bear fruit in the end owing to the superior power of the ideas we put forward. And while Negroes will do the main part of this work, even where the Party has Negro comrades, white comrades must take their part and will win great prestige for the party by showing themselves thoroughly familiar with Negro life and thought. We must work patiently in the rather restricted milieu to which even groups of educated Negroes are condemned by their position in American society.</p>
<p>The Committee should get into contact with the French, British, Belgian, and South African sections, get regular information about their work and contacts, a good supply of British and South African papers, especially those dealing with colonial questions, and circulate these and translations from the French among the Negro organizations and interested groups and persons. Every effort should be made to circulate the <strong>Spark</strong> widely among interested Negro contacts. The International African Service Bureau and its organ, <strong>International African Opinion</strong>, should be popularized by the party among Negroes and whites alike. Negroes will welcome and appreciate this. This organization of Fourth International colonial activity in a manner to present it constantly and regularly to Negroes in America, is not only one of the most important means of drawing Negro contact ultimately into our party. It means also, and this is of immense importance in our period, that Negro organizations everywhere which are internationally minded or drawing towards internationalism will ultimately realize that the only genuine international organization in the world at the present time is the Fourth International.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Footnote</h3>
<p class="note"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> The neglect of the Ethiopian question by the Fourth International (the British Section included) is a grave strategic error. The Ethiopians are in the field fighting and are going to be there for years. If there is any break in Italy during a war, these fighters will sweep the isolated Italian force out of the country. The African revolution today has a starting point in Africa. It is obvious what effect any such sweeping victory by the Ethiopian army will have on French black troops in Western Europe, and on Africans.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question
(June 1939)
Originally published in the Socialist Workers Party’s Internal Bulletin, No. 9, June 1939, pp. 1–9.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 3–14.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked upby Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I
The 14 or 15 million Negroes in the USA represent potentially the most militant section of the population. Economic exploitation and the crudest forms of racial discrimination make this radicalization inevitable. We also have historical proof, first in the part played by the Negroes in the Civil War and in the response to a Marcus Garvey. Superficially, the Negro accepts, but that acceptance does not go very deep down. It is essentially dissimulation and a feeling of impotence, the age-old protective armor of the slave. It has been stated that the CP in organizing the Negroes in the South got such response that it had to check the campaign. The reason given was that owing to the number of Negroes joining and the fewness of the whites, the result would soon be a race-war between the Southern workers and sharecroppers.
II
The Negro responds not only to national but international questions. It is stated that during the Ethiopian crisis, thousands of Negroes were ready to go to Ethiopia as fighters and nurses. Since the trouble in the West Indies, Jamaicans in New York have formed a Jamaica Progressive Association. They drafted a memorandum demanding a democratic constitution for the West Indies, sent a delegate to meet the Royal Commission and to visit Panama and Colon to organize membership of the association.
III
Finally, I am informed that a new spirit is moving among the Negroes, in Harlem and elsewhere today. People who knew the Harlem Negro fifteen years ago and know him today state that the change is incredible. The Negro press today, poor as it is, is an immense advance on what it was five years ago. The Pittsburgh Courier, with a circulation of over 100,000 weekly, though a bourgeois paper, bitterly attacks the Roosevelt administration for its failure to deal with the Negro question. The younger generation in particular aims at equality, not to be discriminated against simply because they are black. To sum up then
The Negro represents potentially the most revolutionary section of the population.
He is ready to respond to militant leadership.
He will respond to political situations abroad which concern him.
He is today more militant than ever.
IV
The Fourth International movement has neglected the Negro question almost completely. If even the Party personnel were not of a type to do active work among the Negro masses, the Negro question as an integral part of the American revolution can no longer be neglected. The Negro helped materially to win the Civil War and he can make the difference between success and failure in any given revolutionary situation. A Negro department of some sort should be organized (consisting, if need be, entirely of whites) which will deal as comprehensively with the Negro question as the Trade Union Department deals with the Trade Union Question. If the Party thinks the question important enough this will be done. The Party members and sympathizers must be educated to the significance of the Negro question. This is not a question of there being no Negroes in the Party. That has nothing to do with it at all. This work can begin immediately. The main question, however, that of organizing or helping to organize the Negro masses, is one of enormous difficulty for a party like the SWP. The main reasons for this are of course the discrimination against the Negro in industry by both capitalists and workers, the chauvinism of the white workers, and the political backwardness of the American movement. Each of these are fundamental causes inherent in the economic and social structure of the country.
But an already difficult situation has been complicated by the funereal role of the CP, especially during the last few years. It is stated, and there is every reason to believe it, that the possibilities of a rapprochement between blacks and whites on a working class basis are today worse than they were ten years ago. The CP has lost 1,579 or 79% of its Negro membership during the last year in New York State alone. Since that time, there has taken place the split of the Workers Alliance, and New York is slated to be always symptomatic of developments in the Party as a whole. It was not always like this. I am informed that some years ago in Harlem, the Negro who was aware of politics might not join the CP, but he would say that of all the white parties, the CP was the only party which did fight for Negro equality and which tried to stick to its principles. Today that is gone. The chief reason for this is, of course, the new Popular Front turn of the CP. The CP cannot gain the allies it wants if it fights the difficult fight for Negro rights. The CP is now an American party, and the petty bourgeois supporters of democracy who are coming into it have nothing in common with the Negro, who, finding himself an outsider, has simply left the Party. I have had personal experience of the bitterness of ex-members of the CP toward the party, and unfortunately, to all white parties also.
But it is to be noted that the main grievance is political – the activity of the CP on the Ethiopian question. First of all, that Russia sold oil to Italy made a disastrous impression on the blacks. Yet many Negro party members remained. What seems to have been a decisive factor was the activity in regard to Spain and China and its lack of activity in regard to Ethiopia.
“Every day it is only Spain, Spain, China, Spain, but nothing done for Ethiopia except one or two meager processions around Harlem.”
I have the impression that the CP could have gotten away with the Soviet selling of oil if it had carried on a vigorous campaign, collecting money, etc. for the Ethiopian cause. The contrast with Spain has been too glaring, and when the CP entirely neglected the West Indian situation, the Negroes became finally conscious that they were once more the dupes of “another white party.”
The Ethiopian question and the West Indian question are still live questions for the politically minded Negroes. They will judge a Party on the international field by what it does or says on these issues. [1]
Articles, leaflets, and even small meetings in Harlem are not beyond the Party today with a little effort. One party comrade has managed to make himself familiar with the Indian problem, to write articles in the NI, and to make valuable contacts. The same could surely be done nearer home.
France at the present time is the key to the world situation. How to awaken interest in the American Negroes on the critical situation in France, obviously of such importance to themselves? Obviously by the struggle for independence of the French colonies and particularly through the Negro organizations in Europe and Africa which are working towards this end. (The French party and with it the Belgian and British parties have their responsibility here.) In France today there are African revolutionary organizations in contact with a similar organization in Britain. The Fourth International must determinately assist in building and strengthening its connections with this work, and the American Party has its part to play in this important means of educating and organizing the Negro movement in America.
The most difficult question is still to be faced. What will the Party aim at in its Negro work? There are certain things that every revolutionary party will do:
Fight for the Negroes’ place and rights in the Trade Unions.
Seek to make as many Negroes as possible members.
Carry on a merciless struggle against White chauvinism.
About (c) a word should be said. The CP has been accused of fostering a black chauvinism. There have been exaggerations and absurdities and downright crimes against socialism, e.g. using white women to catch Negroes, but on the whole, the CP attitude of going to lengths in order to make the Negro feel that the CP looked upon him as a man and equal is not to be lightly dismissed. The general aim was correct. The Negro brought up in America or Africa is extremely sensitive to chauvinism of any kind. Lenin knew this and in his thesis to the Second Congress on the Colonial Question, he warned that concessions would have to made to correct this justifiable suspicion on the part of the colonial workers. No principled concession can ever be made. But sensitiveness to “black chauvinism” will gain nothing and will do a great deal of harm. It should be noted that this suspicious attitude is not directed against whites only. Africans, and also to some degree Americans, are often hostile to educated West Indian Negroes who from their British education and the comparative absence of sharp racial discrimination in the West Indies are accused, and justly, of having a “superior” and “white” attitude. Organizations in London predominantly West Indian find it difficult to get African members, and in America, to get American members.
The party will base itself in the everyday needs of the Negroes. It must aim at being a mass organization or it would be useless and mischievous. The dangers of such an organization are obvious. But a recognition of these dangers does not solve two questions:
The great masses of Negroes are unorganized and no white party is going to organize them. They will not join the Fourth International. Is it worthwhile to assist in the formation of an organization which will rally Negroes, and, though reformist in character, must from the very nature of its membership develop into a militant organization? The Negro has poured his money into Garvey’s coffers, and now into Father Divine’s, has worked hard and been robbed. Is there a way out for him to fight unless he joins the Fourth International?
Though I may be wrong here, I think that such an organization is going to be formed whatever we do.
This question of the Negro organization is one that deserves the closest study. As far as I can see, no white leader or white organization is going to build a mass organization among the Negroes, either in Africa or in America. As recently as 1935, however, the Negroes have shown their capacity for mass political action under one of their own leaders. One, Sufi, a Southern Negro, masquerading as a man from the East, organized a party, picketed shops, and helped to force employers to give one-third of their jobs to Negroes. He was the leading figure in the riots which gained Harlem schools, more colored teachers, recreation grounds, etc. Sufi was a racketeering demagogue and was entangled into an Anti-Semitism which, I am informed, was no part of his creed, such as it was. But he was ready to fight for such things as the Negro understood and he got a strong response. The question, however, is pertinently asked: Why is it that intelligent Negroes with political understanding never attempt to lead Negroes but always leave them to men like Garvey and Sufi?
This, it seems to me, is one of the most important questions on which the party has to come to a decision. It is closely linked to the question of self-determination for American Negroes. Self-determination for the American Negroes is (1) economically reactionary and (2) politically false because no Negroes (except CP stooges) want it. For Negroes it is merely an inverted segregation. Yet it is not to be lightly dismissed without providing for what it aims at: the creation of confidence among the Negroes that revolutionary socialism does honestly and sincerely mean to stand by its promises. As so often with Marxists, the subsidiary psychological factors are not carefully provided for in the planning of political campaigns.
The Negro must be won for socialism. There is no other way out for him in America or elsewhere. But he must be won on the basis of his own experience and his own activity. There is no other way for him to learn, nor for that matter, for any other group of toilers. If he wanted self-determination, then however reactionary it might be in every other respect, it would be the business of the revolutionary party to raise that slogan. If after the revolution, he insisted on carrying out that slogan and forming his own Negro state, the revolutionary party would have to stand by its promises and (similarly to its treatment of large masses of the peasantry) patiently trust to economic development and education to achieve an integration. But the Negro, fortunately for Socialism, does not want self-determination.
Yet Negroes, individually and in the mass, will remain profoundly suspicious of whites. In private and in public, they ask the question: “How are we to know that after the revolution we shall not be treated in the same way?” Many who do not say this think it. The CP Negroes are looked upon as touts for Negro converts in exactly the same way as the Democratic and Republican Parties have touts for Negro votes.
What is the remedy? I propose that there is an obvious way – the organization of a Negro movement. That the Negro masses do certainly want – they will respond to that and therefore they must have it. They will follow such a movement ably and honestly led. They have followed similar movements in the past and are looking for a similar movement now.
The great argument for such a movement is that it has the possibility of setting the Negro masses in motion, the only way in which they will learn the realities of political activity and be brought to realize the necessity of mortal struggle against capitalism. Who opposes such a procedure must have some concrete suggestions for attaining this most important end: bringing Negro masses into the struggle.
What precise aims will such an organization have? What it must not at any cost do is to seek to duplicate existing white organizations so as to result in anything like dual unionism, etc. One of its main tasks will be to demand and struggle for the right of the Negro to full participation in all industries and in all unions. Any Negro organization which fought militantly for such an aim would thereby justify its existence.
There are many urgent issues: the struggle for the Negro right to vote, against social and legal discrimination, against discrimination in schools (and universities), against oppressive rents. The struggle against such things and the task of bringing the white workers to see to a concrete realization of their responsibility in these questions can be best achieved by a combination of the few politically advanced whites backed by a powerful Negro movement. To expect a continuous struggle by the whites on these Negro issues is absurd to lay down as a condition. For what it amounts to – that the Negro cannot struggle against these things unless he forms organizations predominantly white – is sectarian and stupid.
The Negro himself will have the satisfaction of supporting his own movement. The constant domination of whites, whether by the bourgeoisie or in workers’ movements, more and more irks the Negro. That is why he followed a Marcus Garvey in such hundreds of thousands and would not join the CP. The Party’s attitude towards such a movement should therefore be one of frank, sincere, and unwavering support. The white proletariat will have to demonstrate concretely its value to the Negro not once, but many times, before it wins the Negro’s confidence.
The support of this movement by the Party should be frank, sincere, and unwavering. This is not as easy as it sounds. What the Party must avoid at all costs is looking upon such a movement as a recruiting ground for party members, something to be “captured” or manipulated for the aims of the party, or something which it supports spasmodically at the time it needs something in return. The party should frankly and openly endorse such a movement, urge Negroes to join it, assist the movement in every way and, while pointing out the political differences and showing that revolutionary socialism is the ultimate road, work side by side to influence this movement by criticism and activity combined. It is in this way and on the basis of a common struggle, with the party always helping by never seeking to manipulate the movement, that the confidence of the Negro movement be gained by revolutionary socialism, without raising the impracticable slogan of self-determination.
What are the dangers of such a movement? The chief are: (a) the danger that it might be used by reactionary elements such as the Democratic Party or the Communist Party, (b) the danger of encouraging racial chauvinism. A fortunate combination of circumstances reduces these dangers to manageable proportions.
At the present moment, there is a sufficient number of capable Negroes ready and willing to lead such a movement who, while willing to cooperate with white parties, have no racial chauvinism.
While all Negroes will be admitted and racial discrimination against any Negro as a Negro will be fought, it is recognized by all with whom I have discussed this question, that such a movement must be a mass movement based on the demands of Negro workers and peasants. Much will depend on the leadership here. I see no reason, however, to have any doubts on this score. Such a leadership exists at the present time and needs only be mobilized. The Negro’s right to his place in industry and the trade unions must be one of the main planks of the platform and one of the main fields of activity. The prospective leadership, as I see it, will be militantly opposed to the political line and organizational practice of the CP.
Yet this is not sufficient as a political basis. Sooner or later the organization will have to face its attitude towards capitalism. Is it to be a reformist or revolutionary organization? It will not start as a full-fledged revolutionary socialist organization. As Lenin pointed out to the pioneers of communism in Britain immediately after the war, it would be a mistake to flaunt the banner of revolution right at the beginning. The basis of the organization must be the struggle for the day-to-day demands of the Negro. But the American economy is already and will increasingly pose the question to every political organization fascism or communism. Here again the initial leadership will exercise a decisive influence. This is a question which will ultimately be decided by struggle within the organization.
However, many factors are in favor of a victory ultimately for those who support revolutionary socialism, when the Negro masses are ready for it. First there is the question of revolutionary struggle for the Negroes in Africa against imperialism. On this, most politically minded Negroes are agreed. Secondly, the International African Service Bureau, a British organization, issued a Manifesto during the Munich crisis which demands a joint struggle of British workers in Britain and colonials of the Empire for the overthrow of Imperialism. This Manifesto has been warmly welcomed among advanced Negroes in America, and the bureau and its paper, International African Opinion, have already a powerful influence, and this not only on account of its policy, but because it is run by Negroes.
Militant struggle for day-to-day demands must be the basis and constant activity of the movement, but in this period, action on this basis will drive the movement sharply up against the capitalist state and fascists or neo-fascist bands; and the transition to revolutionary socialism will not ultimately be difficult. As soon as this organization has achieved a firm basis, an international conference will most probably be called between the various militant Negro organizations and from my personal knowledge of them and their personnel, there is a probability that Socialism may be adopted. Such are the possibilities at the present time. And it is fortunate that they are so favorable. But it must be insisted upon that support of a Negro mass movement must not be conditional upon whether it is or soon will be socialist or not. It is the awakening and bringing into political activity of the large mass of Negroes which is the main consideration, and to this the party must give its frank, sincere, and unwavering support. The rest depends on the development of the whole international situation, the struggle of revolutionary parties, e.g. the growth of the SWP and the individuals who will constitute the leadership.
On the specific danger of racial chauvinism, I shall say little; in my view, it is for the movement of the kind projected a minor question. No movement which proclaims the Negro’s right to his place in the trade unions can be deeply penetrated with chauvinism. The Negroes who are likely to lead this movement see the dangers of chauvinism as clearly as the whites do. In America, where the Negroes are in a definite minority, serious fear of black chauvinism on the part of white revolutionaries seems to me not only unnecessary but dangerous. In the concrete instance, black chauvinism is a progressive force, it is the expression of a desire for equality of an oppressed and deeply humiliated people. The persistent refusal to have “self-determination” is evidence of the limitation of black chauvinism in America. Any excessive sensitiveness to black chauvinism by the white revolutionaries is the surest way to create hostilities and suspicion among the black people.
Such, in outline, it seems to me, should be the attitude of the party towards such an organization. It should actively assist the formation of such a movement. In any case, I have little doubt that such a movement is going to be formed sooner or later. But the party also has its own responsibility to the Negro question. The following are a few observations, based on a necessarily limited knowledge of the American situation, learned chiefly by discussion with Negro Socialists or near-Socialists.
Earlier I stated that the Party must form a section devoted entirely to the Negro question. This is urgent work, whether a Negro organization is formed or not. Our great weapon at the present moment is Marxism by which we illuminate every grave social and political problem of the day. The Party’s first task, therefore, is to do what no organization, white or Negro, can do completely unless it is based on the principles of Marxism, study the Negro question in relation to the national and international situation.
The Negro Committee should embark on an unremitting study of the Negro question, and immediately make arrangements for the publication of articles regularly in the Socialist Appeal and the New International. The Appeal should have a weekly column devoted to the Negro question. It will not be difficult to get regular information if contact is kept with Negroes. Not only accounts of lynchings, specific discriminations in industry, etc., but the presentation and analysis of various economic and social statistics issued, with special reference to the Negro, the colonial struggle in Africa, etc. This must now be a prominent and permanent section of the party’s work, for Party members as well as Negro contacts.
Particularly urgent for the New International is an article or series of articles written from the inside and exposing the dealings of the American Communist Party with the Negro. The political line, the activities of Ford, Richard Moore, and Co., would be shown up, and their political corruption and degeneration traced in relation to the decline of the Comintern. The Negroes must be shown why the CP policy to the Negro has been what it has been at different times and why. The bureaucratic “promotion” and “demotion” of Negroes must be shown as a direct reflection of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution. A series of articles and a pamphlet relating the CP political and organizational policy towards Negroes with the zigzags of the Comintern would be of inestimable value. This should be done as a first task.
The numerous Negro organizations in Harlem and elsewhere must be contacted. This should be done very carefully, for the CP policy of “penetration” or “capturing from within” and generally of being concerned chiefly with bringing the organization under its influence, and not with helping in the Negro struggle, has borne bitter fruit, and the attitude towards any white is likely to be “What have you come here to get?” That the party should encourage the formation of a Negro mass movement does not mean that it will in any way cease activity to gain membership among Negroes. What is to be avoided is the impression that it is interested in Negro activity solely for the purpose of getting members or influence, and not for the purpose of assisting Negro struggles. That would be a grave crime not only against Negroes but against the socialist movement. Yet the party will openly and frankly seek membership. It seems, however, that here certain dangers are to be avoided.
The NAACP, the Urban League, and other Negro organizations, weekly forums, etc., carry on a certain amount of activity. Mere condemnation of these as bourgeois is worse than useless. At present, in most areas, the party’s appeal to most Negroes would chiefly be to those who are attracted by its superior understanding and analysis of the Negro question and the world situation. But these Negroes, when won, must not be immediately abstracted from their milieu and plunged into the struggle against Stalinism, etc. One of their main tasks at the present stage is to remain among the Negroes in their areas in the local organizations, carrying on an active fight for the party’s ideas in a manner carefully adapted to their hearers’ point of view. Broadly speaking, among whites there is a differentiation; revolutionaries circle around revolutionary organizations, and the petty bourgeois democrats belong to the various petty bourgeois organizations. Among Negroes, especially in the provinces, it is not so. All types, instinctive revolutionaries and conservatives, can be found at the local Negro forums, YMCA etc. even though these meetings often begin with prayers. There is a vast field here for the winning of Negro members to the party if the party press and literature give them a weapon which they can use.
But at the same time, the party must beware of looking upon Negro work as to be done necessarily by Negroes. The clearance of the long road to socialist equality must begin at once. Certain white comrades can now begin to become experts on the Negro question. The method is easy to define, hard to carry out. It means a regular reading of the Negro press, Negro literature, regular attendance at Negro meetings, etc. The arguments for socialism are to be directed against the latest pronouncements of Kelly, Miller, Mordecai, Johnson, George, Schulyer, the local Negro representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties, not against Stalin, Daladiuer, and Chiang Kai-Sheck. And to attempt to do propaganda among Negroes on any other basis than attack, debate, exposition, etc. concerned with the writers, press etc. read by the Negroes, is to speak a language alien to them. This is of particular importance in areas where the Party is small. (For the moment I exclude organizations of the Negro unemployed etc. which would more properly be the problem of the Trade Union Section). A close attention by one or two white comrades to the discussion, literature, etc. of the various Negro groups in their community must bear fruit in the end owing to the superior power of the ideas we put forward. And while Negroes will do the main part of this work, even where the Party has Negro comrades, white comrades must take their part and will win great prestige for the party by showing themselves thoroughly familiar with Negro life and thought. We must work patiently in the rather restricted milieu to which even groups of educated Negroes are condemned by their position in American society.
The Committee should get into contact with the French, British, Belgian, and South African sections, get regular information about their work and contacts, a good supply of British and South African papers, especially those dealing with colonial questions, and circulate these and translations from the French among the Negro organizations and interested groups and persons. Every effort should be made to circulate the Spark widely among interested Negro contacts. The International African Service Bureau and its organ, International African Opinion, should be popularized by the party among Negroes and whites alike. Negroes will welcome and appreciate this. This organization of Fourth International colonial activity in a manner to present it constantly and regularly to Negroes in America, is not only one of the most important means of drawing Negro contact ultimately into our party. It means also, and this is of immense importance in our period, that Negro organizations everywhere which are internationally minded or drawing towards internationalism will ultimately realize that the only genuine international organization in the world at the present time is the Fourth International.
Footnote
1. The neglect of the Ethiopian question by the Fourth International (the British Section included) is a grave strategic error. The Ethiopians are in the field fighting and are going to be there for years. If there is any break in Italy during a war, these fighters will sweep the isolated Italian force out of the country. The African revolution today has a starting point in Africa. It is obvious what effect any such sweeping victory by the Ethiopian army will have on French black troops in Western Europe, and on Africans.
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<h2>C.L.R. James</h2>
<h1>Beatrice Webb, Reformist</h1>
<h3>(May 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>The New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni43_05" target="new">Vol. IX No. 5</a>, May 1943, pp. 133–134; signed A.A.B.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by Damon Maxwell in 2009.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">In April, Beatrice Webb died. She was the wife of Sidney Webb, co-author with him of many famous books on the labor movement. Her career deserves examination.</p>
<p>She was born in 1858, the daughter of an English finance capitalist of international connections. She had both intelligence and character, and was expensively educated.</p>
<p>To appreciate the career of the Webbs, in this case Beatrice Webb, we must bear in mind the particular stage of development of European civilization in general, especially British capitalism, at the time when she grew to maturity. She was twenty-two in 1880, when European capitalism arrived at a consciousness of its own difficulties and inaugurated the age of imperialism by the division of Africa and other colonial areas.</p>
<p>During the ensuing years, Marxism as an intellectual force enjoyed an immense prestige in Europe. In Germany, the Marxists were the official opponents of bourgeois thought. In Austria, Francis Joseph’s financial minister, Bohm-Bawerk, devoted his literary life to the refutation of Marx. In Italy, Labriola, one of its most distinguished professors, was an open adherent; Gentile was for a time sympathetic to Marx; and Benedetto Croce, the greatest European scholar of his day, accepted in an academic way substantial elements of the doctrine. Masaryk thought it necessary to produce a ponderous volume against Marxism. We know what Marxism was in Russia; and even in France, Sorel, though no Marxist, was an apostle of violence and the class struggle.</p>
<p>Nor was this the interest of intellectuals only. In 1889, the Second International was organized under the aegis of Marxism. If in Britain there was only the unskillful pillage of Marx by Hyndman, there were sufficiently ominous signs. The growing loss of Britain’s position on the world market threw the British economy into disorder; and the interest culminated in two great strikes, the dock strike and the strike of the match girls, both in 1889, when the semi-skilled and the unskilled became organized for the first time.</p>
<p>To this historical milieu, Beatrice Potter, rich, able, cultured, well informed, idealistic and British, reacted with a political program that perfectly expressed the contradiction of her type. The thing to note is that it was conscious. She set herself to guide the British working class along the road of gradual, peaceful, constitutional progress to something she called “socialism,” and at the same time she waged an implacable war against Marxism and the doctrine of the class struggle. Her activities in the first sphere are widely known; not so well known are her activities in the second. In 1885, <em>in one of her earliest writings</em>, she denounced Marx’s economic theory and the doctrine of class struggle and revolution. At the same time she was carrying on an agitation against the living conditions of the poorer London workers which gained special prominence owing to her social position. She actually lived among them for some months in order to be able to speak with the necessary knowledge and authority.</p>
<p>In 1890 she married Sidney Webb, a brilliant young Oxford man and a British civil servant. In a most literal sense they were agents of the British ruling class, finance and administration, in the working class movement. Together they wrote the books which made them famous all over the world, their studies of the trade union movement, of English local government, and the Poor Law. They were neither passionate nor brilliant writers, but they were conscientious, they were thorough and they were able to do research with an expensive apparatus. They sincerely hated the obvious evils of capitalism. The harsh realities of the early struggles in the trade union movement and the corruption of early English local government forced its way through their essentially conservative temperament and stood out in their writings. The British labor movement was built ideologically on these works more than on any other, and Lenin, in exile in Siberia, studied the Webbs. The Webbs did distinguished work on the Royal Commission on the Poor Law. They drew up a famous minority report to this commission, which accomplished results and enhanced their reputation.<br>
</p>
<h4>Opponents of Marxism</h4>
<p class="fst">But these two people knew what they were doing. Their psychology may be left to future Marxist biographers. But this much is certain: that, while negatively they guided the working class in a reformist direction, positively they built an intellectual barrier against the powerful Marxist current on the continent. They spent time, money and influence in founding the London School of Economics <em>for the special purpose of combating Marxism</em>. Webb tor a time lectured there. Thus over forty years ago, with truly remarkable prescience, these two leaders of the British workers were creating new weapons tor safeguarding the intellectual foundations of bourgeois society. In one of the rooms of the London School are two large portraits of them, a testimony to human futility, for the London School in its time became a center of Marxist and neo-Marxist study, especially among the student body.</p>
<p>It is their subsequent career which enables us to see their earlier activities with the proper comprehensiveness. The Webbs supported the war of 1914-18; as soon as they war was over, they published books on the decay of capitalist civilization, and the outline of a socialist constitution for Great Britain. But against the Russian Revolution, Marxism in the flesh, they were as hostile as they had been to Marxism in the spirit, and they saw no difference between the Russia of Lenin and Trotsky and the Italy of Mussolini.<br>
</p>
<h4>Against Lenin and Trotsky; for Stalin</h4>
<p class="fst">How clear-sighted these well educated members of the English ruling class were is proved by the latest phase of their consistent political career.</p>
<p>In 1932, Russia as a source of revolution was still a subject of violent hatred and fear all over the bourgeois world. The Communist International was in the throes of the third period, preaching revolution today, not tomorrow, in every civilized country. Yet all this time, the Webbs divined the fundamental conservativeness of the Russian bureaucracy. They settled down to years of devoted labor and produced in 1936 a study of Russia entitled <strong>Soviet Communism, a New Civilization?</strong> It is stated that they received all the necessary documents from the Soviet government itself or at least from its representatives. They visited Russia and, as early as 1932, Beatrice Webb was talking enthusiastically over the British radio about the USSR. The book, inordinately long, can be described in a sentence. It was a compilation of all the plans – considered as accomplished facts – of the Soviet bureaucracy and its promises to the Russian people. With ignorance, dishonesty and with an ill-concealed malice, the book attacked Trotskyism. It said that the new civilization would spread its doctrine best by showing the world what it could do, instead of by the Trotskyist doctrine of world revolution.</p>
<p>The volume was well timed. In 1933 the British labor movement was in ferment and at the Brighton Conference voted by an overwhelming majority never to support British imperialism in another imperialist war. But in May, 1934, the USSR applied for membership in the League of Nations. The British labor bureaucrats, quaking at the Brighton vote, mobilized all their forces to swing British labor back into the imperialist fold under the smoke-screen of collective security, and the chief bait was Russia’s entry into the League. But the job was not easily done, and as tar as books and personal influence helped, the Webbs’ endorsement exercised enormous weight. They ended as they had begun, friends and advocates of anything which would help the workers, as long as they remained in their place; and enemies of everything which would help them to realize that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Socialism of the Webbs</h4>
<p class="fst">A curious episode later in her career illuminates the mental process of this very typical social democratic English woman. When the Labor Party took over the government in 1929, Sidney Webb was made Colonial Minister; and as the Labor Party was weak in the House of Lords, he assumed the title of Lord Passfield and entered the upper house. This for Beatrice Webb became a principled question. To become <em>Lady</em> Passfield was treason to socialism. But to remain Beatrice Webb was to insult the traditions of the British ruling class, her class (in her early life she had been presented at Court).</p>
<p>Here was a problem tor this septuagenarian. She could not solve it herself, and finally went to, above all people. Lord Balfour, a man who, in every possible respect, even in his personal appearance, was the most characteristic example extant of the traditional British aristocracy. He, the British earl, was to solve this socialist problem. As Marx found in his analysis of the commodity the clue to all the contradictions of capitalism, so you can see in this minor incident the clue to the Webbs’ politics. Balfour snubbed her with amused contempt, said he didn’t think the question was important. For her it was. She decided to remain Mrs. Webb, and the philistines applauded.</p>
<p>For us, she has a more than merely historical importance Lenin, puzzled at the contrast between the quality of Sidney Webb’s books and his apparently inane politics, once asked if the British bourgeoisie bribed him. Today, after forty years, we have no need to ask such questions. After 1914 and the long record of the post-war Social-Democracy, we deserve the branding iron if we are caught unawares by any of these people. Whatever their record, whatever their services, they are enemies of working class emancipation, and more conscious than we thought. They deserve from us no more and no less than the same unwearied, undeviating enmity that they have always shown to Marxism and the social revolution.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James
Beatrice Webb, Reformist
(May 1943)
From The New International, Vol. IX No. 5, May 1943, pp. 133–134; signed A.A.B.
Transcribed & marked up by Damon Maxwell in 2009.
In April, Beatrice Webb died. She was the wife of Sidney Webb, co-author with him of many famous books on the labor movement. Her career deserves examination.
She was born in 1858, the daughter of an English finance capitalist of international connections. She had both intelligence and character, and was expensively educated.
To appreciate the career of the Webbs, in this case Beatrice Webb, we must bear in mind the particular stage of development of European civilization in general, especially British capitalism, at the time when she grew to maturity. She was twenty-two in 1880, when European capitalism arrived at a consciousness of its own difficulties and inaugurated the age of imperialism by the division of Africa and other colonial areas.
During the ensuing years, Marxism as an intellectual force enjoyed an immense prestige in Europe. In Germany, the Marxists were the official opponents of bourgeois thought. In Austria, Francis Joseph’s financial minister, Bohm-Bawerk, devoted his literary life to the refutation of Marx. In Italy, Labriola, one of its most distinguished professors, was an open adherent; Gentile was for a time sympathetic to Marx; and Benedetto Croce, the greatest European scholar of his day, accepted in an academic way substantial elements of the doctrine. Masaryk thought it necessary to produce a ponderous volume against Marxism. We know what Marxism was in Russia; and even in France, Sorel, though no Marxist, was an apostle of violence and the class struggle.
Nor was this the interest of intellectuals only. In 1889, the Second International was organized under the aegis of Marxism. If in Britain there was only the unskillful pillage of Marx by Hyndman, there were sufficiently ominous signs. The growing loss of Britain’s position on the world market threw the British economy into disorder; and the interest culminated in two great strikes, the dock strike and the strike of the match girls, both in 1889, when the semi-skilled and the unskilled became organized for the first time.
To this historical milieu, Beatrice Potter, rich, able, cultured, well informed, idealistic and British, reacted with a political program that perfectly expressed the contradiction of her type. The thing to note is that it was conscious. She set herself to guide the British working class along the road of gradual, peaceful, constitutional progress to something she called “socialism,” and at the same time she waged an implacable war against Marxism and the doctrine of the class struggle. Her activities in the first sphere are widely known; not so well known are her activities in the second. In 1885, in one of her earliest writings, she denounced Marx’s economic theory and the doctrine of class struggle and revolution. At the same time she was carrying on an agitation against the living conditions of the poorer London workers which gained special prominence owing to her social position. She actually lived among them for some months in order to be able to speak with the necessary knowledge and authority.
In 1890 she married Sidney Webb, a brilliant young Oxford man and a British civil servant. In a most literal sense they were agents of the British ruling class, finance and administration, in the working class movement. Together they wrote the books which made them famous all over the world, their studies of the trade union movement, of English local government, and the Poor Law. They were neither passionate nor brilliant writers, but they were conscientious, they were thorough and they were able to do research with an expensive apparatus. They sincerely hated the obvious evils of capitalism. The harsh realities of the early struggles in the trade union movement and the corruption of early English local government forced its way through their essentially conservative temperament and stood out in their writings. The British labor movement was built ideologically on these works more than on any other, and Lenin, in exile in Siberia, studied the Webbs. The Webbs did distinguished work on the Royal Commission on the Poor Law. They drew up a famous minority report to this commission, which accomplished results and enhanced their reputation.
Opponents of Marxism
But these two people knew what they were doing. Their psychology may be left to future Marxist biographers. But this much is certain: that, while negatively they guided the working class in a reformist direction, positively they built an intellectual barrier against the powerful Marxist current on the continent. They spent time, money and influence in founding the London School of Economics for the special purpose of combating Marxism. Webb tor a time lectured there. Thus over forty years ago, with truly remarkable prescience, these two leaders of the British workers were creating new weapons tor safeguarding the intellectual foundations of bourgeois society. In one of the rooms of the London School are two large portraits of them, a testimony to human futility, for the London School in its time became a center of Marxist and neo-Marxist study, especially among the student body.
It is their subsequent career which enables us to see their earlier activities with the proper comprehensiveness. The Webbs supported the war of 1914-18; as soon as they war was over, they published books on the decay of capitalist civilization, and the outline of a socialist constitution for Great Britain. But against the Russian Revolution, Marxism in the flesh, they were as hostile as they had been to Marxism in the spirit, and they saw no difference between the Russia of Lenin and Trotsky and the Italy of Mussolini.
Against Lenin and Trotsky; for Stalin
How clear-sighted these well educated members of the English ruling class were is proved by the latest phase of their consistent political career.
In 1932, Russia as a source of revolution was still a subject of violent hatred and fear all over the bourgeois world. The Communist International was in the throes of the third period, preaching revolution today, not tomorrow, in every civilized country. Yet all this time, the Webbs divined the fundamental conservativeness of the Russian bureaucracy. They settled down to years of devoted labor and produced in 1936 a study of Russia entitled Soviet Communism, a New Civilization? It is stated that they received all the necessary documents from the Soviet government itself or at least from its representatives. They visited Russia and, as early as 1932, Beatrice Webb was talking enthusiastically over the British radio about the USSR. The book, inordinately long, can be described in a sentence. It was a compilation of all the plans – considered as accomplished facts – of the Soviet bureaucracy and its promises to the Russian people. With ignorance, dishonesty and with an ill-concealed malice, the book attacked Trotskyism. It said that the new civilization would spread its doctrine best by showing the world what it could do, instead of by the Trotskyist doctrine of world revolution.
The volume was well timed. In 1933 the British labor movement was in ferment and at the Brighton Conference voted by an overwhelming majority never to support British imperialism in another imperialist war. But in May, 1934, the USSR applied for membership in the League of Nations. The British labor bureaucrats, quaking at the Brighton vote, mobilized all their forces to swing British labor back into the imperialist fold under the smoke-screen of collective security, and the chief bait was Russia’s entry into the League. But the job was not easily done, and as tar as books and personal influence helped, the Webbs’ endorsement exercised enormous weight. They ended as they had begun, friends and advocates of anything which would help the workers, as long as they remained in their place; and enemies of everything which would help them to realize that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
The Socialism of the Webbs
A curious episode later in her career illuminates the mental process of this very typical social democratic English woman. When the Labor Party took over the government in 1929, Sidney Webb was made Colonial Minister; and as the Labor Party was weak in the House of Lords, he assumed the title of Lord Passfield and entered the upper house. This for Beatrice Webb became a principled question. To become Lady Passfield was treason to socialism. But to remain Beatrice Webb was to insult the traditions of the British ruling class, her class (in her early life she had been presented at Court).
Here was a problem tor this septuagenarian. She could not solve it herself, and finally went to, above all people. Lord Balfour, a man who, in every possible respect, even in his personal appearance, was the most characteristic example extant of the traditional British aristocracy. He, the British earl, was to solve this socialist problem. As Marx found in his analysis of the commodity the clue to all the contradictions of capitalism, so you can see in this minor incident the clue to the Webbs’ politics. Balfour snubbed her with amused contempt, said he didn’t think the question was important. For her it was. She decided to remain Mrs. Webb, and the philistines applauded.
For us, she has a more than merely historical importance Lenin, puzzled at the contrast between the quality of Sidney Webb’s books and his apparently inane politics, once asked if the British bourgeoisie bribed him. Today, after forty years, we have no need to ask such questions. After 1914 and the long record of the post-war Social-Democracy, we deserve the branding iron if we are caught unawares by any of these people. Whatever their record, whatever their services, they are enemies of working class emancipation, and more conscious than we thought. They deserve from us no more and no less than the same unwearied, undeviating enmity that they have always shown to Marxism and the social revolution.
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C.L.R. James
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>1946 – Survey of the Old Year Poses Labor’s Tasks – 1947</h1>
<h3>(30 December 1946)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_52" target="new">Vol. 10 No. 52</a>, 30 December 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The year 1946 is drawing to a close. It is a year in which there has never been so much employment in the United States. Some 60 million people have had what the capitalist press, for reasons of its own, likes to call “gainful” employment. Production, if not as high as during the later war years, has nevertheless soared beyond all bounds conceived of before the war.</p>
<p>During the year there has been no drought, earthquake, or tidal wave to wreck the constructions and plans by which men build civilization.</p>
<p>Except for the special barbarism of the South, the processes of democracy under capitalism have pursued their customary course. Parties have campaigned, people have listened and voted, legislatures and councils have assembled in true democratic fashion. No unions have been destroyed. If one union, the United Mine Workers, saw itself in danger of being annihilated financially, this attack was carried out by the government, headed personally by the President, and everything done was within the framework of capitalist law.</p>
<p><em>Abroad the United States is powerful as no other country has ever been in the whole history of mankind. All countries, ALL, tremble before the economic power and military might the U.S. displayed in the last war. Alone it holds the secret of the atomic bomb. The countries of the world, in every continent, either seek desperately to share in this economic and political power, or mobilize all their forces and allies in frantic attempts to ward off, to lessen, to undermine this colossal potential enemy.</em></p>
<p>Such is the reality of 1946. Surely this is the dream of capitalistic, of imperialistic ambition come true.</p>
<p>And yet, never, never, has the capitalist system been in such dire peril at home and abroad. The working class and the great masses of the people have demonstrated a bitterness, a resentment against their conditions of labor and of life which have repeatedly threatened the whole economy with paralysis. Leaders of rival labor organizations have been driven to closer unity than at any time during the past thirty years, forced to unite in a common defense against the threat to labor’s most elementary rights and liberties.</p>
<p><em>The capitalist class has found it necessary to mobilize itself in defense of its system, its profits and its privileges in a manner that shows it feels itself and all it stands for to be in serious danger. Class struggle and all its atfendant antagonisms have raged with unabated ferocity through every month of 1946, and as the. new year faces us there is no peace nor hint of peace.</em></p>
<p>Abroad the picture is the same. Capitalism has not known such imperialist antagonism as now exists between the U.S. and Stalinist Russia. Britain is torn between need for U.S. economic and military might, hatred of U.S. domination and fear of being sucked down by a crisis-ridden U.S. economy.</p>
<p><em>In Central Europe, where millions can exist only by means of doles from U.S. production, hatred for the arrogance, the incompetence and the black market thievery of the occupying forces grows apace. In India, in the Middle East, in the Far East, in Latin America, vast millions are learning to distinguish between the democratic pretensions and the actual close alliance with fascistic and reactionary cliques which characterize American policy in their countries.</em></p>
<p>This is the picture. Let him deny who can. Victory and sixty million jobs have only added sixty million torments, frustrations, enmities and defeats to the lives of the American people.</p>
<p>The capitalistic system under which we live is washed up. It can function only by antagonisms and maladjustments, suffering, lies, pretenses, repressions, hypocrisies, which show that its vital organs and mechanisms are in irreparable decay.</p>
<p><em>Democracy, “our free institutions,” have been the greatest pride of capitalism and above all of U.S. capitalism. Yet 1946 has seen democracy failing at every turn. Government of the people, by the people, for the people has been flouted at every critical stage of the life of the nation.</em></p>
<p>In the face of food shortages and rising prices, the people clamored for price control. If it had been possible to take a Gallup poll of the nation, it is safe to say that over 80 per cent of the population would have been overwhelmingly in favor of such control. Yet between them, Congress, the elected “representatives” of the people, and the President, directly elected by the people, broke the system of price control, such as it was, and frustrated the wishes of the people.</p>
<p><em>This was one of the great battles of the year and in it was exemplified the insoluble contradiction, the living fraud of capitalist democracy. For so long as the ownership, the control, the monopoly of the means of production are retained by a few there follows automatically the impotence of the votes of the many.</em></p>
<p>Capitalist parliamentarism cannot counteract this stranglehold by the monopolists upon the vital life-source of the nation. The workers and the great masses of the people wanted price control. The meat interests and their capitalistic allies simply starved out the people – refused to let them have any meat and related products until they had attained their end – the abolition of price control.</p>
<p><em>Once more capitalist democracy was exposed for what it was, the tool of capitalist interests. It was not long before a more brutal example of its true character was held up before the people. The meat interests had meanly, secretly and conspiratorially agreed with one another and Congress to starve the people into submission. But when the United Mine Workers openly before the nation demanded higher wages, then the same government which had been so helpless in face of the capitalist starvation of the people, suddenly recovered all its vigor.</em></p>
<p>Those capitalists who starved the nation had won their demands. The workers who demanded higher wages and better conditions for the most essential, the most difficult and most dangerous work in the country were met with all the judicial and propagandistic power at the disposal of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. When the capitalists withdrew their meat, complete capitulation by the state! When the miners withdrew their labor, complete mobilization by the state.</p>
<p>It is this, the capitalist character of all the institutions of production and of government which have racked the country during the past year. This is the root of the evil.</p>
<p><em>During the four years from 1941 to 1944, despite the fact that nearly 13 million of the youngest and most physically fit and best educated were withdrawn from labor, production in the United States reached astonishing heights. The government fed, clothed, housed, drilled, educated, transported these millions to various ends of the earth. At the same time it could give a pittance to their dependents. It built ships, it built planes and tanks and guns lavishly. It produced food for the U.S., food for Britain, food for Russia, munitions for the U.S., munitions for Britain, munitions for Russia.</em></p>
<p>But in 1946 the war was over. The same people, the same nation, wanted housing. This same government, which could perform so much in 1940-44, suddenly has become impotent. It can do nothing. It could take two billion dollars during the war, find labor, build whole towns, produce an atomic bomb. It could build supply lines running from the heart of the United States to the center of Asia, the heart of Africa, to Iceland, to Italy, to anywhere!</p>
<p><em>But houses? It cannot. It doesn’t know what to do. And a housing shortage of unprecedented scope has poisoned home life in the United States during the very year 1946 when possibilities of building existed such as have never existed before.</em></p>
<p>Under capitalism and its democracy, it is what capital wants that wins, not what the people want. Look back again at 1946. The people wanted a great housing program. What have they got? The people want rent control. Of every 100 people, Democratic or Republican, 99 want rent control. Yet 1946, gloomy as it has been, has its last days clouded still more by the fact that unless a herculean effort is made by the public, their rents are going to be raised. Vote Democrat, vote Republican – the result is the same.<br>
</p>
<h4>Wave of Brutality</h4>
<p class="fst">Thus 1946, the year after the great war for democracy, has seen a wave of brutality against Negroes such as has not been seen in this country for 20 years. A crop of lynchings all over the country, particularly the South, shocked the nation. Tens’ of millions, white and black, both North and South, felt that such a lynching as that of the two Negro couples in Georgia, threatened something vital to the existence and the reputation of the U.S. as a civilized country.</p>
<p>The federal government, Congress, the judiciary, all of them suddenly realized their impotence. They could do nothing. They had tracked down German spies and celebrated it in films. OSS had carried on sabotage and espionage in all quarters of the globe; in a few weeks the government would build up a legal case against John L. Lewis which would threaten the union he leads with financial extinction. Truman was ready to. use Army, Navy and Air Force against the railway men. He used the whole judicial system against the UMW. But against the lynchers, the capitalist state suddenly goes bankrupt in every nerve and limb. He is a blind tool and slave of capitalism who cannot see that the state is the tool and slave of the economic powers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Power of Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">Yet if 1946 has shown us the pretenses and the realities of capitalist democracy as never before, by the same token the year shows us the growing recognition of the need for united resistance among the organized workers. There lies the only power strong enough to challenge, to engage and to conquer capital.</p>
<p><em>For organized labor the year has been a testing-ground, and organized labor has struggled and suffered and learned. The UAW strike, the steel strike, the splendid series of maritime strikes, the strike of the railwaymen, in all these heroic efforts labor repeatedly showed its determination not to be deflected from its objectives by the government.</em></p>
<p>But as the prices rose and turned the wage gains to ashes, there slowly grew in the working class a sober realization that such strikes did not bring the desired results. The attempt of the government to smash the UMW was a rallying signal to all labor. From one end of the country to the other could be heard the recognition by labor that the threat to Lewis was a threat to the whole labor movement. It culminated in the letter of Murray to the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods calling for united action.</p>
<p><em>In Detroit, the storm center of capital-labor relations in the crisis-ridden U.S., AFL and CIO prepared for a 24-hour general strike to demonstrate labor solidarity with the UMW and defiance of the government.</em></p>
<p>As the year ends, the UAW, the Steel-Workers and the United Electrical Workers are planning a joint strategy which they and the whole country know will set the pattern for the wage negotiations and inevitable struggles which will begin in 1947.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Will 1947 Bring?</h4>
<p class="fst">Who seeks some order, some pattern, some line of thought by which to orient his thinking and his actions had better learn to read the lessons of 1946. Magnificent productive power on the one hand and an almost malicious incapacity to satisfy the needs of the people on the other. A type of democracy which produces a government able to perform miracles for the capitalists, but which is powerless to implement the clearly-expressed wishes of the people, a government which springs into life and energy only when it is necessary to intimidate and beat down the labor movement.</p>
<p><em>And where lies salvation? Not in the sky. But there under our eyes the force which will replace capitalism (or otherwise we perish), there under our eyes, the labor movement has fought the capitalist class and its capitalist government unceasingly through the year. That struggle continues. That is already the keynote of 1947.</em></p>
<p>What will 1947 bring? No one can tell. But this much is certain. The capitalist government, capitalist democracy, cannot change its spots. It is as it is and does as it does because it must. It represents capitalist interests against the great body of the nation.</p>
<p><em>It is the type of government that must be changed. We want a government of the workers, based upon the economic power of the working class, their ownership and control of the means of production, of the resources of the nation. How could such a government, a people’s government in the most genuine sense of that term, how could it deny, flout and cheat the wishes of the people.</em></p>
<p>As we look into the darkening gloom of 1947 we can see a way out if we can only grasp the true pattern of 1946 – increasing decay and barbarism of capitalist civilization, increasing solidarity of labor against this unbearable chaos and tyranny.<br>
</p>
<h4>Must See Task</h4>
<p class="fst">But to struggle successfully labor must see its task clearly. That task can be summed up in a sentence. It is to replace the capitalist government with a workers’ government.</p>
<p>Unity of labor, organize the unorganized, especially organize the South, defense of the living standards of the lower middles classes; joint labor-farmer committees; defense of the democratic rights and abroad, all American aid to workers’ and farmers’ political and industrial organizations abroad; these and a dozen other slogans, programs aims, aspirations, hopes, form the content of the struggles of American labor in this year which faces us and for years to come.</p>
<p><em>But they will achieve their fullest fruition, awaken the greatest enthusiasm, call forth miracles of organization and sacrifice as yet unseen, only when labor has its own independent political party, its own independent aim, mortal struggle against the pretenses of capitalist democracy, and its own proud goal, a free socialist society.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
1946 – Survey of the Old Year Poses Labor’s Tasks – 1947
(30 December 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 52, 30 December 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The year 1946 is drawing to a close. It is a year in which there has never been so much employment in the United States. Some 60 million people have had what the capitalist press, for reasons of its own, likes to call “gainful” employment. Production, if not as high as during the later war years, has nevertheless soared beyond all bounds conceived of before the war.
During the year there has been no drought, earthquake, or tidal wave to wreck the constructions and plans by which men build civilization.
Except for the special barbarism of the South, the processes of democracy under capitalism have pursued their customary course. Parties have campaigned, people have listened and voted, legislatures and councils have assembled in true democratic fashion. No unions have been destroyed. If one union, the United Mine Workers, saw itself in danger of being annihilated financially, this attack was carried out by the government, headed personally by the President, and everything done was within the framework of capitalist law.
Abroad the United States is powerful as no other country has ever been in the whole history of mankind. All countries, ALL, tremble before the economic power and military might the U.S. displayed in the last war. Alone it holds the secret of the atomic bomb. The countries of the world, in every continent, either seek desperately to share in this economic and political power, or mobilize all their forces and allies in frantic attempts to ward off, to lessen, to undermine this colossal potential enemy.
Such is the reality of 1946. Surely this is the dream of capitalistic, of imperialistic ambition come true.
And yet, never, never, has the capitalist system been in such dire peril at home and abroad. The working class and the great masses of the people have demonstrated a bitterness, a resentment against their conditions of labor and of life which have repeatedly threatened the whole economy with paralysis. Leaders of rival labor organizations have been driven to closer unity than at any time during the past thirty years, forced to unite in a common defense against the threat to labor’s most elementary rights and liberties.
The capitalist class has found it necessary to mobilize itself in defense of its system, its profits and its privileges in a manner that shows it feels itself and all it stands for to be in serious danger. Class struggle and all its atfendant antagonisms have raged with unabated ferocity through every month of 1946, and as the. new year faces us there is no peace nor hint of peace.
Abroad the picture is the same. Capitalism has not known such imperialist antagonism as now exists between the U.S. and Stalinist Russia. Britain is torn between need for U.S. economic and military might, hatred of U.S. domination and fear of being sucked down by a crisis-ridden U.S. economy.
In Central Europe, where millions can exist only by means of doles from U.S. production, hatred for the arrogance, the incompetence and the black market thievery of the occupying forces grows apace. In India, in the Middle East, in the Far East, in Latin America, vast millions are learning to distinguish between the democratic pretensions and the actual close alliance with fascistic and reactionary cliques which characterize American policy in their countries.
This is the picture. Let him deny who can. Victory and sixty million jobs have only added sixty million torments, frustrations, enmities and defeats to the lives of the American people.
The capitalistic system under which we live is washed up. It can function only by antagonisms and maladjustments, suffering, lies, pretenses, repressions, hypocrisies, which show that its vital organs and mechanisms are in irreparable decay.
Democracy, “our free institutions,” have been the greatest pride of capitalism and above all of U.S. capitalism. Yet 1946 has seen democracy failing at every turn. Government of the people, by the people, for the people has been flouted at every critical stage of the life of the nation.
In the face of food shortages and rising prices, the people clamored for price control. If it had been possible to take a Gallup poll of the nation, it is safe to say that over 80 per cent of the population would have been overwhelmingly in favor of such control. Yet between them, Congress, the elected “representatives” of the people, and the President, directly elected by the people, broke the system of price control, such as it was, and frustrated the wishes of the people.
This was one of the great battles of the year and in it was exemplified the insoluble contradiction, the living fraud of capitalist democracy. For so long as the ownership, the control, the monopoly of the means of production are retained by a few there follows automatically the impotence of the votes of the many.
Capitalist parliamentarism cannot counteract this stranglehold by the monopolists upon the vital life-source of the nation. The workers and the great masses of the people wanted price control. The meat interests and their capitalistic allies simply starved out the people – refused to let them have any meat and related products until they had attained their end – the abolition of price control.
Once more capitalist democracy was exposed for what it was, the tool of capitalist interests. It was not long before a more brutal example of its true character was held up before the people. The meat interests had meanly, secretly and conspiratorially agreed with one another and Congress to starve the people into submission. But when the United Mine Workers openly before the nation demanded higher wages, then the same government which had been so helpless in face of the capitalist starvation of the people, suddenly recovered all its vigor.
Those capitalists who starved the nation had won their demands. The workers who demanded higher wages and better conditions for the most essential, the most difficult and most dangerous work in the country were met with all the judicial and propagandistic power at the disposal of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. When the capitalists withdrew their meat, complete capitulation by the state! When the miners withdrew their labor, complete mobilization by the state.
It is this, the capitalist character of all the institutions of production and of government which have racked the country during the past year. This is the root of the evil.
During the four years from 1941 to 1944, despite the fact that nearly 13 million of the youngest and most physically fit and best educated were withdrawn from labor, production in the United States reached astonishing heights. The government fed, clothed, housed, drilled, educated, transported these millions to various ends of the earth. At the same time it could give a pittance to their dependents. It built ships, it built planes and tanks and guns lavishly. It produced food for the U.S., food for Britain, food for Russia, munitions for the U.S., munitions for Britain, munitions for Russia.
But in 1946 the war was over. The same people, the same nation, wanted housing. This same government, which could perform so much in 1940-44, suddenly has become impotent. It can do nothing. It could take two billion dollars during the war, find labor, build whole towns, produce an atomic bomb. It could build supply lines running from the heart of the United States to the center of Asia, the heart of Africa, to Iceland, to Italy, to anywhere!
But houses? It cannot. It doesn’t know what to do. And a housing shortage of unprecedented scope has poisoned home life in the United States during the very year 1946 when possibilities of building existed such as have never existed before.
Under capitalism and its democracy, it is what capital wants that wins, not what the people want. Look back again at 1946. The people wanted a great housing program. What have they got? The people want rent control. Of every 100 people, Democratic or Republican, 99 want rent control. Yet 1946, gloomy as it has been, has its last days clouded still more by the fact that unless a herculean effort is made by the public, their rents are going to be raised. Vote Democrat, vote Republican – the result is the same.
Wave of Brutality
Thus 1946, the year after the great war for democracy, has seen a wave of brutality against Negroes such as has not been seen in this country for 20 years. A crop of lynchings all over the country, particularly the South, shocked the nation. Tens’ of millions, white and black, both North and South, felt that such a lynching as that of the two Negro couples in Georgia, threatened something vital to the existence and the reputation of the U.S. as a civilized country.
The federal government, Congress, the judiciary, all of them suddenly realized their impotence. They could do nothing. They had tracked down German spies and celebrated it in films. OSS had carried on sabotage and espionage in all quarters of the globe; in a few weeks the government would build up a legal case against John L. Lewis which would threaten the union he leads with financial extinction. Truman was ready to. use Army, Navy and Air Force against the railway men. He used the whole judicial system against the UMW. But against the lynchers, the capitalist state suddenly goes bankrupt in every nerve and limb. He is a blind tool and slave of capitalism who cannot see that the state is the tool and slave of the economic powers.
Power of Workers
Yet if 1946 has shown us the pretenses and the realities of capitalist democracy as never before, by the same token the year shows us the growing recognition of the need for united resistance among the organized workers. There lies the only power strong enough to challenge, to engage and to conquer capital.
For organized labor the year has been a testing-ground, and organized labor has struggled and suffered and learned. The UAW strike, the steel strike, the splendid series of maritime strikes, the strike of the railwaymen, in all these heroic efforts labor repeatedly showed its determination not to be deflected from its objectives by the government.
But as the prices rose and turned the wage gains to ashes, there slowly grew in the working class a sober realization that such strikes did not bring the desired results. The attempt of the government to smash the UMW was a rallying signal to all labor. From one end of the country to the other could be heard the recognition by labor that the threat to Lewis was a threat to the whole labor movement. It culminated in the letter of Murray to the AFL and the Railroad Brotherhoods calling for united action.
In Detroit, the storm center of capital-labor relations in the crisis-ridden U.S., AFL and CIO prepared for a 24-hour general strike to demonstrate labor solidarity with the UMW and defiance of the government.
As the year ends, the UAW, the Steel-Workers and the United Electrical Workers are planning a joint strategy which they and the whole country know will set the pattern for the wage negotiations and inevitable struggles which will begin in 1947.
What Will 1947 Bring?
Who seeks some order, some pattern, some line of thought by which to orient his thinking and his actions had better learn to read the lessons of 1946. Magnificent productive power on the one hand and an almost malicious incapacity to satisfy the needs of the people on the other. A type of democracy which produces a government able to perform miracles for the capitalists, but which is powerless to implement the clearly-expressed wishes of the people, a government which springs into life and energy only when it is necessary to intimidate and beat down the labor movement.
And where lies salvation? Not in the sky. But there under our eyes the force which will replace capitalism (or otherwise we perish), there under our eyes, the labor movement has fought the capitalist class and its capitalist government unceasingly through the year. That struggle continues. That is already the keynote of 1947.
What will 1947 bring? No one can tell. But this much is certain. The capitalist government, capitalist democracy, cannot change its spots. It is as it is and does as it does because it must. It represents capitalist interests against the great body of the nation.
It is the type of government that must be changed. We want a government of the workers, based upon the economic power of the working class, their ownership and control of the means of production, of the resources of the nation. How could such a government, a people’s government in the most genuine sense of that term, how could it deny, flout and cheat the wishes of the people.
As we look into the darkening gloom of 1947 we can see a way out if we can only grasp the true pattern of 1946 – increasing decay and barbarism of capitalist civilization, increasing solidarity of labor against this unbearable chaos and tyranny.
Must See Task
But to struggle successfully labor must see its task clearly. That task can be summed up in a sentence. It is to replace the capitalist government with a workers’ government.
Unity of labor, organize the unorganized, especially organize the South, defense of the living standards of the lower middles classes; joint labor-farmer committees; defense of the democratic rights and abroad, all American aid to workers’ and farmers’ political and industrial organizations abroad; these and a dozen other slogans, programs aims, aspirations, hopes, form the content of the struggles of American labor in this year which faces us and for years to come.
But they will achieve their fullest fruition, awaken the greatest enthusiasm, call forth miracles of organization and sacrifice as yet unseen, only when labor has its own independent political party, its own independent aim, mortal struggle against the pretenses of capitalist democracy, and its own proud goal, a free socialist society.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>This Is Labor’s Own Problem!</h1>
<h3>(18 October 1943)</h3>
<hr>
<p>From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, Vol. 7 No. 42, 18 October 1943, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">This business of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and the hearings on racial discrimination on the railroads may soon have far greater significance then appears at present.</p>
<p>We pointed out last week that both the government and the rail companies are laying the chief blame on the railroad unions. The government took advantage of the situation to put itself in a fairly strong position. It can say: “Look. The government committee brought the question out into the open and exposed it.”</p>
<h4>Looking in the Wrong Place</h4>
<p class="fst">Now Negroes themselves are looking to the government to take steps on their behalf. Says the <strong>Pittsburgh Courier</strong> (December 25):</p>
<p class="quoteb">“One thing seems clear: that the FEPC is only a small part of the government machinery which must be brought into play to win for Negroes equal rights in the railroad industry.”</p>
<p class="fst">This sounds innocent and reasonable enough. But the <strong>Courier</strong> then goes on to say that the fight will be a terrific one against the combined power of “poll-tax congressmen, <em>the powerful railroad unions, with a million and a half members</em>, the powerful railroad combines, with money and power.” These, says the <strong>Courier</strong>, will do all in their power to make the FEPC and the President “back down on the issue.”</p>
<p>This is the general attitude of the Negro press. Labor, organized labor, must see to it that it does not continue. <em>It must bring pressure to bear on the railroad unions to separate themselves from the railroad combines on this question and to do it now.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>A Dangerous Proposal</h4>
<p class="fst">All labor is concerned. We repeat: ALL OF LABOR! Philip Randolph has demanded more funds for the FEPC and has also asked that the National Labor Relations Act be amended to give the National Labor Relations Board the power to act in cases of discrimination. This means direct interference by the government in the affairs of unions. It is a sentiment that is growing, and it must be fought on all fronts.</p>
<p>Let the capitalist government deal with the capitalist railroad combines. The relations between workers, Negro and white, in a union, are the concern of labor, Negro and white. All labor must unite to keep the government from interfering with the union movement. But to do this most effectively, labor must set its own house in order.</p>
<p>It is asserted in the Negro press (the <strong>Atlanta Daily World</strong> of September 21) that the government is actually preparing a bill to establish a Court of Fair Practices to carry on in peacetime the work done by the FEPC in wartime. The employers will be prohibited from refusing employment or discriminating in conditions of employment against persons on account of creed, race or color. But <em>“Unions would be called to book if they deny membership, expel from membership or discriminate in any way against an individual for similar reasons.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>It Can Turn Against Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">There is not question at all that such a bill can be turned into an instrument against labor. First, such a bill dealing with railroads will discredit labor. Next, it will make the Negroes think that the government, and not labor, is their friend; and, finally, <em>it will bring the labor unions more closely under government supervision</em>.</p>
<p>If such a bill is passed, every employer in the country will use it at the first sign of any dissatisfaction among backward elements with the promotion of Negroes in the plant or with complete equality of working conditions, etc. We may be sure that the bill will be drawn in such a way as to give the government far more powers than will appear in the press reports. The bill will also have loopholes enough for all of Wall Street to crawl in and out of as it suits them.</p>
<p>Labor must see this question in sound perspective. It is not only a matter of the rights of Negroes in the unions. It is that, but today it is more than that. It is a question of whether the capitalist government and the capitalist railroad combines will continue to persecute Negroes, shift, dodge, promise and not perform, and then, as now, seek to pass the buck. It is a question of whether this will continue or whether labor will boldly announce that the capitalist class cannot and will not solve the Negro problem, but that labor will solve it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Correcting Policy Is Our Job</h4>
<p class="fst">It is in labor’s total interest to do so, and, as this latest maneuver of the bosses shows, it is in labor’s immediate interest as well. Above all, it it must be recognized that this projected bill is the concern not only of railroad unions, but of all labor as well.</p>
<p><em>No one can correct errors in union policy except the great mass of our union rank and file. lt is, after all, our job and n0t the job of a bunch of professional politicians in league with big business.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
This Is Labor’s Own Problem!
(18 October 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 42, 18 October 1943, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
This business of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and the hearings on racial discrimination on the railroads may soon have far greater significance then appears at present.
We pointed out last week that both the government and the rail companies are laying the chief blame on the railroad unions. The government took advantage of the situation to put itself in a fairly strong position. It can say: “Look. The government committee brought the question out into the open and exposed it.”
Looking in the Wrong Place
Now Negroes themselves are looking to the government to take steps on their behalf. Says the Pittsburgh Courier (December 25):
“One thing seems clear: that the FEPC is only a small part of the government machinery which must be brought into play to win for Negroes equal rights in the railroad industry.”
This sounds innocent and reasonable enough. But the Courier then goes on to say that the fight will be a terrific one against the combined power of “poll-tax congressmen, the powerful railroad unions, with a million and a half members, the powerful railroad combines, with money and power.” These, says the Courier, will do all in their power to make the FEPC and the President “back down on the issue.”
This is the general attitude of the Negro press. Labor, organized labor, must see to it that it does not continue. It must bring pressure to bear on the railroad unions to separate themselves from the railroad combines on this question and to do it now.
A Dangerous Proposal
All labor is concerned. We repeat: ALL OF LABOR! Philip Randolph has demanded more funds for the FEPC and has also asked that the National Labor Relations Act be amended to give the National Labor Relations Board the power to act in cases of discrimination. This means direct interference by the government in the affairs of unions. It is a sentiment that is growing, and it must be fought on all fronts.
Let the capitalist government deal with the capitalist railroad combines. The relations between workers, Negro and white, in a union, are the concern of labor, Negro and white. All labor must unite to keep the government from interfering with the union movement. But to do this most effectively, labor must set its own house in order.
It is asserted in the Negro press (the Atlanta Daily World of September 21) that the government is actually preparing a bill to establish a Court of Fair Practices to carry on in peacetime the work done by the FEPC in wartime. The employers will be prohibited from refusing employment or discriminating in conditions of employment against persons on account of creed, race or color. But “Unions would be called to book if they deny membership, expel from membership or discriminate in any way against an individual for similar reasons.”
It Can Turn Against Labor
There is not question at all that such a bill can be turned into an instrument against labor. First, such a bill dealing with railroads will discredit labor. Next, it will make the Negroes think that the government, and not labor, is their friend; and, finally, it will bring the labor unions more closely under government supervision.
If such a bill is passed, every employer in the country will use it at the first sign of any dissatisfaction among backward elements with the promotion of Negroes in the plant or with complete equality of working conditions, etc. We may be sure that the bill will be drawn in such a way as to give the government far more powers than will appear in the press reports. The bill will also have loopholes enough for all of Wall Street to crawl in and out of as it suits them.
Labor must see this question in sound perspective. It is not only a matter of the rights of Negroes in the unions. It is that, but today it is more than that. It is a question of whether the capitalist government and the capitalist railroad combines will continue to persecute Negroes, shift, dodge, promise and not perform, and then, as now, seek to pass the buck. It is a question of whether this will continue or whether labor will boldly announce that the capitalist class cannot and will not solve the Negro problem, but that labor will solve it.
Correcting Policy Is Our Job
It is in labor’s total interest to do so, and, as this latest maneuver of the bosses shows, it is in labor’s immediate interest as well. Above all, it it must be recognized that this projected bill is the concern not only of railroad unions, but of all labor as well.
No one can correct errors in union policy except the great mass of our union rank and file. lt is, after all, our job and n0t the job of a bunch of professional politicians in league with big business.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>A New Joke – “Jim-Crow Helps The Negro Race”</h1>
<h3>(5 May 1941)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info"><em>The Negro’s Fight</em>, <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1941/index.htm#la05_18" target="new">Vol. 5 No. 18</a>, 5 May 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<table align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="quoteb">“Oh, Judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,<br>
And men have lost their reason.”</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">This, is what Shakespeare makes Mark Anthony (that great faker) say in the famous speech over Caesar’s dead body. Often when one looks at capitalist politics today one is tempted to say the same thing.</p>
<p>Friends, Americans and countrymen, lend me your ears. This war is a war for “democracy.” It is a war to preserve “a way of life,” it is a war against tyranny, persecution, aggression. It is a war for freedom. So our modern Mark Anthony, Franklin Roosevelt, says. And all the liberals and the labor leaders follow him shouting “Hosannah!”<br>
</p>
<h4>State Attorneys Give Their View</h4>
<p class="fst">Now one of our most precious “free” institutions is Congress, and in this Congress is one solitary Negro, Representative Arthur W. Mitchell. Brother Mitchell tried to travel in a Pullman coach in the South and was kicked out and made to go into another carriage. He filed an action. The case is before the Supreme Court. So far, nothing unusual. This happens regularly. (Since this column, was written, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of Negroes to travel in Pullmans. We will comment on this decision next week. – <em>Ed.</em>)</p>
<p>But note now what has been the result. The attorney generals of ten states, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, these men who are the expounders of the laws of democracy, they drew up an appeal and sent it to the Supreme Court, asking it not to take any decision on this question. These lawyers of democracy say that the Jim Crow jungle laws (most elegantly called, “segregation statutes”) “were enacted for the purpose of promoting the welfare, comfort, peace and safety of the people of both races.” And these attorney generals of “democracy” say that “it” is a matter of common knowledge, which this court probably knows, “that in those states which are parties to this brief, where large numbers of both races reside, such statutes do, in truth and in fact, promote the welfare, comfort, peace and safety of the people of both races.”</p>
<p>In other words, these men of “democratic” law say this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If Representative Arthur Mitchell or any black man travels with whites, he is personally offensive to the whites. We don’t want him. He offends our welfare and our comfort.</p>
<p class="quote">“If he insists on traveling, we southerners are going to beat him up. That will offend his peace and safety. In the course of beating him up of lynching him, he and his friends may hurt some of us. That offends OUR peace and safety. So the laws are for the benefit of both of us. Therefore, Supreme Court, do not interfere.”<br>
</p>
<h4>These Is a Reason for What They Say</h4>
<p class="fst">Is it any wonder that Hitler laughs at Franklin Roosevelt’s pretentious to being a defender of “democracy”? There are ten million Negroes in the South whom these and similar laws directly affect. There were only about half a million Jews in Germany. If Hitler had said that the laws against the Jews were passed for their comfort, peace, welfare and safety, how. Mark Anthony Roosevelt would have thundered. Hitler, however, says simply and plainly: “We don’t want you Jews. Get out.” But these southern democrats say that their fascist types of racial laws are FOR the BENEFIT of the Negroes; and the men of law, the attorney generals, write to the Supreme Court and say the same thing.</p>
<p>We began by quoting the passage from Shakespeare, saying that men had lost their reason. Have these southerners lost their reason? Oh, no! They want to keep the Negro where he is in order to exploit him, to work him hard and pay him cheap. That is why they tell these abominable lies and talk this abominable legal nonsense. They SEEM to have lost their reason. In reality they have very good reasons for saying what they do. But the Negroes have very good reason for saying:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“You and your holy war against fascism may suit you, but they don’t suit me! I have my war. And it is against you, Messrs. Attorney Generals, to break that system which is so rotten that it compels its defenders to talk like men who have just come out of a lunatic asylum.”</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
A New Joke – “Jim-Crow Helps The Negro Race”
(5 May 1941)
The Negro’s Fight, Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 18, 5 May 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“Oh, Judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.”
This, is what Shakespeare makes Mark Anthony (that great faker) say in the famous speech over Caesar’s dead body. Often when one looks at capitalist politics today one is tempted to say the same thing.
Friends, Americans and countrymen, lend me your ears. This war is a war for “democracy.” It is a war to preserve “a way of life,” it is a war against tyranny, persecution, aggression. It is a war for freedom. So our modern Mark Anthony, Franklin Roosevelt, says. And all the liberals and the labor leaders follow him shouting “Hosannah!”
State Attorneys Give Their View
Now one of our most precious “free” institutions is Congress, and in this Congress is one solitary Negro, Representative Arthur W. Mitchell. Brother Mitchell tried to travel in a Pullman coach in the South and was kicked out and made to go into another carriage. He filed an action. The case is before the Supreme Court. So far, nothing unusual. This happens regularly. (Since this column, was written, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of Negroes to travel in Pullmans. We will comment on this decision next week. – Ed.)
But note now what has been the result. The attorney generals of ten states, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, these men who are the expounders of the laws of democracy, they drew up an appeal and sent it to the Supreme Court, asking it not to take any decision on this question. These lawyers of democracy say that the Jim Crow jungle laws (most elegantly called, “segregation statutes”) “were enacted for the purpose of promoting the welfare, comfort, peace and safety of the people of both races.” And these attorney generals of “democracy” say that “it” is a matter of common knowledge, which this court probably knows, “that in those states which are parties to this brief, where large numbers of both races reside, such statutes do, in truth and in fact, promote the welfare, comfort, peace and safety of the people of both races.”
In other words, these men of “democratic” law say this:
“If Representative Arthur Mitchell or any black man travels with whites, he is personally offensive to the whites. We don’t want him. He offends our welfare and our comfort.
“If he insists on traveling, we southerners are going to beat him up. That will offend his peace and safety. In the course of beating him up of lynching him, he and his friends may hurt some of us. That offends OUR peace and safety. So the laws are for the benefit of both of us. Therefore, Supreme Court, do not interfere.”
These Is a Reason for What They Say
Is it any wonder that Hitler laughs at Franklin Roosevelt’s pretentious to being a defender of “democracy”? There are ten million Negroes in the South whom these and similar laws directly affect. There were only about half a million Jews in Germany. If Hitler had said that the laws against the Jews were passed for their comfort, peace, welfare and safety, how. Mark Anthony Roosevelt would have thundered. Hitler, however, says simply and plainly: “We don’t want you Jews. Get out.” But these southern democrats say that their fascist types of racial laws are FOR the BENEFIT of the Negroes; and the men of law, the attorney generals, write to the Supreme Court and say the same thing.
We began by quoting the passage from Shakespeare, saying that men had lost their reason. Have these southerners lost their reason? Oh, no! They want to keep the Negro where he is in order to exploit him, to work him hard and pay him cheap. That is why they tell these abominable lies and talk this abominable legal nonsense. They SEEM to have lost their reason. In reality they have very good reasons for saying what they do. But the Negroes have very good reason for saying:
“You and your holy war against fascism may suit you, but they don’t suit me! I have my war. And it is against you, Messrs. Attorney Generals, to break that system which is so rotten that it compels its defenders to talk like men who have just come out of a lunatic asylum.”
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<p class="title">C. L. R. James 1962</p>
<img src="cover.jpg" align="right" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="2" width="400">
<h3>Marxism and the Intellectuals<br>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">The working class and socialism in<br>a review of two books by British socialist Raymond Williams.<br>Plus documentary material on the destruction of a workers paper</span></h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">First published</span>: in May 1962 by the Facing Reality Publishing Committee, 14832 Parkside, Detroit 38, Michigan;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Damon Maxwell.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="indentb">
<a href="introduction.htm">An Introductory Statement</a> by Martin Glaberman <br>
</p><p class="index">Marxism and the Intellectuals</p>
<p class="indentb">
I. <a href="ch01.htm">The Creative Power of the Working Class</a><br>
II. <a href="ch02.htm">The American Working Class</a></p>
<p class="index">The Destruction of a Workers Paper </p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="statement.htm">A Statement to the Editorial Board </a><br>
<a href="dear-grace.htm">Letter to Grace Lee Boggs </a><br>
<a href="lenin-working-class.htm">Lenin on the Working Class</a><br>
<a href="postscript.htm">Postscript</a><br>
</p><p class="index">Working Class Journalism: Extracts from Two Letters</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="letter1.htm">Facing Reality – Now</a><br>
<a href="letter2.htm">To Freddy Paine</a> from Martin Glaberman<br>
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C. L. R. James 1962
Marxism and the Intellectuals
The working class and socialism ina review of two books by British socialist Raymond Williams.Plus documentary material on the destruction of a workers paper
First published: in May 1962 by the Facing Reality Publishing Committee, 14832 Parkside, Detroit 38, Michigan;
Transcribed: by Damon Maxwell.
An Introductory Statement by Martin Glaberman
Marxism and the Intellectuals
I. The Creative Power of the Working Class
II. The American Working Class
The Destruction of a Workers Paper
A Statement to the Editorial Board
Letter to Grace Lee Boggs
Lenin on the Working Class
Postscript
Working Class Journalism: Extracts from Two Letters
Facing Reality – Now
To Freddy Paine from Martin Glaberman
C. L. R. James Archive
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1936</p>
<h3>“Civilising” the “Blacks”; Why Britain needs to Maintain Her African Possessions</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>New Leader</em>, 29 May 1936;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Christian Hogsbjerg for Marxists.org 2007.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>Never was a book more timely than George Padmore’s <em>How Britain Rules Africa</em> (Wishart, 12s. 6d). The chapter on South Africa is particularly relevant. By false documents, by making chiefs drunk, by setting tribes against each other, by missionaries preaching religion, by every sort of dishonesty, and when that failed, by ruthless conquest, all of which is described in this book, Dutch and British brought the natives under their control, steadily fighting each other meanwhile. The British defeated the Boers, and both British and Dutch settled down to joint exploitation.</p>
<p>The native proletariat on the mines live in huge concentration camps, guarded night and day. They sleep like cattle on the concrete floor. After a meal of cold mealie porridge they are in the mines at 3 a.m. They may have to work in water to the waist for days. The white miners have tall rubber boots, stand in dry places, and order about and kick the blacks who do the work. If the black does not do his quota, the whole day’s pay is forfeit.</p>
<h5>Why We Are Concerned</h5>
<p>At 4.30 work stops, and the native gets a warm meal consisting of the same mealie with beans – once a week three-quarters of a pound of meat. His wage is �36 a year, and ‘skilled labour’ gets on the average �376 a year. But by law no native may become skilled.</p>
<p>The British worker may say, ‘I am sorry for these poor beggars, but I can’t take the troubles of the whole world on my shoulders.’ He would be wrong. In the last twenty-five years the mineral wealth of South Africa alone has produced for British and allied capital �1,578,541,929. The annual income of the gold-mining industry is over �65 millions per year. Some of Britain’s share, but very little, goes in the form of super-tax towards the social services. Some goes seeking investment elsewhere and laying the basis for Imperialist war. </p>
<p>But its most important function is to swell the ranks of the parasitic petty-bourgeoisie at Brighton and Southport, to give good wages to certain workers who create a firm support for Citrine, Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Lansbury and Co., and thus, in the last analysis, keep the great millions of British workers in firm subjection. And that is why Mussolini will risk his regime for Abyssinia.</p>
<p>The book relentlessly exposes the ‘civilisation’ lie. In South Africa 1,800,000 whites have stolen 80 percent of the best land, 7,000,000 Bantu have 8 percent. After that you only have to tax him, and to pay the tax he must come to work at whatever wages you want to pay. Out of the funds raised by native taxation the South African Government spends �650,000 on the education of 500,000 native children, but out of general revenue, contributed to by white and black, �10 million on 400,000 Europeans. There are today in South Africa, after 300 years of European domination, but five native doctors.</p>
<h5>Lies and Hypocrisy</h5>
<p>Except in parts of West Africa and Uganda, where the Europeans cannot settle, the tale is the same. In Rhodesia and Kenya the natives are paid fourpence and fivepence a day, and then taxed to help educate European children. The imperialists strive to keep him ignorant. They educate him through missionary schools which confuse him with talk about suffering and obedience and the life to come. In Kenya the natives tried to organise their own schools. The Government closed them down. In Tanganyika they forbid English in the schools, lest the native might learn things not good for him.</p>
<p>Tyranny and oppression in the Colonies, and lies and hypocrisy at home, in order that the British worker may be acquiescent and peaceably assist in forging his own chains. In West Africa the native has his land, but in 1930 Imperialists paid �29 16s. per ton for cocoa at Lagos and sold for �35 12s. at Liverpool. So capitalism, by its control of prices at home and abroad, keeps its profits up though people buy less.</p>
<p>The book is not easy reading; it could have been better arranged; it badly needs an index. But as a picture of Africa today, economic and political, it is a masterpiece of reliable information, knowledge and understanding, and easily the best book of its type that has yet appeared. </p>
<h5>Workers’ Co-operation</h5>
<p>It is on the future of Africa that the author, himself a man of African descent, is grievously disappointing. He heads one section ‘Will Britain Betray Her Trust?’ as if he were some missionary or Labour politician. In the true tradition of Lenin, he insists on the rights of the African people to choose their own development. But, astonishingly, he welcomes the appeal of ‘enlightened far-sighted sections of the ruling classes of Europe with colonial interests in Africa’ to co-operate with Africans. That is madness. How does the lion co-operate with the lamb?</p>
<p>Africans must win their own freedom. Nobody will win it for them. They need co-operation, but that co-operation must be with the revolutionary movement in Europe and Asia. There is no other way out. Each movement will neglect the other at its peril, and there is not much time left. The great cracks in the imperialist structure are widening day by day.</p>
<p><em>Africa Answers Back</em>, by Prince Nyabongo (Routledge, 7s. 6d.), himself an African educated at Yale and Oxford, describes the native life of an East African tribe. The book, authoritative and written with disarming simplicity, is a powerful satire on the imperialist claim that it ‘civilises’ Africa. It was an enormous success in America, and will be here also. </p>
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C.L.R. James 1936
“Civilising” the “Blacks”; Why Britain needs to Maintain Her African Possessions
Source: New Leader, 29 May 1936;
Transcribed: by Christian Hogsbjerg for Marxists.org 2007.
Never was a book more timely than George Padmore’s How Britain Rules Africa (Wishart, 12s. 6d). The chapter on South Africa is particularly relevant. By false documents, by making chiefs drunk, by setting tribes against each other, by missionaries preaching religion, by every sort of dishonesty, and when that failed, by ruthless conquest, all of which is described in this book, Dutch and British brought the natives under their control, steadily fighting each other meanwhile. The British defeated the Boers, and both British and Dutch settled down to joint exploitation.
The native proletariat on the mines live in huge concentration camps, guarded night and day. They sleep like cattle on the concrete floor. After a meal of cold mealie porridge they are in the mines at 3 a.m. They may have to work in water to the waist for days. The white miners have tall rubber boots, stand in dry places, and order about and kick the blacks who do the work. If the black does not do his quota, the whole day’s pay is forfeit.
Why We Are Concerned
At 4.30 work stops, and the native gets a warm meal consisting of the same mealie with beans – once a week three-quarters of a pound of meat. His wage is �36 a year, and ‘skilled labour’ gets on the average �376 a year. But by law no native may become skilled.
The British worker may say, ‘I am sorry for these poor beggars, but I can’t take the troubles of the whole world on my shoulders.’ He would be wrong. In the last twenty-five years the mineral wealth of South Africa alone has produced for British and allied capital �1,578,541,929. The annual income of the gold-mining industry is over �65 millions per year. Some of Britain’s share, but very little, goes in the form of super-tax towards the social services. Some goes seeking investment elsewhere and laying the basis for Imperialist war.
But its most important function is to swell the ranks of the parasitic petty-bourgeoisie at Brighton and Southport, to give good wages to certain workers who create a firm support for Citrine, Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Lansbury and Co., and thus, in the last analysis, keep the great millions of British workers in firm subjection. And that is why Mussolini will risk his regime for Abyssinia.
The book relentlessly exposes the ‘civilisation’ lie. In South Africa 1,800,000 whites have stolen 80 percent of the best land, 7,000,000 Bantu have 8 percent. After that you only have to tax him, and to pay the tax he must come to work at whatever wages you want to pay. Out of the funds raised by native taxation the South African Government spends �650,000 on the education of 500,000 native children, but out of general revenue, contributed to by white and black, �10 million on 400,000 Europeans. There are today in South Africa, after 300 years of European domination, but five native doctors.
Lies and Hypocrisy
Except in parts of West Africa and Uganda, where the Europeans cannot settle, the tale is the same. In Rhodesia and Kenya the natives are paid fourpence and fivepence a day, and then taxed to help educate European children. The imperialists strive to keep him ignorant. They educate him through missionary schools which confuse him with talk about suffering and obedience and the life to come. In Kenya the natives tried to organise their own schools. The Government closed them down. In Tanganyika they forbid English in the schools, lest the native might learn things not good for him.
Tyranny and oppression in the Colonies, and lies and hypocrisy at home, in order that the British worker may be acquiescent and peaceably assist in forging his own chains. In West Africa the native has his land, but in 1930 Imperialists paid �29 16s. per ton for cocoa at Lagos and sold for �35 12s. at Liverpool. So capitalism, by its control of prices at home and abroad, keeps its profits up though people buy less.
The book is not easy reading; it could have been better arranged; it badly needs an index. But as a picture of Africa today, economic and political, it is a masterpiece of reliable information, knowledge and understanding, and easily the best book of its type that has yet appeared.
Workers’ Co-operation
It is on the future of Africa that the author, himself a man of African descent, is grievously disappointing. He heads one section ‘Will Britain Betray Her Trust?’ as if he were some missionary or Labour politician. In the true tradition of Lenin, he insists on the rights of the African people to choose their own development. But, astonishingly, he welcomes the appeal of ‘enlightened far-sighted sections of the ruling classes of Europe with colonial interests in Africa’ to co-operate with Africans. That is madness. How does the lion co-operate with the lamb?
Africans must win their own freedom. Nobody will win it for them. They need co-operation, but that co-operation must be with the revolutionary movement in Europe and Asia. There is no other way out. Each movement will neglect the other at its peril, and there is not much time left. The great cracks in the imperialist structure are widening day by day.
Africa Answers Back, by Prince Nyabongo (Routledge, 7s. 6d.), himself an African educated at Yale and Oxford, describes the native life of an East African tribe. The book, authoritative and written with disarming simplicity, is a powerful satire on the imperialist claim that it ‘civilises’ Africa. It was an enormous success in America, and will be here also.
C.L.R. James Archive
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<blockquote>
<div class="border">
<h2>C L R James on Hegel</h2>
<h3>Notes on Dialectics: PART II<br>
The Hegelian Logic</h3>
<hr class="section">
<p class="pagenote">“ ... and now before we go on, do me a little favour, friends. Just sit down and read this whole previous section over. No? OK. As Marx said in the last paragraph of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, do what you like now. I have saved my own soul...” <a href="james6.htm">Doctrine of Notion</a></p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source:</span> Notes on Dialectics, CLR James, first published 1948;<br>
<span class="info">Selection</span>: About half of Part II reproduced, concentrating on commentary on the Logic;<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Allison & Busby, 1980;<br>
<span class="info">HTML Markup: </span><a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/ablunden.htm">Andy Blunden</a>.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="index">
<a href="james2.htm">The Doctrine of Being</a><br>
<a href="james3.htm">The Doctrine of Essence</a><br>
<a href="james4.htm">Review and Leninist Interlude</a><br>
<a href="james5.htm">Appearance and Actuality</a><br>
<a href="james6.htm">The Doctrine of The Notion</a><br>
<a href="james7.htm">Leninism and the Notion</a><br>
</p>
<hr class="section">
<p class="toc">Further reading:</p>
<p class="information">
<a href="../../../lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/index.htm">Annotations on Hegel’s Logic</a>, by Lenin 1914<br>
<a href="../../../dunayevskaya/works/1972/misc/james.htm">On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics</a>, by Raya Dunayevskaya 1972<br>
<a href="../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slconten.htm"> Hegel’s Logic</a></p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">C L R James Internet Archive</a> </p>
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</body> |
C L R James on Hegel
Notes on Dialectics: PART II
The Hegelian Logic
“ ... and now before we go on, do me a little favour, friends. Just sit down and read this whole previous section over. No? OK. As Marx said in the last paragraph of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, do what you like now. I have saved my own soul...” Doctrine of Notion
Source: Notes on Dialectics, CLR James, first published 1948;
Selection: About half of Part II reproduced, concentrating on commentary on the Logic;
Publisher: Allison & Busby, 1980;
HTML Markup: Andy Blunden.
The Doctrine of Being
The Doctrine of Essence
Review and Leninist Interlude
Appearance and Actuality
The Doctrine of The Notion
Leninism and the Notion
Further reading:
Annotations on Hegel’s Logic, by Lenin 1914
On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics, by Raya Dunayevskaya 1972
Hegel’s Logic
C L R James Internet Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>A Great Figure in American History</h1>
<h3>(December 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_49" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 49</a>, 4 December 1944, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">I wish to begin this column with a tribute to a man to whom I shall often refer. His name is Frederick Douglass. He is known as a great fighter on behalf of the abolition of slavery, as a great orator, great propagandist, etc. I want here to emphasize his career as a political strategist.</p>
<p>The leaders of the Abolitionists were, of course, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. It is not often remembered that for some twenty years before 1861 their policy for the abolition of slavery was that the South should secede. Day in and day out they preached that doctrine, and, when, after Lincoln’s election, the Southern states began to secede one by one, the Garrisonians rejoiced. It was only when the Civil War began that they changed their line and supported Lincoln.<br>
</p>
<h4>Secession and No Politics</h4>
<p class="fst">Their basic theoretical argument was that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. As far as I understand their practical argument, they believed that a seceded South would not be able to hold the Negroes as slaves for any length of time.</p>
<p>They staunchly upheld another important doctrine of their creed. They were non-political. They held politics to be corrupt. Participation in politics meant inevitably the manipulation of the abolition crusade for base ends of wealth and political gain. Therefore they and their followers abstained from joining such parties as the Liberty Party andthe Free Soil Party, which sought to abolish slavery by political action. Not only that. They abstained, and taught their followers to abstain, from voting.<br>
</p>
<h4>Douglass and Garrison</h4>
<p class="fst">Frederick Douglass was in his early years a follower of Garrison. The Garrisonians educated him, gave him opportunities which made him famous sent him abroad. He was one of their paid lecturers. Like so many other escaped slaves, Douglass for years preached the Garrisonian doctrine – secession by the South, non-participation in politics. But after a few years Douglass broke with Garrison and evolved his own policy.</p>
<p>He claimed that the aim of the Abolitionists should be to form a government which would abolish slavery in the United States – in all of them. He opposed secession, he advocated political action, he joined the Free Soil Party and later worked heart and soul for the victory of Lincoln and the Republican Party.</p>
<p>The Garrisonian slogan was “No union with slave-holders.” Of this Douglass wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... Its logical result is but negatively anti-slavery. [The] doctrine of ‘No union with slave-holders,’ carried out, dissolves the union and leaves the slaves and their masters to fight their own battles, in their own way. This I hold to be an abandonment of the great idea with which [Garrison’s] society started. It started to free the slave. It ends by leaving the slave to free himself.”</p>
<p class="fst">Douglass was bitterly attacked by his former friends. He went his own way. He continued to be an abolitionist in the old sense, carried on agitation as vigorously as before, took part in the Underground Railroad and refused to go with John Brown on the Harper’s Ferry raid only because he was sure it would fail. For the same reason he tried to dissuade Brown from going. In principle he had no objection to the raid.</p>
<p>But at the same time Douglass worked in the very closest relation with Senator Sumner, ex-Governor Seward, who became Lincoln’s Secretary of State, Gerritt Smith and other political leaders of the anti-slavery fight. He joined with the Free Soil Party, then was active in a party called the Radical Abolitionists, and finally threw all his powers into the struggle for the victory of the Republican Party.</p>
<p><em>Without exaggeration, he can be called one of the founders of that party. Certainly some of the men who actually founded it and led it to victory learned much of what they knew about the slavery question and the abolition movement from Douglass.</em></p>
<p>For the Whig Party and the Democratic Party, the two great parties of those days, Douglass had nothing but the most utter contempt. He attacked them and all their works without mercy and without fear. It is obvious that the career of this remarkable politician can teach us many lessons today.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
A Great Figure in American History
(December 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 49, 4 December 1944, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
I wish to begin this column with a tribute to a man to whom I shall often refer. His name is Frederick Douglass. He is known as a great fighter on behalf of the abolition of slavery, as a great orator, great propagandist, etc. I want here to emphasize his career as a political strategist.
The leaders of the Abolitionists were, of course, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. It is not often remembered that for some twenty years before 1861 their policy for the abolition of slavery was that the South should secede. Day in and day out they preached that doctrine, and, when, after Lincoln’s election, the Southern states began to secede one by one, the Garrisonians rejoiced. It was only when the Civil War began that they changed their line and supported Lincoln.
Secession and No Politics
Their basic theoretical argument was that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. As far as I understand their practical argument, they believed that a seceded South would not be able to hold the Negroes as slaves for any length of time.
They staunchly upheld another important doctrine of their creed. They were non-political. They held politics to be corrupt. Participation in politics meant inevitably the manipulation of the abolition crusade for base ends of wealth and political gain. Therefore they and their followers abstained from joining such parties as the Liberty Party andthe Free Soil Party, which sought to abolish slavery by political action. Not only that. They abstained, and taught their followers to abstain, from voting.
Douglass and Garrison
Frederick Douglass was in his early years a follower of Garrison. The Garrisonians educated him, gave him opportunities which made him famous sent him abroad. He was one of their paid lecturers. Like so many other escaped slaves, Douglass for years preached the Garrisonian doctrine – secession by the South, non-participation in politics. But after a few years Douglass broke with Garrison and evolved his own policy.
He claimed that the aim of the Abolitionists should be to form a government which would abolish slavery in the United States – in all of them. He opposed secession, he advocated political action, he joined the Free Soil Party and later worked heart and soul for the victory of Lincoln and the Republican Party.
The Garrisonian slogan was “No union with slave-holders.” Of this Douglass wrote:
“... Its logical result is but negatively anti-slavery. [The] doctrine of ‘No union with slave-holders,’ carried out, dissolves the union and leaves the slaves and their masters to fight their own battles, in their own way. This I hold to be an abandonment of the great idea with which [Garrison’s] society started. It started to free the slave. It ends by leaving the slave to free himself.”
Douglass was bitterly attacked by his former friends. He went his own way. He continued to be an abolitionist in the old sense, carried on agitation as vigorously as before, took part in the Underground Railroad and refused to go with John Brown on the Harper’s Ferry raid only because he was sure it would fail. For the same reason he tried to dissuade Brown from going. In principle he had no objection to the raid.
But at the same time Douglass worked in the very closest relation with Senator Sumner, ex-Governor Seward, who became Lincoln’s Secretary of State, Gerritt Smith and other political leaders of the anti-slavery fight. He joined with the Free Soil Party, then was active in a party called the Radical Abolitionists, and finally threw all his powers into the struggle for the victory of the Republican Party.
Without exaggeration, he can be called one of the founders of that party. Certainly some of the men who actually founded it and led it to victory learned much of what they knew about the slavery question and the abolition movement from Douglass.
For the Whig Party and the Democratic Party, the two great parties of those days, Douglass had nothing but the most utter contempt. He attacked them and all their works without mercy and without fear. It is obvious that the career of this remarkable politician can teach us many lessons today.
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<h2>J.R. Johnston</h2>
<h4>The Centralia Disaster in Retrospect</h4>
<h1>The Capitalist Class Is Responsible<br>
for Agony of the Miners</h1>
<h3>(14 April 1947)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1947/index.htm#la11_15" target="new">Vol. 11 No. 15</a>, 14 April 1947, p. 6.<br>
Marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The mining disaster in Centralia, Ill., coming after the persecution of the miners by the coal operators and the government is a dramatic touchstone of what our society really is:</p>
<p class="fst"><em><strong>Labor Action</strong> and the Workers Party say again: The system is responsible. Until the men who go down into the pits control every stage at production, until we have a government composed of workers or these whom they chose to represent them, these barbarous conditions of life and labor will continue.</em></p>
<p>This is not merely a question of a hundred dead men and their sorrowing families and friends. Charity and regrets will not help. The men and their families live with this threat over their heads every day. They live with it from childhood until they are killed or die. What kind of a life is this that when a man leaves home in the morning, neither he nor his wife and children know if he will return?</p>
<p>There is no need for these conditions to exist. There are ways and means whereby they can be reduced to a minimum. If the power of science were devoted to making mining safe, if the elementary precautions known already were taken, we would not have this unnecessary toll of lives and the permanent strain upon the consciousness of millions.</p>
<p><em>No wonder the miners are bitter and have the supremest contempt for all except their union and those who directly support if. We hope they will rapidly learn that they are marked out to be among the leaders of those who will tear to bits this murderous capitalist society and build a human existence for themselves and all who bear upon their bent backs the expenditures, the crimes, the follies, the greed and the hypocrisy of capitalist society.</em></p>
<p>Listen to the <strong>New York Post</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We’re sure the miners who died doing their jobs wouldn’t want that kind of memorial.</p>
<p class="quote">“What they might want would be some guarantee that government officials, like Governor Green of Illinois, would act in the future when a local union committee complains of dangerous conditions. They also might favor prompt action by the top men in their union – like John L. Lewis – when such warnings get no result. He or his appointees didn’t make any great outcry a year ago, after the appeal to Governor Green produced nothing. They might hope that some pressure would be put on the mine-owners quickly enough to do some good.”</p>
<p class="fst">Isn’t that shameful? See how they are protecting capitalist society, white-washing the state, blackened by a century of criminal negligence.<br>
</p>
<h4>The <em>PM</em> Whitewash</h4>
<p class="fst">Max Lerner in <strong>PM</strong> writes an editorial entitled <em>The Enemy: Firedamp</em>. That is a monstrous lie. The enemy is not firedamp. The enemy are the coal owners and the government and all who support them.</p>
<p><em>To say that the enemy is fire-damp is to be no more than a lackey of the capitalist class. True, later in the editorial, he blames the coal owners and ends with the pious wish that until we have a government like the British Labor government which takes over the mines and runs them, we shall not have responsibility where we can locate it.</em></p>
<p>This too is hypocrisy and fraud. We leave aside for the moment what exactly the British Labor Government is doing for the miners. But what has Max Lerner done to contribute to the forming of such a government? Has he written a line to the miners telling them that only such a government will help them?</p>
<p>Has he said “I am for such a government. Miners, steel workers, railroad men, rubber workers, to end your trials, you need a labor government. I and my colleagues shall do all that we can to help you form one”? No, he hangs on to Roosevelt’s coattail, then transfers himself to Truman’s. Then he says that Truman’s government is a failure, but the liberals must be careful lest they let the Republicans in by opposing Truman. So he jumps from side to side defending capitalism.</p>
<p>Is the word hypocrite too strong to be applied to Max Lerner? Tell us, please, what other word can be applied to an ex-professor, author of numerous books, and editor of a paper, who writes, as he does, in this editorial:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“It would seem more decent for the spokesmen of the coal operators, instead of attacking john L. Lewis, to accept the stoppage and recognise the grievance, and to join with the miners and the government to make this the last major mine explosion in America.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">In the name of sense and reason, who else but a hypocrite (or a raving lunatic) can ask the spokesmen of the mine owners to join with miners to prevent explosions? The coal owners are the enemy. The government is their ally. Their spokesmen are paid to attack Lewis and cover up the crimes of the mine owners. To ask them to join with the miners is a shameful mockery and could come only from a pen which first and foremost seeks always to defend capitalism. That is the truth about Max Lerner and all his type and we want the miners to know them and remember them and recognize them as soon as they open their mouths.</p>
<p>Brothers and sisters of the mining areas. We cannot claim to appreciate a fraction of the tortures to which capitalism daily and hourly subjects you. We can only claim that you do not detest this monstrous system with a greater hatred than we do. We understand that nothing, nothing can correct its evils but its overthrow by the workers.</p>
<p><em>We know that in a socialist society you yourselves can organize production so as to produce coal at only a fraction of the cost in suffering, in labor, and in daily fear. Your friends are those who know this and are willing, ready to go step by step with you, in uncompromising resistance to coal owners and government until the time comes when we can say: “Down with capitalism. The workers are ready for the new society.”</em></p>
<p>Meanwhile in every step that you take to improve your conditions we are with you, always on your side, hating your enemies. And high up On that list are the hypocritical scoundrels who, in the moment of your great trial, are concerned with nothing else but defense of capitalist society and “pressure” upon the criminals who lead it. When we criticise and bitterly criticize your leaders, it is not as the liberals and the labor leaders criticize him. We at times denounce Lewis because he will not understand that this society, capitalism, will never be able to give you a human existence. We criticize him for not leading you politically in an unceasing struggle for the overthrow of the system.</p>
<p>We ask you to read our press, pass it around, tell us what you think of it, knowing that in all your difficulties we are with you, and if we differ with you, it is as comrades and friends who wish only to convince you that the destruction of capitalism is our only solution.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnston
The Centralia Disaster in Retrospect
The Capitalist Class Is Responsible
for Agony of the Miners
(14 April 1947)
From Labor Action, Vol. 11 No. 15, 14 April 1947, p. 6.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The mining disaster in Centralia, Ill., coming after the persecution of the miners by the coal operators and the government is a dramatic touchstone of what our society really is:
Labor Action and the Workers Party say again: The system is responsible. Until the men who go down into the pits control every stage at production, until we have a government composed of workers or these whom they chose to represent them, these barbarous conditions of life and labor will continue.
This is not merely a question of a hundred dead men and their sorrowing families and friends. Charity and regrets will not help. The men and their families live with this threat over their heads every day. They live with it from childhood until they are killed or die. What kind of a life is this that when a man leaves home in the morning, neither he nor his wife and children know if he will return?
There is no need for these conditions to exist. There are ways and means whereby they can be reduced to a minimum. If the power of science were devoted to making mining safe, if the elementary precautions known already were taken, we would not have this unnecessary toll of lives and the permanent strain upon the consciousness of millions.
No wonder the miners are bitter and have the supremest contempt for all except their union and those who directly support if. We hope they will rapidly learn that they are marked out to be among the leaders of those who will tear to bits this murderous capitalist society and build a human existence for themselves and all who bear upon their bent backs the expenditures, the crimes, the follies, the greed and the hypocrisy of capitalist society.
Listen to the New York Post:
“We’re sure the miners who died doing their jobs wouldn’t want that kind of memorial.
“What they might want would be some guarantee that government officials, like Governor Green of Illinois, would act in the future when a local union committee complains of dangerous conditions. They also might favor prompt action by the top men in their union – like John L. Lewis – when such warnings get no result. He or his appointees didn’t make any great outcry a year ago, after the appeal to Governor Green produced nothing. They might hope that some pressure would be put on the mine-owners quickly enough to do some good.”
Isn’t that shameful? See how they are protecting capitalist society, white-washing the state, blackened by a century of criminal negligence.
The PM Whitewash
Max Lerner in PM writes an editorial entitled The Enemy: Firedamp. That is a monstrous lie. The enemy is not firedamp. The enemy are the coal owners and the government and all who support them.
To say that the enemy is fire-damp is to be no more than a lackey of the capitalist class. True, later in the editorial, he blames the coal owners and ends with the pious wish that until we have a government like the British Labor government which takes over the mines and runs them, we shall not have responsibility where we can locate it.
This too is hypocrisy and fraud. We leave aside for the moment what exactly the British Labor Government is doing for the miners. But what has Max Lerner done to contribute to the forming of such a government? Has he written a line to the miners telling them that only such a government will help them?
Has he said “I am for such a government. Miners, steel workers, railroad men, rubber workers, to end your trials, you need a labor government. I and my colleagues shall do all that we can to help you form one”? No, he hangs on to Roosevelt’s coattail, then transfers himself to Truman’s. Then he says that Truman’s government is a failure, but the liberals must be careful lest they let the Republicans in by opposing Truman. So he jumps from side to side defending capitalism.
Is the word hypocrite too strong to be applied to Max Lerner? Tell us, please, what other word can be applied to an ex-professor, author of numerous books, and editor of a paper, who writes, as he does, in this editorial:
“It would seem more decent for the spokesmen of the coal operators, instead of attacking john L. Lewis, to accept the stoppage and recognise the grievance, and to join with the miners and the government to make this the last major mine explosion in America.”
In the name of sense and reason, who else but a hypocrite (or a raving lunatic) can ask the spokesmen of the mine owners to join with miners to prevent explosions? The coal owners are the enemy. The government is their ally. Their spokesmen are paid to attack Lewis and cover up the crimes of the mine owners. To ask them to join with the miners is a shameful mockery and could come only from a pen which first and foremost seeks always to defend capitalism. That is the truth about Max Lerner and all his type and we want the miners to know them and remember them and recognize them as soon as they open their mouths.
Brothers and sisters of the mining areas. We cannot claim to appreciate a fraction of the tortures to which capitalism daily and hourly subjects you. We can only claim that you do not detest this monstrous system with a greater hatred than we do. We understand that nothing, nothing can correct its evils but its overthrow by the workers.
We know that in a socialist society you yourselves can organize production so as to produce coal at only a fraction of the cost in suffering, in labor, and in daily fear. Your friends are those who know this and are willing, ready to go step by step with you, in uncompromising resistance to coal owners and government until the time comes when we can say: “Down with capitalism. The workers are ready for the new society.”
Meanwhile in every step that you take to improve your conditions we are with you, always on your side, hating your enemies. And high up On that list are the hypocritical scoundrels who, in the moment of your great trial, are concerned with nothing else but defense of capitalist society and “pressure” upon the criminals who lead it. When we criticise and bitterly criticize your leaders, it is not as the liberals and the labor leaders criticize him. We at times denounce Lewis because he will not understand that this society, capitalism, will never be able to give you a human existence. We criticize him for not leading you politically in an unceasing struggle for the overthrow of the system.
We ask you to read our press, pass it around, tell us what you think of it, knowing that in all your difficulties we are with you, and if we differ with you, it is as comrades and friends who wish only to convince you that the destruction of capitalism is our only solution.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Historical Retrogression or Socialist Revolution</h1>
<h4>A Discussion Article on the Thesis of the IKD</h4>
<h3>(September 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni46_01" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 1</a>, January 1946, pp. 25–29.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
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<table align="center" width="90%">
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<p class="fst"><em>The document of the German comrades, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/vol10/no10/ikd.htm" target="new"><strong>Capitalist Barbarism or Socialism</strong></a>, proposes a thesis of historical retrogression and a program of “democratic-political revolution” which in my view is in fundamental opposition to the general principles of Marxism and the specific perspectives of the Fourth International for the socialist revolution in Europe. I propose here to refute them as comprehensively as possible in the space at my disposal.</em><br>
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<h3>Part I: The Theory of the Question</h3>
<p class="fst">The retrogressionists post their thesis in Hegelian terms. We have therefore first to grapple with the dialectic.</p>
<p>In the <strong>Dialectic of Nature</strong>, Engels lists the three basic laws: (1) The law of the transformation of quantity into quality. (2) The law of the interpenetration of the opposites. (3) The law of the negation of the negation. The third “figures as the fundamental law for the contruction of the whole system.” The interconnection can be demonstrated as follows:</p>
<p class="fst">Capitalist society is a negation of a previous organism, feudal society, it consists of two opposites, capital and labor, interpenetrated – one cannot be conceived without the other. The contradiction between capital and labor develops by degrees in a constant series of minor negations. Thus, commercial capitalism, through quantitative changes in the mode of production, develops a new quality and is transformed into industrial capitalism with, of course, corresponding changes in its opposite, labor. This industrial capitalism is further negated by monopoly capitalism which is further negated by state-monopoly capitalism. But this increasing negativity, i.e., this constant transformation into a higher stage in a certain direction, only sharpens the fundamental antagonism which constitutes the organism. The maturity of the organism is demonstrated by the fact that the contradictions become so developed that the organism can no longer contain them. There arises the necessity of a complete negation, not of successive stages of development but of the organism itself. The organism will be negated, abolished, transcended by the antagonisms developed <em>within its own self</em>, without the intervention of any third party. That is negation of the negation. That is abolition or <em>self-abolition</em>.</p>
<p>The key word for us here is the word abolition (German: <em>Aufhebung</em>). The retrogressionists use the word <em>Selbst-Aufhebung</em>. The implication is that this means self-abolition, while <em>Aufhebung</em> means plain abolition. But in the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, all abolition of an organism means self-abolition. Two years ago I had to deal with this very question and wrote as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“For the word abolition, <em>Aufhebung</em>, Marx went again to Hegel, to show quite clearly what he had in mind. <em>Aufhebung</em> does not mean mere non-existence, or abolition, as you abolish a hot dog or wipe some chalk off a board. As Hegel explains at length (<strong>Logic</strong>, tr. Johnston and Struthers, vol. 1, p. 120), it means for him transcendence, raising of one moment or active factor from its subordinate position in the dialectical contradiction to its rightful and predestined place, superseding the opposite moment with which it is interpenetrated, i.e., inseparably united, in this case, raising labor, the basis of all value, to a dominant position over the other moment, the mass of accumulated labor. Thereby self-developing humanity takes the place formerly held by self-developing value. The real history of humanity will begin.” (<strong>Internal Bulletin</strong>, April, 1943.)</p>
<p class="fst">In <strong>The Holy Family</strong>, Marx has a long passage, of which this is a fair sample:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... The proletariat is as proletariat forced to abolish itself and with this, the opposite which determines it, private property. It is the negative side of the opposition, its principle of unrest.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If the proletariat is victorious it does not mean that it has become the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then both the proletariat and its conditioning opposite, private property, have vanished.”</p>
<p class="fst">In <strong>Capital</strong> itself, the word he almost invariably uses for the abolition of capitalist production is <em>Aufhebung</em>, i.e., its substitution by socialist production, its own interpenetrated opposite.<br>
</p>
<h4>Dialectic as Scientific Method</h4>
<p class="fst">In 1915, Lenin wrote that “dialectic is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism.” (<strong>Collected Works</strong>, vol. 13, pp. 321–327.) And Lenin not only calls this “the essence of the matter but condemns Plekhanov and other Marxists for paying “no attention” to it. This, for Marx and Lenin, is a scientific method, not faith.</p>
<p>It is this grave weakness in Plekhanov which has led to so much confusion in Marxism and the dialectic. As Lenin saw, Hegel, idealist though he might be, understood this perfectly. In the <strong>Larger Logic</strong> (tr. Johnston and Struther, p. 65, vol. 1) he says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The one and only thing <em>for securing scientific progress</em> (and for quite simple insight into which, it is essential to strive) ii knowledge of the logical precept that Negation is just as much Affirmation as Negation.”</p>
<p class="fst">All the great Marxists understood that for the scientific analysis of capitalist society, you must postulate the positive in the negative, the affirmation in the negation, i.e., the inevitability of socialism. Give it up, play with it and you lose, for example, the Marxist theory of the socialist revolution as the culmination of the daily class struggle. If the revolution is not understood as rooted inevitably in the objective necessity of socialism, then it is attributed to the subjective consciousness of the leaders. It is because the Mensheviks and the Eastmans deny the inevitability of socialism that they repudiate the Marxist conception of the party and accuse the Bolsheviks of imposing their dialectical religion upon the Russian workers in October, 1917. For the Mensheviks and the Eastmans, Russia could have had <em>either</em> a democratic revolution <em>or</em> the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin and Trotsky always maintained the opposite, that they were acting in accordance with inner historic necessity as it expressed itself concretely in 1917.</p>
<p>Hegel could not maintain the dialectical method consistently because he based himself on the inevitability of bourgeois society. Marx could retain and extend it only by basing himself on the inevitability of socialism. As he wrote to Weydemeyer on March 6, 1852, he had discovered neither the class struggle nor the economic anatomy of the classes.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“What I did that was new was to prove ... that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”</p>
<p class="fst">Perhaps the most useful statement of dialectic as a scientific theory for Marxists is made by Rosa Luxembourg (<strong>Reform and Revolution</strong>):</p>
<p class="quoteb">“What precisely was the key which enabled Marx to open the door to the secrets of capitalist phenomena? The secret of Marx’s theory of value, of his analysis of the problem of money, of his theory of capital, of the theory of the rate of profit, and consequently of the entire economic system, is found in the transitory character of capitalist economy, the inevitability of its collapse, leading – and this is only <em>another aspect of the same phenomena</em> (emphasis mine – <em>J.R.J.</em>) – to socialism.... And it is precisely because he took the socialist viewpoint for his analysis of bourgeois society that he was in the position to give a scientific basis to the socialist movement.”</p>
<p class="fst">Bernstein believed that <strong>Capital</strong> was not scientific because Marx had had the conclusions in his head long before he wrote it. He did not understand that Marx could only write it because he took as a premise the transitory nature of capitalist society and the inevitability of socialism. This is the guide to Marxist theory. The test is in practice. If the inevitability of socialism is the key by which Marx opened the door to his world-shaking discoveries, the “if the world revolution fails to come” is the key by which the retrogressionists open the door to theirs.<br>
</p>
<h4>“The Invading Socialist Society”</h4>
<p class="fst">As far back as <strong>Anti-Dühring</strong> (1878), Marx and Engels saw socialism invading and dialectically altering capitalism.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its <em>opposite</em> (emphasis mine – <em>J.R.J.</em>). into monopoly. The planless production of capitalist sorietv capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is the philosophical concept which permeates <em>The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation</em>, the most famous chapter in <strong>Capital</strong> and all Marxist writing. This for the retrogression-ists is their “center of gravity.” Let us see what Marx says:</p>
<p class="fst">The very laws of capitalist production bring forth the “material agencies” for its dissolution – concentration of production and socialization of labor. But on these material agencies as basis spring up “new forces and new passions.” This is the proletariat “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.” This is the proletarian revolution.</p>
<p>Only then does Marx sum up the process in terms of property which is a legal, historical manifestation of the productive process. He says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The capitalist ... mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property.”</p>
<p class="fst">Production, appropriation, property.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor.”</p>
<p class="fst">Labor, you note, is the foundation. A certain kind of property is the result of a certain mode of production, a certain type of labor.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But capitalist production begets with the inexorability of a law of nature its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”</p>
<p class="fst">Hitherto among Marxists and anti-Marxists, this was understood to mean socialism. The retrogressionists challenge this. They say:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The capitalist mode of production begets its own negation with the inexorability of a law of nature <em>even if the socialist revolution fails to come</em>.”</p>
<p class="fst">This they tell us is the “deepest essence of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation.” So that when Marx wrote “negation of the negation” he did not mean socialism only. He meant that capitalist private property and capitalist production were going to be negated, destroyed, proletariat or no proletariat This, Marx’s most emphatic statement of the proletarian socialist revolution as the inevitable alternative to capitalism, is historically, i.e., in life, interpreted to mean that capitalist property can be abolished and a new kind of state (bureaucratic-collectivist, managerial) will take its place. This certainly is the most remarkable interpretation of Marxism ever made and is likely to remain so.<br>
</p>
<h4>Class Struggle or National Struggle</h4>
<p class="fst">I have to confine myself here to its immediate political consequences. The material self-abolition of capital is for the retrogressionists a process by which the capitalists expropriate one another and the many capitalist nations are expropriated by one. In their preoccupation with the expropriation of the property, they lose sight of the antagonistic roles of bourgeoisie and proletariat in the process of production.</p>
<p>It appears immediately in their analysis of Europe. This is based not upon the class struggle in production between the German centralization of European capital and the European working class. For them, the basic analysis is of one imperialist nation oppressing and expropriating other nations. The native bourgeoisie of the occupied countries is not defined basically in its economic association with the centralized capital of Europe but as part of the expropriated and exploited nations. The class struggle of the European proletariat against the existing capitalist society is thus replaced by the national struggle of individual nations, including bourgeoisie and workers. Hence the national struggle for them is not primarily a class struggle to overthrow a certain mode of production but a struggle to “reconstruct the whole screwed-back development, to regain all the achievements of the bourgeoisie (including the labor movement), to reach the highest accomplishments and to excel them.” But if the proletariat is to “reconstruct the whole screwed-back development,” etc., etc., then the task of the proletariat can only be to rebuild the whole bourgeois-democratic, i.e., the national, structure. Turn and twist as they may, the retrogressionists are in a vise from which they cannot escape.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Economic Laws of Motion: The “General Law”</h4>
<p class="fst">Without a firm grasp of the laws of production, you are blown all ways by every wind. Let us see what the retrogressionists do with the general law of capitalist accumulation which is Marx’s theoretical basis for the historical, i.e., the actual, living tendency. The retrogressionists say:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The theory of the retrogressive movement is therefore no more than the theoretical grasp of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production <em>at the point of transformation into their opposite in the reversal determined by its contents, in which they become concretely demonstrable laws of its collapse independent of the proletarian revolution</em>.” (p. 334.)</p>
<p class="fst">Marx has summed up the general law as the law of the organic composition of capital, the relation of the constant capital (the mass of machinery, concrete labor, use-values) to the variable capital (labor-power, the only source of value). The relation is 1 : 1, then 2 : 1, then 3 : 1, then 4 : 1, etc. This developing ratio is the <em>organic</em> law of capitalist society, i.e., it is of the very nature of the organism.</p>
<p>You would expect that anyone who had discovered economic laws of retrogression would show how <em>this</em> law was in retrogression. But you search the retrogressionist document in vain. Not a word. Why? Because no such economic movement exists. Where in the world is there any retrogression in this organic law? In fascist Germany the relation oi constant to variable capital increased enormously. In Britain, in the USA, in Japan, in China, in India, in Latin America, the war has seen a vast increase; the post-war will see a still greater. What post-war Germany loses will go to increase the ratio of its neighbors. Whatever production does take place in Germany will take place according to the organic composition of 1946 and not according to that of 1845.</p>
<p>If the victorious powers dare to deindustrialize Germany, all that they will do is to transform millions of proletarians into an industrial reserve army on a vast scale which is precisely the “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.” Colonization of France or Germany can only be an agitational phrase. In the sense of a historical retrogression it means creating a countryside like that in India or China with feudal and semi-feudal peasants comprising the large majority of the population. The relations of production, the social relations and the whole political structure of those countries would be altered. <em>A bourgeois-democratic revolution would be on the order of the day</em>. The victorious imperialisms, as Lenin foresaw, cannot do it. Capitalist competition, which is in its present form imperialist war, compels them to obey the general law of capitalist accumulation and tomorrow will force them to rearm, i.e., reindustrialize Germany. Into these Marxist fundamentals they have introduced an unexampled confusion.<br>
</p>
<h4>Retrogression and the Industrial Reserve Army</h4>
<p class="fst">The retrogressionists say:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Under imperialism production is carried on in a capitalist manner from A to Z, but all relations from A to Z are <em>qualitatively</em> altered. The ‘camp system,’ labor and forced labor service, prisons, etc., become by the massive extent and the manner of their utilization, first, special forms of slave labor, and beyond that, imperialist forms of utilizing the capitalist overpopulation.” (p. 342.)</p>
<p class="fst">Wasn’t it Marx who told us that the antagonism of capitalist production “vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, the industrial reserve army, <em>kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital</em>.” If today they are kept in labor camps, it is because the proletarian movement toward the socialist future is such that capital must assume complete control over the workers not only inside but outside of the process of production. But do these workers “qualitatively” produce more surplus ‘value or less? Do they alter the organic law? Do they modify or accentuate the contradiction between use-value and value? Do they become isolated groups of slaves, serfs on widely separated latifundia, on manorial farms, or on medieval peasant allotments? Do they acquire the social and political characteristics of slaves and serfs in the Middle Ages? To this last question the retrogressionists answer “Yes.” They say that society</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... harks back in reverse order to the end of the Middle Ages, the epoch of primitive accumulation, the Thirty Years War, the bourgeois revolutions, etc. In those days it was a question of smashing an outlived economic form and of winning the independence of nations – now it is a question of abolishing independence and shoving society back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages.” (pp. 333–334.)</p>
<p class="fst">It is not a question of smashing economic forms, not a question of winning a new society. That is merely the program of the Fourth International. That, they tell us, is not the question. Independence has been abolished, society has been shoved back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages and the proletariat, to save the situation, must restore democracy. They must write this. Socialized labor, the socialist proletariat, has vanished into the labor camp. The historical initiative is placed entirely in the hands of the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>According to their mode of scientific analysis, the world revolution cannot but fail to come. The throwback of labor to the Middle Ages is their general law of capitalist accumulation. To think that this can be arrested by democratic slogans is, to put it moderately, a retrogression to the Utopias not even of the nineteenth century but of the Middle Ages.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Productive Forces</h4>
<p class="fst">The retrogressionist thesis claims to be based upon the collapse of capitalism “independently of the question of the extension of the market.” (p. 333.) Very good. To this, as is characteristic of them, they give not a word of analysis. I have to try to <em>illustrate</em> the difference between this theory and that of the underconsumptionists.</p>
<p>If you observe the growth of capital empirically, i.e., with bourgeois eyes, then it must <em>appear</em> that as the market declines, the productive power also declines and therefore brings the whole process to a standstill. In reality the struggle for the declining market <em>makes each competitor increase its productive power in order to drive its competitor off the field</em>. Naturally this leads to a fine crash. But in the crash the technologically backward units go under and the system as a whole emerges on a higher technological level – of course to start the whole process again. But the growth of the productive power of capital can come only by the higher organic composition. This leads to the falling rate of profit and it is the falling rate which compels a crisis. In Vol. III of <strong>Capital</strong> (p. 301) Marx says that it is “the fall in the rate of profit [which] calls forth the competitive struggle among the capitalists, not vice versa.” Most Marxist commentators recognize that the Marxian crisis is not a crisis of incapacity to sell goods or, in bourgeois terms, of “effective demand.” It is when the crisis is imminent that capitalists rush to sell goods and naturally the bottom falls out of the market. Blake expresses it very well, in <strong>An American Looks at Karl Marx</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Thus the limiting factor of consumption is a <em>precipitant</em>, the discharge of workers in the means of production is a <em>manifestation</em>, the transferred crack in consumers’ purchases the ‘<em>cause</em>’ of a panic, while all along the crisis is implicit, overcome by <em>accumulation by the stronger</em> ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Now every serious dispute by serious people about the future of capitalist society will in the long run find the protagonists lined up, in the camp either of the Leninists or the underconsumptionists. The retrogressionists say that they follow the Leninist interpretation. Yet their thesis is that the productive forces have ceased to grow and they quote Lenin and Trotsky. I do not propose to take up Trotsky here. He undoubtedly wrote this many times. He also wrote other passages in apparent contradiction. At any rate he left no developed economic thesis. But Lenin did. He wrote <strong>Imperialism</strong> to prove the decline of capitalism. Nevertheless he states (and more than once):</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the possibility of the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a more or less degree, one or another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before.”</p>
<p class="fst">But argument about this does not need quotations from Lenin. In 1929 the productive power was higher than it had ever been; in 1939 it was still higher than it was in 1929; by 1942 it had reached fantastic heights compared with 1939. Do the retrogressionists dare to deny this? War is only capitalist competition carried out by national units, and the laws hold firm. In times of peace the fundamental movement is development of the productive power precisely because “the market” is declining. In war, where the world market is exhausted and can only be redivided, each national state fanatically develops the productive power. If capitalism lasts until 1968, then the preparation for World War III would result in a productive power far beyond that of 1942.</p>
<p>What then is responsible for the retrogressionists’ thesis of lack of growth of the productive forces? Having abandoned the inevitability of the socialist revolution, and having adopted a theory of the tendency of capitalist accumulation, which increasingly disorganizes and colonizes the proletariat and hence makes it unfit for the socialist revolution, they cannot see the growth of the productive forces which organizes and disciplines the proletariat in the process of production and prepares it for the socialist revolution. Having given up the process of production as the means of developing the productive forces and organizing the proletariat, they must look outside the process of production, i.e., to democracy.<br>
</p>
<h4>Productive Forces and Social Relations</h4>
<p class="fst">Underconsumptionists are distinguished by the fact that value plays no part in their analysis. Thus they lose sight of the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production, that between the means of production in its value form (the main concern of the bourgeoisie) and means of production in its material form (the main concern of the proletariat). They thus ruin the possibility of future analysis. A recent article in the <strong>Saturday Evening Post</strong> shows how clearly the bourgeoisie sees its own side of this question. Admiral Ramsey says that all the existing planes must be systematically destroyed because in five years’ time they would be obsolete. And not only planes, but means of production. General Arnold demands “research laboratories for ever-increasing aeronautical development, a progressive aviation industry capable of great expansion quickly.” Thus essentially as in competition for the market, the material form of the products may be still valuable and able to give great service to the proletariat and the people. But their value, in terms of socially necessary labor time on the world market, is equal only to that of the latest discovery, actual or potential. Hence reorganization of production for more and better production, socialist of labor, increase of the industrial army. The general and the admiral were forward-looking but still did not see far enough. The discovery of atomic energy poses the question of the reorganization of the whole technological system. The second bomb, <em>two days later</em>, made the first obsolete. The retrogressionist thesis makes it impossible to interpret the general capitalist development as socialist society invading capitalism. For then atomic energy is a sign of greater labor camps and therefore of a quicker return to the Middle Ages. Instead of calling upon workers in view of the economic development to prepare for power they are compelled to demand more frantically than ever, a defense of democracy.</p>
<p>What then is the fundamental error of the retrogressionists? They have as always lost sight of the invading socialist society, the socialist future in the capitalist present. Capitalism fetters, i.e., hampers, impedes the development of the productive forces. But it does not bring them to a halt. They move forward by advance, retardation, standstill, but they move forward, bringing the proletariat with them. The theoretical analysis is that the more capitalism increases the productive forces, the more it brings them into conflict with the existing social relations. The more it increases and develops the productive forces the more it socializes labor and the more it degrades it and the more it drives it to revolt. Where Marxism deals in contradictions, growths and deepening of antagonisms, and therefore of class struggle, the retrogressionists deal in absolutes. The productive forces have ceased to grow. Having decided to operate on the basis of “if the world revolution fails to come,” the retrogressionists, rudderless, deny historical fact – the growth of the productive forces since 1917 – make a complete jumble of Marxian economics, all in order to show society on its way back to the Middle Ages. You do not make these blunders without dragging others, and more serious ones, in their train.<br>
</p>
<h4>Idealism and Positivism</h4>
<p class="fst">The vital question is to get hold of the intimate connection between retrogressionist theory and their practical conclusions. In his Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic, Marx pays noble tribute to Hegel for his discovery of the dialectic but foretells that his incapacity to take it further, i.e., to socialism, opens the way to uncritical idealism and equally uncritical positivism. The retrogressionists fall inescapably into both.</p>
<p>In Vol.II Marx divided capital into Department I, means of production and Department II, means of consumption, and bases his further analysis upon this division. The retrogressionists divide the productive forces into means of destruction and means of construction. What is this but idealism – classification according to moral criteria? One stands almost in despair before this muddle. Oil, coal, steel, Willow Run, Curtiss-Wright, were they means of destruction in January 1945? And what are they now in August 1945? Are they once more means of construction? If so, they move from being means of destruction to being means of construction under the same class rule. This is the economics of Philip Murray. The retrogressionists do not know with what sharp weapons they are playing. All Marx’s economic categories are social categories. In the analysis of capital as value, constant capital symbolizes the bourgeoisie, variable capital the proletariat. But men use not value but steel, oil, textiles. Thus, in his analysis of capital as material form, Department I (means of production) is in essence representative of the bourgeoisie and Department II (means of consumption) is representative of the proletariat. The struggle between constant and variable capital, between Department I and Department II is expressive of the struggle of classes. What struggle goes on between means of destruction and means of consumption? The retrogressionists are defining things as things and not according to a social method – the most elementary positivism. But idealism and positivism are not terms of abuse. Politically they mean one thing – analysis of productive forces as things in general, analysis of the proletariat as people in general.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Phenomenology of Mind</h4>
<p class="fst">Marxism is distinguished from idealism and positivism of all types by the fact that (a) it distinguishes the proletariat from all other classes by its types of labor and (b) by the revolutionary effect upon the proletariat and society of this type of labor.</p>
<p>The concept of labor is the very basis of the dialectic, and not merely of the Marxian dialectic but of the dialectic of Hegel himself. In the <strong>Phenomenology of Mind</strong> <a id="f1" href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a>, in the section on <em>Lordship and Bondage</em>, Hegel shows that the lord has a desire for the object and enjoys it. But because he does not actually work on it, his desire lacks objectivity. The labor of the bondsman, in working, in changing, i.e., in negating the raw material, has the contrary effect. This, his labor, gives him his rudimentary sense of personality. Marx hailed this and continued the basic idea in his analysis of handicraft and the early stages of capitalist production (simple cooperation). The laborer’s physical and mental faculties are developed by the fact that he makes a whole chair, a whole table, a piece of armor or a whole shoe.</p>
<p>With the development of the stage of manufacture, however, there begins the division of labor, and here instead of making one object, man begins to produce fragments of an object. <em>In the process of production</em>, there begins a stultification, distortion and ossification of his physical and intellectual faculties.</p>
<p>With the productive process of heavy industry, this stultification is pushed to its ultimate limit. Man becomes merely an appendage to a machine. He now no longer uses the instruments of production. As Marx repeats on page after page, the instruments of production use him. Hegel, who had caught hold of this, was completely baffled by it and seeing no way out, took refuge in idealism. Marx, using the Hegelian method and remaining in the productive process itself, discovered and elaborated one of the most profound truths of social and political psychology. In the very degradation of the workers he saw the basis of their emancipation. Attacking Proudhon for misunderstanding dialectic, he wrote of the laborer in the automatic factory:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But from the moment that all special development ceases, the need of universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to make itself felt.” (<strong>Poverty of Philosophy</strong>, 1847)</p>
<p class="fst">This need of the individual for universality, for a sense of integration so powerful among all modern oppressed classes, is the key to vast areas of social and political jungles of today. The fascists, for example, understood it thoroughly.</p>
<p>Twenty years later in <strong>Capital</strong> Marx developed the political results of the argument to the full.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is as a result of the division of labor in manufactures, that the laborer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production as the property of another and as a ruling power.” (Kerr ed., p. 397)</p>
<p class="fst">He does not need revolutionary parties to teach him this. This process is his revolutionary education. It begins in manufacture. “It is completed in modern industry ...” This is the misery that is accumulated as capital is accumulated. It may not be formulated. But the moment bourgeois society breaks down and the worker breaks out in insurrection, for whatever incidental purpose, resentment against the whole system explodes with terrible power. <a id="f2" href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a></p>
<p>The educational process is not individual but social. As Marx insisted and Lenin never wearied in pointing out, in addition to this personal, individual education, capital educates the worker socially and politically. In <strong>Capital</strong> (pp. 632–3) Marx quoted a passage he had written twenty years before in the <strong>Manifesto</strong>. Former industrial systems, all of them, aimed at conservation of the existing mode of production. Far different is capital:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Constant revolutions in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and superstitions are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is the history of Europe during the last thirty years and <em>particularly</em> the last five.</p>
<p>The very climax of Marx’s chapter on <em>The General Law</em> is to warn that “This antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous but nevertheless essentially distinct and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production,” i.e., the Middle Ages. And why essentially distinct? Because in capital alone the degradation and its historical conditions also create in the workers the determination to overthrow the system and acquire for themselves the intellectual potencies of the material process of production. Who doesn’t understand this in his bones can be a sincere revolutionary but cannot lead the proletariat. The retrogressionists ruin this conception. They say that “the minute the proletarian loses his right to strike, his freedom of movement, and all political rights,” he ceases to be the “classic ‘free’ proletarian ...” (p. 331) For the analysis of production and the stages of production, they have substituted the legislative or repressive action of the bourgeois state. They say that “The modern slave differs much less <em>politically</em> from the slave of antiquity than appears at first glance.” (p. 331) The retrogressionists carry their democratic conceptions into the process of production itself. They say: “Politically, and to a large extent economically, it (the proletariat) lives under the conditions and forms of slavery.” (p. 339) They seem incapable of understanding that increase of misery, subordination, slavery is part of capitalist production and not retrogression.</p>
<p>At this stage we can afford to be empirical. In 1944 the Italian proletariat in North Italy lived under fascism. Mussolini, to placate this proletariat, called his state the Socialist Republic. Every worker who punched the clock and found no work got three-quarters of his day’s pay. Mussolini passed decrees which aimed at making the workers believe that industry was socialized. When the Germans were about to leave, these workers negotiated with them and with Mussolini and drove them out. They seized the factories. They hold them to this day. Such is modern industry that a mere general strike poses the socialist revolution and the question of the state-power with workers organized in factory committees and Soviets. Yet the retrogressionists say in 1944 that because of the absence of bourgeois-democracy the more you looked at these workers the more you saw how much they resembled the slaves who lived in the Italian latifundia 3,000 years ago.<br>
</p>
<h4>Revolutionary Perspectives and Proposals</h4>
<p class="fst">Except seen in the light of their analysis of the proletariat in production, the revolutionary perspectives of the great Marxists have always seemed like stratospheric ravings.</p>
<p>In 1848 Marx said that “the bourgeois revolution in Germany would be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.” In 1858 he wrote to Engels: “On the continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character.” Twenty years later, introducing Marx’s <strong>Civil War in France</strong>, Engels wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Thanks to the economic and political development of France since 1789, Paris has for fifty years been placed in such a position that ... no revolution could there break out without the proletariat ... (after victory) immediately putting forward its own demands ... demands ... more or less indefinite ... but the upshot of them all ... the abolition of the class contrast between capitalist and laborer.”</p>
<p class="fst">The word “immediately” appears every time.</p>
<p>Their enormous confidence is based not upon speculation on the psychology of workers but upon the antagonism of objective relations between labor and capital. From this came their proposals. In 1848 in the <strong>Manifesto</strong> Marx says that Communists support every movement against the existing order, but “In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” For whatever its degree of development at the time, at the moment of insurrection, it flies to the fore.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Revolutionary Epoch</h4>
<p class="fst">individual production of 1871, which had nevertheless produced the Commune, had developed into genuine large-scale industry. Trotsky, watching the revolution in feudal Russia, declared that the victorious bourgeois-democratic revolution would “immediately” assume a socialist character. Lenin, as we know, opposed him. We now know who (despite many important qualifications) was essentially right. 1905 is a very important year. <em>The development of industry brought the political general strike and the soviets</em>. They represent the industrially and socially motivated rejection by the workers of bourgeois democracy. Marx’s 1850 subjective demand for revolutionary workers’ organizations are now objective realities, henceforth inseparable from revolution, as 1917 and post-war Europe and Asia were to show.</p>
<p>In 1938 in the Founding Conference Theses, Trotsky wrote that “The Spanish proletariat has made a series of heroic attempts since April 1931 to take power in its own hands and guide the fate of society.” Are these workers in the “true-bourgeois” tradition of forty years?</p>
<p>He says of the French proletariat that “the great wave of sit-down strikes, particularly during June 1936, revealed the wholehearted readiness of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system.” He left it to the Philistines of all shades to point out that the Spanish workers in 1931 were thinking only of overthrowing the monarch (as presumably the Belgians today), and the French workers only of the 40-hour week.</p>
<p>In 1940 Trotsky’s <strong>Manifesto</strong> had not the faintest breath of retrogression or belief that the workers for forty years have been dominated by “the true bourgeois tradition of revisionism” (p.340) <em>He says the exact opposite</em>. For him in 1939 the workers wanted to “tear themselves free from the bloody chaos” of capitalist society. In 1940 they had “lost practically all democratic and pacifist illusions.” Note that we are here a stage beyond 1848. The crimes and failures of the modern bourgeoisie have created the <em>subjective consciousness</em> of the modern proletariat which re-enforces the objective antagonism of developed modern industry. Trotsky calmly posed three possibilities. The victory of Anglo-American imperialism, an indecisive struggle, and the victory of Hitler in Europe. The last concerns us most. Fascism would over-run Europe. But that would only be a prelude to a ferocious war with the US. The perspective of Soviets, armed insurrection and the social revolution would remain. As industry had developed since 1848, so the crisis of 1940 presented us with antagonisms a thousand times more developed including a socialist proletariat. Yet there is never a word from the retrogressionists as to the relation of their theory to the perspectives of the leader of the Fourth International.<br>
</p>
<h4>Historical Retrogression</h4>
<p class="fst">What would be a retrogression? In the Junius pamphlet (1914) Rosa Luxemburg, although opposed to the imperialist war, put forward a program which did <em>not</em> call for social revolution. Lenin attacked this as a national program. The “<em>objective</em> historical” situation demanded the socialist revolution. He said that a throwback in Europe, i.e., retrogression, was not <em>impossible</em>, <em>if</em> the war ENDED in the domination of Europe by one state ... This was exactly Trotsky’s point when he emphasized that even if Hitler won in 1940, he would have to fight the United States. The war, i.e., the bourgeois crisis would not be <em>ended</em>. <em>If</em>, continued Lenin, the proletariat remained impotent for twenty years. Who, who (now) dares to say that the European proletariat is impotent? But the impotence of the whole European proletariat for twenty years would not be retrogression. <em>In addition</em>, for the same twenty years, the American and the Japanese proletariat must fail to achieve a socialist revolution. Then, and only then, after several decades, or in the time of our sons’ sons (Trotsky in 1938) would the revolutionary socialist movement recognize retrogression and once more raise the national program of the restoration of the bourgeois national state. <a id="f3" href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p>But the retrogressionists, the vanguard of the vanguard, no sooner saw Hitler dominating Europe, then in the very midst of the war, when the whole situation was in flux, they proclaimed their labor camp theory and a “democratic-political revolution” for national independence and democracy. Not only that Their economic analysis (such as it is) leads them to foresee that the victorious imperialist nations, Anglo-American and Russian imperialism, will continue the same process. Hence their “democratic political revolution” still holds the stage.<br>
</p>
<h4>Two Types of Democratic Demands</h4>
<p class="fst">It should be obvious that what Lenin said about “democratic demands” has nothing at all to do with this dispute. It would be a crying and intolerable imposition to attempt to confuse the two. For Lenin all democratic demands in advanced countries were a means of mobilizing workers to overthrow the bourgeoisie. <em>He</em> said that we could have socialist revolution without one democratic demand being realized. The retrogressionists say we must have a “democratic-political revolution” so as to give the workers a chance to “reconstruct” the whole “screwed-back development,” and to learn to link scientific socialism to the labor movement. The two perspectives are at opposite poles. Never before has any revolutionary made such a proposal. Trotsky proposed that the democratic slogans of right to organize and free press be raised in fascist countries, but warned that they should not be a “noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie’s agents.” (<em>Founding Conference</em>) Writing of “transitional demands in fascist countries,” he warned:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Fascism plunged these countries into political barbarism. But it did not change their social structure. Fascism is a tool in the hands of finance-capital and not of feudal landowners. A revolutionary program should base itself on the dialectics of the class struggle, obligatory also to fascist countries, and not on the psychology of terrified bankrupts.”</p>
<p class="fst">For him the Soviets “will cover Germany before a new Constitutional Assembly will gather in Weimar.” <a id="f4" href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> But the retrogressionists do not propose democratic demands which are to be thrown aside as soon as the masses move. They do the exact opposite. They propose a <em>revolution</em> for democratic demands. What is this but a rejection of the social revolution until later when the whole “screwed-back development” will have been “reconstructed.” This is the theory. Let us see how it measures up to events.</p>
<p class="c"><a href="ikd2.html">(The concluding part will appear in the next issue)</a></p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="fst"><a id="n1" href="#f1" name="n1">1.</a> One of the three basic books used by Lenin in his studies for <strong>Imperialism</strong>.</p>
<p class="fst"><a id="n2" href="#f2" name="n2">2.</a> The babblers who think that all the American workers want is “full employment” are in for a rude awakening. That capitalism increases the use-values (radio, education, books, etc.) that he uses outside of production only increases his antagonism.</p>
<p class="fst"><a id="n3" href="#f3" name="n3">3.</a> That, said Lenin, was not impossible. But a few months later he said emphatically that the victorious bourgeoisie might think they could do this, but they could not. The economic retrogression of Europe by political means would be a colossal, in fact, an impossible task. (<strong>Collected Works</strong>, XIX. p.22.)</p>
<p class="fst"><a id="n4" href="#f4" name="n4">4.</a> Those who want to use the fact that this did not happen are free to try. They should, however, think many times before they begin this type of argument.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Historical Retrogression or Socialist Revolution
A Discussion Article on the Thesis of the IKD
(September 1945)
From New International, Vol. 12 No. 1, January 1946, pp. 25–29.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The document of the German comrades, Capitalist Barbarism or Socialism, proposes a thesis of historical retrogression and a program of “democratic-political revolution” which in my view is in fundamental opposition to the general principles of Marxism and the specific perspectives of the Fourth International for the socialist revolution in Europe. I propose here to refute them as comprehensively as possible in the space at my disposal.
Part I: The Theory of the Question
The retrogressionists post their thesis in Hegelian terms. We have therefore first to grapple with the dialectic.
In the Dialectic of Nature, Engels lists the three basic laws: (1) The law of the transformation of quantity into quality. (2) The law of the interpenetration of the opposites. (3) The law of the negation of the negation. The third “figures as the fundamental law for the contruction of the whole system.” The interconnection can be demonstrated as follows:
Capitalist society is a negation of a previous organism, feudal society, it consists of two opposites, capital and labor, interpenetrated – one cannot be conceived without the other. The contradiction between capital and labor develops by degrees in a constant series of minor negations. Thus, commercial capitalism, through quantitative changes in the mode of production, develops a new quality and is transformed into industrial capitalism with, of course, corresponding changes in its opposite, labor. This industrial capitalism is further negated by monopoly capitalism which is further negated by state-monopoly capitalism. But this increasing negativity, i.e., this constant transformation into a higher stage in a certain direction, only sharpens the fundamental antagonism which constitutes the organism. The maturity of the organism is demonstrated by the fact that the contradictions become so developed that the organism can no longer contain them. There arises the necessity of a complete negation, not of successive stages of development but of the organism itself. The organism will be negated, abolished, transcended by the antagonisms developed within its own self, without the intervention of any third party. That is negation of the negation. That is abolition or self-abolition.
The key word for us here is the word abolition (German: Aufhebung). The retrogressionists use the word Selbst-Aufhebung. The implication is that this means self-abolition, while Aufhebung means plain abolition. But in the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, all abolition of an organism means self-abolition. Two years ago I had to deal with this very question and wrote as follows:
“For the word abolition, Aufhebung, Marx went again to Hegel, to show quite clearly what he had in mind. Aufhebung does not mean mere non-existence, or abolition, as you abolish a hot dog or wipe some chalk off a board. As Hegel explains at length (Logic, tr. Johnston and Struthers, vol. 1, p. 120), it means for him transcendence, raising of one moment or active factor from its subordinate position in the dialectical contradiction to its rightful and predestined place, superseding the opposite moment with which it is interpenetrated, i.e., inseparably united, in this case, raising labor, the basis of all value, to a dominant position over the other moment, the mass of accumulated labor. Thereby self-developing humanity takes the place formerly held by self-developing value. The real history of humanity will begin.” (Internal Bulletin, April, 1943.)
In The Holy Family, Marx has a long passage, of which this is a fair sample:
“... The proletariat is as proletariat forced to abolish itself and with this, the opposite which determines it, private property. It is the negative side of the opposition, its principle of unrest.”
“If the proletariat is victorious it does not mean that it has become the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then both the proletariat and its conditioning opposite, private property, have vanished.”
In Capital itself, the word he almost invariably uses for the abolition of capitalist production is Aufhebung, i.e., its substitution by socialist production, its own interpenetrated opposite.
Dialectic as Scientific Method
In 1915, Lenin wrote that “dialectic is the theory of knowledge of (Hegel and) Marxism.” (Collected Works, vol. 13, pp. 321–327.) And Lenin not only calls this “the essence of the matter but condemns Plekhanov and other Marxists for paying “no attention” to it. This, for Marx and Lenin, is a scientific method, not faith.
It is this grave weakness in Plekhanov which has led to so much confusion in Marxism and the dialectic. As Lenin saw, Hegel, idealist though he might be, understood this perfectly. In the Larger Logic (tr. Johnston and Struther, p. 65, vol. 1) he says:
“The one and only thing for securing scientific progress (and for quite simple insight into which, it is essential to strive) ii knowledge of the logical precept that Negation is just as much Affirmation as Negation.”
All the great Marxists understood that for the scientific analysis of capitalist society, you must postulate the positive in the negative, the affirmation in the negation, i.e., the inevitability of socialism. Give it up, play with it and you lose, for example, the Marxist theory of the socialist revolution as the culmination of the daily class struggle. If the revolution is not understood as rooted inevitably in the objective necessity of socialism, then it is attributed to the subjective consciousness of the leaders. It is because the Mensheviks and the Eastmans deny the inevitability of socialism that they repudiate the Marxist conception of the party and accuse the Bolsheviks of imposing their dialectical religion upon the Russian workers in October, 1917. For the Mensheviks and the Eastmans, Russia could have had either a democratic revolution or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin and Trotsky always maintained the opposite, that they were acting in accordance with inner historic necessity as it expressed itself concretely in 1917.
Hegel could not maintain the dialectical method consistently because he based himself on the inevitability of bourgeois society. Marx could retain and extend it only by basing himself on the inevitability of socialism. As he wrote to Weydemeyer on March 6, 1852, he had discovered neither the class struggle nor the economic anatomy of the classes.
“What I did that was new was to prove ... that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Perhaps the most useful statement of dialectic as a scientific theory for Marxists is made by Rosa Luxembourg (Reform and Revolution):
“What precisely was the key which enabled Marx to open the door to the secrets of capitalist phenomena? The secret of Marx’s theory of value, of his analysis of the problem of money, of his theory of capital, of the theory of the rate of profit, and consequently of the entire economic system, is found in the transitory character of capitalist economy, the inevitability of its collapse, leading – and this is only another aspect of the same phenomena (emphasis mine – J.R.J.) – to socialism.... And it is precisely because he took the socialist viewpoint for his analysis of bourgeois society that he was in the position to give a scientific basis to the socialist movement.”
Bernstein believed that Capital was not scientific because Marx had had the conclusions in his head long before he wrote it. He did not understand that Marx could only write it because he took as a premise the transitory nature of capitalist society and the inevitability of socialism. This is the guide to Marxist theory. The test is in practice. If the inevitability of socialism is the key by which Marx opened the door to his world-shaking discoveries, the “if the world revolution fails to come” is the key by which the retrogressionists open the door to theirs.
“The Invading Socialist Society”
As far back as Anti-Dühring (1878), Marx and Engels saw socialism invading and dialectically altering capitalism.
“In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its opposite (emphasis mine – J.R.J.). into monopoly. The planless production of capitalist sorietv capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society.”
This is the philosophical concept which permeates The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, the most famous chapter in Capital and all Marxist writing. This for the retrogression-ists is their “center of gravity.” Let us see what Marx says:
The very laws of capitalist production bring forth the “material agencies” for its dissolution – concentration of production and socialization of labor. But on these material agencies as basis spring up “new forces and new passions.” This is the proletariat “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.” This is the proletarian revolution.
Only then does Marx sum up the process in terms of property which is a legal, historical manifestation of the productive process. He says:
“The capitalist ... mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property.”
Production, appropriation, property.
“This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor.”
Labor, you note, is the foundation. A certain kind of property is the result of a certain mode of production, a certain type of labor.
“But capitalist production begets with the inexorability of a law of nature its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”
Hitherto among Marxists and anti-Marxists, this was understood to mean socialism. The retrogressionists challenge this. They say:
“The capitalist mode of production begets its own negation with the inexorability of a law of nature even if the socialist revolution fails to come.”
This they tell us is the “deepest essence of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation.” So that when Marx wrote “negation of the negation” he did not mean socialism only. He meant that capitalist private property and capitalist production were going to be negated, destroyed, proletariat or no proletariat This, Marx’s most emphatic statement of the proletarian socialist revolution as the inevitable alternative to capitalism, is historically, i.e., in life, interpreted to mean that capitalist property can be abolished and a new kind of state (bureaucratic-collectivist, managerial) will take its place. This certainly is the most remarkable interpretation of Marxism ever made and is likely to remain so.
Class Struggle or National Struggle
I have to confine myself here to its immediate political consequences. The material self-abolition of capital is for the retrogressionists a process by which the capitalists expropriate one another and the many capitalist nations are expropriated by one. In their preoccupation with the expropriation of the property, they lose sight of the antagonistic roles of bourgeoisie and proletariat in the process of production.
It appears immediately in their analysis of Europe. This is based not upon the class struggle in production between the German centralization of European capital and the European working class. For them, the basic analysis is of one imperialist nation oppressing and expropriating other nations. The native bourgeoisie of the occupied countries is not defined basically in its economic association with the centralized capital of Europe but as part of the expropriated and exploited nations. The class struggle of the European proletariat against the existing capitalist society is thus replaced by the national struggle of individual nations, including bourgeoisie and workers. Hence the national struggle for them is not primarily a class struggle to overthrow a certain mode of production but a struggle to “reconstruct the whole screwed-back development, to regain all the achievements of the bourgeoisie (including the labor movement), to reach the highest accomplishments and to excel them.” But if the proletariat is to “reconstruct the whole screwed-back development,” etc., etc., then the task of the proletariat can only be to rebuild the whole bourgeois-democratic, i.e., the national, structure. Turn and twist as they may, the retrogressionists are in a vise from which they cannot escape.
The Economic Laws of Motion: The “General Law”
Without a firm grasp of the laws of production, you are blown all ways by every wind. Let us see what the retrogressionists do with the general law of capitalist accumulation which is Marx’s theoretical basis for the historical, i.e., the actual, living tendency. The retrogressionists say:
“The theory of the retrogressive movement is therefore no more than the theoretical grasp of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production at the point of transformation into their opposite in the reversal determined by its contents, in which they become concretely demonstrable laws of its collapse independent of the proletarian revolution.” (p. 334.)
Marx has summed up the general law as the law of the organic composition of capital, the relation of the constant capital (the mass of machinery, concrete labor, use-values) to the variable capital (labor-power, the only source of value). The relation is 1 : 1, then 2 : 1, then 3 : 1, then 4 : 1, etc. This developing ratio is the organic law of capitalist society, i.e., it is of the very nature of the organism.
You would expect that anyone who had discovered economic laws of retrogression would show how this law was in retrogression. But you search the retrogressionist document in vain. Not a word. Why? Because no such economic movement exists. Where in the world is there any retrogression in this organic law? In fascist Germany the relation oi constant to variable capital increased enormously. In Britain, in the USA, in Japan, in China, in India, in Latin America, the war has seen a vast increase; the post-war will see a still greater. What post-war Germany loses will go to increase the ratio of its neighbors. Whatever production does take place in Germany will take place according to the organic composition of 1946 and not according to that of 1845.
If the victorious powers dare to deindustrialize Germany, all that they will do is to transform millions of proletarians into an industrial reserve army on a vast scale which is precisely the “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.” Colonization of France or Germany can only be an agitational phrase. In the sense of a historical retrogression it means creating a countryside like that in India or China with feudal and semi-feudal peasants comprising the large majority of the population. The relations of production, the social relations and the whole political structure of those countries would be altered. A bourgeois-democratic revolution would be on the order of the day. The victorious imperialisms, as Lenin foresaw, cannot do it. Capitalist competition, which is in its present form imperialist war, compels them to obey the general law of capitalist accumulation and tomorrow will force them to rearm, i.e., reindustrialize Germany. Into these Marxist fundamentals they have introduced an unexampled confusion.
Retrogression and the Industrial Reserve Army
The retrogressionists say:
“Under imperialism production is carried on in a capitalist manner from A to Z, but all relations from A to Z are qualitatively altered. The ‘camp system,’ labor and forced labor service, prisons, etc., become by the massive extent and the manner of their utilization, first, special forms of slave labor, and beyond that, imperialist forms of utilizing the capitalist overpopulation.” (p. 342.)
Wasn’t it Marx who told us that the antagonism of capitalist production “vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, the industrial reserve army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital.” If today they are kept in labor camps, it is because the proletarian movement toward the socialist future is such that capital must assume complete control over the workers not only inside but outside of the process of production. But do these workers “qualitatively” produce more surplus ‘value or less? Do they alter the organic law? Do they modify or accentuate the contradiction between use-value and value? Do they become isolated groups of slaves, serfs on widely separated latifundia, on manorial farms, or on medieval peasant allotments? Do they acquire the social and political characteristics of slaves and serfs in the Middle Ages? To this last question the retrogressionists answer “Yes.” They say that society
“... harks back in reverse order to the end of the Middle Ages, the epoch of primitive accumulation, the Thirty Years War, the bourgeois revolutions, etc. In those days it was a question of smashing an outlived economic form and of winning the independence of nations – now it is a question of abolishing independence and shoving society back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages.” (pp. 333–334.)
It is not a question of smashing economic forms, not a question of winning a new society. That is merely the program of the Fourth International. That, they tell us, is not the question. Independence has been abolished, society has been shoved back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages and the proletariat, to save the situation, must restore democracy. They must write this. Socialized labor, the socialist proletariat, has vanished into the labor camp. The historical initiative is placed entirely in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
According to their mode of scientific analysis, the world revolution cannot but fail to come. The throwback of labor to the Middle Ages is their general law of capitalist accumulation. To think that this can be arrested by democratic slogans is, to put it moderately, a retrogression to the Utopias not even of the nineteenth century but of the Middle Ages.
The Productive Forces
The retrogressionist thesis claims to be based upon the collapse of capitalism “independently of the question of the extension of the market.” (p. 333.) Very good. To this, as is characteristic of them, they give not a word of analysis. I have to try to illustrate the difference between this theory and that of the underconsumptionists.
If you observe the growth of capital empirically, i.e., with bourgeois eyes, then it must appear that as the market declines, the productive power also declines and therefore brings the whole process to a standstill. In reality the struggle for the declining market makes each competitor increase its productive power in order to drive its competitor off the field. Naturally this leads to a fine crash. But in the crash the technologically backward units go under and the system as a whole emerges on a higher technological level – of course to start the whole process again. But the growth of the productive power of capital can come only by the higher organic composition. This leads to the falling rate of profit and it is the falling rate which compels a crisis. In Vol. III of Capital (p. 301) Marx says that it is “the fall in the rate of profit [which] calls forth the competitive struggle among the capitalists, not vice versa.” Most Marxist commentators recognize that the Marxian crisis is not a crisis of incapacity to sell goods or, in bourgeois terms, of “effective demand.” It is when the crisis is imminent that capitalists rush to sell goods and naturally the bottom falls out of the market. Blake expresses it very well, in An American Looks at Karl Marx:
“Thus the limiting factor of consumption is a precipitant, the discharge of workers in the means of production is a manifestation, the transferred crack in consumers’ purchases the ‘cause’ of a panic, while all along the crisis is implicit, overcome by accumulation by the stronger ...”
Now every serious dispute by serious people about the future of capitalist society will in the long run find the protagonists lined up, in the camp either of the Leninists or the underconsumptionists. The retrogressionists say that they follow the Leninist interpretation. Yet their thesis is that the productive forces have ceased to grow and they quote Lenin and Trotsky. I do not propose to take up Trotsky here. He undoubtedly wrote this many times. He also wrote other passages in apparent contradiction. At any rate he left no developed economic thesis. But Lenin did. He wrote Imperialism to prove the decline of capitalism. Nevertheless he states (and more than once):
“It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the possibility of the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a more or less degree, one or another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before.”
But argument about this does not need quotations from Lenin. In 1929 the productive power was higher than it had ever been; in 1939 it was still higher than it was in 1929; by 1942 it had reached fantastic heights compared with 1939. Do the retrogressionists dare to deny this? War is only capitalist competition carried out by national units, and the laws hold firm. In times of peace the fundamental movement is development of the productive power precisely because “the market” is declining. In war, where the world market is exhausted and can only be redivided, each national state fanatically develops the productive power. If capitalism lasts until 1968, then the preparation for World War III would result in a productive power far beyond that of 1942.
What then is responsible for the retrogressionists’ thesis of lack of growth of the productive forces? Having abandoned the inevitability of the socialist revolution, and having adopted a theory of the tendency of capitalist accumulation, which increasingly disorganizes and colonizes the proletariat and hence makes it unfit for the socialist revolution, they cannot see the growth of the productive forces which organizes and disciplines the proletariat in the process of production and prepares it for the socialist revolution. Having given up the process of production as the means of developing the productive forces and organizing the proletariat, they must look outside the process of production, i.e., to democracy.
Productive Forces and Social Relations
Underconsumptionists are distinguished by the fact that value plays no part in their analysis. Thus they lose sight of the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production, that between the means of production in its value form (the main concern of the bourgeoisie) and means of production in its material form (the main concern of the proletariat). They thus ruin the possibility of future analysis. A recent article in the Saturday Evening Post shows how clearly the bourgeoisie sees its own side of this question. Admiral Ramsey says that all the existing planes must be systematically destroyed because in five years’ time they would be obsolete. And not only planes, but means of production. General Arnold demands “research laboratories for ever-increasing aeronautical development, a progressive aviation industry capable of great expansion quickly.” Thus essentially as in competition for the market, the material form of the products may be still valuable and able to give great service to the proletariat and the people. But their value, in terms of socially necessary labor time on the world market, is equal only to that of the latest discovery, actual or potential. Hence reorganization of production for more and better production, socialist of labor, increase of the industrial army. The general and the admiral were forward-looking but still did not see far enough. The discovery of atomic energy poses the question of the reorganization of the whole technological system. The second bomb, two days later, made the first obsolete. The retrogressionist thesis makes it impossible to interpret the general capitalist development as socialist society invading capitalism. For then atomic energy is a sign of greater labor camps and therefore of a quicker return to the Middle Ages. Instead of calling upon workers in view of the economic development to prepare for power they are compelled to demand more frantically than ever, a defense of democracy.
What then is the fundamental error of the retrogressionists? They have as always lost sight of the invading socialist society, the socialist future in the capitalist present. Capitalism fetters, i.e., hampers, impedes the development of the productive forces. But it does not bring them to a halt. They move forward by advance, retardation, standstill, but they move forward, bringing the proletariat with them. The theoretical analysis is that the more capitalism increases the productive forces, the more it brings them into conflict with the existing social relations. The more it increases and develops the productive forces the more it socializes labor and the more it degrades it and the more it drives it to revolt. Where Marxism deals in contradictions, growths and deepening of antagonisms, and therefore of class struggle, the retrogressionists deal in absolutes. The productive forces have ceased to grow. Having decided to operate on the basis of “if the world revolution fails to come,” the retrogressionists, rudderless, deny historical fact – the growth of the productive forces since 1917 – make a complete jumble of Marxian economics, all in order to show society on its way back to the Middle Ages. You do not make these blunders without dragging others, and more serious ones, in their train.
Idealism and Positivism
The vital question is to get hold of the intimate connection between retrogressionist theory and their practical conclusions. In his Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic, Marx pays noble tribute to Hegel for his discovery of the dialectic but foretells that his incapacity to take it further, i.e., to socialism, opens the way to uncritical idealism and equally uncritical positivism. The retrogressionists fall inescapably into both.
In Vol.II Marx divided capital into Department I, means of production and Department II, means of consumption, and bases his further analysis upon this division. The retrogressionists divide the productive forces into means of destruction and means of construction. What is this but idealism – classification according to moral criteria? One stands almost in despair before this muddle. Oil, coal, steel, Willow Run, Curtiss-Wright, were they means of destruction in January 1945? And what are they now in August 1945? Are they once more means of construction? If so, they move from being means of destruction to being means of construction under the same class rule. This is the economics of Philip Murray. The retrogressionists do not know with what sharp weapons they are playing. All Marx’s economic categories are social categories. In the analysis of capital as value, constant capital symbolizes the bourgeoisie, variable capital the proletariat. But men use not value but steel, oil, textiles. Thus, in his analysis of capital as material form, Department I (means of production) is in essence representative of the bourgeoisie and Department II (means of consumption) is representative of the proletariat. The struggle between constant and variable capital, between Department I and Department II is expressive of the struggle of classes. What struggle goes on between means of destruction and means of consumption? The retrogressionists are defining things as things and not according to a social method – the most elementary positivism. But idealism and positivism are not terms of abuse. Politically they mean one thing – analysis of productive forces as things in general, analysis of the proletariat as people in general.
The Phenomenology of Mind
Marxism is distinguished from idealism and positivism of all types by the fact that (a) it distinguishes the proletariat from all other classes by its types of labor and (b) by the revolutionary effect upon the proletariat and society of this type of labor.
The concept of labor is the very basis of the dialectic, and not merely of the Marxian dialectic but of the dialectic of Hegel himself. In the Phenomenology of Mind [1], in the section on Lordship and Bondage, Hegel shows that the lord has a desire for the object and enjoys it. But because he does not actually work on it, his desire lacks objectivity. The labor of the bondsman, in working, in changing, i.e., in negating the raw material, has the contrary effect. This, his labor, gives him his rudimentary sense of personality. Marx hailed this and continued the basic idea in his analysis of handicraft and the early stages of capitalist production (simple cooperation). The laborer’s physical and mental faculties are developed by the fact that he makes a whole chair, a whole table, a piece of armor or a whole shoe.
With the development of the stage of manufacture, however, there begins the division of labor, and here instead of making one object, man begins to produce fragments of an object. In the process of production, there begins a stultification, distortion and ossification of his physical and intellectual faculties.
With the productive process of heavy industry, this stultification is pushed to its ultimate limit. Man becomes merely an appendage to a machine. He now no longer uses the instruments of production. As Marx repeats on page after page, the instruments of production use him. Hegel, who had caught hold of this, was completely baffled by it and seeing no way out, took refuge in idealism. Marx, using the Hegelian method and remaining in the productive process itself, discovered and elaborated one of the most profound truths of social and political psychology. In the very degradation of the workers he saw the basis of their emancipation. Attacking Proudhon for misunderstanding dialectic, he wrote of the laborer in the automatic factory:
“But from the moment that all special development ceases, the need of universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to make itself felt.” (Poverty of Philosophy, 1847)
This need of the individual for universality, for a sense of integration so powerful among all modern oppressed classes, is the key to vast areas of social and political jungles of today. The fascists, for example, understood it thoroughly.
Twenty years later in Capital Marx developed the political results of the argument to the full.
“It is as a result of the division of labor in manufactures, that the laborer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production as the property of another and as a ruling power.” (Kerr ed., p. 397)
He does not need revolutionary parties to teach him this. This process is his revolutionary education. It begins in manufacture. “It is completed in modern industry ...” This is the misery that is accumulated as capital is accumulated. It may not be formulated. But the moment bourgeois society breaks down and the worker breaks out in insurrection, for whatever incidental purpose, resentment against the whole system explodes with terrible power. [2]
The educational process is not individual but social. As Marx insisted and Lenin never wearied in pointing out, in addition to this personal, individual education, capital educates the worker socially and politically. In Capital (pp. 632–3) Marx quoted a passage he had written twenty years before in the Manifesto. Former industrial systems, all of them, aimed at conservation of the existing mode of production. Far different is capital:
“Constant revolutions in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and superstitions are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
This is the history of Europe during the last thirty years and particularly the last five.
The very climax of Marx’s chapter on The General Law is to warn that “This antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous but nevertheless essentially distinct and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production,” i.e., the Middle Ages. And why essentially distinct? Because in capital alone the degradation and its historical conditions also create in the workers the determination to overthrow the system and acquire for themselves the intellectual potencies of the material process of production. Who doesn’t understand this in his bones can be a sincere revolutionary but cannot lead the proletariat. The retrogressionists ruin this conception. They say that “the minute the proletarian loses his right to strike, his freedom of movement, and all political rights,” he ceases to be the “classic ‘free’ proletarian ...” (p. 331) For the analysis of production and the stages of production, they have substituted the legislative or repressive action of the bourgeois state. They say that “The modern slave differs much less politically from the slave of antiquity than appears at first glance.” (p. 331) The retrogressionists carry their democratic conceptions into the process of production itself. They say: “Politically, and to a large extent economically, it (the proletariat) lives under the conditions and forms of slavery.” (p. 339) They seem incapable of understanding that increase of misery, subordination, slavery is part of capitalist production and not retrogression.
At this stage we can afford to be empirical. In 1944 the Italian proletariat in North Italy lived under fascism. Mussolini, to placate this proletariat, called his state the Socialist Republic. Every worker who punched the clock and found no work got three-quarters of his day’s pay. Mussolini passed decrees which aimed at making the workers believe that industry was socialized. When the Germans were about to leave, these workers negotiated with them and with Mussolini and drove them out. They seized the factories. They hold them to this day. Such is modern industry that a mere general strike poses the socialist revolution and the question of the state-power with workers organized in factory committees and Soviets. Yet the retrogressionists say in 1944 that because of the absence of bourgeois-democracy the more you looked at these workers the more you saw how much they resembled the slaves who lived in the Italian latifundia 3,000 years ago.
Revolutionary Perspectives and Proposals
Except seen in the light of their analysis of the proletariat in production, the revolutionary perspectives of the great Marxists have always seemed like stratospheric ravings.
In 1848 Marx said that “the bourgeois revolution in Germany would be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.” In 1858 he wrote to Engels: “On the continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character.” Twenty years later, introducing Marx’s Civil War in France, Engels wrote:
“Thanks to the economic and political development of France since 1789, Paris has for fifty years been placed in such a position that ... no revolution could there break out without the proletariat ... (after victory) immediately putting forward its own demands ... demands ... more or less indefinite ... but the upshot of them all ... the abolition of the class contrast between capitalist and laborer.”
The word “immediately” appears every time.
Their enormous confidence is based not upon speculation on the psychology of workers but upon the antagonism of objective relations between labor and capital. From this came their proposals. In 1848 in the Manifesto Marx says that Communists support every movement against the existing order, but “In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” For whatever its degree of development at the time, at the moment of insurrection, it flies to the fore.
The Revolutionary Epoch
individual production of 1871, which had nevertheless produced the Commune, had developed into genuine large-scale industry. Trotsky, watching the revolution in feudal Russia, declared that the victorious bourgeois-democratic revolution would “immediately” assume a socialist character. Lenin, as we know, opposed him. We now know who (despite many important qualifications) was essentially right. 1905 is a very important year. The development of industry brought the political general strike and the soviets. They represent the industrially and socially motivated rejection by the workers of bourgeois democracy. Marx’s 1850 subjective demand for revolutionary workers’ organizations are now objective realities, henceforth inseparable from revolution, as 1917 and post-war Europe and Asia were to show.
In 1938 in the Founding Conference Theses, Trotsky wrote that “The Spanish proletariat has made a series of heroic attempts since April 1931 to take power in its own hands and guide the fate of society.” Are these workers in the “true-bourgeois” tradition of forty years?
He says of the French proletariat that “the great wave of sit-down strikes, particularly during June 1936, revealed the wholehearted readiness of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system.” He left it to the Philistines of all shades to point out that the Spanish workers in 1931 were thinking only of overthrowing the monarch (as presumably the Belgians today), and the French workers only of the 40-hour week.
In 1940 Trotsky’s Manifesto had not the faintest breath of retrogression or belief that the workers for forty years have been dominated by “the true bourgeois tradition of revisionism” (p.340) He says the exact opposite. For him in 1939 the workers wanted to “tear themselves free from the bloody chaos” of capitalist society. In 1940 they had “lost practically all democratic and pacifist illusions.” Note that we are here a stage beyond 1848. The crimes and failures of the modern bourgeoisie have created the subjective consciousness of the modern proletariat which re-enforces the objective antagonism of developed modern industry. Trotsky calmly posed three possibilities. The victory of Anglo-American imperialism, an indecisive struggle, and the victory of Hitler in Europe. The last concerns us most. Fascism would over-run Europe. But that would only be a prelude to a ferocious war with the US. The perspective of Soviets, armed insurrection and the social revolution would remain. As industry had developed since 1848, so the crisis of 1940 presented us with antagonisms a thousand times more developed including a socialist proletariat. Yet there is never a word from the retrogressionists as to the relation of their theory to the perspectives of the leader of the Fourth International.
Historical Retrogression
What would be a retrogression? In the Junius pamphlet (1914) Rosa Luxemburg, although opposed to the imperialist war, put forward a program which did not call for social revolution. Lenin attacked this as a national program. The “objective historical” situation demanded the socialist revolution. He said that a throwback in Europe, i.e., retrogression, was not impossible, if the war ENDED in the domination of Europe by one state ... This was exactly Trotsky’s point when he emphasized that even if Hitler won in 1940, he would have to fight the United States. The war, i.e., the bourgeois crisis would not be ended. If, continued Lenin, the proletariat remained impotent for twenty years. Who, who (now) dares to say that the European proletariat is impotent? But the impotence of the whole European proletariat for twenty years would not be retrogression. In addition, for the same twenty years, the American and the Japanese proletariat must fail to achieve a socialist revolution. Then, and only then, after several decades, or in the time of our sons’ sons (Trotsky in 1938) would the revolutionary socialist movement recognize retrogression and once more raise the national program of the restoration of the bourgeois national state. [3]
But the retrogressionists, the vanguard of the vanguard, no sooner saw Hitler dominating Europe, then in the very midst of the war, when the whole situation was in flux, they proclaimed their labor camp theory and a “democratic-political revolution” for national independence and democracy. Not only that Their economic analysis (such as it is) leads them to foresee that the victorious imperialist nations, Anglo-American and Russian imperialism, will continue the same process. Hence their “democratic political revolution” still holds the stage.
Two Types of Democratic Demands
It should be obvious that what Lenin said about “democratic demands” has nothing at all to do with this dispute. It would be a crying and intolerable imposition to attempt to confuse the two. For Lenin all democratic demands in advanced countries were a means of mobilizing workers to overthrow the bourgeoisie. He said that we could have socialist revolution without one democratic demand being realized. The retrogressionists say we must have a “democratic-political revolution” so as to give the workers a chance to “reconstruct” the whole “screwed-back development,” and to learn to link scientific socialism to the labor movement. The two perspectives are at opposite poles. Never before has any revolutionary made such a proposal. Trotsky proposed that the democratic slogans of right to organize and free press be raised in fascist countries, but warned that they should not be a “noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie’s agents.” (Founding Conference) Writing of “transitional demands in fascist countries,” he warned:
“Fascism plunged these countries into political barbarism. But it did not change their social structure. Fascism is a tool in the hands of finance-capital and not of feudal landowners. A revolutionary program should base itself on the dialectics of the class struggle, obligatory also to fascist countries, and not on the psychology of terrified bankrupts.”
For him the Soviets “will cover Germany before a new Constitutional Assembly will gather in Weimar.” [4] But the retrogressionists do not propose democratic demands which are to be thrown aside as soon as the masses move. They do the exact opposite. They propose a revolution for democratic demands. What is this but a rejection of the social revolution until later when the whole “screwed-back development” will have been “reconstructed.” This is the theory. Let us see how it measures up to events.
(The concluding part will appear in the next issue)
Footnotes
1. One of the three basic books used by Lenin in his studies for Imperialism.
2. The babblers who think that all the American workers want is “full employment” are in for a rude awakening. That capitalism increases the use-values (radio, education, books, etc.) that he uses outside of production only increases his antagonism.
3. That, said Lenin, was not impossible. But a few months later he said emphatically that the victorious bourgeoisie might think they could do this, but they could not. The economic retrogression of Europe by political means would be a colossal, in fact, an impossible task. (Collected Works, XIX. p.22.)
4. Those who want to use the fact that this did not happen are free to try. They should, however, think many times before they begin this type of argument.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1937</p>
<h5>Doctrine and History for the Youth No.3</h5>
<h3>
THE LENINIST POLICY FOR SPAIN</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">First Published</span>: in <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/fight/index.htm#f37_05">Fight</a>,Volume 1. No. 5. April, 1937, p. 16, signed CL Rudder;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed/Marked up</span>: by Ted Crawford/Damon Maxwell.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">In our last issue, No. 4, there appeared a remarkable extract from Lenin’s denunciation of bourgeois democracy. We must get this question of democracy clear. That is the great political issue of the Spanish revolution. Is the revolution for bourgeois democracy against Fascism or is it for a Soviet Spain? All the Liberals say it is for bourgeois democracy. We know them. They are for bourgeois democracy because that means the protection of capitalist property. But the Communist Party is also for democracy. In the <em>International Press Correspondence</em> of August 8, 1936, Harry Pollitt says “<em>The people of Spain are not fighting to establish soviets, or the proletarian dictatorship. Only downright lying scoundrels, or misguided self-styled “Lefts” declare that they are – and both combine to help the aims of the fascist rebels.</em>”</p>
<p>The Marxist Group and the Fourth International are the “downright lying scoundrels” who condemn the Communist Party policy. That is why we give critical support to the P.O.U.M. because although they are not Trotskyist, they stand for the socialist revolution. And that is one of the reasons why we and the P.O.U.M. and all in Russia who oppose Stalinism, are slandered, called agents of Franco and of the German Gestapo, etc. These lies are necessary to the Stalinists. They have to lie for they cannot argue. What is our idea about democracy? We shall let one of our comrades express it.</p>
<p>“It is just there that people calling themselves teachers of Marxism have come forward with the banner of democracy, not understanding that democracy, so long as the capitalists keep their property, is only a thoroughly hypocritical covering for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and there cannot even be any question of emancipating labour from the yoke of capital unless that hypocritical covering is torn aside, unless we put the question as Marx always taught us to put it, as the daily struggle of the workers has taught us to put it, as every strike, every sharpening of the trade union struggle has put it. The question has to be put in this way, that so long as property remains in the hands of the capitalists any kind of democracy is only a hypocritically concealed bourgeois dictatorship. All kinds of talk about universal suffrage, about plebiscite, about equality in voting, is only utter deceit so long as there is no equality between exploiters and exploited, between the owners of capital and property and the modern wage slaves.”</p>
<p>That is our position exactly. We say that as long as the capitalists have the property, whether the Government is Popular Front or Labour, wage-slavery remains. But if it were possible for our comrade to be with us at a meeting in London and say this, the Stalinists would shout at him, “Agent of Hitler,” “Trotskyist mad-dog,” “Friend of Franco,” etc., etc. That unfortunately cannot happen. For the comrade is Lenin. All youth should read his little pamphlet on “Democracy and Trade Unions.” The Stalinist bureaucracy, rich, powerful, privileged, is using Lenin’s name to deceive the workers. It wants no more socialist revolutions anywhere and organises great trials in Russia and huge campaigns of slander against all who still fight for the socialist revolution. Trotskyism means Leninism.</p>
<p>But it is here that an important question arises. Caballero is for democracy. But Caballero is fighting Franco. If we fight Caballero we may weaken the fight against Franco. Suppose I put it this way.</p>
<p><em>Even now we must not support the revolution of Caballero. It would be a failure of principle. How then, it will be said, must Franco not be fought? Certainly, yes. But between fighting Franco and supporting Caballero there is a difference. We wage and shall continue to wage war on Franco, but we do not support Caballero; we unveil his feebleness. There is a difference. That difference is subtle enough, but it is most essential, and it must not be forgotten.</em></p>
<p>Now supposing we were the party of the P.O.U.M. in Madrid where Caballero is still fairly strong, and the revolutionary socialist movement not strong enough as it is in Catalonia to raise the slogan of the immediate seizure of power. We would say to our party: <em>we must at the same moment agitate against Caballero, but let the agitation be indirect rather than direct, but insisting on an active war against Franco [a war of attack which at last Caballero, under pressure, is just beginning]. Only the active development of that war can lead us to power, but of that we must speak as little as possible in our agitation (we keep it well in mind that even tomorrow events may compel us to take power, and that then we shall not let it go).</em></p>
<p>The policy is that while fighting against Franco we constantly point out the things that the Caballero Government does not do, cannot do, being a bourgeois government. And when sufficient of the masses see from the way the war is going that the Caballero Government is not mobilising the full force of workers and peasants (they are seeing it today already) they will turn to the party which will lead a really revolutionary war.</p>
<p>It is along those lines that we think the battle should be fought in Spain, a United Front against Franco with the Azana-Caballero Government but building up the Socialist Revolution to seize power and abolish capitalism and parliamentary democracy. That is the policy for which the P.O.U.M. is called Mola’s Fifth Column in Madrid, agents of Franco, etc. by the Stalinists. But every line that is in italics was written by Lenin a few weeks before October 1917. All I have done is to substitute Franco for Kornilov and Caballero for Kerensky. I could have put Azana for Kerensky but Caballero works hand in glove with Azana the Republican. By lining themselves up with Azana and Caballero in a Popular policy against the Leninist line, the Stalinists have broken every principle of Leninism. They cannot argue. All they can do is to slander.</p>
<p>Get into contact with us, comrades, so that we can discuss these things together and organise assistance to P.O.U.M., slandered and persecuted not only by the bourgeois but by the Stalinist murderers of everything revolutionary inside and outside Russia.</p>
<p class="author">C. L. RUDDER</p>
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C.L.R. James 1937
Doctrine and History for the Youth No.3
THE LENINIST POLICY FOR SPAIN
First Published: in Fight,Volume 1. No. 5. April, 1937, p. 16, signed CL Rudder;
Transcribed/Marked up: by Ted Crawford/Damon Maxwell.
In our last issue, No. 4, there appeared a remarkable extract from Lenin’s denunciation of bourgeois democracy. We must get this question of democracy clear. That is the great political issue of the Spanish revolution. Is the revolution for bourgeois democracy against Fascism or is it for a Soviet Spain? All the Liberals say it is for bourgeois democracy. We know them. They are for bourgeois democracy because that means the protection of capitalist property. But the Communist Party is also for democracy. In the International Press Correspondence of August 8, 1936, Harry Pollitt says “The people of Spain are not fighting to establish soviets, or the proletarian dictatorship. Only downright lying scoundrels, or misguided self-styled “Lefts” declare that they are – and both combine to help the aims of the fascist rebels.”
The Marxist Group and the Fourth International are the “downright lying scoundrels” who condemn the Communist Party policy. That is why we give critical support to the P.O.U.M. because although they are not Trotskyist, they stand for the socialist revolution. And that is one of the reasons why we and the P.O.U.M. and all in Russia who oppose Stalinism, are slandered, called agents of Franco and of the German Gestapo, etc. These lies are necessary to the Stalinists. They have to lie for they cannot argue. What is our idea about democracy? We shall let one of our comrades express it.
“It is just there that people calling themselves teachers of Marxism have come forward with the banner of democracy, not understanding that democracy, so long as the capitalists keep their property, is only a thoroughly hypocritical covering for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and there cannot even be any question of emancipating labour from the yoke of capital unless that hypocritical covering is torn aside, unless we put the question as Marx always taught us to put it, as the daily struggle of the workers has taught us to put it, as every strike, every sharpening of the trade union struggle has put it. The question has to be put in this way, that so long as property remains in the hands of the capitalists any kind of democracy is only a hypocritically concealed bourgeois dictatorship. All kinds of talk about universal suffrage, about plebiscite, about equality in voting, is only utter deceit so long as there is no equality between exploiters and exploited, between the owners of capital and property and the modern wage slaves.”
That is our position exactly. We say that as long as the capitalists have the property, whether the Government is Popular Front or Labour, wage-slavery remains. But if it were possible for our comrade to be with us at a meeting in London and say this, the Stalinists would shout at him, “Agent of Hitler,” “Trotskyist mad-dog,” “Friend of Franco,” etc., etc. That unfortunately cannot happen. For the comrade is Lenin. All youth should read his little pamphlet on “Democracy and Trade Unions.” The Stalinist bureaucracy, rich, powerful, privileged, is using Lenin’s name to deceive the workers. It wants no more socialist revolutions anywhere and organises great trials in Russia and huge campaigns of slander against all who still fight for the socialist revolution. Trotskyism means Leninism.
But it is here that an important question arises. Caballero is for democracy. But Caballero is fighting Franco. If we fight Caballero we may weaken the fight against Franco. Suppose I put it this way.
Even now we must not support the revolution of Caballero. It would be a failure of principle. How then, it will be said, must Franco not be fought? Certainly, yes. But between fighting Franco and supporting Caballero there is a difference. We wage and shall continue to wage war on Franco, but we do not support Caballero; we unveil his feebleness. There is a difference. That difference is subtle enough, but it is most essential, and it must not be forgotten.
Now supposing we were the party of the P.O.U.M. in Madrid where Caballero is still fairly strong, and the revolutionary socialist movement not strong enough as it is in Catalonia to raise the slogan of the immediate seizure of power. We would say to our party: we must at the same moment agitate against Caballero, but let the agitation be indirect rather than direct, but insisting on an active war against Franco [a war of attack which at last Caballero, under pressure, is just beginning]. Only the active development of that war can lead us to power, but of that we must speak as little as possible in our agitation (we keep it well in mind that even tomorrow events may compel us to take power, and that then we shall not let it go).
The policy is that while fighting against Franco we constantly point out the things that the Caballero Government does not do, cannot do, being a bourgeois government. And when sufficient of the masses see from the way the war is going that the Caballero Government is not mobilising the full force of workers and peasants (they are seeing it today already) they will turn to the party which will lead a really revolutionary war.
It is along those lines that we think the battle should be fought in Spain, a United Front against Franco with the Azana-Caballero Government but building up the Socialist Revolution to seize power and abolish capitalism and parliamentary democracy. That is the policy for which the P.O.U.M. is called Mola’s Fifth Column in Madrid, agents of Franco, etc. by the Stalinists. But every line that is in italics was written by Lenin a few weeks before October 1917. All I have done is to substitute Franco for Kornilov and Caballero for Kerensky. I could have put Azana for Kerensky but Caballero works hand in glove with Azana the Republican. By lining themselves up with Azana and Caballero in a Popular policy against the Leninist line, the Stalinists have broken every principle of Leninism. They cannot argue. All they can do is to slander.
Get into contact with us, comrades, so that we can discuss these things together and organise assistance to P.O.U.M., slandered and persecuted not only by the bourgeois but by the Stalinist murderers of everything revolutionary inside and outside Russia.
C. L. RUDDER
C.L.R. James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>What Russia Wants in Germany</h1>
<h3>(July 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_30" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 30</a>, 24 July 1944, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Red Army is on the borders of Germany and Mike Gold, the Stalinist columnist, writes as follows in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> of July 17:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“What can be our duty but to disarm them once and for all? <em>Unless – unless</em> the German Revolution first disarms and destroys this cancer in the heart of Germany, Europe and the world.”</p>
<p class="fst">This gives the impression, and is intended to give the impression, that the Stalinists favor a German revolution to destroy fascism. At the same time Stalin and the Stalinist diplomats are collaborating closely with Anglo-American imperialism, working out the most abominable plans for the suppression of the German people. This is a carefully-worked-out tactic, and is a valuable example of the role the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Stalinist Red Army and the Stalinist parties in the various countries are playing in international relations. It is worth some examination.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Happened Before</h4>
<p class="fst">In 1918 there was a revolution in Germany. The revolution, however, did not touch the foundations of imperialist Germany, the ownership by a small group of capitalists of German heavy industry, the ownership of the large landed estates by the Junkers, the grip on the state-machine by the German bureaucracy, dominated and controlled by these very Junkers. A republic was established but the capitalist system remained.</p>
<p>Fifteen short years saw Hitler in power and the same capitalist interests took the German people along the same road which had led to the catastrophe of 1918.</p>
<p><em>We therefore face the question: What kind of revolution is needed in Germany? First of all, a revolution which would tear out and crush the Nazi regime. But this revolution cannot merely repeat the errors of 1918. It must stamp out capitalist property and create a socialist society. The Krupps, Thyssens, Stinneses and the other heavy industrialists, the German aristocracy, the von this and von that and von the other must be thrown out of power once and for all. The disasters these people have brought to Germany within the last thirty years, the tortures they have inflicted on the German workers, the barbarism which they and their imperialist rivals have imposed on Europe, these repeated crimes make it a pressing necessity not only to punish them but to break their economic power.</em></p>
<p>This is the revolution Germany needs. And even a few liberals (with much chattering of teeth and stammering) sometimes go so far as to say that the power of the Junkers (at least) should be destroyed.</p>
<p>Is this the revolution the Stalinists are for? <em>No such thing!</em></p>
<p>It is known that Stalin in Moscow has been nursing a committee of Germans captured in battle. This committee organizes, pulishes propaganda and agitation and broadcasts to Germany. <em>Many of its most important members are Junkers.</em> They are generals, colonels, colonel-generals, and the head is a relative of the German statesman Bismarck, who was a Junker of Junkers. These people call upon the German people and the German army to overthrow Hitler. But that is all. They are Junkers. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to expect them to lead a revolution against themselves and their own property?</p>
<p>With them on that committee are some Stalinist bureaucrats, old members of the Communist Party of Germany. In their journal they publish articles which say that although there must be a revolution against Hitler, what took place in 1918 must at all costs be avoided.</p>
<p>What took place in 1918 was that the workers formed Soviets and the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party had such power in their hands that they could have done what they pleased with the German economy. But, as we saw, they did nothing. <em>Even this is too much for the Stalinists today.</em> If there is a revolution they want it under the control of anti-Hitler German officers and the German army. If there is no revolution, then British imperialism, American imperialism and Stalinist imperialism will be able to “disarm” the German people at their ease.</p>
<p>So the Stalinist government plots with Roosevelt and Churchill for the suppression of the German and the European people. Meanwhile, Stalin’s committee, packed with Junkers, gets ready to bridle the German revolution and leave the bridle in safe hands. Meanwhile, as the Red Army approaches East Prussia, the stronghold of the Junkers, Mike Gold says that the Germans will have to be disarmed – UNLESS there is a revolution. Thus the American workers are being prepared for any situation which may arise.</p>
<p>In Germany itself the Stalinists can incite agitation, against the Hitler regime and point to those workers who hate the Junkers, the old communists who are members of Stalin’s committee. They serve as guarantee to the workers and peasants that they can have confidence in it.</p>
<p>That is the Stalinist international organization, with its representatives both in the councils of capitalism and in the councils of the worker. <em>They cannot fool Roosevelt or Churchill. But they can do untold mischief among the workers.</em> One of the most important needs of working-class leadership is a vigilant eye on them, not only for their reactionary, anti-working class policies on the national scene, but for the inexhaustible variety of the ways and means by which they plot to deceive the workers.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
What Russia Wants in Germany
(July 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 30, 24 July 1944, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The Red Army is on the borders of Germany and Mike Gold, the Stalinist columnist, writes as follows in the Daily Worker of July 17:
“What can be our duty but to disarm them once and for all? Unless – unless the German Revolution first disarms and destroys this cancer in the heart of Germany, Europe and the world.”
This gives the impression, and is intended to give the impression, that the Stalinists favor a German revolution to destroy fascism. At the same time Stalin and the Stalinist diplomats are collaborating closely with Anglo-American imperialism, working out the most abominable plans for the suppression of the German people. This is a carefully-worked-out tactic, and is a valuable example of the role the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Stalinist Red Army and the Stalinist parties in the various countries are playing in international relations. It is worth some examination.
What Happened Before
In 1918 there was a revolution in Germany. The revolution, however, did not touch the foundations of imperialist Germany, the ownership by a small group of capitalists of German heavy industry, the ownership of the large landed estates by the Junkers, the grip on the state-machine by the German bureaucracy, dominated and controlled by these very Junkers. A republic was established but the capitalist system remained.
Fifteen short years saw Hitler in power and the same capitalist interests took the German people along the same road which had led to the catastrophe of 1918.
We therefore face the question: What kind of revolution is needed in Germany? First of all, a revolution which would tear out and crush the Nazi regime. But this revolution cannot merely repeat the errors of 1918. It must stamp out capitalist property and create a socialist society. The Krupps, Thyssens, Stinneses and the other heavy industrialists, the German aristocracy, the von this and von that and von the other must be thrown out of power once and for all. The disasters these people have brought to Germany within the last thirty years, the tortures they have inflicted on the German workers, the barbarism which they and their imperialist rivals have imposed on Europe, these repeated crimes make it a pressing necessity not only to punish them but to break their economic power.
This is the revolution Germany needs. And even a few liberals (with much chattering of teeth and stammering) sometimes go so far as to say that the power of the Junkers (at least) should be destroyed.
Is this the revolution the Stalinists are for? No such thing!
It is known that Stalin in Moscow has been nursing a committee of Germans captured in battle. This committee organizes, pulishes propaganda and agitation and broadcasts to Germany. Many of its most important members are Junkers. They are generals, colonels, colonel-generals, and the head is a relative of the German statesman Bismarck, who was a Junker of Junkers. These people call upon the German people and the German army to overthrow Hitler. But that is all. They are Junkers. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to expect them to lead a revolution against themselves and their own property?
With them on that committee are some Stalinist bureaucrats, old members of the Communist Party of Germany. In their journal they publish articles which say that although there must be a revolution against Hitler, what took place in 1918 must at all costs be avoided.
What took place in 1918 was that the workers formed Soviets and the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party had such power in their hands that they could have done what they pleased with the German economy. But, as we saw, they did nothing. Even this is too much for the Stalinists today. If there is a revolution they want it under the control of anti-Hitler German officers and the German army. If there is no revolution, then British imperialism, American imperialism and Stalinist imperialism will be able to “disarm” the German people at their ease.
So the Stalinist government plots with Roosevelt and Churchill for the suppression of the German and the European people. Meanwhile, Stalin’s committee, packed with Junkers, gets ready to bridle the German revolution and leave the bridle in safe hands. Meanwhile, as the Red Army approaches East Prussia, the stronghold of the Junkers, Mike Gold says that the Germans will have to be disarmed – UNLESS there is a revolution. Thus the American workers are being prepared for any situation which may arise.
In Germany itself the Stalinists can incite agitation, against the Hitler regime and point to those workers who hate the Junkers, the old communists who are members of Stalin’s committee. They serve as guarantee to the workers and peasants that they can have confidence in it.
That is the Stalinist international organization, with its representatives both in the councils of capitalism and in the councils of the worker. They cannot fool Roosevelt or Churchill. But they can do untold mischief among the workers. One of the most important needs of working-class leadership is a vigilant eye on them, not only for their reactionary, anti-working class policies on the national scene, but for the inexhaustible variety of the ways and means by which they plot to deceive the workers.
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<p class="title">C.L.R. James 1967</p>
<h3>World Politics Today</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Speak Out</em>, (March 1967).<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Christian Hogsbjerg, with thanks to Ian Birchall.</p>
<p class="information">This article is based on a talk given by C.L.R. James at Windsor, Ontario, in Canada on January 14, 1967. – Ed.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>I am very sensitive to the fact that I am in North America, that the society in which I am and where I lived for a number of years, began about the beginning of the 17th century. The only civilization that you are aware of here is this bourgeois civilization, the industrial development of a capitalist civilization. Therefore, the change that that development wrought in Western civilization you have no practical experience of – you haven’t got the remains of earlier civilizations around you.</p>
<p>I am very much aware of that and, therefore, in talking about modern politics I shall lay emphasis on the civilization which we have seen in Western Europe and in America from the year 1600. In 1619 the first slaves came to the U.S.; 1620 was the Mayflower. The foundation of American civilization is that British basis and from 1619-1620 to 1914 that civilization existed in the world. It had many great triumphs. It had all the evils that any advanced civilization has. But it was accepted by people as representing the best that humanity had yet done and it showed the way of progress for the future. From 1620 – I prefer 1619 for obvious reasons – to 1914, 300 years, the world lived and the people in it accommodated themselves to existence in a certain way.</p>
<p>What I have to say about modern politics is this: In 1914 that world broke down. I have not found that people in North America and in the Americas as a whole are very much aware of the fact that it came to an end in 1914. People in Europe are extremely aware of that. They know that these 300 years mark the beginning, the development, and the decline and decay of a certain form of civilization.</p>
<p>The bourgeois regime, the capitalist regime, the developed industrial regime, which began in the beginning of the 17th century established the national state. An important part of its development (which remains to plague it up to this day, despite all the pretenses that they have gone far towards solving it) is the question of the relations they have developed with the underdeveloped countries. I do not think many people are aware of the fact that when Britain, for example, and France went to India, the Indian civilization in 1600 had many features that were in advance of what existed in Europe at the time. And this relation of these countries which became the advanced countries is to a substantial degree owing to their exploitation of the underdeveloped countries. That is what made them what they became, looked upon as the vanguard of civilization, and in general as the advanced countries. I do not say that in order to taunt people with it or ask for some response. I say that because that today, as I hope to show, is one of the most powerful influences that led to the decay and makes it impossible for them to establish any harmony or order in the civilization which they represent.</p>
<p>So, the national states were formed. They had contact with underdeveloped</p>
<p>countries and laid the basis of the wealth that made them advanced countries. They were able to establish a political form- parliamentary democracy. Very important in 1914, not as important today. And in addition to establishing parliamentary democracy they were able, by means of parliamentary democracy and the joining together of political interest, representing political divisions in the country, to establish a form of government which was usually a monarchy. That monarchy didn’t represent what the writers like to say today, some liking for some symbol of everybody being together and some rule, some authority. The reason for the establishment of the dynasties on the basis of parliamentary democracy was to bring the</p>
<p>feudal elements, particularly the landowning elements, into the organization of the modern state.</p>
<p>That was the situation in 1914. There were disturbances, there was the Paris Commune, they had one or two small wars. But the wars were not very important. They went and they shot and they killed about 20,000 people or something of that kind. They came home again, and the people came out to welcome them and to celebrate that the war was over, and then the people went on with their lives. There were some very great difficulties,</p>
<p>some people cried. But by and large the wars didn’t fundamentally upset the</p>
<p>social life of the country. That was the situation up to 1914. I have to mention another aspect. I was reading a lot of books. I knew a lot of people who knew that world. The world of 1914 was, despite the disturbances in Europe during the 19th century, a solid world and knew where it stood. And the chief thing that I would like to remember about it is shown in this:</p>
<p>In Russia they used to send people into exile, into Siberia. And they made the Russian citizen have a passport in order to move. And it is very interesting today to read of the contempt in which they were held, the absolute degradation that Russia represented to a great deal of Western Europe, because they sent people into exile and demanded of the Russian citizen a passport. They didn’t know what they would be doing in less than 50 years’ time.</p>
<p>In 1914 the war began, by 1918 the basis of the world was gone. The disruption of the economy was such that in 1929 you had the greatest disorder in the economic life, the tremendous depression, something that Europe had not seen before. That was a direct result of this war. But the thing I would like to speak about was the breakdown of the parliamentary regime, and the dynasties that occupied the positions of rulers.</p>
<p>Up to 1914 democracy in the national state was the kind of government that everybody respected, that the backward countries looked forward to as the kind of government that in time they would be able to arrive at. By 1921 and 1922 that was done. Democracy began its descent downward. So today a large majority of the population isn’t democratic, has no wish to be democratic, though it may not like the particular regime that it has. But the parliamentary democratic regime is finished. In 1914 that was not so. In 1917 there was the revolution in Russia. And it seemed to people that he working class talking about socialism and trying to establish the new socialist regime, showed some promise for the future. Some were against it, but at least it had some historical development. What happened in 1922 in Italy was very different. You had the beginnings of the definite destruction of the democratic regime and the establishment of fascism. In 1933 you had that in Germany. It was coming a long time, you had the breakdown of the Russian revolution in Russia and the establishment of a totalitarian regime. By the time (1938-1941) the Second World War began, from the Bay of Biscay right over northern Europe, to Vladivostoc in Asia, you had the totalitarian regimes of the greatest cruelty and barbarism. The regime of Hitler and then the regime of Stalin. And those regimes were what Europe had reached in a few years after the great war of 1914 to 1918.</p>
<p>There is something that I think I ought to say. We know something about European civilization. We speak about Shakespeare, we do not necessarily make him English. We speak about Michelangelo. We speak of the great musical development in Germany, the great painting in France. It is European, it is part of the development of Europe. And it is easy to trace the reciprocal influences of these various countries upon each other in the particular spheres in which they have become very important and have led the world. But once you say that, you have to recognize that the degradation of civilization that took place in Germany is not particularly German. It is not a question of Hitler and his wicked Nazis. It is a stage of the decay and degradation of Western civilization as a whole. If we look upon Dante and Beethoven, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, the great Russian writers, as part of the development of Western civilization, then we have to look at what happened in Germany, and what took place in various parts of the earth as a sign, not of the evils that affect those particular countries in which it spread, but as a sign of general decay and decline of European civilization as a whole. And it began in 1914, and laid the foundations for the future decay between 1914 and 1918. </p>
<p>Now I think I can go a little further. The economy went to pieces. The parliamentary democracy did not only fail in certain countries but a large portion of civilization looked upon parliamentary democracy as the certain way of degradation and began to seek other ways of development.</p>
<p>And you have also art and such things taking a form in which we are unable to see any patterns for the future. There are gifted men, there has never been a more gifted man (I am told by people who ought to know) than Picasso, in technique and finish. But what he has had to say was very different than what the great painters of an earlier time had to say. Until he did Guernica he didn’t know what he was saying. He was making a lot of experiments, developing a remarkable technique, but in actual statement of something about the future of civilization, it took Guernica and the breakdown of civilization in Spain for him to do that.</p>
<p>We went into World War II and what took place in World War II was merely a development of what had started in World War I. There were certain additional features, that is to say, they had discovered by means of mechanical development the means of destroying people in a way that Napoleon had never thought of. They hadn’t reached that in World War I, though they had killed enough millions. But in World War II the habit of total destruction became an inescapable part of governments of the world and today that has grown still further.</p>
<p>Let me tell you two stories which I think w.ill give you some idea of the decay that has taken place. When I was a small boy I used to study history in the West Indies, but we used to study history in. the English language. We learned of three terrible massacres. One of them was the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It seemed some French Queen thought it was about time to get rid of some Protestants. She got rid of a few thousand, and that was known all over as one of the great massacres of the world. There was another massacre that we used to study in school. It was the massacre of Glencoe, in which those massacred were the Macdonalds, a Scottish clan. I never was too sure of it, but there was a lot of killing- almost 40 of them were seen after. The other one that we were concerned with was something that took place in Calcutta. I think it was in the year 1757 when an Indian potentate put about 500 British people, men, women, and children, in some small room. When they opened the place in the morning a good many of them were dead, the rest were pretty miserable, and we were assured that, by and large, that is the reason why the British went to India- to see about India and teach the Indian potentates that they were not to push all sorts of people into small places where they couldn’t breathe properly.</p>
<p>There are the three massacres. The massacre of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the massacre of Glencoe, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Nowadays, in 1967, unless you kill about a million people you can’t even make the front page. That is where we are. The question of massacre has reached the stage where you can kill any number of people and it does not matter what happens. The population is, or appears to be, seasoned to the idea of hundreds of thousands of people being killed for no particular reason at all.</p>
<p>The second thing is a series of articles that I read in the <em>New York Times</em>. They talked about the importance and the necessity of the people of the United States, the government, being able to destroy the population of Russia and vice versa, the importance of the people of Russia being able to destroy the population of the United States. The killing of 200 million people.! You had to live in 1914 to know that that sort of thing would have brought forth expressions of horror from all sections of the population. Today in the U.S. they discuss it in their popular press. They discuss the same thing in China. Mao joins in this nonsense: where they’re killing, 200 million Americans, 200 million Russians, if they killed 200 million in China I would still have 400 million remaining. So I can stand that awful business if that is the kind of game they want to play. That is the level civilization has reached. I want you to understand that as far as far as I and my friends are concerned, it is complete degradation and decay. The barbarism is not to come, it is here.</p>
<p>And now I want to road a passage from the highly respectable <em>Times Literary Supplement</em> (quoted in <em>Facing Reality</em>). They are not Marxists, they are not socialists, they are not revolutionaries. They are the voice of one of the most conservative social forces in the world today, the British aristocracy. The passage is worth bringing to your notice because it tells you what they think of the world in which we live, and the stage to which we have been reduced after the war of 1914-1918. “A time of strained and breaking loyalties all over the world – in politics, nationalities, religions, moralities and families – is certainly a time of troubles. Such a time has come upon us all, for the first time in history.” This is the first time in history that such degradation, barbarism, decay, and no perspective has descended upon the world. “That secular religion which once seemed the hope of half the world- Communism-has equally become a prey to conflicts of loyalty, nationalism and morality.” You see, some people believed that Communism was a doctrine which might offer some way out to the world in general. But after the 20th congress in 1956, in which the Russians paid tribute long overdue to Stalin; and the Hungarian Revolution, which showed that people could be brought up in the totalitarian regime, but that did not prevent them from revolting against it with a force and range and power which was absolutely unknown in the world before; and then later the struggles in Russia, the way in which Khruschev was got rid of -that has been a shock to vast numbers of people. And then the split between the Communist regime of Russia and of China, people realize that Communism, as they have known it, offers no way out. “In Russia, as in America, India and Britain; in the Jewry of the diaspora and of Israel alike, as among the dwellers in Arabia, the old faiths cannot hold the young, materialism rules the roost and societies bid fair to come apart at the seams. Worse, they begin to seem unpatchable;” They don’t begin to seem unpatchable; that may have been so in 1957. In 1967 you will find few people who take an interest in public affairs, and many who do not, who believe that the society in which we live is absolutely unpatchable. Their problem is what to do; they don’t know. “Worse, they begin to seem unpatchable; yet no one knows, no one can foretell, what kind of society will emerge as typical of the continental groupings (if not the “World State’ itself) towards which our familiar nation-states are being hustled.... The citizenry – and particularly, primarily, the thinking elite – will suffer a kind of schizophrenia: on the one hand their social instincts will still be urgent, but unsatisfiable; on the other hand, as a human-natural defense mechanism, they will decry and debunk any form of social activity, for that would identify them with the powers-that-be and imply acquiescence in the various forms of deployment of those powers.” They are sounding like the Communists used to sound in the old days, the difference between them and the old-fashioned Communists being that they are saying that everybody thinks that way of the kind of government under which we live. They go further: “Thus ‘a sort of traitor’ arises; not very many real, political, or military traitors, but rather a vast number of non-citizens – citizens of nothing, attaching no positive value whatever to their society and its administrative state, having no emotive affection for it, living as atoms in it, fulfilling the barest minimum of obligations to ‘get by’ and generally betraying an ‘I couldn’t care less’ mood.” That is what the acme of respectability in 1957 says about the large majority of citizens in the modern world. By 1967 it is infinitely worse.</p>
<p>And now I want to take up certain elements of the decay to which I had referred before. I speak of the question, what is to be done, or what we can reasonably expect will have to be done. I am not going to recommend anything. I don’t want to do that. I want to put the situation before you and I expect you are one of these ruthless citizens who live and get by how you can, but have lost faith and belief in the society to which you belong. And although you may not be active about it, although you are not a military or political traitor, you are a traitor in the sense that you don’t accept what is going on and keep yourself as far from it as possible. That is what I believe, if I am wrong some of you will be able to tell me so.</p>
<p>Now we go back to what began to break up in 1914. I said they had formed the national state. Now the national state today is not accepted anymore, they are trying to form a united Europe. Over half of Europe the national state was subordinated to one powerful state, to Russia. One most important national state in Europe, Germany, is split in two. I will quote Mr. Walter Lippmann. I don’t often quote him, but he says here one of the few things that I think is important, “that Germany is split in two because the two great powers, Russia and the United States, want it split.” They don’t want it joined together either one way or the other. So Germany, this central nation in Europe, one of the great centers of civilization despite what in Germany still remains a part of Europe and a part of Western civilization, is split in two. And there we have an example of what is happening to the national state.</p>
<p>Now we want to see also what the national state has been attempting to do. The British used to fight wars in order to prevent any national state becoming powerful in Europe. That is why they fought against Napoleon; that is why they fought against the Kaiser; that is why they fought against Hitler. It wasn’t a question of democracy and all that, that was to keep the people going. It was to prevent the domination of any single state in Europe. So they fought the war and America had to come to their assistance, and the state that was to dominate Europe under the Hitlerite regime was put in its place. What is the result of the war? Russia now dominates Europe as no previous state has ever done. In other words the purpose for which they fought the war has been lost completely.</p>
<p>In regard to parliamentary democracy, even the Pope, the Pope before this one, I believe, said, now look, there are these hundreds of millions of people who are Communists. They are not likely to change. So let us realize that we have to live with them, and accept them into the arena of modern civilization. The Catholic church has to take that step. So the idea of parliamentary democracy is gone and in the opinion of the Catholic church, which should have important information on these matters, is gone forever.</p>
<p>In regard to the economies of these countries, one of the steps Britain took after the war was to make both parties in Britain understand that there would be no unemployment in Britain anymore. Mr. Wilson had a majority of six and then he had a majority of 100 in the British Parliament. And the result of Wilson, the Labour Party in power, is that before the end of the year there will be nearly a million people unemployed in Great Britain, owing to the set policy of the government in reorganizing the economy.</p>
<p>You take France. France has had five republics since 1789. DeGaulle is now ruling France and the general opinion is that when he goes there is certain to be a sixth republic and it will only come into power as a result of violence.</p>
<p>What is happening in the United States? I will not go into that; we are too near. But at the same time I don’t think there is anybody who could say harmony and peace and the development towards civilization is taking place. I will mention only one American writer, Mr. Harrington, who says that the people living in substandard ways in the U.S. amount to 40 million of the population of nearly 200 million. And he sees no chance within the next few years of that 40 million being sensibly reduced. He says that it is likely to be increased. That is his attitude towards the richest nation in the world. And I was quite astonished when I saw Mr. Johnson deciding that he had to find something which will register him in the minds of the American public as somebody who was not merely going to continue with the Kennedy regime but was going to do something new. He came up with the abolition of poverty. Now, if you had lived in Europe you would know that the Stalinists in particular kept on telling everybody how poverty had been abolished in the United States. It was no use looking to the working class in the United States for anything. For some of them lived in fine houses, and had two cars; they went to work with one in the morning, and went to work with another one in the afternoon. You should have seen what happened to the British intellectual, first when Kennedy was shot, and then when Harrington’s book came and told about 40 million people living at substandard levels in the United States.</p>
<p>Now that is where we are. That’s the United States; that is Germany; there is no settlement on any sort of system or order in Russia at the present time. And I want now to deal with some political matters before we move on into finding out what there is to replace these regimes, which show an utter incapacity to settle the problems which began in 1914, and have continued uninterruptedly up to the present day.</p>
<p>I want to refer to something that they claimed to have settled. Their relations with the underdeveloped countries. I think that if we look at that we will see that they have settled absolutely nothing despite the giving of independence to the people of Africa beginning in 1957 and despite the achievement of independence of India in 1947 and the achievement of independence by China in 1949. Nothing has been settled. And the problems that have started as a result of the relations to the underdeveloped countries from 1600 to 1900 still remain to plague them, and year after year they get worse and worse. You remember in 1935 there was the invasion of Ethopia, by Mussolini. That is not a question of Italy and Ethiopia; it upset and nearly broke to pieces the collective security policy of the League of Nations. That was the relation of one small underdeveloped country to one imperialist country. Then came World War II, and afterwards they have come thick and fast.</p>
<p>I will just mention France: the problem with Vietnam, then the problem with Morocco, then the problem with Tunisia, and the problem with Algeria that broke up French democracy. It was the relation between France and Algeria which put DeGaulle into power with the peculiar regime that he has instituted there. But I prefer to speak of the United States and the underdeveloped countries. The U.S. has been able to say, well we have not been colonists, we are all in favor of the colonial regimes being made into independent states. But nevertheless when the struggle for independence began in the Congo, the U.S. was up to their ears in it, and in the fight over Katanga the United States intervened and took sides. I don’t want to go into what particular side they took, but they found themselves immersed in it to the last degree. Earlier they were immersed in a battle in Korea. And today they are up to their ears in a battle over Vietnam, a remote part of the world, far away. It shows, you see, that the relations that were established during the years when the advanced countries were dominant have not been able to work out, there are no viable relations between them and the underdeveloped countries.</p>
<p>So that today the U.S. in relation to Vietnam is carrying on a struggle which you would have thought could have taken place only during the 19th or 18th century. And not only the U.S. but the whole world is involved in it, which shows the stage which things have reached.</p>
<p>That is where we are. And the citizens are traitors. Some of them are traitors in their hearts. But they cannot accept the regime in which they live. They turn their back and do things to prevent themselves from being taken up by the police. But that is about all. The regimes can go the way that they want to go, but the people cannot accept them, cannot feel that they are a part of this state. They have shown themselves absolutely incapable of settling the problems which began in 1914 and which have continued uninterruptedly into the present. My position is simple. It is absolutely impossible to expect any order, any system, any recovery from imminent and actual disaster, from any of the governments which exist at the present time in the world. I am not speaking as a socialist, I am not speaking as a Marxist. I am speaking as someone who. is looking at the world and looking at the response of people to it. </p>
<p>Now, what is to happen. I don’t believe mankind has lived all this time and gone through all the trouble-that it has gone through, and built up the civilization that it has built, only to end in the decay and decline and the barbarism that began in 1914.</p>
<p>I start from the premise that today what I am saying to you is not as Lenin had to do, to say this and that and the other, to quote Marx, to say he wrote this in the Communist Manifesto, and this happened at the Commune. I haven’t got to do that. I am speaking to you about matters that you know, about information that you can gather every morning from your newspapers, from things that you talk of easily or things that you wouldn’t talk about because it is too offensive to talk about them. And I am speaking about matters that you are aware of, that everybody knows, and that is the problem. That is where we have to look for solutions. Everybody knows what is going on. The idea that you have to form special political parties consisting of the vanguard of people who want to overthrow the system, or consisting of people who know something about democracy, and wish to introduce democracy by revolutionary means in the backward countries- that is all over. There are some people today who say that we cannot look to the people of the advanced countries to make revolutions, but we have to turn to the people of the underdeveloped countries who seem anxious to move forward. I am not speaking of the necessity of making revolutions, I am speaking of sheer self-defense, sheer physical self-defense, to escape the dangers that are being built up by all these various governments today, and the damage that is being done to us psychologically and to the children, by the things we are forced to follow and accept. That is the situation in which a large majority of people in the world are, the mass of the population in the advanced countries and the great masses of the population in the underdeveloped countries, who have been brought into the stream of modern civilization by the means of communication which have been developed. Except for some people who control the means of production, the means of communication, etc., the large majority of people in the world today have a vital interest in bringing to an end what is going on. It was not so in 1917. It was not so even in 1939. I remember those days very well, everybody went forward, to educate the people and got them to support some kind of policy or program. Even Hitler and Mussolini from that point of view had to do that. They had to mobilize a certain section of the people and get them to enforce their strength over the others. Today it is not so. Everybody knows what is happening. And everybody is against it. You will tell me if that is not so. Everybody realizes a necessity of doing something to put an end to what is going on. Because what is going on is not only not human. It is barbarous. It is self-destructive, it destroys all the principles by which humanity has lived for many centuries.</p>
<p>Now who must do something about it? This is what I believe: the days of special political parties are over. The political organizations which will take part in the change of today will consist of the large majority of the population. For, except for those who are part of the special interests which continue to hold on to power, the largo majority of the population in every country, advanced and backward, is involved in what is taking place, and is, to use the words of the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>, a “sort of traitor” to the governments which are over it. The large majority of people have to form some sort of political organization and bring this to an end.</p>
<p>An important part of this massive political organization will be played by elements of the working class for the simple reason that in modern society they occupy a very important and, in many respects, a dominant position. They will be a part of it. But the large majority of citizens, I am quite sure, if the possibility is placed before them of changing those regimes which have not been able to establish any confidence in themselves, will also be a part of it.</p>
<p>I believe humanity will continue to live and struggle with the difficulties that it faces. It has had many difficulties in the past, it has overcome them all. The difficulties that it faces today may seem to be immense, and they are immense, but the qualifications of people for settling their difficulties are as great, and are bound to be as great as the difficulties. I have to leave you with that; that the large majority of the population are against what is going on, they have no confidence in the regimes that exist. This is not Marxism, this is not socialism, this is not revolution. This is a common understanding of what is taking place in the world around us. This is what I’m speaking about. Mankind is faced with survival or destruction and I believe that the large majority of people will turn for survival and will in time take the steps that are necessary to recover what has been in danger in previous centuries, and which can continue if only we get rid of those who insist on maintaining power which they cannot handle.</p>
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C.L.R. James 1967
World Politics Today
Source: Speak Out, (March 1967).
Transcribed: by Christian Hogsbjerg, with thanks to Ian Birchall.
This article is based on a talk given by C.L.R. James at Windsor, Ontario, in Canada on January 14, 1967. – Ed.
I am very sensitive to the fact that I am in North America, that the society in which I am and where I lived for a number of years, began about the beginning of the 17th century. The only civilization that you are aware of here is this bourgeois civilization, the industrial development of a capitalist civilization. Therefore, the change that that development wrought in Western civilization you have no practical experience of – you haven’t got the remains of earlier civilizations around you.
I am very much aware of that and, therefore, in talking about modern politics I shall lay emphasis on the civilization which we have seen in Western Europe and in America from the year 1600. In 1619 the first slaves came to the U.S.; 1620 was the Mayflower. The foundation of American civilization is that British basis and from 1619-1620 to 1914 that civilization existed in the world. It had many great triumphs. It had all the evils that any advanced civilization has. But it was accepted by people as representing the best that humanity had yet done and it showed the way of progress for the future. From 1620 – I prefer 1619 for obvious reasons – to 1914, 300 years, the world lived and the people in it accommodated themselves to existence in a certain way.
What I have to say about modern politics is this: In 1914 that world broke down. I have not found that people in North America and in the Americas as a whole are very much aware of the fact that it came to an end in 1914. People in Europe are extremely aware of that. They know that these 300 years mark the beginning, the development, and the decline and decay of a certain form of civilization.
The bourgeois regime, the capitalist regime, the developed industrial regime, which began in the beginning of the 17th century established the national state. An important part of its development (which remains to plague it up to this day, despite all the pretenses that they have gone far towards solving it) is the question of the relations they have developed with the underdeveloped countries. I do not think many people are aware of the fact that when Britain, for example, and France went to India, the Indian civilization in 1600 had many features that were in advance of what existed in Europe at the time. And this relation of these countries which became the advanced countries is to a substantial degree owing to their exploitation of the underdeveloped countries. That is what made them what they became, looked upon as the vanguard of civilization, and in general as the advanced countries. I do not say that in order to taunt people with it or ask for some response. I say that because that today, as I hope to show, is one of the most powerful influences that led to the decay and makes it impossible for them to establish any harmony or order in the civilization which they represent.
So, the national states were formed. They had contact with underdeveloped
countries and laid the basis of the wealth that made them advanced countries. They were able to establish a political form- parliamentary democracy. Very important in 1914, not as important today. And in addition to establishing parliamentary democracy they were able, by means of parliamentary democracy and the joining together of political interest, representing political divisions in the country, to establish a form of government which was usually a monarchy. That monarchy didn’t represent what the writers like to say today, some liking for some symbol of everybody being together and some rule, some authority. The reason for the establishment of the dynasties on the basis of parliamentary democracy was to bring the
feudal elements, particularly the landowning elements, into the organization of the modern state.
That was the situation in 1914. There were disturbances, there was the Paris Commune, they had one or two small wars. But the wars were not very important. They went and they shot and they killed about 20,000 people or something of that kind. They came home again, and the people came out to welcome them and to celebrate that the war was over, and then the people went on with their lives. There were some very great difficulties,
some people cried. But by and large the wars didn’t fundamentally upset the
social life of the country. That was the situation up to 1914. I have to mention another aspect. I was reading a lot of books. I knew a lot of people who knew that world. The world of 1914 was, despite the disturbances in Europe during the 19th century, a solid world and knew where it stood. And the chief thing that I would like to remember about it is shown in this:
In Russia they used to send people into exile, into Siberia. And they made the Russian citizen have a passport in order to move. And it is very interesting today to read of the contempt in which they were held, the absolute degradation that Russia represented to a great deal of Western Europe, because they sent people into exile and demanded of the Russian citizen a passport. They didn’t know what they would be doing in less than 50 years’ time.
In 1914 the war began, by 1918 the basis of the world was gone. The disruption of the economy was such that in 1929 you had the greatest disorder in the economic life, the tremendous depression, something that Europe had not seen before. That was a direct result of this war. But the thing I would like to speak about was the breakdown of the parliamentary regime, and the dynasties that occupied the positions of rulers.
Up to 1914 democracy in the national state was the kind of government that everybody respected, that the backward countries looked forward to as the kind of government that in time they would be able to arrive at. By 1921 and 1922 that was done. Democracy began its descent downward. So today a large majority of the population isn’t democratic, has no wish to be democratic, though it may not like the particular regime that it has. But the parliamentary democratic regime is finished. In 1914 that was not so. In 1917 there was the revolution in Russia. And it seemed to people that he working class talking about socialism and trying to establish the new socialist regime, showed some promise for the future. Some were against it, but at least it had some historical development. What happened in 1922 in Italy was very different. You had the beginnings of the definite destruction of the democratic regime and the establishment of fascism. In 1933 you had that in Germany. It was coming a long time, you had the breakdown of the Russian revolution in Russia and the establishment of a totalitarian regime. By the time (1938-1941) the Second World War began, from the Bay of Biscay right over northern Europe, to Vladivostoc in Asia, you had the totalitarian regimes of the greatest cruelty and barbarism. The regime of Hitler and then the regime of Stalin. And those regimes were what Europe had reached in a few years after the great war of 1914 to 1918.
There is something that I think I ought to say. We know something about European civilization. We speak about Shakespeare, we do not necessarily make him English. We speak about Michelangelo. We speak of the great musical development in Germany, the great painting in France. It is European, it is part of the development of Europe. And it is easy to trace the reciprocal influences of these various countries upon each other in the particular spheres in which they have become very important and have led the world. But once you say that, you have to recognize that the degradation of civilization that took place in Germany is not particularly German. It is not a question of Hitler and his wicked Nazis. It is a stage of the decay and degradation of Western civilization as a whole. If we look upon Dante and Beethoven, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, the great Russian writers, as part of the development of Western civilization, then we have to look at what happened in Germany, and what took place in various parts of the earth as a sign, not of the evils that affect those particular countries in which it spread, but as a sign of general decay and decline of European civilization as a whole. And it began in 1914, and laid the foundations for the future decay between 1914 and 1918.
Now I think I can go a little further. The economy went to pieces. The parliamentary democracy did not only fail in certain countries but a large portion of civilization looked upon parliamentary democracy as the certain way of degradation and began to seek other ways of development.
And you have also art and such things taking a form in which we are unable to see any patterns for the future. There are gifted men, there has never been a more gifted man (I am told by people who ought to know) than Picasso, in technique and finish. But what he has had to say was very different than what the great painters of an earlier time had to say. Until he did Guernica he didn’t know what he was saying. He was making a lot of experiments, developing a remarkable technique, but in actual statement of something about the future of civilization, it took Guernica and the breakdown of civilization in Spain for him to do that.
We went into World War II and what took place in World War II was merely a development of what had started in World War I. There were certain additional features, that is to say, they had discovered by means of mechanical development the means of destroying people in a way that Napoleon had never thought of. They hadn’t reached that in World War I, though they had killed enough millions. But in World War II the habit of total destruction became an inescapable part of governments of the world and today that has grown still further.
Let me tell you two stories which I think w.ill give you some idea of the decay that has taken place. When I was a small boy I used to study history in the West Indies, but we used to study history in. the English language. We learned of three terrible massacres. One of them was the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It seemed some French Queen thought it was about time to get rid of some Protestants. She got rid of a few thousand, and that was known all over as one of the great massacres of the world. There was another massacre that we used to study in school. It was the massacre of Glencoe, in which those massacred were the Macdonalds, a Scottish clan. I never was too sure of it, but there was a lot of killing- almost 40 of them were seen after. The other one that we were concerned with was something that took place in Calcutta. I think it was in the year 1757 when an Indian potentate put about 500 British people, men, women, and children, in some small room. When they opened the place in the morning a good many of them were dead, the rest were pretty miserable, and we were assured that, by and large, that is the reason why the British went to India- to see about India and teach the Indian potentates that they were not to push all sorts of people into small places where they couldn’t breathe properly.
There are the three massacres. The massacre of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the massacre of Glencoe, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Nowadays, in 1967, unless you kill about a million people you can’t even make the front page. That is where we are. The question of massacre has reached the stage where you can kill any number of people and it does not matter what happens. The population is, or appears to be, seasoned to the idea of hundreds of thousands of people being killed for no particular reason at all.
The second thing is a series of articles that I read in the New York Times. They talked about the importance and the necessity of the people of the United States, the government, being able to destroy the population of Russia and vice versa, the importance of the people of Russia being able to destroy the population of the United States. The killing of 200 million people.! You had to live in 1914 to know that that sort of thing would have brought forth expressions of horror from all sections of the population. Today in the U.S. they discuss it in their popular press. They discuss the same thing in China. Mao joins in this nonsense: where they’re killing, 200 million Americans, 200 million Russians, if they killed 200 million in China I would still have 400 million remaining. So I can stand that awful business if that is the kind of game they want to play. That is the level civilization has reached. I want you to understand that as far as far as I and my friends are concerned, it is complete degradation and decay. The barbarism is not to come, it is here.
And now I want to road a passage from the highly respectable Times Literary Supplement (quoted in Facing Reality). They are not Marxists, they are not socialists, they are not revolutionaries. They are the voice of one of the most conservative social forces in the world today, the British aristocracy. The passage is worth bringing to your notice because it tells you what they think of the world in which we live, and the stage to which we have been reduced after the war of 1914-1918. “A time of strained and breaking loyalties all over the world – in politics, nationalities, religions, moralities and families – is certainly a time of troubles. Such a time has come upon us all, for the first time in history.” This is the first time in history that such degradation, barbarism, decay, and no perspective has descended upon the world. “That secular religion which once seemed the hope of half the world- Communism-has equally become a prey to conflicts of loyalty, nationalism and morality.” You see, some people believed that Communism was a doctrine which might offer some way out to the world in general. But after the 20th congress in 1956, in which the Russians paid tribute long overdue to Stalin; and the Hungarian Revolution, which showed that people could be brought up in the totalitarian regime, but that did not prevent them from revolting against it with a force and range and power which was absolutely unknown in the world before; and then later the struggles in Russia, the way in which Khruschev was got rid of -that has been a shock to vast numbers of people. And then the split between the Communist regime of Russia and of China, people realize that Communism, as they have known it, offers no way out. “In Russia, as in America, India and Britain; in the Jewry of the diaspora and of Israel alike, as among the dwellers in Arabia, the old faiths cannot hold the young, materialism rules the roost and societies bid fair to come apart at the seams. Worse, they begin to seem unpatchable;” They don’t begin to seem unpatchable; that may have been so in 1957. In 1967 you will find few people who take an interest in public affairs, and many who do not, who believe that the society in which we live is absolutely unpatchable. Their problem is what to do; they don’t know. “Worse, they begin to seem unpatchable; yet no one knows, no one can foretell, what kind of society will emerge as typical of the continental groupings (if not the “World State’ itself) towards which our familiar nation-states are being hustled.... The citizenry – and particularly, primarily, the thinking elite – will suffer a kind of schizophrenia: on the one hand their social instincts will still be urgent, but unsatisfiable; on the other hand, as a human-natural defense mechanism, they will decry and debunk any form of social activity, for that would identify them with the powers-that-be and imply acquiescence in the various forms of deployment of those powers.” They are sounding like the Communists used to sound in the old days, the difference between them and the old-fashioned Communists being that they are saying that everybody thinks that way of the kind of government under which we live. They go further: “Thus ‘a sort of traitor’ arises; not very many real, political, or military traitors, but rather a vast number of non-citizens – citizens of nothing, attaching no positive value whatever to their society and its administrative state, having no emotive affection for it, living as atoms in it, fulfilling the barest minimum of obligations to ‘get by’ and generally betraying an ‘I couldn’t care less’ mood.” That is what the acme of respectability in 1957 says about the large majority of citizens in the modern world. By 1967 it is infinitely worse.
And now I want to take up certain elements of the decay to which I had referred before. I speak of the question, what is to be done, or what we can reasonably expect will have to be done. I am not going to recommend anything. I don’t want to do that. I want to put the situation before you and I expect you are one of these ruthless citizens who live and get by how you can, but have lost faith and belief in the society to which you belong. And although you may not be active about it, although you are not a military or political traitor, you are a traitor in the sense that you don’t accept what is going on and keep yourself as far from it as possible. That is what I believe, if I am wrong some of you will be able to tell me so.
Now we go back to what began to break up in 1914. I said they had formed the national state. Now the national state today is not accepted anymore, they are trying to form a united Europe. Over half of Europe the national state was subordinated to one powerful state, to Russia. One most important national state in Europe, Germany, is split in two. I will quote Mr. Walter Lippmann. I don’t often quote him, but he says here one of the few things that I think is important, “that Germany is split in two because the two great powers, Russia and the United States, want it split.” They don’t want it joined together either one way or the other. So Germany, this central nation in Europe, one of the great centers of civilization despite what in Germany still remains a part of Europe and a part of Western civilization, is split in two. And there we have an example of what is happening to the national state.
Now we want to see also what the national state has been attempting to do. The British used to fight wars in order to prevent any national state becoming powerful in Europe. That is why they fought against Napoleon; that is why they fought against the Kaiser; that is why they fought against Hitler. It wasn’t a question of democracy and all that, that was to keep the people going. It was to prevent the domination of any single state in Europe. So they fought the war and America had to come to their assistance, and the state that was to dominate Europe under the Hitlerite regime was put in its place. What is the result of the war? Russia now dominates Europe as no previous state has ever done. In other words the purpose for which they fought the war has been lost completely.
In regard to parliamentary democracy, even the Pope, the Pope before this one, I believe, said, now look, there are these hundreds of millions of people who are Communists. They are not likely to change. So let us realize that we have to live with them, and accept them into the arena of modern civilization. The Catholic church has to take that step. So the idea of parliamentary democracy is gone and in the opinion of the Catholic church, which should have important information on these matters, is gone forever.
In regard to the economies of these countries, one of the steps Britain took after the war was to make both parties in Britain understand that there would be no unemployment in Britain anymore. Mr. Wilson had a majority of six and then he had a majority of 100 in the British Parliament. And the result of Wilson, the Labour Party in power, is that before the end of the year there will be nearly a million people unemployed in Great Britain, owing to the set policy of the government in reorganizing the economy.
You take France. France has had five republics since 1789. DeGaulle is now ruling France and the general opinion is that when he goes there is certain to be a sixth republic and it will only come into power as a result of violence.
What is happening in the United States? I will not go into that; we are too near. But at the same time I don’t think there is anybody who could say harmony and peace and the development towards civilization is taking place. I will mention only one American writer, Mr. Harrington, who says that the people living in substandard ways in the U.S. amount to 40 million of the population of nearly 200 million. And he sees no chance within the next few years of that 40 million being sensibly reduced. He says that it is likely to be increased. That is his attitude towards the richest nation in the world. And I was quite astonished when I saw Mr. Johnson deciding that he had to find something which will register him in the minds of the American public as somebody who was not merely going to continue with the Kennedy regime but was going to do something new. He came up with the abolition of poverty. Now, if you had lived in Europe you would know that the Stalinists in particular kept on telling everybody how poverty had been abolished in the United States. It was no use looking to the working class in the United States for anything. For some of them lived in fine houses, and had two cars; they went to work with one in the morning, and went to work with another one in the afternoon. You should have seen what happened to the British intellectual, first when Kennedy was shot, and then when Harrington’s book came and told about 40 million people living at substandard levels in the United States.
Now that is where we are. That’s the United States; that is Germany; there is no settlement on any sort of system or order in Russia at the present time. And I want now to deal with some political matters before we move on into finding out what there is to replace these regimes, which show an utter incapacity to settle the problems which began in 1914, and have continued uninterruptedly up to the present day.
I want to refer to something that they claimed to have settled. Their relations with the underdeveloped countries. I think that if we look at that we will see that they have settled absolutely nothing despite the giving of independence to the people of Africa beginning in 1957 and despite the achievement of independence of India in 1947 and the achievement of independence by China in 1949. Nothing has been settled. And the problems that have started as a result of the relations to the underdeveloped countries from 1600 to 1900 still remain to plague them, and year after year they get worse and worse. You remember in 1935 there was the invasion of Ethopia, by Mussolini. That is not a question of Italy and Ethiopia; it upset and nearly broke to pieces the collective security policy of the League of Nations. That was the relation of one small underdeveloped country to one imperialist country. Then came World War II, and afterwards they have come thick and fast.
I will just mention France: the problem with Vietnam, then the problem with Morocco, then the problem with Tunisia, and the problem with Algeria that broke up French democracy. It was the relation between France and Algeria which put DeGaulle into power with the peculiar regime that he has instituted there. But I prefer to speak of the United States and the underdeveloped countries. The U.S. has been able to say, well we have not been colonists, we are all in favor of the colonial regimes being made into independent states. But nevertheless when the struggle for independence began in the Congo, the U.S. was up to their ears in it, and in the fight over Katanga the United States intervened and took sides. I don’t want to go into what particular side they took, but they found themselves immersed in it to the last degree. Earlier they were immersed in a battle in Korea. And today they are up to their ears in a battle over Vietnam, a remote part of the world, far away. It shows, you see, that the relations that were established during the years when the advanced countries were dominant have not been able to work out, there are no viable relations between them and the underdeveloped countries.
So that today the U.S. in relation to Vietnam is carrying on a struggle which you would have thought could have taken place only during the 19th or 18th century. And not only the U.S. but the whole world is involved in it, which shows the stage which things have reached.
That is where we are. And the citizens are traitors. Some of them are traitors in their hearts. But they cannot accept the regime in which they live. They turn their back and do things to prevent themselves from being taken up by the police. But that is about all. The regimes can go the way that they want to go, but the people cannot accept them, cannot feel that they are a part of this state. They have shown themselves absolutely incapable of settling the problems which began in 1914 and which have continued uninterruptedly into the present. My position is simple. It is absolutely impossible to expect any order, any system, any recovery from imminent and actual disaster, from any of the governments which exist at the present time in the world. I am not speaking as a socialist, I am not speaking as a Marxist. I am speaking as someone who. is looking at the world and looking at the response of people to it.
Now, what is to happen. I don’t believe mankind has lived all this time and gone through all the trouble-that it has gone through, and built up the civilization that it has built, only to end in the decay and decline and the barbarism that began in 1914.
I start from the premise that today what I am saying to you is not as Lenin had to do, to say this and that and the other, to quote Marx, to say he wrote this in the Communist Manifesto, and this happened at the Commune. I haven’t got to do that. I am speaking to you about matters that you know, about information that you can gather every morning from your newspapers, from things that you talk of easily or things that you wouldn’t talk about because it is too offensive to talk about them. And I am speaking about matters that you are aware of, that everybody knows, and that is the problem. That is where we have to look for solutions. Everybody knows what is going on. The idea that you have to form special political parties consisting of the vanguard of people who want to overthrow the system, or consisting of people who know something about democracy, and wish to introduce democracy by revolutionary means in the backward countries- that is all over. There are some people today who say that we cannot look to the people of the advanced countries to make revolutions, but we have to turn to the people of the underdeveloped countries who seem anxious to move forward. I am not speaking of the necessity of making revolutions, I am speaking of sheer self-defense, sheer physical self-defense, to escape the dangers that are being built up by all these various governments today, and the damage that is being done to us psychologically and to the children, by the things we are forced to follow and accept. That is the situation in which a large majority of people in the world are, the mass of the population in the advanced countries and the great masses of the population in the underdeveloped countries, who have been brought into the stream of modern civilization by the means of communication which have been developed. Except for some people who control the means of production, the means of communication, etc., the large majority of people in the world today have a vital interest in bringing to an end what is going on. It was not so in 1917. It was not so even in 1939. I remember those days very well, everybody went forward, to educate the people and got them to support some kind of policy or program. Even Hitler and Mussolini from that point of view had to do that. They had to mobilize a certain section of the people and get them to enforce their strength over the others. Today it is not so. Everybody knows what is happening. And everybody is against it. You will tell me if that is not so. Everybody realizes a necessity of doing something to put an end to what is going on. Because what is going on is not only not human. It is barbarous. It is self-destructive, it destroys all the principles by which humanity has lived for many centuries.
Now who must do something about it? This is what I believe: the days of special political parties are over. The political organizations which will take part in the change of today will consist of the large majority of the population. For, except for those who are part of the special interests which continue to hold on to power, the largo majority of the population in every country, advanced and backward, is involved in what is taking place, and is, to use the words of the Times Literary Supplement, a “sort of traitor” to the governments which are over it. The large majority of people have to form some sort of political organization and bring this to an end.
An important part of this massive political organization will be played by elements of the working class for the simple reason that in modern society they occupy a very important and, in many respects, a dominant position. They will be a part of it. But the large majority of citizens, I am quite sure, if the possibility is placed before them of changing those regimes which have not been able to establish any confidence in themselves, will also be a part of it.
I believe humanity will continue to live and struggle with the difficulties that it faces. It has had many difficulties in the past, it has overcome them all. The difficulties that it faces today may seem to be immense, and they are immense, but the qualifications of people for settling their difficulties are as great, and are bound to be as great as the difficulties. I have to leave you with that; that the large majority of the population are against what is going on, they have no confidence in the regimes that exist. This is not Marxism, this is not socialism, this is not revolution. This is a common understanding of what is taking place in the world around us. This is what I’m speaking about. Mankind is faced with survival or destruction and I believe that the large majority of people will turn for survival and will in time take the steps that are necessary to recover what has been in danger in previous centuries, and which can continue if only we get rid of those who insist on maintaining power which they cannot handle.
C.L.R. James Archive
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>One-Tenth of the Nation</h4>
<h1>Negroes Watch “Operation Dixie”</h1>
<h2>(20 May 1946)</h2>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/index.htm#la10_20" target="new">Vol. X No. 20</a>, 20 May 1946, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">“Operation Dixie” is getting under way and we have not only to follow its development but to enter actively into what is potentially one of the most significant campaigns ever entered upon by the labor movement in this country.</p>
<p>The CIO is establishing headquarters at Birmingham, Ala. Van A. Bittner, veteran of many organizing campaigns, is director. The list of his assistants is significant in its associations. From the Rubber Workers Union is Sherman Dalrymple. From the Textile Workers Union comes George Baldanzi, vice-president. From the Amalgamated Clothing Workers comes Jack Kroll, vice-president. From the Auto Workers will come another assistant director. Rubber, textile, clothing, auto and, at the head, Van Bittner of the steel industry. The labor movement in its most significant sections is challenging the Southern system. The aim of the CIO drive is a million and a half members.</p>
<p>The AFL has already established headquarters in Atlanta, Ga. Their Southern representative is George L. Googe. On May 11 and 12 there will be a conference of 8,600 AFL locals in Asheville, N. C., which will formally launch the AFL drive. The goal is one million members.</p>
<p>If the AFL is launching its drive with a conference representing its 8.600 locals, the CIO, beginning with the UAW conference at Atlantic City has made it clear to all its members and sympathizers that the next important stage in its development is the successful carrying out of this drive.</p>
<p>Simultaneously the Political Action Committee has declared that it is ready to launch a drive against certain of the Southern congressmen.<br>
</p>
<h4>Negroes See Significance</h4>
<p class="fst">Meanwhile, on Sunday last in Harlem, thousands of people attended a great rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom. True the Stalinists around <strong>People’s Voice</strong> were its inspirers. But the Negroes who attended did so, not because they were interested in Stalinist maneuvers, but because they for the most part felt that labor was undertaking a task of vital importance to Negroes not only in the South, but everywhere. The Negroes all over the country have made great strides toward recognizing that a victory for the CIO anywhere is a victory for the Negro people as a whole. Even Father Divine spoke and his followers (who are much more important than he is) turned out in great numbers.</p>
<p><em>“Operation Dixie” has caught the imagination of the Negro people. That in itself is political progress – the fact that their minds have been turned from the President and from Congress and telegrams to Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt to the most powerful social force in the country – the organized labor movement.</em></p>
<p>This column, from the very beginning of this drive, has recognized its significance for the Negroes, for organized labor, and for the country as a whole. I have traced the political relation between the conflict in the Democratic Party and this drive to spread the doctrine and organization of collective bargaining in the South. I think, however, that at this stage, it is necessary to restate a few things and to say some that have not been said.<br>
</p>
<h4>Only a Beginning</h4>
<ol>
<li>The present drive can only be a beginning. True, it is a beginning in a fundamental, basic sphere – the organization of Southern workers. But in relation to the problems of the South, it is only a beginning. Its political significance is that the country being where it is today, it will be impossible to organize the South on any serious scale without coming face to face with the deep-rooted racial segregation and anti-democratic practices characteristic of the area.<br>
</li>
<li><em>Once this is recognized, it follows that at this stage, one cannot expect the CIO and AFL drives to overturn the social organization of the South. Passing of a permanent FEPC Bill for the nation, abolition of the poll-tax, important and progressive as these measures would be, could not seriously alter the barbarous social regime of the Southern states. It took a desperate civil war to abolish slavery and, if history is any guide, it will take equally conscious determination to make the South into a truly democratic community.</em><br>
</li>
<li>The labor leaders, both of the CIO and the AFL, are not people who are ready to risk all for the sake of liberty and justice in the South. They are ready enough to capitulate to the ruling class in the North, as soon as the struggle becomes fierce, far more so in the South, where the situation is packed with dynamite. They know, however, that it is packed with dynamite. Yet they propose these drives. They are serious and, as far as is possible within their timid, narrow conceptions of social development, they will push hard to organize the Southern workers.<br>
</li>
<li>But the Southern employers of labor and the plantation owners are not going to allow labor organizers to sow the seeds of their overthrow without fighting back. They are mobilizing in opposition already. They are not made more “democratic” by the moderation of Murray and Green. They know that this drive can set off currents of social and political opposition among the workers far beyond what is contemplated by Murray and Green and their lieutenants.<br>
</li>
<li><em>From this flows the task of the revolutionaries, the militant CIO workers, the Negro workers and those elements among the Negro people who are ready to sacrifice all for the emancipation of their race. We have to bring the national significance of “Operation Dixie” to the attention of the nation. We have to mobilize such political and moral support for it as to strike terror into the minds of the Southern reactionaries and stiffen the CIO leadership.</em></li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Let us remember how the CIO was built in Detroit, in Flint, in Akron and in Chicago. It will be ten times as hard in the South. But 1946 is not 1936. Organized labor can lead the nation. This is one critical sphere in the life of the American people where it can begin.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
Negroes Watch “Operation Dixie”
(20 May 1946)
From Labor Action, Vol. X No. 20, 20 May 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
“Operation Dixie” is getting under way and we have not only to follow its development but to enter actively into what is potentially one of the most significant campaigns ever entered upon by the labor movement in this country.
The CIO is establishing headquarters at Birmingham, Ala. Van A. Bittner, veteran of many organizing campaigns, is director. The list of his assistants is significant in its associations. From the Rubber Workers Union is Sherman Dalrymple. From the Textile Workers Union comes George Baldanzi, vice-president. From the Amalgamated Clothing Workers comes Jack Kroll, vice-president. From the Auto Workers will come another assistant director. Rubber, textile, clothing, auto and, at the head, Van Bittner of the steel industry. The labor movement in its most significant sections is challenging the Southern system. The aim of the CIO drive is a million and a half members.
The AFL has already established headquarters in Atlanta, Ga. Their Southern representative is George L. Googe. On May 11 and 12 there will be a conference of 8,600 AFL locals in Asheville, N. C., which will formally launch the AFL drive. The goal is one million members.
If the AFL is launching its drive with a conference representing its 8.600 locals, the CIO, beginning with the UAW conference at Atlantic City has made it clear to all its members and sympathizers that the next important stage in its development is the successful carrying out of this drive.
Simultaneously the Political Action Committee has declared that it is ready to launch a drive against certain of the Southern congressmen.
Negroes See Significance
Meanwhile, on Sunday last in Harlem, thousands of people attended a great rally at the Golden Gate Ballroom. True the Stalinists around People’s Voice were its inspirers. But the Negroes who attended did so, not because they were interested in Stalinist maneuvers, but because they for the most part felt that labor was undertaking a task of vital importance to Negroes not only in the South, but everywhere. The Negroes all over the country have made great strides toward recognizing that a victory for the CIO anywhere is a victory for the Negro people as a whole. Even Father Divine spoke and his followers (who are much more important than he is) turned out in great numbers.
“Operation Dixie” has caught the imagination of the Negro people. That in itself is political progress – the fact that their minds have been turned from the President and from Congress and telegrams to Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt to the most powerful social force in the country – the organized labor movement.
This column, from the very beginning of this drive, has recognized its significance for the Negroes, for organized labor, and for the country as a whole. I have traced the political relation between the conflict in the Democratic Party and this drive to spread the doctrine and organization of collective bargaining in the South. I think, however, that at this stage, it is necessary to restate a few things and to say some that have not been said.
Only a Beginning
The present drive can only be a beginning. True, it is a beginning in a fundamental, basic sphere – the organization of Southern workers. But in relation to the problems of the South, it is only a beginning. Its political significance is that the country being where it is today, it will be impossible to organize the South on any serious scale without coming face to face with the deep-rooted racial segregation and anti-democratic practices characteristic of the area.
Once this is recognized, it follows that at this stage, one cannot expect the CIO and AFL drives to overturn the social organization of the South. Passing of a permanent FEPC Bill for the nation, abolition of the poll-tax, important and progressive as these measures would be, could not seriously alter the barbarous social regime of the Southern states. It took a desperate civil war to abolish slavery and, if history is any guide, it will take equally conscious determination to make the South into a truly democratic community.
The labor leaders, both of the CIO and the AFL, are not people who are ready to risk all for the sake of liberty and justice in the South. They are ready enough to capitulate to the ruling class in the North, as soon as the struggle becomes fierce, far more so in the South, where the situation is packed with dynamite. They know, however, that it is packed with dynamite. Yet they propose these drives. They are serious and, as far as is possible within their timid, narrow conceptions of social development, they will push hard to organize the Southern workers.
But the Southern employers of labor and the plantation owners are not going to allow labor organizers to sow the seeds of their overthrow without fighting back. They are mobilizing in opposition already. They are not made more “democratic” by the moderation of Murray and Green. They know that this drive can set off currents of social and political opposition among the workers far beyond what is contemplated by Murray and Green and their lieutenants.
From this flows the task of the revolutionaries, the militant CIO workers, the Negro workers and those elements among the Negro people who are ready to sacrifice all for the emancipation of their race. We have to bring the national significance of “Operation Dixie” to the attention of the nation. We have to mobilize such political and moral support for it as to strike terror into the minds of the Southern reactionaries and stiffen the CIO leadership.
Let us remember how the CIO was built in Detroit, in Flint, in Akron and in Chicago. It will be ten times as hard in the South. But 1946 is not 1936. Organized labor can lead the nation. This is one critical sphere in the life of the American people where it can begin.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>One-Tenth of the Nation</h1>
<h3>(19 February 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_08" target="new">Vol. IX No. 8</a>, 19 February 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Revolutionary socialists have made it a basic principle to refuse to support candidates of capitalist parties. Even when Harlem rallies around a candidate like Councilman Powell in the legitimate desire to have a Negro represent them in Congress, the revolutionary party refuses to support this representative of the Democratic-capitalist Party.<br>
</p>
<h4>Promises – And Reeds</h4>
<p class="fst">Powell has gained a great deal of notoriety in Harlem by promising to answer the slanderous abuse of the Negro people by Senator Rankin and other Southern Negro-baiters in Congress. The violent attacks upon the Negro people constantly made by the Southerners in Congress have as their special purpose the task of covering with disgrace, with shame, with humiliation, the masses of the Negro people so as to maintain hostility between Negroes and whites. The New Dealers and other “progressive” congressmen never reply in kind to these anti-Negro diatribes. They sit and take it because politically they are closely allied to the Southern senators and secondly, it is not their business, as they see it, to defend the Negro people. Powell promised that he would put an end to this state of affairs.</p>
<p>He goes to Congress and, as usual, Senator Rankin opens up his usual anti-Negro assault. Every one was looking to hear a militant reply from Powell. Powell said nothing.</p>
<p><em>His excuse was that his colleagues in the Democratic Party, had told him that he had a great career open to him in the House on behalf of his people and that his first speech should be constructive. It is strange that these same colleagues have never been able to persuade Rankin to shut his mouth about the Negro people. Yet they had no difficulty in shutting up Powell at a time when he could have signalized his appearance in the House by serving notice to the Southern Bourbons that in the future on the question of Negroes they would get as good as they gave.</em></p>
<p>Was this merely an accident? Not at all. A few weeks ago the May-Bailey bill to draft labor came up in Congress. Now every Negro knows that a bill of this kind hits not only the labor movement in general but Negroes in particular. In the South especially it places Negro labor more than ever at the mercy of the state governments which use the war and such legislation to keep Negroes in the lowest possible positions at starvation wages, all under the slogan of “defense of democracy.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Against Amending May Bill</h4>
<p class="fst">While the bill was on the floor, Representative Charles Clason of Massachusetts, introduced an amendment which, in words at least, opposed discrimination against any workers because of race, creed or color. Up to his feet came Congressman Powell in order to make his first constructive speech. <em>He spoke against the amendment!</em> He called it a “cheap partisan trick to play upon racial prejudice in order to defeat a bill which should stand or fall Upon its own merits.”</p>
<p>The House was astonished. The liberals, weak brothers at best, had the ground cut from under their feet. Immediately after Powell’s speech, Congressman May moved that the debate be closed and a vote be taken. The Clason amendment was defeated by 148 votes to 113.</p>
<p>A survey of the Negro press shows a general opinion that there was a possibility of the amendment being passed until Powell made his “constructive” speech. It gave the liberals just the opportunity they wanted to drop the whole business. Senator Rankin was seen patting his colleagues on the back and congratulating them upon this new recruit to the anti-Negro forces in the House. <em>Rankin and Powell walked up the aisle side by side in order to cast their vote against legislation aimed at Negro discrimination.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Just a Capitalist Politician</h4>
<p class="fst">Harlem and the Negro people as a whole are in an uproar over this betrayal. Powell has been doing some vigorous explaining. He convinces nobody and even the Negro Labor Victory Committee in Harlem which worked so hard for his election has condemned him. Powell afterward voted against the bill on the score that it was totalitarian, thereby making still more inexcusable his vote against the Clason amendment.</p>
<p>That is the inevitable conduct to be expected from these capitalist politicians, whether they are white or Negro.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
One-Tenth of the Nation
(19 February 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 8, 19 February 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Revolutionary socialists have made it a basic principle to refuse to support candidates of capitalist parties. Even when Harlem rallies around a candidate like Councilman Powell in the legitimate desire to have a Negro represent them in Congress, the revolutionary party refuses to support this representative of the Democratic-capitalist Party.
Promises – And Reeds
Powell has gained a great deal of notoriety in Harlem by promising to answer the slanderous abuse of the Negro people by Senator Rankin and other Southern Negro-baiters in Congress. The violent attacks upon the Negro people constantly made by the Southerners in Congress have as their special purpose the task of covering with disgrace, with shame, with humiliation, the masses of the Negro people so as to maintain hostility between Negroes and whites. The New Dealers and other “progressive” congressmen never reply in kind to these anti-Negro diatribes. They sit and take it because politically they are closely allied to the Southern senators and secondly, it is not their business, as they see it, to defend the Negro people. Powell promised that he would put an end to this state of affairs.
He goes to Congress and, as usual, Senator Rankin opens up his usual anti-Negro assault. Every one was looking to hear a militant reply from Powell. Powell said nothing.
His excuse was that his colleagues in the Democratic Party, had told him that he had a great career open to him in the House on behalf of his people and that his first speech should be constructive. It is strange that these same colleagues have never been able to persuade Rankin to shut his mouth about the Negro people. Yet they had no difficulty in shutting up Powell at a time when he could have signalized his appearance in the House by serving notice to the Southern Bourbons that in the future on the question of Negroes they would get as good as they gave.
Was this merely an accident? Not at all. A few weeks ago the May-Bailey bill to draft labor came up in Congress. Now every Negro knows that a bill of this kind hits not only the labor movement in general but Negroes in particular. In the South especially it places Negro labor more than ever at the mercy of the state governments which use the war and such legislation to keep Negroes in the lowest possible positions at starvation wages, all under the slogan of “defense of democracy.”
Against Amending May Bill
While the bill was on the floor, Representative Charles Clason of Massachusetts, introduced an amendment which, in words at least, opposed discrimination against any workers because of race, creed or color. Up to his feet came Congressman Powell in order to make his first constructive speech. He spoke against the amendment! He called it a “cheap partisan trick to play upon racial prejudice in order to defeat a bill which should stand or fall Upon its own merits.”
The House was astonished. The liberals, weak brothers at best, had the ground cut from under their feet. Immediately after Powell’s speech, Congressman May moved that the debate be closed and a vote be taken. The Clason amendment was defeated by 148 votes to 113.
A survey of the Negro press shows a general opinion that there was a possibility of the amendment being passed until Powell made his “constructive” speech. It gave the liberals just the opportunity they wanted to drop the whole business. Senator Rankin was seen patting his colleagues on the back and congratulating them upon this new recruit to the anti-Negro forces in the House. Rankin and Powell walked up the aisle side by side in order to cast their vote against legislation aimed at Negro discrimination.
Just a Capitalist Politician
Harlem and the Negro people as a whole are in an uproar over this betrayal. Powell has been doing some vigorous explaining. He convinces nobody and even the Negro Labor Victory Committee in Harlem which worked so hard for his election has condemned him. Powell afterward voted against the bill on the score that it was totalitarian, thereby making still more inexcusable his vote against the Clason amendment.
That is the inevitable conduct to be expected from these capitalist politicians, whether they are white or Negro.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>Capitalism Taboos ‘Equal Opportunity’<br>
for Negro People</h1>
<h3>(August 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_34" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 34</a>, 21 August 1944, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Addressing an audience at Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Ill., some days ago, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York state: “It is a fitting occasion to renew our determination to bring complete equality of opportunity of life in America to all the Negro people.”</p>
<p>Governor Dewey does not mean this. It is campaign baloney. The Republican platform has been characterized by Walter White as “dishonest and stupid.” The Democratic platform simply did its best to pretend that the Negro question does not exist.</p>
<p>Yet we can expect many statements like the one quoted, by Dewey, from all types of political candidates and agitators between now and the elections. Let us make it quite clear at once that this phrase, “complete equality of opportunity for Negroes,” is not to be judged according to the sincerity or insincerity of capitalist politicians. <em>Both parties are seeking to fool the Negroes. But if even they were not attempting to do this, it would be impossible for Negroes to have equality of opportunity under capitalist society.</em> We struggle for it. The more advanced unions struggle for it also. Victories can be gained. But the thinking Negro must bear in mind always the limitations of the society in which he lives.</p>
<p>Since 1929, this country was unable to have less than ten million unemployed, until the preparations for the war saved the situation temporarily.</p>
<p>Since the war, however, the development of production in the United States has reached astonishing heights. Today the productive capacity of the country is such that if the population returned to the standard of living that existed before the war, there would be at the very least some twenty million unemployed. This is the problem that faces the country as a whole. This is the problem that the Negroes must constantly bear in mind.</p>
<p>First of all, if the United States economy cannot be organized in such a manner as to prevent this mass of unemployment, the “equality of opportunity” open to large numbers of the Negroes would be equality of opportunity to starve side by side with the white workers. No amount of promises, sincere or insincere, by Democratic or Republican politicians can prevent that.</p>
<p>But, secondly, and flowing from this, the very conditions of unemployment create a terrible situation.</p>
<p>In the cut-throat struggle of fifty million people for thirty million jobs, all the worst passions of humanity in general and the traditional racial prejudices of the United States come into play and disrupt the labor movement.</p>
<p>This basis of unemployment is the fertile soil on which flourish the race-haters and the race-baiters. They organize themselves politically, using the unemployment in industry as a means of creating social and political difficulties for the Negroes. Under these circumstances, the whole Negro question becomes one of the tensest political questions in the country. Instead of orderly progress toward the achievement of greater and greater equality, we have a period of racial riots and the unloosing of terror and counter-terror. During the last year or two the signs of this have been coming thick and fast.</p>
<p>Therefore, we struggle always for the immediate issues of equality wherever possible. But we must cultivate no illusions about the sincerity or insincerity of this or that particular party or candidate. Along with their immediate struggles the Negroes must ask themselves: What is the program of this or that political organization or party for the creation of such a society in the United States as will root out the conditions from which the prejudice and the inequality spring?</p>
<p>Neither of the two major parties has any serious program for the reconstruction of American society. All their talk, therefore, among capitalist politicians, about equality of opportunity for Negroes has no meaning in the face of the economic and social crisis which lies ahead.</p>
<p>The Workers Party has its transitional program for the purpose of mobilizing the American workers toward the struggle for a new social order. For the large masses of the workers, that struggle centers about the struggle for a mass Labor Party. The Negro, however, who sees clearly not only the immediate struggles but the basic and fundamental problem which lies behind it must make up his mind to follow the example of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and those other great Negroes in the greatest period of American history. These banded themselves together in revolutionary organisations in order, by precept and example, to mobilize the large masses of the population for a radical solution of the American crisis of those days. Here is a case where we can safely say to serious Negroes today: Come thou and do likewise.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
Capitalism Taboos ‘Equal Opportunity’
for Negro People
(August 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 34, 21 August 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Addressing an audience at Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Ill., some days ago, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York state: “It is a fitting occasion to renew our determination to bring complete equality of opportunity of life in America to all the Negro people.”
Governor Dewey does not mean this. It is campaign baloney. The Republican platform has been characterized by Walter White as “dishonest and stupid.” The Democratic platform simply did its best to pretend that the Negro question does not exist.
Yet we can expect many statements like the one quoted, by Dewey, from all types of political candidates and agitators between now and the elections. Let us make it quite clear at once that this phrase, “complete equality of opportunity for Negroes,” is not to be judged according to the sincerity or insincerity of capitalist politicians. Both parties are seeking to fool the Negroes. But if even they were not attempting to do this, it would be impossible for Negroes to have equality of opportunity under capitalist society. We struggle for it. The more advanced unions struggle for it also. Victories can be gained. But the thinking Negro must bear in mind always the limitations of the society in which he lives.
Since 1929, this country was unable to have less than ten million unemployed, until the preparations for the war saved the situation temporarily.
Since the war, however, the development of production in the United States has reached astonishing heights. Today the productive capacity of the country is such that if the population returned to the standard of living that existed before the war, there would be at the very least some twenty million unemployed. This is the problem that faces the country as a whole. This is the problem that the Negroes must constantly bear in mind.
First of all, if the United States economy cannot be organized in such a manner as to prevent this mass of unemployment, the “equality of opportunity” open to large numbers of the Negroes would be equality of opportunity to starve side by side with the white workers. No amount of promises, sincere or insincere, by Democratic or Republican politicians can prevent that.
But, secondly, and flowing from this, the very conditions of unemployment create a terrible situation.
In the cut-throat struggle of fifty million people for thirty million jobs, all the worst passions of humanity in general and the traditional racial prejudices of the United States come into play and disrupt the labor movement.
This basis of unemployment is the fertile soil on which flourish the race-haters and the race-baiters. They organize themselves politically, using the unemployment in industry as a means of creating social and political difficulties for the Negroes. Under these circumstances, the whole Negro question becomes one of the tensest political questions in the country. Instead of orderly progress toward the achievement of greater and greater equality, we have a period of racial riots and the unloosing of terror and counter-terror. During the last year or two the signs of this have been coming thick and fast.
Therefore, we struggle always for the immediate issues of equality wherever possible. But we must cultivate no illusions about the sincerity or insincerity of this or that particular party or candidate. Along with their immediate struggles the Negroes must ask themselves: What is the program of this or that political organization or party for the creation of such a society in the United States as will root out the conditions from which the prejudice and the inequality spring?
Neither of the two major parties has any serious program for the reconstruction of American society. All their talk, therefore, among capitalist politicians, about equality of opportunity for Negroes has no meaning in the face of the economic and social crisis which lies ahead.
The Workers Party has its transitional program for the purpose of mobilizing the American workers toward the struggle for a new social order. For the large masses of the workers, that struggle centers about the struggle for a mass Labor Party. The Negro, however, who sees clearly not only the immediate struggles but the basic and fundamental problem which lies behind it must make up his mind to follow the example of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and those other great Negroes in the greatest period of American history. These banded themselves together in revolutionary organisations in order, by precept and example, to mobilize the large masses of the population for a radical solution of the American crisis of those days. Here is a case where we can safely say to serious Negroes today: Come thou and do likewise.
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<h2>C.L.R. James </h2>
<h1>Truth about ‘Peace Plan’:<br>
Britain’s Imperialist Game</h1>
<h3>(20 December 1935)</h3>
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<p class="information"><span class="info">Source:</span> <strong>New Leader</strong>, 20 December 1935.<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> Christian Høgsbjerg.<br>
<span class="info">Marked up:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="end" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">The cat is out of the bag – or at least most of it. Honest Stanley Baldwin, holding desperately onto the tail, has only been able to prevent the hindquarters of the unsavoury animal from displaying itself. It had to come, of course, but the moment was untimely. That was all.</p>
<p>The agitation appears to be taking the form of protest against the dismemberment of Abyssinia by those who believe in the Covenant of the League.</p>
<p>It is nothing of the kind. By the proposals of the Committee of Five the independence of Abyssinia was sold two months ago. The Peace Plan is the inevitable consequence of the previous Imperialist negotiations.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Story of the Plot</h4>
<p class="fst">Every worker knows today that in return for help against a re-armed Germany, Laval gave Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia. Having made his bargain with French Imperialism, Mussolini, as Hoare informed the House of Commons on October 22, told the British Government that he was ready to talk Abyssinia with them. The British Government, as Hoare said in the same speech, never replied. The reason Hoare gives is, first, that they had to set up a committee, had to make investigations in the Sudan and Kenya, and at last were so upset and confused by events that they could not discuss the matter calmly (This sounds unbelievable but it is true, and can be found in Hansard for October 22).</p>
<p>The real reason is simple. They did not want to tell Mussolini ‘yes’. That could be used in evidence against them by the League later. But if they said ‘no’ and stood by the League, Mussolini, at that early stage, would have had a serious check. And if so, then goodbye to all hopes of joint exploitation of Abyssinia.</p>
<p>Since 1902 Britain has been trying for the Lake Tsana concession and had not got it. Japan was penetrating Abyssinia; America was beginning. And if Abyssinia got over this difficulty she would arm so that none of her European Imperialist neighbours would have another chance to do what they had been attempting by war and intimidation for fifty years.</p>
<p>The British Imperialists were right. On May 11, Abyssinia, desperate, offered British Imperialists, the Lake Tsana concession, after having refused for 33 years. The British Imperialists said ‘no’. To take it then would have been awkward. They could afford to wait.<br>
</p>
<h4>Eden as Puppet</h4>
<p class="fst">Up to late June, Peace Ballot or no Peace Ballot, they were bargaining with Mussolini. The famous Zeila offer of a British port to Abyssinia in return for territory to Italy has come up again. Eden, who made it, is the darling of all those, who put their faith in the League. But this gentlemen told the House on July 11 exactly why British Imperialism made it. ‘Had the proposal been accepted and allowed us to find a basis for a settlement, <em>let us not forget that Great Britain stood to gain as much as any other nation</em>.’ Eden, like all the rest, will use the League for purposes of Imperialism. If he did not, Imperialism would throw him on the dust-heap.</p>
<p>But Mussolini proved, from the British point of view, unreasonable. In Paris in late August, as was noted by the Foreign Correspondent of the <strong>Manchester Guardian</strong> (September 7), they offered him everything except the actual Protectorate, and still Mussolini said ‘no’. The British Government realised that he aimed at dominating the whole of the strategically powerful plateau of Abyssinia. That would be a permanent threat to British East Africa, and that they were not going to have. So they began to shout for the Covenant, the whole Covenant and nothing but the Covenant.</p>
<p>‘Action now!’ said Eden, and Britain led the way, the Labour Party, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Communist Party calling for more Sanctions and still more. But the British Government did not, and does not, want to fight Italian Fascism. If Mussolini persisted in being unreasonable they would have to fight him, and it would be better to fight a League war, or, as the <strong>Daily Herald</strong> put it two years ago, ‘a legal war’; they mobilised world opinion behind them, made sure of the future exploitation of Abyssinia by the proposals of the Committee of Five (see the <strong>New Leader</strong> of October 4), and then invited Italy to sit at the Board, but under the auspices of the League. Mussolini refused.</p>
<p>The British Government, though sorely perturbed at his unreason, stood firm, for British interests were involved. They had won the election on the League slogan, and had even started on the gradual imposition of Sanctions. They tried to bring Laval in. Laval bargained stiffly – he wanted a promise of help against Germany. The British Government haggled. They did not want to commit themselves so far. It is certain that if Abyssinia did not stop Mussolini they would have to give Laval his promise.</p>
<p>But here the course of the war and Mussolini’s internal difficulties played into their hands. The war is not going well. The Italians will never dominate that plateau. That is certain. The British Government therefore is first of all safe from the threatened danger, and, secondly, has got the League mandate of the Committee of Five to fall back on whenever a general settlement is to take place. It has got no more use for the League, and taking the bull by the horns produces this Peace Plan.<br>
</p>
<h4>Workers and Imperialism</h4>
<p class="fst">Eden, who was the chief mouthpiece of the League policy, feels rather an ass. Honest Stanley has once more deceived his admirers, but that clever confidence man will most probably get away with it.</p>
<p>Even if the Cabinet is severely shaken (which is doubtful) British Imperialism will not fight Italy either for Abyssinia or for collective security. It will fight for British Imperialist interests and nothing else. British Imperialism will stand firm til it is broken by the British working class, supported by the Colonial workers and peasants. All else is illusion and hypocrisy.</p>
<p>If Abyssinia is to be saved it will be by her own exertions and the help of the International working class.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James
Truth about ‘Peace Plan’:
Britain’s Imperialist Game
(20 December 1935)
Source: New Leader, 20 December 1935.
Transcribed: Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The cat is out of the bag – or at least most of it. Honest Stanley Baldwin, holding desperately onto the tail, has only been able to prevent the hindquarters of the unsavoury animal from displaying itself. It had to come, of course, but the moment was untimely. That was all.
The agitation appears to be taking the form of protest against the dismemberment of Abyssinia by those who believe in the Covenant of the League.
It is nothing of the kind. By the proposals of the Committee of Five the independence of Abyssinia was sold two months ago. The Peace Plan is the inevitable consequence of the previous Imperialist negotiations.
The Story of the Plot
Every worker knows today that in return for help against a re-armed Germany, Laval gave Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia. Having made his bargain with French Imperialism, Mussolini, as Hoare informed the House of Commons on October 22, told the British Government that he was ready to talk Abyssinia with them. The British Government, as Hoare said in the same speech, never replied. The reason Hoare gives is, first, that they had to set up a committee, had to make investigations in the Sudan and Kenya, and at last were so upset and confused by events that they could not discuss the matter calmly (This sounds unbelievable but it is true, and can be found in Hansard for October 22).
The real reason is simple. They did not want to tell Mussolini ‘yes’. That could be used in evidence against them by the League later. But if they said ‘no’ and stood by the League, Mussolini, at that early stage, would have had a serious check. And if so, then goodbye to all hopes of joint exploitation of Abyssinia.
Since 1902 Britain has been trying for the Lake Tsana concession and had not got it. Japan was penetrating Abyssinia; America was beginning. And if Abyssinia got over this difficulty she would arm so that none of her European Imperialist neighbours would have another chance to do what they had been attempting by war and intimidation for fifty years.
The British Imperialists were right. On May 11, Abyssinia, desperate, offered British Imperialists, the Lake Tsana concession, after having refused for 33 years. The British Imperialists said ‘no’. To take it then would have been awkward. They could afford to wait.
Eden as Puppet
Up to late June, Peace Ballot or no Peace Ballot, they were bargaining with Mussolini. The famous Zeila offer of a British port to Abyssinia in return for territory to Italy has come up again. Eden, who made it, is the darling of all those, who put their faith in the League. But this gentlemen told the House on July 11 exactly why British Imperialism made it. ‘Had the proposal been accepted and allowed us to find a basis for a settlement, let us not forget that Great Britain stood to gain as much as any other nation.’ Eden, like all the rest, will use the League for purposes of Imperialism. If he did not, Imperialism would throw him on the dust-heap.
But Mussolini proved, from the British point of view, unreasonable. In Paris in late August, as was noted by the Foreign Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (September 7), they offered him everything except the actual Protectorate, and still Mussolini said ‘no’. The British Government realised that he aimed at dominating the whole of the strategically powerful plateau of Abyssinia. That would be a permanent threat to British East Africa, and that they were not going to have. So they began to shout for the Covenant, the whole Covenant and nothing but the Covenant.
‘Action now!’ said Eden, and Britain led the way, the Labour Party, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Communist Party calling for more Sanctions and still more. But the British Government did not, and does not, want to fight Italian Fascism. If Mussolini persisted in being unreasonable they would have to fight him, and it would be better to fight a League war, or, as the Daily Herald put it two years ago, ‘a legal war’; they mobilised world opinion behind them, made sure of the future exploitation of Abyssinia by the proposals of the Committee of Five (see the New Leader of October 4), and then invited Italy to sit at the Board, but under the auspices of the League. Mussolini refused.
The British Government, though sorely perturbed at his unreason, stood firm, for British interests were involved. They had won the election on the League slogan, and had even started on the gradual imposition of Sanctions. They tried to bring Laval in. Laval bargained stiffly – he wanted a promise of help against Germany. The British Government haggled. They did not want to commit themselves so far. It is certain that if Abyssinia did not stop Mussolini they would have to give Laval his promise.
But here the course of the war and Mussolini’s internal difficulties played into their hands. The war is not going well. The Italians will never dominate that plateau. That is certain. The British Government therefore is first of all safe from the threatened danger, and, secondly, has got the League mandate of the Committee of Five to fall back on whenever a general settlement is to take place. It has got no more use for the League, and taking the bull by the horns produces this Peace Plan.
Workers and Imperialism
Eden, who was the chief mouthpiece of the League policy, feels rather an ass. Honest Stanley has once more deceived his admirers, but that clever confidence man will most probably get away with it.
Even if the Cabinet is severely shaken (which is doubtful) British Imperialism will not fight Italy either for Abyssinia or for collective security. It will fight for British Imperialist interests and nothing else. British Imperialism will stand firm til it is broken by the British working class, supported by the Colonial workers and peasants. All else is illusion and hypocrisy.
If Abyssinia is to be saved it will be by her own exertions and the help of the International working class.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>The Race Pogroms and the Negro</h1>
<h4>The Beginnings of an Analysis</h4>
<h3>(July 1943)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>New International</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni43_07" target="new">Vol. IX No. 7</a>, July 1943, pp. 201–204.<br>
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), <strong>C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”</strong>, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 36–46.<br>
Transcribed and Marked up by Damon Maxwell for <strong>ETOL</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Gloom and despair have gripped millions of the Negro population of this country. For at least a year the coming explosions were a topic of conversation everywhere. They were written about extensively in the Negro press and in certain sections of the capitalist press as well. Masses of the Negro people had shown their determination, their courage, their willingness to sacrifice, on every possible occasion that an opportunity presented itself. Yet the blow has fallen upon them and they have been powerless to meet it. Not only that. They expect, and with good reason, that more desperate times are ahead. This is not a matter now of a long-range program for abolishing the economic and social basis of race prejudice. The problem is much more urgent than that. Events in states as far apart as Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan and New York have shown that at any moment gangs of whites will begin to beat up and murder Negroes in the streets, and to wreck and burn down blocks of Negro homes. Yet the helplessness with which the Negroes watched the peril approach shows quite clearly that though they, above all people, realize how urgent the problem is, they are still not clearly aware of the real forces at work against them and, therefore, cannot plan to meet the emergency. Now when they are searching everywhere for a way out of the danger in which they stand, we propose to place before them and their friends certain fundamental facts of the present situation and to draw certain conclusions from these facts.</p>
<p>The first and most important point is that it is useless to depend on the government for protection. By the government, we mean the Washington Administration under Roosevelt, or whoever may be President, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the senators and congressmen, the state administrations, the state governors, the city police, the FEPC, all forms and manner of official power. These will not and, being what they are, cannot protect the Negro people.</p>
<p>First, the Administration in Washington. The Roosevelt government knew that the Detroit outbreak was on the way. After the rioting in 1942 over the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit, government investigators reported on the general situation in Detroit as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is not melodrama when city officials here [Detroit] say this conflict is the most serious the city has faced since way back beyond the time of the big strikes.</p>
<p class="quote">“They don’t go far enough in what they say. It would be nearer realism to say that, if not today, tomorrow, this country, or let us say the war effort, will face its biggest crisis all over the North!”;</p>
<p>The investigator referred specifically to Buffalo and Philadelphia as danger points.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A person not in the vortex of the situation can hardly realize its urgency.</p>
<p class="quote">“Therefore, let it be repeated once more: It is beyond control and extends far beyond Detroit, and unless strong and quick intervention by some high official, preferably the President, is taken at once, hell is going to be let loose in every Northern city where large numbers of Negroes are in competition.” (<strong>PM</strong>, June 27.)</p>
<p class="fst">We are not going into the question here of whether immigrants or the Ku Klux Planners are mainly responsible for the outbreaks in Detroit. It is sufficient that whoever they are, in the Northern cities at least, they are a definite minority even among the workers. The point is that the Roosevelt government knew, and the Roosevelt government did nothing. Remember also that the government today wants no interruption in war production. Yet rather than take steps to protect the Negroes, it preferred to let the situation rest as it was. In connection with the Sojourner Truth riot, the government arrested three men, three, on a charge of “seditious conspiracy.” This was in February, 1942. Today, eighteen months later, the government has not brought them to trial. To depend on this government for protection is suicide.</p>
<p>This is what happened before. Now mark what happened during the riots. The police are the local representatives of the state. To them is entrusted the power of the state in its dealings with civilians. Their duty is supposedly to protect the lives and property of civilians who are lawlessly attacked. But the police cannot be expected to act in one way when the government, from whom they derive their authority, acts in another. Their actions, therefore, merely show crudely what is the real policy of the government. <em>They sided with the rioters!</em> Every Negro and every friend of elementary human decency should frame and display in his house that shameful photograph in which two policemen hold a Negro while a white rioter hits him in the face, and a third policeman on a horse looks on. That the police, the power of the state, is in this conspiracy against the Negro people has penetrated into the head even of Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP. He writes from Detroit on June 23: “Twenty-five of the twenty-eight who lie dead from the race rioting here are Negroes. Eighty-five per cent of those arrested are Negroes. One hundred per cent of the thirty-two who were tried and convicted of rioting yesterday were Negroes. In these figures lies the answer to the sullenness and bitter despair I saw yesterday on the faces of Negroes.”</p>
<p>Of the twenty-four Negroes killed, twenty were killed directly by the shots of the police. So that the lives of the Negroes were in far more danger from the government’s representatives than from the rioters. The triggers were pressed by the fingers of Detroit policemen, but the guns were aimed by the government in Washington. For the Roosevelt government had shown the policemen quite clearly where it stood in regard to Negroes. It had not only segregated them in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the federal government itself, thereby making it impossible for policemen to have the proper respect for the rights of Negroes. By the government’s action over the Sojourner Truth riots, by its refusal to take one single step to avert a crisis which everybody, and particularly the police, knew was on the way, the government had given the police a clear direction as to where the guns were to be pointed. The government in Washington could pretend to be neutral. But when the fighting is actually on, the police have to take action. They acted in accordance with the policy of the government: restore order by putting the Negroes in their place.</p>
<p>The government in all its shapes and forms is responsible for these murderous attacks, not only before they occurred, but while they were going on. On Monday, June 22, two hundred and fifty representatives of labor, fraternal and social organizations, <em>both Negro and white</em>, crowded into the dining room of the Lucy Thurman YWCA at noon in order to take measures to protect the Negro people. This was obvious from the speeches. Speaker after speaker indicted the police for murdering Negroes, for concentrating on Negro areas, for refusing to arrest the leaders of the white mobs. They gave examples from their own personal observation. They called on Mayor Jeffries, who was present, to put an end to this lawlessness by the state. They asked him to go on the radio and warn that all instigators would be severely punished. They condemned his handling of the situation.</p>
<p><em>Jeffries refused point-blank to take the actions they recommended</em>. The latest news is that both Jeffries and the FBI have agreed that there is no need for any investigation. Washington government, local mayor and local police are all fundamentally one. In Los Angeles, the city police joined with the rioters against the Mexicans and Negroes. After the Mobile outbreak, Monsignor Haas, new head of the FEPC, another government body, recommended that the Negroes be segregated into four Jim Crow shipyards which make only bare hulls. This means that though they can become ship-fitters, welders and drillers, they will be debarred from such highly skilled and highly paid work as machine operating, pipe fitting and electrical installation. By this action, rioters are told by the government that it they riot hard enough they can be sure of attaining their substantial demands: “keeping the Negro in his place.” A PM reporter in Texas reports again what is common knowledge, that the state guard and police in Beaumont, as all over the South, resented the fact that they were called upon to defend Negroes against white men. And it is no longer a question of only the South.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Situation in New York</h4>
<p class="fst">New York has long been known as one of the places where segregation is practiced least (that is the best that can be said) and Mayor LaGuardia is reputed to be one of the great friends of the Negro. Some weeks ago the Mayor gave his assent to a Metropolitan Insurance Housing Project which will exclude Negroes. Thus, at this critical time, the head of the city administration gives an unequivocal demonstration to would-be rioters and his own city police as to what his attitude is on the race question. The city police understood their Mayor even before he spoke. On June 24, at a meeting of the City Council, Councilman Clayton Powell, a Negro, said that New York had recently witnessed “a continuous succession of unwarranted brutality perpetrated upon Negro citizens in our city,” with many cases resulting in deaths. He had taken each of these cases up by mail with Police Commissioner Valentine. One letter had been acknowledged, the rest had been ignored. “now say, fellow councilmen,” continued Powell, “that the riots of Detroit can easily be duplicated here in New York City. If any riot breaks out here in New York, the blood of innocent people, white and Negro, will rest upon the hands of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, who have refused to see representative citizens to discuss means of combatting outbreaks in New York.” What protection can be expected from such a police force?</p>
<p>The Negro people, therefore, had better make up their minds. The state, the government, in Washington, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, or anywhere else, is no protection. There will be some talk. The government may send in some troops after the mischief has been done and the situation seems to be spreading too far. It may even appoint a commission. But before, during and after the rioting, the government and its agents act in accordance with the three hundred-year-old policy of American capitalism – nor could it be otherwise. The state, says Marx, is the executive committee of the ruling class. The American capitalist class has gained untold riches by its specially brutal exploitation of Negroes. To deaden the consciousness of exploitation among the white workers it taught them to despise Negroes. Now today it needs uninterrupted production for its war. But when certain backward elements among the whites attack Negroes, the capitalist class, through its executive committee, the state, shows that even against its own immediate war interests, it must continue that persecution on which so much of its power and privileges have been built. The Army, the Navy, the police, the Department of Justice, all these are the instruments whereby the capitalist class holds down the masses of the people. These are soaked and trained in race prejudice as a matter of high policy. If even the government dislikes race riots, it cannot take vigorous steps to repress them because that will tear down the prejudice on which so much depends. If Negroes depend upon the government, they are going to be dragged from trolleys and beaten up, they and their wives and children will be shot down by rioters and police, and their homes will be wrecked and burned. Furthermore, these riots are no passing phase. It even by some miracle they are held in check during the war, when the war is over they will burst forth with tenfold intensity.</p>
<h4>The Bishop and the Uncle Toms</h4>
<p>Two weeks before the Detroit outburst, the Rt. Rev. C. Ransom, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, addressed a meeting of 1,500 people at Town Hall, New York. The bishop spoke to a people strongly conscious of the danger which hung over them. He made one reference to the work of the President and “his great wife” for Negro equality, but he called upon the Negro people to fight. He made a public confession. “I am tired of lying and compromising; we praise William Lloyd Garrison – he was a white man who died for the Negro – but Negroes must learn to die for themselves!” He concluded: “I’d rather die and be damned than to surrender my absolute equality to any man!” The bishop is a little shaky on the theology. We can assure him on the very highest authority that if he were to die fighting for equality he will at least not be damned. But his political line is impeccable. What makes his speech so noteworthy is that in all the outpourings of the wordy Negro leaders in this crisis, it stands almost alone. With all that had happened and the prospects of still worse to come, not one of the so-called leaders of the Negro people had the courage, the sense, or the honesty to call upon the people to defend themselves. We shall give a selection of what they did say, so that there will be some coordinated record of the shameful cowardice, self-seeking and bankruptcy of these betrayers of the Negro masses. (The selections are all from the June 26 issues.)</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>The People’s Voice</strong>: “It is evident that the Axis is planning an invasion of America. ... Our government has been mysteriously soft-hearted in dealing with the big-time fifth columnists of America. ... It is time the President of the United States stopped phony investigations of lynchings, police brutality, maltreatment of black soldiers, mob law, and got down to business. ...” Then, in large capitals: “THE QUESTION THAT NOW CONCERNS US IS NOT – WILL WE WIN THE PEACE, BUT WILL WE WIN THE WAR? AND, IF SO, WHICH ONE? ABROAD OR AT HOME?”</p>
<p class="quoter">Signed: ADAM CLAYTON POWELL.</p>
<p class="fst">To the people in Buffalo, Philadelphia and elsewhere, wondering their turn will come, it must be comforting to know that the Axis is planning an invasion of America and that is why their heads are being busted open.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>The New York Age</strong>: “The saturation point is fast being reached. The failure of legal authorities to face the situation is bringing near and nearer that fatal day when the limit of human endurance shall have been reached. ... If and when that day is allowed to come –there will be trouble.”</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>The Pittsburgh Courier</strong>: “We urge prompt and immediate action by the Office of the Attorney General. ... The Federal Bureau of Investigation ... Nazi saboteurs, Axis-inspired!” Then, in large print: “WE DEMAND ACTION.”</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>The Chicago Defender</strong>: “Biddle must be made to act or vacate his high office. ... Let us still further unify our country and go forward to win the war NOW in 1943.”</p>
<p class="quoteb"><strong>The Journal and Guide</strong>: “The state governments must play their part; the city and country governments must play their part; if they fail the federal government must assume its responsibility as was done in the Detroit case. It is time for America to close ranks if we are to retain the respect of the other members of the United Nations....”</p>
<p class="fst">You see, it is not Negro lives which are at stake, but the respect for America of the United Nations.</p>
<p><em>Lester Granger</em> (for the National Urban League) in a telegram to President Roosevelt:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We therefore call on you to order an immediate investigation of these outbreaks and the possibility of their subversive instigation ...”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Walter White</em> (for the NAACP) in a telegram to President Roosevelt:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We urge you to go on the radio at the earliest possible moment and appeal to America to resist Axis and other propaganda ...”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Ferdinand Smith</em>, chairman, and <em>Charlie Collins</em>, secretary, Negro Labor Victory Committee:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We feel that the Detroit outbreak demands most stringent measures to prevent the further breakdown of morale and war production.”</p>
<p class="fst">These are the Negro leaders. These are the cringing, crawling, whining Uncle Toms who have not, not a single one, addressed a single manifesto to the Negro people and to their white fellow citizens, many of whom, in organizations and in groups or singly, are ready to do what they can for the defense of the Negro people. No. To that very President to those very legal authorities who have themselves so criminally, by commission and omission, encouraged and protected the rioters, it is to them that these Negro leaders address themselves, beating the big drum against the Axis. Read those extracts again. What they are saying is this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Don’t you see, Mr. President, that when they shoot us down and bust our heads open, it stops our war production? If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t trouble you.”</p>
<p class="fst">The President is the same man who so shocked Walter White by openly supporting segregation in the armed forces, who has used the FEPC as a toy windmill to fool Negroes; the same who, according to Adam C. Powell, has instigated phony investigations into the thousands of government-organized brutalities perpetrated against the Negro people every day. So far, the President has kept quiet. As long as he can have Walter White, Lester Granger and Ferdinand Smith to keep the Negroes quiet, why should he say anything? However, Eleanor Roosevelt has not the gift of silence. When the zoot suit riots broke out, she was in Washington, the center of government. The world will little note nor long remember what she did there. She did nothing. But she said plenty. As a fitting crown to a notably platitudinous career she declared that “Americans must sooner or later face the fact that we have a race problem” (<strong>Journal and Guide</strong>, June 26.) The words are not an indictment of Eleanor Roosevelt. This pouring of little thimblefuls of water on great fires is her job. But the colossal insolence and contempt of her remarks is an indictment of the Walter Whites, the Lester Grangers and the Ferdinand Smiths. It will be an everlasting tribute to their role as <em>de facto</em> agents of the white ruling class among the Negro people that, in this crisis, not one of them turned to the Negroes and said: “Negroes, defend yourselves.”</p>
<p>Two voices, and two voices only, spoke up clearly on the riots in general, if not actually on Detroit. The first was the <strong>Afro-American</strong> of Baltimore, which, commenting on the Texas riots, spoke words which should be learned by heart. Every sentence is pregnant with wisdom:</p>
<p class="quoteb">The cause of the attack upon the hundreds of innocent colored people is not important. Some Southern communities need no incentive to mob action. All they want is an excuse.</p>
<p class="quote">In a situation like this in the South, it is idle to appeal either to state or federal authorities for assistance. It usually comes too late.</p>
<p class="quote">Colored communities must be prepared to protect themselves. Frederick Douglas said that the slave that resisted vigorously was almost never whipped.</p>
<p class="quote">If mobsters attacking colored homes get a hot reception once, they will not repeat that visit.</p>
<p>The second, the <em>Amsterdam News</em> of New York, was still more powerful:</p>
<p class="quoteb">We knew and we have said repeatedly that there can be no law and order (Negroes really don’t care whether whites like them or not) in the United States until the federal government steps in and stops the continuous program of pogroms perpetrated against Negro citizens, particularly in the South. By failing to protect the lives and security of American citizens, our government tacitly enters into what amounts to collusion with the Nazi-minded and acting whites of America. Conditions between the two races are now so bad that any sane citizen fears not only for his country, but for his family, friends and himself.</p>
<p class="quote">Because our government refuses to act resolutely – go in and punish the mob members, regardless of their number – it is now mandatory on every citizen to protect himself. To protect oneself in face of mob violence means to fight back hard without giving any quarter to anyone. This may mean death but it’s far, far better to die fighting as a man than to perish like a caged animal in Beaumont or elsewhere.</p>
<p class="quote">Unfortunately, the Negro citizen’s war is right here at home against white mobs. Let us battle them unto death, until our government, dedicated to protect all of its citizens, does its duty as any government worth its salt would. The die is cast and we must fight all the way for our lives, our homes and our self-respect.</p>
<p class="fst">There is the whole thing in a nutshell. It is true for the South, and true for the North, and true for everywhere. There are some thirteen million Negroes in this country. They are willing and anxious to defend themselves. In their place, who would not be? But their leaders never do anything else but appeal to the same President, the same state, the same police, the same authorities, who, being what they are, will not and cannot defend the people. We ask the Negroes: Shouldn’t Ferdinand Smith, Lester Granger, Walter White and all the Negro press have joined in a common manifesto to the Negro people? Shouldn’t they have called upon them to defend themselves, shouldn’t they have denounced by name the President, the police officers, the legal authorities, the mayors and all who have so criminally encouraged and aided, directly and indirectly, in the persecution of the Negro people? Shouldn’t they have appealed to the great body of white people in this country, telling them that in view of the shameless failure to protect the Negroes, it was up to the citizens themselves to do it? Isn’t it this which the situation demands? Is there any other way to save the people from the imminent perils of the future? Any Negro leader who cannot answer in the affirmative to the above questions is a traitor to his people and should be driven out from among them.</p>
<p>Every school club, every street, every church group, can organize for defense where official authority has failed them, as it has. They can pool their resources and train defense guards. The movement should be nationwide and it could be started tomorrow.</p>
<p>Should the President be ignored? Not at all. The President should be informed, but he should be informed not by weekly telegrams about the Axis, but by tens of thousands of citizens marching on Washington. Walter White and Philip Randolph bear a direct responsibility for the helpless situation the masses of the Negroes find themselves in today. When the people were ready to march on Washington, these perpetual cringers cringed before Roosevelt and LaGuardia and called off the march. Is it any wonder that the state has continued its contemptuous course? Only one thing will make it change, and that is when it sees that the Negro masses are not listening to those who continually present their behinds to be kicked, but are themselves undertaking their own defense, and are presenting their ills to the government in person.</p>
<p>Some of these cowards and hangers-on to the Roosevelt government whisper that “we Negroes cannot fight the whole white population.” The statement is a gross slander against tens of millions of white people in America and, above all, a slander against the CIO. We ask the Negro people to note that during the last ten weeks the whole bungling, hypocritical administration set-up for placing the burdens of the war upon the masses has been exposed and made to totter by the magnificent action of the miners. These half-million men have trusted in their union, and not in the state which they have recognized for what it is – the executive committee of the ruling class. They have shown what well organized, determined men can do. <em>One hundred thousand of these are Negroes</em>. Yet nobody thinks of white miners and Negro miners. They are just “the miners.” The reason is because the Negro miners are perfectly integrated into the labor movement. This is what the Negroes must aim at. They must integrate themselves as tightly as possible into the labor movement. It is true that even in the CIO some white workers are hostile to Negroes, such as those workers who struck at the Packard plant against the upgrading of Negroes. But the UAW of Detroit, for instance, has repeatedly demonstrated its sympathy with the Negroes against the comparatively small section of Detroit race-baiters. It has repeatedly condemned the Detroit Mayor for his criminal laxity. Let the Negroes note this, and where, as in Detroit, they are strongly represented in the unions, let them make direct appeal to the unions for help in the organization of the defense. There are difficulties in the way. But the Negroes can overcome them if they first depend upon themselves and then call for the direct support of labor.</p>
<p>Walter Reuther, vice-president of the UAW, has said: “As soon as they pull the troops out of here it will happen again. Our only hope is that some active committee is organized to arouse the decent people of this town so that this won’t happen again.” R. J. Thomas, president of the UAW, has stupidly complained that the auto manufacturers “have given us little cooperation in helping to smooth race relations.” That remark is in its way as miserable as the telegrams of Walter White and Lester Granger to Roosevelt. But the union leaders are undoubtedly bitter about the whole savage business and know the danger which it represents for union solidarity. Let the Negro community and particularly the Negro workers in the unions, put the problem squarely up to the unions themselves. “We cannot trust the state, in Washington or here. You are the most powerful organized force in the community. We are, most of us, workers like yourselves. We are organizing for our own defense and we appeal to you.” If only the workers see that the Negroes mean business, they are certain to respond. But the Negroes must first rid themselves of the misleaders who are always looking to Roosevelt or to Pearl Buck, or to Willkie for help, and, incidentally, the publicity which it brings. <em>If the Negroes do not defend themselves, then it is certain nobody else will</em>.</p>
<p>There are, of course, many other aspects to this problem: Its fundamental economic and social causes, the problem of labor cooperation, seen at its best in the miners’ strike and at its worst in the reactionary AFL; the attitude of political parties; perspectives of the future. These will be dealt with by future articles in The NEW INTERNATIONAL and are regularly treated in the weekly, <em>Labor Action</em>. But the problem here emphasized is an urgent one and has been treated as such. One of the most important lessons a Marxist learns is that the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. Another is that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. As the Negroes search their minds for a way out, let them carefully think over the two principles illustrated above. If in their determination to protect themselves they should grasp these two ideas, they will have learned lessons which will take them far.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
The Race Pogroms and the Negro
The Beginnings of an Analysis
(July 1943)
From New International, Vol. IX No. 7, July 1943, pp. 201–204.
Republished in Scott McLemee (ed.), C.L.R. James on the “Negro Question”, Jackson (Miss.) 1996, pp. 36–46.
Transcribed and Marked up by Damon Maxwell for ETOL.
Gloom and despair have gripped millions of the Negro population of this country. For at least a year the coming explosions were a topic of conversation everywhere. They were written about extensively in the Negro press and in certain sections of the capitalist press as well. Masses of the Negro people had shown their determination, their courage, their willingness to sacrifice, on every possible occasion that an opportunity presented itself. Yet the blow has fallen upon them and they have been powerless to meet it. Not only that. They expect, and with good reason, that more desperate times are ahead. This is not a matter now of a long-range program for abolishing the economic and social basis of race prejudice. The problem is much more urgent than that. Events in states as far apart as Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan and New York have shown that at any moment gangs of whites will begin to beat up and murder Negroes in the streets, and to wreck and burn down blocks of Negro homes. Yet the helplessness with which the Negroes watched the peril approach shows quite clearly that though they, above all people, realize how urgent the problem is, they are still not clearly aware of the real forces at work against them and, therefore, cannot plan to meet the emergency. Now when they are searching everywhere for a way out of the danger in which they stand, we propose to place before them and their friends certain fundamental facts of the present situation and to draw certain conclusions from these facts.
The first and most important point is that it is useless to depend on the government for protection. By the government, we mean the Washington Administration under Roosevelt, or whoever may be President, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the senators and congressmen, the state administrations, the state governors, the city police, the FEPC, all forms and manner of official power. These will not and, being what they are, cannot protect the Negro people.
First, the Administration in Washington. The Roosevelt government knew that the Detroit outbreak was on the way. After the rioting in 1942 over the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit, government investigators reported on the general situation in Detroit as follows:
“It is not melodrama when city officials here [Detroit] say this conflict is the most serious the city has faced since way back beyond the time of the big strikes.
“They don’t go far enough in what they say. It would be nearer realism to say that, if not today, tomorrow, this country, or let us say the war effort, will face its biggest crisis all over the North!”;
The investigator referred specifically to Buffalo and Philadelphia as danger points.
“A person not in the vortex of the situation can hardly realize its urgency.
“Therefore, let it be repeated once more: It is beyond control and extends far beyond Detroit, and unless strong and quick intervention by some high official, preferably the President, is taken at once, hell is going to be let loose in every Northern city where large numbers of Negroes are in competition.” (PM, June 27.)
We are not going into the question here of whether immigrants or the Ku Klux Planners are mainly responsible for the outbreaks in Detroit. It is sufficient that whoever they are, in the Northern cities at least, they are a definite minority even among the workers. The point is that the Roosevelt government knew, and the Roosevelt government did nothing. Remember also that the government today wants no interruption in war production. Yet rather than take steps to protect the Negroes, it preferred to let the situation rest as it was. In connection with the Sojourner Truth riot, the government arrested three men, three, on a charge of “seditious conspiracy.” This was in February, 1942. Today, eighteen months later, the government has not brought them to trial. To depend on this government for protection is suicide.
This is what happened before. Now mark what happened during the riots. The police are the local representatives of the state. To them is entrusted the power of the state in its dealings with civilians. Their duty is supposedly to protect the lives and property of civilians who are lawlessly attacked. But the police cannot be expected to act in one way when the government, from whom they derive their authority, acts in another. Their actions, therefore, merely show crudely what is the real policy of the government. They sided with the rioters! Every Negro and every friend of elementary human decency should frame and display in his house that shameful photograph in which two policemen hold a Negro while a white rioter hits him in the face, and a third policeman on a horse looks on. That the police, the power of the state, is in this conspiracy against the Negro people has penetrated into the head even of Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP. He writes from Detroit on June 23: “Twenty-five of the twenty-eight who lie dead from the race rioting here are Negroes. Eighty-five per cent of those arrested are Negroes. One hundred per cent of the thirty-two who were tried and convicted of rioting yesterday were Negroes. In these figures lies the answer to the sullenness and bitter despair I saw yesterday on the faces of Negroes.”
Of the twenty-four Negroes killed, twenty were killed directly by the shots of the police. So that the lives of the Negroes were in far more danger from the government’s representatives than from the rioters. The triggers were pressed by the fingers of Detroit policemen, but the guns were aimed by the government in Washington. For the Roosevelt government had shown the policemen quite clearly where it stood in regard to Negroes. It had not only segregated them in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the federal government itself, thereby making it impossible for policemen to have the proper respect for the rights of Negroes. By the government’s action over the Sojourner Truth riots, by its refusal to take one single step to avert a crisis which everybody, and particularly the police, knew was on the way, the government had given the police a clear direction as to where the guns were to be pointed. The government in Washington could pretend to be neutral. But when the fighting is actually on, the police have to take action. They acted in accordance with the policy of the government: restore order by putting the Negroes in their place.
The government in all its shapes and forms is responsible for these murderous attacks, not only before they occurred, but while they were going on. On Monday, June 22, two hundred and fifty representatives of labor, fraternal and social organizations, both Negro and white, crowded into the dining room of the Lucy Thurman YWCA at noon in order to take measures to protect the Negro people. This was obvious from the speeches. Speaker after speaker indicted the police for murdering Negroes, for concentrating on Negro areas, for refusing to arrest the leaders of the white mobs. They gave examples from their own personal observation. They called on Mayor Jeffries, who was present, to put an end to this lawlessness by the state. They asked him to go on the radio and warn that all instigators would be severely punished. They condemned his handling of the situation.
Jeffries refused point-blank to take the actions they recommended. The latest news is that both Jeffries and the FBI have agreed that there is no need for any investigation. Washington government, local mayor and local police are all fundamentally one. In Los Angeles, the city police joined with the rioters against the Mexicans and Negroes. After the Mobile outbreak, Monsignor Haas, new head of the FEPC, another government body, recommended that the Negroes be segregated into four Jim Crow shipyards which make only bare hulls. This means that though they can become ship-fitters, welders and drillers, they will be debarred from such highly skilled and highly paid work as machine operating, pipe fitting and electrical installation. By this action, rioters are told by the government that it they riot hard enough they can be sure of attaining their substantial demands: “keeping the Negro in his place.” A PM reporter in Texas reports again what is common knowledge, that the state guard and police in Beaumont, as all over the South, resented the fact that they were called upon to defend Negroes against white men. And it is no longer a question of only the South.
The Situation in New York
New York has long been known as one of the places where segregation is practiced least (that is the best that can be said) and Mayor LaGuardia is reputed to be one of the great friends of the Negro. Some weeks ago the Mayor gave his assent to a Metropolitan Insurance Housing Project which will exclude Negroes. Thus, at this critical time, the head of the city administration gives an unequivocal demonstration to would-be rioters and his own city police as to what his attitude is on the race question. The city police understood their Mayor even before he spoke. On June 24, at a meeting of the City Council, Councilman Clayton Powell, a Negro, said that New York had recently witnessed “a continuous succession of unwarranted brutality perpetrated upon Negro citizens in our city,” with many cases resulting in deaths. He had taken each of these cases up by mail with Police Commissioner Valentine. One letter had been acknowledged, the rest had been ignored. “now say, fellow councilmen,” continued Powell, “that the riots of Detroit can easily be duplicated here in New York City. If any riot breaks out here in New York, the blood of innocent people, white and Negro, will rest upon the hands of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, who have refused to see representative citizens to discuss means of combatting outbreaks in New York.” What protection can be expected from such a police force?
The Negro people, therefore, had better make up their minds. The state, the government, in Washington, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, or anywhere else, is no protection. There will be some talk. The government may send in some troops after the mischief has been done and the situation seems to be spreading too far. It may even appoint a commission. But before, during and after the rioting, the government and its agents act in accordance with the three hundred-year-old policy of American capitalism – nor could it be otherwise. The state, says Marx, is the executive committee of the ruling class. The American capitalist class has gained untold riches by its specially brutal exploitation of Negroes. To deaden the consciousness of exploitation among the white workers it taught them to despise Negroes. Now today it needs uninterrupted production for its war. But when certain backward elements among the whites attack Negroes, the capitalist class, through its executive committee, the state, shows that even against its own immediate war interests, it must continue that persecution on which so much of its power and privileges have been built. The Army, the Navy, the police, the Department of Justice, all these are the instruments whereby the capitalist class holds down the masses of the people. These are soaked and trained in race prejudice as a matter of high policy. If even the government dislikes race riots, it cannot take vigorous steps to repress them because that will tear down the prejudice on which so much depends. If Negroes depend upon the government, they are going to be dragged from trolleys and beaten up, they and their wives and children will be shot down by rioters and police, and their homes will be wrecked and burned. Furthermore, these riots are no passing phase. It even by some miracle they are held in check during the war, when the war is over they will burst forth with tenfold intensity.
The Bishop and the Uncle Toms
Two weeks before the Detroit outburst, the Rt. Rev. C. Ransom, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, addressed a meeting of 1,500 people at Town Hall, New York. The bishop spoke to a people strongly conscious of the danger which hung over them. He made one reference to the work of the President and “his great wife” for Negro equality, but he called upon the Negro people to fight. He made a public confession. “I am tired of lying and compromising; we praise William Lloyd Garrison – he was a white man who died for the Negro – but Negroes must learn to die for themselves!” He concluded: “I’d rather die and be damned than to surrender my absolute equality to any man!” The bishop is a little shaky on the theology. We can assure him on the very highest authority that if he were to die fighting for equality he will at least not be damned. But his political line is impeccable. What makes his speech so noteworthy is that in all the outpourings of the wordy Negro leaders in this crisis, it stands almost alone. With all that had happened and the prospects of still worse to come, not one of the so-called leaders of the Negro people had the courage, the sense, or the honesty to call upon the people to defend themselves. We shall give a selection of what they did say, so that there will be some coordinated record of the shameful cowardice, self-seeking and bankruptcy of these betrayers of the Negro masses. (The selections are all from the June 26 issues.)
The People’s Voice: “It is evident that the Axis is planning an invasion of America. ... Our government has been mysteriously soft-hearted in dealing with the big-time fifth columnists of America. ... It is time the President of the United States stopped phony investigations of lynchings, police brutality, maltreatment of black soldiers, mob law, and got down to business. ...” Then, in large capitals: “THE QUESTION THAT NOW CONCERNS US IS NOT – WILL WE WIN THE PEACE, BUT WILL WE WIN THE WAR? AND, IF SO, WHICH ONE? ABROAD OR AT HOME?”
Signed: ADAM CLAYTON POWELL.
To the people in Buffalo, Philadelphia and elsewhere, wondering their turn will come, it must be comforting to know that the Axis is planning an invasion of America and that is why their heads are being busted open.
The New York Age: “The saturation point is fast being reached. The failure of legal authorities to face the situation is bringing near and nearer that fatal day when the limit of human endurance shall have been reached. ... If and when that day is allowed to come –there will be trouble.”
The Pittsburgh Courier: “We urge prompt and immediate action by the Office of the Attorney General. ... The Federal Bureau of Investigation ... Nazi saboteurs, Axis-inspired!” Then, in large print: “WE DEMAND ACTION.”
The Chicago Defender: “Biddle must be made to act or vacate his high office. ... Let us still further unify our country and go forward to win the war NOW in 1943.”
The Journal and Guide: “The state governments must play their part; the city and country governments must play their part; if they fail the federal government must assume its responsibility as was done in the Detroit case. It is time for America to close ranks if we are to retain the respect of the other members of the United Nations....”
You see, it is not Negro lives which are at stake, but the respect for America of the United Nations.
Lester Granger (for the National Urban League) in a telegram to President Roosevelt:
“We therefore call on you to order an immediate investigation of these outbreaks and the possibility of their subversive instigation ...”
Walter White (for the NAACP) in a telegram to President Roosevelt:
“We urge you to go on the radio at the earliest possible moment and appeal to America to resist Axis and other propaganda ...”
Ferdinand Smith, chairman, and Charlie Collins, secretary, Negro Labor Victory Committee:
“We feel that the Detroit outbreak demands most stringent measures to prevent the further breakdown of morale and war production.”
These are the Negro leaders. These are the cringing, crawling, whining Uncle Toms who have not, not a single one, addressed a single manifesto to the Negro people and to their white fellow citizens, many of whom, in organizations and in groups or singly, are ready to do what they can for the defense of the Negro people. No. To that very President to those very legal authorities who have themselves so criminally, by commission and omission, encouraged and protected the rioters, it is to them that these Negro leaders address themselves, beating the big drum against the Axis. Read those extracts again. What they are saying is this:
“Don’t you see, Mr. President, that when they shoot us down and bust our heads open, it stops our war production? If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t trouble you.”
The President is the same man who so shocked Walter White by openly supporting segregation in the armed forces, who has used the FEPC as a toy windmill to fool Negroes; the same who, according to Adam C. Powell, has instigated phony investigations into the thousands of government-organized brutalities perpetrated against the Negro people every day. So far, the President has kept quiet. As long as he can have Walter White, Lester Granger and Ferdinand Smith to keep the Negroes quiet, why should he say anything? However, Eleanor Roosevelt has not the gift of silence. When the zoot suit riots broke out, she was in Washington, the center of government. The world will little note nor long remember what she did there. She did nothing. But she said plenty. As a fitting crown to a notably platitudinous career she declared that “Americans must sooner or later face the fact that we have a race problem” (Journal and Guide, June 26.) The words are not an indictment of Eleanor Roosevelt. This pouring of little thimblefuls of water on great fires is her job. But the colossal insolence and contempt of her remarks is an indictment of the Walter Whites, the Lester Grangers and the Ferdinand Smiths. It will be an everlasting tribute to their role as de facto agents of the white ruling class among the Negro people that, in this crisis, not one of them turned to the Negroes and said: “Negroes, defend yourselves.”
Two voices, and two voices only, spoke up clearly on the riots in general, if not actually on Detroit. The first was the Afro-American of Baltimore, which, commenting on the Texas riots, spoke words which should be learned by heart. Every sentence is pregnant with wisdom:
The cause of the attack upon the hundreds of innocent colored people is not important. Some Southern communities need no incentive to mob action. All they want is an excuse.
In a situation like this in the South, it is idle to appeal either to state or federal authorities for assistance. It usually comes too late.
Colored communities must be prepared to protect themselves. Frederick Douglas said that the slave that resisted vigorously was almost never whipped.
If mobsters attacking colored homes get a hot reception once, they will not repeat that visit.
The second, the Amsterdam News of New York, was still more powerful:
We knew and we have said repeatedly that there can be no law and order (Negroes really don’t care whether whites like them or not) in the United States until the federal government steps in and stops the continuous program of pogroms perpetrated against Negro citizens, particularly in the South. By failing to protect the lives and security of American citizens, our government tacitly enters into what amounts to collusion with the Nazi-minded and acting whites of America. Conditions between the two races are now so bad that any sane citizen fears not only for his country, but for his family, friends and himself.
Because our government refuses to act resolutely – go in and punish the mob members, regardless of their number – it is now mandatory on every citizen to protect himself. To protect oneself in face of mob violence means to fight back hard without giving any quarter to anyone. This may mean death but it’s far, far better to die fighting as a man than to perish like a caged animal in Beaumont or elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the Negro citizen’s war is right here at home against white mobs. Let us battle them unto death, until our government, dedicated to protect all of its citizens, does its duty as any government worth its salt would. The die is cast and we must fight all the way for our lives, our homes and our self-respect.
There is the whole thing in a nutshell. It is true for the South, and true for the North, and true for everywhere. There are some thirteen million Negroes in this country. They are willing and anxious to defend themselves. In their place, who would not be? But their leaders never do anything else but appeal to the same President, the same state, the same police, the same authorities, who, being what they are, will not and cannot defend the people. We ask the Negroes: Shouldn’t Ferdinand Smith, Lester Granger, Walter White and all the Negro press have joined in a common manifesto to the Negro people? Shouldn’t they have called upon them to defend themselves, shouldn’t they have denounced by name the President, the police officers, the legal authorities, the mayors and all who have so criminally encouraged and aided, directly and indirectly, in the persecution of the Negro people? Shouldn’t they have appealed to the great body of white people in this country, telling them that in view of the shameless failure to protect the Negroes, it was up to the citizens themselves to do it? Isn’t it this which the situation demands? Is there any other way to save the people from the imminent perils of the future? Any Negro leader who cannot answer in the affirmative to the above questions is a traitor to his people and should be driven out from among them.
Every school club, every street, every church group, can organize for defense where official authority has failed them, as it has. They can pool their resources and train defense guards. The movement should be nationwide and it could be started tomorrow.
Should the President be ignored? Not at all. The President should be informed, but he should be informed not by weekly telegrams about the Axis, but by tens of thousands of citizens marching on Washington. Walter White and Philip Randolph bear a direct responsibility for the helpless situation the masses of the Negroes find themselves in today. When the people were ready to march on Washington, these perpetual cringers cringed before Roosevelt and LaGuardia and called off the march. Is it any wonder that the state has continued its contemptuous course? Only one thing will make it change, and that is when it sees that the Negro masses are not listening to those who continually present their behinds to be kicked, but are themselves undertaking their own defense, and are presenting their ills to the government in person.
Some of these cowards and hangers-on to the Roosevelt government whisper that “we Negroes cannot fight the whole white population.” The statement is a gross slander against tens of millions of white people in America and, above all, a slander against the CIO. We ask the Negro people to note that during the last ten weeks the whole bungling, hypocritical administration set-up for placing the burdens of the war upon the masses has been exposed and made to totter by the magnificent action of the miners. These half-million men have trusted in their union, and not in the state which they have recognized for what it is – the executive committee of the ruling class. They have shown what well organized, determined men can do. One hundred thousand of these are Negroes. Yet nobody thinks of white miners and Negro miners. They are just “the miners.” The reason is because the Negro miners are perfectly integrated into the labor movement. This is what the Negroes must aim at. They must integrate themselves as tightly as possible into the labor movement. It is true that even in the CIO some white workers are hostile to Negroes, such as those workers who struck at the Packard plant against the upgrading of Negroes. But the UAW of Detroit, for instance, has repeatedly demonstrated its sympathy with the Negroes against the comparatively small section of Detroit race-baiters. It has repeatedly condemned the Detroit Mayor for his criminal laxity. Let the Negroes note this, and where, as in Detroit, they are strongly represented in the unions, let them make direct appeal to the unions for help in the organization of the defense. There are difficulties in the way. But the Negroes can overcome them if they first depend upon themselves and then call for the direct support of labor.
Walter Reuther, vice-president of the UAW, has said: “As soon as they pull the troops out of here it will happen again. Our only hope is that some active committee is organized to arouse the decent people of this town so that this won’t happen again.” R. J. Thomas, president of the UAW, has stupidly complained that the auto manufacturers “have given us little cooperation in helping to smooth race relations.” That remark is in its way as miserable as the telegrams of Walter White and Lester Granger to Roosevelt. But the union leaders are undoubtedly bitter about the whole savage business and know the danger which it represents for union solidarity. Let the Negro community and particularly the Negro workers in the unions, put the problem squarely up to the unions themselves. “We cannot trust the state, in Washington or here. You are the most powerful organized force in the community. We are, most of us, workers like yourselves. We are organizing for our own defense and we appeal to you.” If only the workers see that the Negroes mean business, they are certain to respond. But the Negroes must first rid themselves of the misleaders who are always looking to Roosevelt or to Pearl Buck, or to Willkie for help, and, incidentally, the publicity which it brings. If the Negroes do not defend themselves, then it is certain nobody else will.
There are, of course, many other aspects to this problem: Its fundamental economic and social causes, the problem of labor cooperation, seen at its best in the miners’ strike and at its worst in the reactionary AFL; the attitude of political parties; perspectives of the future. These will be dealt with by future articles in The NEW INTERNATIONAL and are regularly treated in the weekly, Labor Action. But the problem here emphasized is an urgent one and has been treated as such. One of the most important lessons a Marxist learns is that the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. Another is that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. As the Negroes search their minds for a way out, let them carefully think over the two principles illustrated above. If in their determination to protect themselves they should grasp these two ideas, they will have learned lessons which will take them far.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>Harlem Negroes Protest Jim Crow Discrimination</h1>
<h3>(9 August 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_32" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 32</a>, 9 August 1943, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Shame has come to our city and sorrow to the large number of our fellow citizens, decent, law-abiding citizens, who live in the Harlem section.”</em></p>
<p class="fst"><em>Thus the first citizen of New York describes the demonstration in Harlem of the Negro people which has resulted in half a dozen deaths, scores of wounded, and hundreds of arrests.</em></p>
<p><em>So that, according to Mayor LaGuardia, when the Negro people demonstrate, shame comes to the citizens, Shame did come to LaGuardia himself when he insulted the Negro people by signing the contract for the Metropolitan Insurance Company housing project which expressly stipulated the exclusion of Negroes.</em></p>
<p><em>Shame does not come to the decent, law-abiding citizens in the White House in Washington and the decent, law-abiding citizens in Congress who have insulted the Negro people by segregating them in the Federal Government, by segregating them in the Army, in the Navy, in the Air Force and in women’s auxiliaries.</em></p>
<p><em>Shame does not come to Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox when the men they have inducted into the Army and Navy are shot down by military police and Southern civilians, are Jim Crowed and ill-treated on their way to the camps, are segregated in the camps themselves, persecuted, maltreated and lynched without any protection from the government.</em></p>
<p><em>We have not seen shame in the industrialists and men of business who in the very City of New York will not employ Negroes, and only when they are compelled to and have no other means of evasion, grudgingly give them work in industry, that same industry which is supposed to be doing all that is possible to win the great “war for democracy.”</em></p>
<p>All these things can be done by the “decent, law-abiding citizens” who merely continue the three hundred year old persecution of the Negro people which has always characterized American capitalist society.</p>
<p>But when the Negroes in Harlem become exasperated to the utmost limit by the combined persecution and hypocrisy of their lords and masters, and decide that they will show their resentment in the only way that seems possible to them, then is the time when LaGuardia goes to the microphone and informs the public theft this indeed is a shame.</p>
<p>This, and not the persecution, is the scandal. This, and not the hypocrisy, is the disgrace. Not those who insult the Negro people, not those who insult the intelligence of the Negroes by the perpetual bawling and yelling to them about the “war for democracy.”</p>
<p>No! According to LaGuardia, the demonstration against these things, that is the shame.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Kind of Demonstration Was It?</h4>
<p class="fst">The Mayor himself has informed the public that the upheaval in Harlem was a demonstration. A demonstration against what? Since when is it shameful to demonstrate against lynch law, segregation, discrimination and hypocrisy in high places, masquerading before the people as “war for democracy”? In this truly shameful hypocrisy. LaGuardia is only one of many. All the press, all the worthy citizens, not only in New York, but in Detroit, in Mobile, in Beaumont and in San Francisco, all get together and in one loud, clear and mournful voice shake their heads and say to the protesting Negro people, “What a shame!”</p>
<p>The people in Harlem are exasperated beyond endurance by the situation of the Negro people in the United States as a whole and the continuous contradiction between being persecuted by democracy and then being told that they must die for that democracy.</p>
<p>But the Harlem people have certain special grievances of their own. The overcrowding in Harlem can be borne with patience and forbearance by those who read about it in the newspapers. The people of Harlem can no longer endure it. They can no longer bear the overcharging for inferior food which is dumped upon the Harlem community by the “decent, law-abiding citizens” who cannot dispose of these goods anywhere else.</p>
<p>The people of Harlem cannot reconcile at all the constant shrieking in the press about the manpower shortage and their inability to get work. All this seems to the people of Harlem particularly shameful. When they do get work in industry, it is more often in New Jersey than in New York.</p>
<p>The people of Harlem for months now have made all manner of protest against the savage brutality of the police under the command of that “decent, law-abiding. citizen,” Police Commissioner Valentine, under the patronage of that equajly “decent” and equally “law-abiding” citizen, Mayor LaGuardia.</p>
<p>At a meeting of the New York City Council on June 25, Councilman A. Clayton Powell said that New York had recently witnessed “a continuous succession of unwarranted brutalities perpetrated upon Negro citizens in our city.” Many of these, said Powell, had resulted in deaths. He said that he Had taken up each of these cases by mail with Police Commissioner Valentine. One letter had been acknowledged. The rest had been ignored.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“I now say, fellow councilmen,” continued Powell, “that the riots of Detroit can easily be duplicated here in New York City. If any riots break out here in New York, the blood of innocent people, white and Negro, will rest upon the hands of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, who have refused to see representative citizens to discuss means of combating outbreaks in New York.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The Negro people in Harlem on Sunday and Monday knew what they were demonstrating against. They were making known their feelings to the government in Washington which continually calls upon them to fight for democracy and at the same time sits quietly while the worst indignities are committed against them in the name of democracy.</p>
<p>For them this question of the government in Washington is symbolized in the Army and the treatment of Negroes there.</p>
<p>The Negro people were protesting against conditions in New York City and the conduct of the police force described by Powell.</p>
<p>The Negro people were demonstrating against the exorbitant prices which every shop in Harlem thinks itself justified in charging them.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Brought the Protest?</h4>
<p class="fst">For several months the police department has maintained a twenty-four hour picket in the lobby of the <em>Hotel Braddock</em>, the second largest hotel in Harlem. The Negroes say, they have said it in the Negro press, that they know many places in downtown Manhattan where, as far as they can judge, a permanent picket is very much needed. Harlem is very much stirred by this official slander of the Negro people.</p>
<p>When Private Bandy stopped a cop from rough-handling a Negro woman in the <em>Braddock Hotel</em>, it was no accidental incident. It represented to every Harlemite who heard it merely another example of the especially malignant persecution and slander which the Harlem people have been suffering during recent months. And when on top of it, the cop shot the Negro soldier, is it any wonder that the rumor spread and the Harlem people decided that they would show in no uncertain terms that they were not going to put up any longer with the continuous provocation of the “decent, law-abiding” officials who rule them.</p>
<p>The crowds heard that Bandy had died. It didn’t matter whether he was dead or not. Bandy was a symbol.</p>
<p>Crowds of Negro service men and civilians, milled around, the hospital where Bandy and Officer Collins who shot him were being hospitalized.<br>
</p>
<h4>Was It a “Race Riot”?</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>It is perfectly clear that the masses of the Negro people in Harlem, far from being thoughtless hoodlums, to quote Mayor LaGuardia again, were people stirred to resentment and action at the insult which they felt had been directed at the whole Negro race in the treatment of the Negro soldiers.</em></p>
<p>We do not propose to go here into any detailed account of the demonstration, except to point out that the smashing of the shopwindows was also a protest and expression of resentment against those petty profiteers, themselves robbed and cheated by big business, who in turn rob and cheat the Negroes by high prices and poor quality goods.</p>
<p>The press and LaGuardia take excessive pains to say the demonstration was not a “race riot.” The demonstration was not a racial demonstration in the sense that the Negroes did not direct their protest indiscriminately against whites. Nor did white gangs invade Harlem.</p>
<p><em>The Negro people of Harlem showed extreme intelligence and understanding in what they did. They were not against individual White citizens in the streets. They were protesting, in the only way they understood, against their unbearable conditions. The protest was, in the fullest sense of the word, a racial demonstration, a demonstration against the wrongs and injustices perpetrated against the Negro people.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The Silence of “Leaders”</h4>
<p class="fst">Since the Detroit events, Roosevelt has not said one single word. He now has imitators. On the Harlem demonstration, Philip Randolph has imitated his master, Roosevelt, and observed a dignified silence. The rest we can foretell in advance. White, Randolph and all such will appoint committees, “inter-racial committees.” They will haggle over whether one new playground or two new playgrounds should be built. They will send a letter full of signatures to the OPA asking for a ceiling on rent. In other words, they will do exactly as they have always done. But the Negro people are becoming tired of words and promises.</p>
<p>What is to happen now? <strong>Labor Action</strong> during the last weeks has pointed out that the situation all over the country is grave, that the masses of the Negro people must organize themselves both for protection against the hoodlum elements such as the Klan and the official hoodlums; that they must organize themselves to fight against segregation of the Negro in the armed forces of the nation – against all forms of oppression.</p>
<p>The Harlem demonstration is to us nothing shameful. It is in reality a demonstration of the masses of the Negro people against their position in American capitalist society. The tremendous stir of oppressed peoples all over the world at the present time, the ferocious appeal to violence and destruction of the ruling classes, the incessant mouthings of “democracy” and the need to “die for democracy,” coupled with the shameful betrayals of democracy at home and abroad, these things are pulling the Negro people from sullen hostility to spontaneous protests against the crimes and hypocrisy of capitalist democracy.</p>
<p>There is nothing shameful about that. What is shameful is the fact that those who pose as the protectors of democratic law and order are the very ones who lay the basis for the persecution and condone others who more savagely follow their lead.</p>
<p>We say to the Negroes, therefore, that to demonstrate against tyranny and injustice has always been one of the greatest and most admired virtues of mankind. The moans and wailings of La Guardia, Walter White and the whole capitalist press will not alter that.</p>
<p>The fact that the Negroes did not attack whites indiscriminately shows that they are on the verge of finding the correct answer to the problems which have plagued the Negro people for three hundred years.</p>
<p>What they have to do in New York and elsewhere is to organize this rebelliousness against tyranny and the insults to their intelligence, and direct it into such channels as will bring their grievances and their wrongs forcibly before the American people and the people of the whole world.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Need for Organization</h4>
<p class="fst">Let them organize themselves to create their own committees and to direct properly the passionate desire for freedom and equality which now stirs all Negro youth. Let them organize themselves to march on Washington, and themselves place before the resident and Congress their shameful conditions. Let them demand their rights in the name of that very democracy for which they are being called upon to die. Let them make it clear, by the tightness of their organization, the determination of their demonstrations and the resoluteness with which they present their demands, that nothing on earth will prevent them from making themselves free and equal citizens in the community, in every sphere of life, particularly the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and factories which are controlled by the government.</p>
<p>Let them make this clear to Roosevelt so that he must emerge from his diplomatic silence and is compelled to make clear statements on the Negro question and pass and enforce laws which guarantee to the Negro people their racial, economic, political and social rights.</p>
<p>The Negro people and Harlem and elsewhere must stop looking for leaders among big names who are always in the capitalist press or filling up space in the Negro press. These are the very ones whose leadership must be avoided at all costs. True leaders are people who do what the masses of the people want them to do. And if the Negro people look for these among themselves, they will find them.<br>
</p>
<h4>Where the Future Lies</h4>
<p class="fst">Negroes also must look for allies among the great masses of the white people who are sympathetic to their point of view. Quite recently, the United Mine Workers of America put on a magnificent demonstration for their just economic rights. Of these 500,000 workers, 100,000 were Negroes.</p>
<p>The Negroes must go to Lewis and to unions whose leaders have shown both in words and in deeds that they support the aspirations for equality of the large masses of the Negro people. They must inform these of their situation, of their determination to fight injustice, and they must demand that these labor leaders and unions come to their assistance in what, after all, is only the eternal fight of the poor against the rich.</p>
<p>The Negro workers where they are strong enough must not only take upon themselves the organization of the defense of the Negro community. They are the ones best fitted to act as representatives of the Negro communities to the white workers in the labor unions.</p>
<p>There is absolutely nothing shameful, nothing disgraceful in demonstrating against tyranny and showing to all the world that the Negroes will no longer put up with all that they have borne for so long. What is required is to use that energy, that determination and that magnificent spirit in such a way and in such a manner as to win concrete victories and build a firm alliance between the masses of the Negro and white people and all those who suffer from the tyranny, the persecution and the cruelties of capitalist society.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>Next week’s <em>Labor Action</em> will carry <a href="union.htm" target="new">another article</a> specifically devoted to the problem of the labor movement and the Negro question.</strong></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
Harlem Negroes Protest Jim Crow Discrimination
(9 August 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 32, 9 August 1943, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
“Shame has come to our city and sorrow to the large number of our fellow citizens, decent, law-abiding citizens, who live in the Harlem section.”
Thus the first citizen of New York describes the demonstration in Harlem of the Negro people which has resulted in half a dozen deaths, scores of wounded, and hundreds of arrests.
So that, according to Mayor LaGuardia, when the Negro people demonstrate, shame comes to the citizens, Shame did come to LaGuardia himself when he insulted the Negro people by signing the contract for the Metropolitan Insurance Company housing project which expressly stipulated the exclusion of Negroes.
Shame does not come to the decent, law-abiding citizens in the White House in Washington and the decent, law-abiding citizens in Congress who have insulted the Negro people by segregating them in the Federal Government, by segregating them in the Army, in the Navy, in the Air Force and in women’s auxiliaries.
Shame does not come to Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox when the men they have inducted into the Army and Navy are shot down by military police and Southern civilians, are Jim Crowed and ill-treated on their way to the camps, are segregated in the camps themselves, persecuted, maltreated and lynched without any protection from the government.
We have not seen shame in the industrialists and men of business who in the very City of New York will not employ Negroes, and only when they are compelled to and have no other means of evasion, grudgingly give them work in industry, that same industry which is supposed to be doing all that is possible to win the great “war for democracy.”
All these things can be done by the “decent, law-abiding citizens” who merely continue the three hundred year old persecution of the Negro people which has always characterized American capitalist society.
But when the Negroes in Harlem become exasperated to the utmost limit by the combined persecution and hypocrisy of their lords and masters, and decide that they will show their resentment in the only way that seems possible to them, then is the time when LaGuardia goes to the microphone and informs the public theft this indeed is a shame.
This, and not the persecution, is the scandal. This, and not the hypocrisy, is the disgrace. Not those who insult the Negro people, not those who insult the intelligence of the Negroes by the perpetual bawling and yelling to them about the “war for democracy.”
No! According to LaGuardia, the demonstration against these things, that is the shame.
What Kind of Demonstration Was It?
The Mayor himself has informed the public that the upheaval in Harlem was a demonstration. A demonstration against what? Since when is it shameful to demonstrate against lynch law, segregation, discrimination and hypocrisy in high places, masquerading before the people as “war for democracy”? In this truly shameful hypocrisy. LaGuardia is only one of many. All the press, all the worthy citizens, not only in New York, but in Detroit, in Mobile, in Beaumont and in San Francisco, all get together and in one loud, clear and mournful voice shake their heads and say to the protesting Negro people, “What a shame!”
The people in Harlem are exasperated beyond endurance by the situation of the Negro people in the United States as a whole and the continuous contradiction between being persecuted by democracy and then being told that they must die for that democracy.
But the Harlem people have certain special grievances of their own. The overcrowding in Harlem can be borne with patience and forbearance by those who read about it in the newspapers. The people of Harlem can no longer endure it. They can no longer bear the overcharging for inferior food which is dumped upon the Harlem community by the “decent, law-abiding citizens” who cannot dispose of these goods anywhere else.
The people of Harlem cannot reconcile at all the constant shrieking in the press about the manpower shortage and their inability to get work. All this seems to the people of Harlem particularly shameful. When they do get work in industry, it is more often in New Jersey than in New York.
The people of Harlem for months now have made all manner of protest against the savage brutality of the police under the command of that “decent, law-abiding. citizen,” Police Commissioner Valentine, under the patronage of that equajly “decent” and equally “law-abiding” citizen, Mayor LaGuardia.
At a meeting of the New York City Council on June 25, Councilman A. Clayton Powell said that New York had recently witnessed “a continuous succession of unwarranted brutalities perpetrated upon Negro citizens in our city.” Many of these, said Powell, had resulted in deaths. He said that he Had taken up each of these cases by mail with Police Commissioner Valentine. One letter had been acknowledged. The rest had been ignored.
“I now say, fellow councilmen,” continued Powell, “that the riots of Detroit can easily be duplicated here in New York City. If any riots break out here in New York, the blood of innocent people, white and Negro, will rest upon the hands of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, who have refused to see representative citizens to discuss means of combating outbreaks in New York.”
The Negro people in Harlem on Sunday and Monday knew what they were demonstrating against. They were making known their feelings to the government in Washington which continually calls upon them to fight for democracy and at the same time sits quietly while the worst indignities are committed against them in the name of democracy.
For them this question of the government in Washington is symbolized in the Army and the treatment of Negroes there.
The Negro people were protesting against conditions in New York City and the conduct of the police force described by Powell.
The Negro people were demonstrating against the exorbitant prices which every shop in Harlem thinks itself justified in charging them.
What Brought the Protest?
For several months the police department has maintained a twenty-four hour picket in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock, the second largest hotel in Harlem. The Negroes say, they have said it in the Negro press, that they know many places in downtown Manhattan where, as far as they can judge, a permanent picket is very much needed. Harlem is very much stirred by this official slander of the Negro people.
When Private Bandy stopped a cop from rough-handling a Negro woman in the Braddock Hotel, it was no accidental incident. It represented to every Harlemite who heard it merely another example of the especially malignant persecution and slander which the Harlem people have been suffering during recent months. And when on top of it, the cop shot the Negro soldier, is it any wonder that the rumor spread and the Harlem people decided that they would show in no uncertain terms that they were not going to put up any longer with the continuous provocation of the “decent, law-abiding” officials who rule them.
The crowds heard that Bandy had died. It didn’t matter whether he was dead or not. Bandy was a symbol.
Crowds of Negro service men and civilians, milled around, the hospital where Bandy and Officer Collins who shot him were being hospitalized.
Was It a “Race Riot”?
It is perfectly clear that the masses of the Negro people in Harlem, far from being thoughtless hoodlums, to quote Mayor LaGuardia again, were people stirred to resentment and action at the insult which they felt had been directed at the whole Negro race in the treatment of the Negro soldiers.
We do not propose to go here into any detailed account of the demonstration, except to point out that the smashing of the shopwindows was also a protest and expression of resentment against those petty profiteers, themselves robbed and cheated by big business, who in turn rob and cheat the Negroes by high prices and poor quality goods.
The press and LaGuardia take excessive pains to say the demonstration was not a “race riot.” The demonstration was not a racial demonstration in the sense that the Negroes did not direct their protest indiscriminately against whites. Nor did white gangs invade Harlem.
The Negro people of Harlem showed extreme intelligence and understanding in what they did. They were not against individual White citizens in the streets. They were protesting, in the only way they understood, against their unbearable conditions. The protest was, in the fullest sense of the word, a racial demonstration, a demonstration against the wrongs and injustices perpetrated against the Negro people.
The Silence of “Leaders”
Since the Detroit events, Roosevelt has not said one single word. He now has imitators. On the Harlem demonstration, Philip Randolph has imitated his master, Roosevelt, and observed a dignified silence. The rest we can foretell in advance. White, Randolph and all such will appoint committees, “inter-racial committees.” They will haggle over whether one new playground or two new playgrounds should be built. They will send a letter full of signatures to the OPA asking for a ceiling on rent. In other words, they will do exactly as they have always done. But the Negro people are becoming tired of words and promises.
What is to happen now? Labor Action during the last weeks has pointed out that the situation all over the country is grave, that the masses of the Negro people must organize themselves both for protection against the hoodlum elements such as the Klan and the official hoodlums; that they must organize themselves to fight against segregation of the Negro in the armed forces of the nation – against all forms of oppression.
The Harlem demonstration is to us nothing shameful. It is in reality a demonstration of the masses of the Negro people against their position in American capitalist society. The tremendous stir of oppressed peoples all over the world at the present time, the ferocious appeal to violence and destruction of the ruling classes, the incessant mouthings of “democracy” and the need to “die for democracy,” coupled with the shameful betrayals of democracy at home and abroad, these things are pulling the Negro people from sullen hostility to spontaneous protests against the crimes and hypocrisy of capitalist democracy.
There is nothing shameful about that. What is shameful is the fact that those who pose as the protectors of democratic law and order are the very ones who lay the basis for the persecution and condone others who more savagely follow their lead.
We say to the Negroes, therefore, that to demonstrate against tyranny and injustice has always been one of the greatest and most admired virtues of mankind. The moans and wailings of La Guardia, Walter White and the whole capitalist press will not alter that.
The fact that the Negroes did not attack whites indiscriminately shows that they are on the verge of finding the correct answer to the problems which have plagued the Negro people for three hundred years.
What they have to do in New York and elsewhere is to organize this rebelliousness against tyranny and the insults to their intelligence, and direct it into such channels as will bring their grievances and their wrongs forcibly before the American people and the people of the whole world.
The Need for Organization
Let them organize themselves to create their own committees and to direct properly the passionate desire for freedom and equality which now stirs all Negro youth. Let them organize themselves to march on Washington, and themselves place before the resident and Congress their shameful conditions. Let them demand their rights in the name of that very democracy for which they are being called upon to die. Let them make it clear, by the tightness of their organization, the determination of their demonstrations and the resoluteness with which they present their demands, that nothing on earth will prevent them from making themselves free and equal citizens in the community, in every sphere of life, particularly the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and factories which are controlled by the government.
Let them make this clear to Roosevelt so that he must emerge from his diplomatic silence and is compelled to make clear statements on the Negro question and pass and enforce laws which guarantee to the Negro people their racial, economic, political and social rights.
The Negro people and Harlem and elsewhere must stop looking for leaders among big names who are always in the capitalist press or filling up space in the Negro press. These are the very ones whose leadership must be avoided at all costs. True leaders are people who do what the masses of the people want them to do. And if the Negro people look for these among themselves, they will find them.
Where the Future Lies
Negroes also must look for allies among the great masses of the white people who are sympathetic to their point of view. Quite recently, the United Mine Workers of America put on a magnificent demonstration for their just economic rights. Of these 500,000 workers, 100,000 were Negroes.
The Negroes must go to Lewis and to unions whose leaders have shown both in words and in deeds that they support the aspirations for equality of the large masses of the Negro people. They must inform these of their situation, of their determination to fight injustice, and they must demand that these labor leaders and unions come to their assistance in what, after all, is only the eternal fight of the poor against the rich.
The Negro workers where they are strong enough must not only take upon themselves the organization of the defense of the Negro community. They are the ones best fitted to act as representatives of the Negro communities to the white workers in the labor unions.
There is absolutely nothing shameful, nothing disgraceful in demonstrating against tyranny and showing to all the world that the Negroes will no longer put up with all that they have borne for so long. What is required is to use that energy, that determination and that magnificent spirit in such a way and in such a manner as to win concrete victories and build a firm alliance between the masses of the Negro and white people and all those who suffer from the tyranny, the persecution and the cruelties of capitalist society.
* * *
Next week’s Labor Action will carry another article specifically devoted to the problem of the labor movement and the Negro question.
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C.L.R. James
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>Mr. Minor, This War Is NOT<br>
Like the Civil War of 1861</h1>
<h3>(August 1944)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1944/index.htm#la08_35" target="new">Vol. 8 No. 35</a>, 28 August 1944, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst"><em>The events in Philadelphia are recognized on all sides as being of great significance in evaluating the present situation of Negroes and their future development.</em></p>
<p>To twist these events to suit their own perverted policy, the Stalinists are now twisting the history of the Negro people. In the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> of August 11, Robert Minor writes an article entitled <em>Like the Draft Riots of ’63</em>. He tells how, ten days after the defeat of Lee at Gettysburg in 1863, political gangs were organized by Fernando Wood, the defeatist former Mayor of New York. They captured and held New York and 1,000 people, most of them Negroes, were killed.</p>
<p>First, this “history” slanders the people of New York. What Minor says is misleading in the extreme.<br>
</p>
<h4>Roots of Antagonism</h4>
<p class="fst">Organized labor was supporting the Republican Party and Lincoln by 1863, supporting them fully. But the Southerners who dominated the old Democratic Party had always had a following among the unorganized in Northern cities. These were very often immigrants, and in New York the immigrants were chiefly Irish. They were the ones who suffered from and feared more the danger of Negro competition in industry. Into this situation came the high prices and profiteering of the war, exasperating everybody. Finally the government was allowing rich men to buy off military service. The attempt to enforce the draft provoked riots, but it was especially the Irish masses who formed the mob. The German immigrants noticeably held off.</p>
<p>Nobody expects Minor, in a newspaper article to tell the complete story, but at any rate it should not be told in a way that gives a false impression of what happened.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Civil War in America</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>In reality, the Civil War was one of the greatest and most progressive wars in history. Its very name, civil war, tells us that it was a REVOLUTIONARY WAR, a war between contending forces in the same country. It destroyed chattel slavery. It abolished the threat of a divided America: After the Civil War the United States economy lifted this country into its present place as the most powerful nation in the world. Imagine what the United States would have been like today if slavery had continued in the Southern states.</em></p>
<p>Today we have arrived at a stage where the capitalist economy is as rotten as was the slave economy of those days. Robert Minor and his associates of the Communist Party (we beg their pardon), the Communist Political Association, have in day a gone by told us the horrible truths abput capitalism. The Civil War today which would correspond to the Civil War of 1861 is a war between the only progressive class today, the working class, and, the enemies of progress, the capitalist class. And just as the Negroes fought with the capitalists who were progressive in those days, so today, if a new civil war should take place, the Negroes should and, we have no doubt, would find themselves on the side of the workers.</p>
<p>But today we are in an imperialist war. As Minor told us up to June 1941, i.e., when Russia was invaded, the war was being fought for imperialist purposes and could result only in increased chains and slavery for the colonial peoples abroad and greater burdens and sufferings for the American masses.</p>
<p><em>Today however, Minor has the nerve to say: “The United States is passing through the early stage of a transition of its inner life, inevitable, long overdue and absolutely necessary for its stability, safety and prosperity.”</em></p>
<p><em>This is a bare-faced attempt to make the Negroes, believe that some sort of revolution is taking place in the United States today and therefore they must support the Roosevelt government, which is leading this revolution.</em></p>
<p>Here we have the crudest and most dishonest perversion of history. Minor brought in the draft riots only to help make the imperialist war into a revolutionary war. The Roosevelt government is as revolutionary as a dead fish. It is the government of Jim Crow. The Negroes had to threaten a march on Washington before the FEPC was formed. The Roosevelt government did not dare to make even a declaration of principle in the convention of the Democratic Party. For a Vice-President it had to take Missouri’s Truman, to please the Southerners. Southern congressmen are high up in its councils. The New Deal, after seven years, still could not get rid of ten million unemployed. Roosevelt, himself says that the New Deal is dead. Where is this “transformation ... of inner life” which characterizes the government? All Minor means is that Roosevelt is allied with Stalinist Russia and to maintain this alliance the Communist Party will bamboozle the working class, break strikes, urge incentive pay, try to make the Negroes believe that Roosevelt is their savior. For this purpose they pervert history and create a revolutionary transformation in America at the typewriter.<br>
</p>
<h4>Guarding History from the Liars</h4>
<p class="fst">Negroes, very rightly, make a study of Negro history. They have had to rescue it from the lies and perversions of the capitalists. Now they have to guard it from the lies and perversions of the Stalinists.</p>
<p><em>We can sum up the main lesson of that history. It is this: to free the Negroes from chattel slavery, a revolution was needed, a revolution that put the capitalist class in undisputed economic and political power. To free the Negroes from the crimes of capitalism, a revolution is needed – one that will put the working class in full economic and political power. Only a renegade revolutionary like Minor and a renegade party like the Communist Party (we beg their pardon, the Communist Political Association), can pretend that this imperialist war is a revolution.</em></p>
<p>The Communist Party was founded to lead the American workers’ revolution, for socialism and to struggle against imperialist war. Today they are the loudest and most active supporters of imperialist war and bankrupt American capitalism which can only employ the full population in wartime. The Negroes should realize that the indispensable party for militants who see clearly the past and future of this country is not the Communist Political Association, which is ashamed even to call itself a party, but a great mass party of labor – the organized workers and their allies of the office and the farm.</p>
<p><em>The Workers Party is the rallying ground for all, whites and Negroes alike, who see the need for a Labor Party and the equal need to expose the lies, current and historical, of the renegade Communist Party.</em></p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
Mr. Minor, This War Is NOT
Like the Civil War of 1861
(August 1944)
From Labor Action, Vol. 8 No. 35, 28 August 1944, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
The events in Philadelphia are recognized on all sides as being of great significance in evaluating the present situation of Negroes and their future development.
To twist these events to suit their own perverted policy, the Stalinists are now twisting the history of the Negro people. In the Daily Worker of August 11, Robert Minor writes an article entitled Like the Draft Riots of ’63. He tells how, ten days after the defeat of Lee at Gettysburg in 1863, political gangs were organized by Fernando Wood, the defeatist former Mayor of New York. They captured and held New York and 1,000 people, most of them Negroes, were killed.
First, this “history” slanders the people of New York. What Minor says is misleading in the extreme.
Roots of Antagonism
Organized labor was supporting the Republican Party and Lincoln by 1863, supporting them fully. But the Southerners who dominated the old Democratic Party had always had a following among the unorganized in Northern cities. These were very often immigrants, and in New York the immigrants were chiefly Irish. They were the ones who suffered from and feared more the danger of Negro competition in industry. Into this situation came the high prices and profiteering of the war, exasperating everybody. Finally the government was allowing rich men to buy off military service. The attempt to enforce the draft provoked riots, but it was especially the Irish masses who formed the mob. The German immigrants noticeably held off.
Nobody expects Minor, in a newspaper article to tell the complete story, but at any rate it should not be told in a way that gives a false impression of what happened.
The Civil War in America
In reality, the Civil War was one of the greatest and most progressive wars in history. Its very name, civil war, tells us that it was a REVOLUTIONARY WAR, a war between contending forces in the same country. It destroyed chattel slavery. It abolished the threat of a divided America: After the Civil War the United States economy lifted this country into its present place as the most powerful nation in the world. Imagine what the United States would have been like today if slavery had continued in the Southern states.
Today we have arrived at a stage where the capitalist economy is as rotten as was the slave economy of those days. Robert Minor and his associates of the Communist Party (we beg their pardon), the Communist Political Association, have in day a gone by told us the horrible truths abput capitalism. The Civil War today which would correspond to the Civil War of 1861 is a war between the only progressive class today, the working class, and, the enemies of progress, the capitalist class. And just as the Negroes fought with the capitalists who were progressive in those days, so today, if a new civil war should take place, the Negroes should and, we have no doubt, would find themselves on the side of the workers.
But today we are in an imperialist war. As Minor told us up to June 1941, i.e., when Russia was invaded, the war was being fought for imperialist purposes and could result only in increased chains and slavery for the colonial peoples abroad and greater burdens and sufferings for the American masses.
Today however, Minor has the nerve to say: “The United States is passing through the early stage of a transition of its inner life, inevitable, long overdue and absolutely necessary for its stability, safety and prosperity.”
This is a bare-faced attempt to make the Negroes, believe that some sort of revolution is taking place in the United States today and therefore they must support the Roosevelt government, which is leading this revolution.
Here we have the crudest and most dishonest perversion of history. Minor brought in the draft riots only to help make the imperialist war into a revolutionary war. The Roosevelt government is as revolutionary as a dead fish. It is the government of Jim Crow. The Negroes had to threaten a march on Washington before the FEPC was formed. The Roosevelt government did not dare to make even a declaration of principle in the convention of the Democratic Party. For a Vice-President it had to take Missouri’s Truman, to please the Southerners. Southern congressmen are high up in its councils. The New Deal, after seven years, still could not get rid of ten million unemployed. Roosevelt, himself says that the New Deal is dead. Where is this “transformation ... of inner life” which characterizes the government? All Minor means is that Roosevelt is allied with Stalinist Russia and to maintain this alliance the Communist Party will bamboozle the working class, break strikes, urge incentive pay, try to make the Negroes believe that Roosevelt is their savior. For this purpose they pervert history and create a revolutionary transformation in America at the typewriter.
Guarding History from the Liars
Negroes, very rightly, make a study of Negro history. They have had to rescue it from the lies and perversions of the capitalists. Now they have to guard it from the lies and perversions of the Stalinists.
We can sum up the main lesson of that history. It is this: to free the Negroes from chattel slavery, a revolution was needed, a revolution that put the capitalist class in undisputed economic and political power. To free the Negroes from the crimes of capitalism, a revolution is needed – one that will put the working class in full economic and political power. Only a renegade revolutionary like Minor and a renegade party like the Communist Party (we beg their pardon, the Communist Political Association), can pretend that this imperialist war is a revolution.
The Communist Party was founded to lead the American workers’ revolution, for socialism and to struggle against imperialist war. Today they are the loudest and most active supporters of imperialist war and bankrupt American capitalism which can only employ the full population in wartime. The Negroes should realize that the indispensable party for militants who see clearly the past and future of this country is not the Communist Political Association, which is ashamed even to call itself a party, but a great mass party of labor – the organized workers and their allies of the office and the farm.
The Workers Party is the rallying ground for all, whites and Negroes alike, who see the need for a Labor Party and the equal need to expose the lies, current and historical, of the renegade Communist Party.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>Speech of Railroad Lawyer<br>
at FEPC Hearing Shows Up<br>
Hypocrisy of American Racial Policy</h1>
<h3>(27 September 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_39" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 39</a>, 27 September 1943, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Sydney Alderman, counsel for railroad companies, in testifying before the recent hearings of the FEPC on race discrimination on railroads, stated that the roads had to adapt their “operations and employment practices to the prevailing mores and legal systems of the states they serve.”</p>
<p>This statement is an excuse for discriminatory practice against Negroes and Mexicans. There are certain things that we should remember and repeat;</p>
<p>First of all, the characterization of the society in which we live as a society ridden with race prejudice is absolutely correct.</p>
<p>The “liberals,” of course, raise their usual howl. If we accept what Mr. Alderman says, then we would have to accept the Hitlerite regime in Germany. This can’t be true, say the liberals, because there is a war against Germany, and Hitler practices race discrimination and persecution. But it should be clear by now that the war is not being fought because Hitler persecutes Jews or to bring about race equality. Hitler could as well argue that he is fighting to liberate India and Africans from British race prejudice. His agents in Africa and India are saying both these things. They are stupid lies.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Problem Before the Unions</h4>
<p class="fst">This plain, blunt statement by Mr. Alderman is to be taken at its full value. American society persecutes Negroes. It is a problem which confronts the American people. But it is especially the problem of the labor movement. Labor must maintain its solidarity, and for this reason alone it must fight against discrimination within its own ranks. It must do that for its own self-defense.</p>
<p><em>The CIO has given a great lead here, has done and is doing a great work. In defense of labor’s power to fight the bosses’ anti-labor policies the CIO must unsparingly condemn the practice of railroad unions which discriminate on account of race and all workers, CIO and otherwise, must agitate for the inclusion of all workers, black, white, yellow and brown, into all unions on terms of equality.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Negroes, Fast and Present</h4>
<p class="fst">First the Negroes were enslaved. Since that time the persecution of the Negroes has been one of the foulest blots on American society. This was true before the Civil War, which ended slavery; it is true since 1864. The Negroes have been promised their equal rights, now by the Republicans, now by the Democrats. Glib and noisy Negroes, hungry for jobs, have conspired with white politicians to deceive the Negroes election after election. The Negroes are sick to death of it.</p>
<p><em>Now, with the war, “the great war for democracy,” official segregation, persecution and , hypocrisy have reached such a pitch, and in the armed forces, too, that the colored peoples of the world are aghast when they look toward us, and hundreds of millions of Asiatics listen to the propaganda of the Japanese warlords that the white man is the enemy of the colored races.</em></p>
<p>America is not Roosevelt and the small minority of capitalists (financiers, industrialists, rich farmers), who rule this country. The millions of workers who made this country what it is have far more right to the title, American, than the small minority of blood-sucking profiteers. Labor cannot continue to allow hundreds of millions of Asiatics and Negroes to brand all Americans with the crimes of imperialism.</p>
<p>We are entering into a new world, a world where, as the advertisements tell us, no country is more than sixty hours from an American airport, a world where the fate of one nation is inextricably intertwined with the fate of all. One World.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Has a Job to Do</h4>
<p class="fst">Labor faces the choice: to be the servant, the tool of imperialism, bearing the burden and shame of its crimes; or going forward boldly to reconstruct society and open out the new possibilities which lie in our</p>
<p>hands. The time to start is now. And one of the things which is crying for solution is the position of the Negro in American society.</p>
<p><em>Labor cannot and must not accommodate itself to the evils of American capitalism. This society has had its day. It is now an obstacle in the path of human progress. Labor must set itself the task of cleaning up the mess, must say swiftly and clearly:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">“<em>You have had 300 years to solve this question. You have used the Negroes against labor, and labor against the Negroes. You have made the term ‘white man’ hated over half the world. You have even poisoned some of us with your vile prejudices. We have had enough. We are not going into the post-war world carrying the burden you have imposed on American society for go long. We shall clean the country of this filthy plague of race discrimination and prejudice.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">All of labor will say this one day. The thing is not to wait but to begin to say it now.<br>
</p>
<h4>At the Crossroads</h4>
<p class="fst">The world is at a stage when men all the world over are looking lor leadership in all fields, to show them a way out of the hell which capitalist society has plunged us in. A clear statement by American labor that it intends to take the Negro question into its own hands and put an end to one of the most vicious of capitalist abuses will not only lift the forces of real democracy in this country, the working class, to a height of power and enthusiasm never known before.</p>
<p>It will also call forth a response from the workers in Britain, who hate and are ashamed of British imperialism. It will bring new hope to the underground fighters in Europe, and the hundreds of millions of colonial peoples will turn to a new America, the America of the greatest labor movement history has ever known, the only architect capable of building the new world at home and the powerful ally of those who must build it abroad.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
Speech of Railroad Lawyer
at FEPC Hearing Shows Up
Hypocrisy of American Racial Policy
(27 September 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 39, 27 September 1943, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Sydney Alderman, counsel for railroad companies, in testifying before the recent hearings of the FEPC on race discrimination on railroads, stated that the roads had to adapt their “operations and employment practices to the prevailing mores and legal systems of the states they serve.”
This statement is an excuse for discriminatory practice against Negroes and Mexicans. There are certain things that we should remember and repeat;
First of all, the characterization of the society in which we live as a society ridden with race prejudice is absolutely correct.
The “liberals,” of course, raise their usual howl. If we accept what Mr. Alderman says, then we would have to accept the Hitlerite regime in Germany. This can’t be true, say the liberals, because there is a war against Germany, and Hitler practices race discrimination and persecution. But it should be clear by now that the war is not being fought because Hitler persecutes Jews or to bring about race equality. Hitler could as well argue that he is fighting to liberate India and Africans from British race prejudice. His agents in Africa and India are saying both these things. They are stupid lies.
The Problem Before the Unions
This plain, blunt statement by Mr. Alderman is to be taken at its full value. American society persecutes Negroes. It is a problem which confronts the American people. But it is especially the problem of the labor movement. Labor must maintain its solidarity, and for this reason alone it must fight against discrimination within its own ranks. It must do that for its own self-defense.
The CIO has given a great lead here, has done and is doing a great work. In defense of labor’s power to fight the bosses’ anti-labor policies the CIO must unsparingly condemn the practice of railroad unions which discriminate on account of race and all workers, CIO and otherwise, must agitate for the inclusion of all workers, black, white, yellow and brown, into all unions on terms of equality.
Negroes, Fast and Present
First the Negroes were enslaved. Since that time the persecution of the Negroes has been one of the foulest blots on American society. This was true before the Civil War, which ended slavery; it is true since 1864. The Negroes have been promised their equal rights, now by the Republicans, now by the Democrats. Glib and noisy Negroes, hungry for jobs, have conspired with white politicians to deceive the Negroes election after election. The Negroes are sick to death of it.
Now, with the war, “the great war for democracy,” official segregation, persecution and , hypocrisy have reached such a pitch, and in the armed forces, too, that the colored peoples of the world are aghast when they look toward us, and hundreds of millions of Asiatics listen to the propaganda of the Japanese warlords that the white man is the enemy of the colored races.
America is not Roosevelt and the small minority of capitalists (financiers, industrialists, rich farmers), who rule this country. The millions of workers who made this country what it is have far more right to the title, American, than the small minority of blood-sucking profiteers. Labor cannot continue to allow hundreds of millions of Asiatics and Negroes to brand all Americans with the crimes of imperialism.
We are entering into a new world, a world where, as the advertisements tell us, no country is more than sixty hours from an American airport, a world where the fate of one nation is inextricably intertwined with the fate of all. One World.
Labor Has a Job to Do
Labor faces the choice: to be the servant, the tool of imperialism, bearing the burden and shame of its crimes; or going forward boldly to reconstruct society and open out the new possibilities which lie in our
hands. The time to start is now. And one of the things which is crying for solution is the position of the Negro in American society.
Labor cannot and must not accommodate itself to the evils of American capitalism. This society has had its day. It is now an obstacle in the path of human progress. Labor must set itself the task of cleaning up the mess, must say swiftly and clearly:
“You have had 300 years to solve this question. You have used the Negroes against labor, and labor against the Negroes. You have made the term ‘white man’ hated over half the world. You have even poisoned some of us with your vile prejudices. We have had enough. We are not going into the post-war world carrying the burden you have imposed on American society for go long. We shall clean the country of this filthy plague of race discrimination and prejudice.”
All of labor will say this one day. The thing is not to wait but to begin to say it now.
At the Crossroads
The world is at a stage when men all the world over are looking lor leadership in all fields, to show them a way out of the hell which capitalist society has plunged us in. A clear statement by American labor that it intends to take the Negro question into its own hands and put an end to one of the most vicious of capitalist abuses will not only lift the forces of real democracy in this country, the working class, to a height of power and enthusiasm never known before.
It will also call forth a response from the workers in Britain, who hate and are ashamed of British imperialism. It will bring new hope to the underground fighters in Europe, and the hundreds of millions of colonial peoples will turn to a new America, the America of the greatest labor movement history has ever known, the only architect capable of building the new world at home and the powerful ally of those who must build it abroad.
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<h2>W.F. Carlton</h2>
<h1>PAC’s Hillman Repudiates<br>
Need of the Hour – A Labor Party</h1>
<h3>(5 March 1945)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1945/index.htm#la09_10" target="new">Vol. IX No. 10</a>, 5 March 1945, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for <strong>MIA</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Sidney Hillman, leader of the Political Action Committee, has addressed the American public on the future of the PAC. His analysis appeared in <strong>Liberty</strong> in the issue of February 24, which no doubt will be read by millions of people. A substantial part of the article is taken up with the question of a third political party. It is with this that we propose to deal here.</p>
<p>It is to be noted first of all that Hillman nowhere talks about a Labor Party. That is an idea he strives to keep from the minds of the workers and the great masses of the people. Why? Because it is too dangerous. For Hillman and his bureaucrats that is dynamite. Nevertheless, this question of the organization of labor into a political party of its own continues to intrude itself even upon the public meditations of the coy and timid Sidney Hillman.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Skates Stand in Way</h4>
<p class="fst">On page 17 of <strong>Liberty</strong>, he raises the question himself.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Mr. Murray also answered as early as November 1943 ... the question that is being asked frequently today.”</p>
<p class="fst">Murray’s statement at the time, according to Hillman, was as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If is definitely not the policy of CIO to organize a third party but rather to abstain from and discourage any move in that direction.”</p>
<p class="fst">Hillman tells us why. He says that there were technical problems in placing such a party on the ballot in 1944 which were almost insurmountable. Let us accept that for the moment. But are they insurmountable for 1945? Are they going to continue to be insurmountable for 1948? Is the organization of a third party to remain forever impossible in the United States because of the “insurmountable” technical problems of placing such a party on the ballot?</p>
<p>Is the whole development of society to be deflected, postponed or rejected because of insurmountable technical problems in placing such a party on the ballot? Come, come, Sidney. You should be able to do better than that. That, my friend, will not fool the workers.</p>
<p>The second reason is the one that is always given. Such a party would serve only to divide labor and the progressive forces, resulting in the election of political enemies.<br>
</p>
<h4>Some Past Experience</h4>
<p class="fst">The argument is entirely false. In Germany, France and Great Britain parties similar to a Labor Party (in Britain, a Labor Party) have held governmental power in their hands. The failure of these parties was due not to the fact that they were “third” parties or Labor Parties, but to false programs and divisions within the labor movement.</p>
<p>In Canada, the Canadian Commonwealth Federation has broken with the capitalist parties and today is a political force infinitely more powerful than Political Action in this country. It has this power precisely because it rests itself boldly on the labor movement. No, Sidney, that won’t do. You have to get a new argument.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reactionary Position</h4>
<p class="fst">We go down a little further. And here we are again:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In its former resolution endorsing the continuation of the Political Action Committee, the CIO convention reaffirmed the decision</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="quoteb">“‘to abstain from and discourage any move in the direction of a third party.’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="fst">You would think that this is enough about any third party in one little article in <strong>Liberty</strong>. But no. Sidney just can’t leave the subject. He tells us that the executive committee of the National Citizens Political Actjon Committee, also made a statement on the third party. And he quotes it:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“We reject any and all proposals to organize a third party. A third party would only act as a divisive force, splitting the progressive ranks at the very moment when close unity is our greatest need.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Meanwhile Hillman has made it clear that the CIO is not going to ally itself with either of the two existing parties. At this stage in the article, however, the ridiculousness of the position forces itself home even to him. So he is compelled to ask the question which the reader is already asking. Says Hillman:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The reader may well ask: ‘If you are not going to form a third party and if you reject all alliances with the existing major parties, what are you going to do?’”</p>
<p class="fst">Glory, glory, hallelujah! We have now reached the stage where Hillman has stopped telling us what he is not going to do and is going to tell us what he is going to do. And what is it that he WILL do? He proposes to continue and intensify the work of political education through pamphlets, radio, articles in the press; to collaborate with progressive organizations and to keep the organization informed on the political proposals which will be presented during the years to come. PAC and the National Citizens JPAC, will also maintain national unity and help to get out the vote, etc.</p>
<p>Now isn’t this disgraceful? Here we have the whole country interested in the future development of labor’s political organization. PAC has had a dramatic success in its impact upon the American public. In Great Britain it has awakened tremendous interest, and when Hillman and B.J. Thomas go to Britain, the British politicians inquire eagerly what is their next step. What are they going to do with all this political influence that they have gained?<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Needs a Lead</h4>
<p class="fst">The country is now waiting a lead, a direct, powerful, confident lead on the tremendous issues which face it. Hillman’s article shows that a substantial section of the people of the U.S. are looking toward the Political Action Committee as the basis of a new political organization. Some may be for it. Some may be against it. The point is that the question is posed. His whole article shows that. And he and Murray at the head of the CIO, the most powerful mass organization in the country and one which in alliance with the AFL would be politically irresistible, these two instead of fighting for unity and putting forward a program of their own, can only bleat:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We are not going to form a third party. We think a third party would be wrong. Above all, we are not going to form a third party. We shall keep the people informed. We shall use the organization to get out the vote. We shall support people who look forward instead of backward. But above all, dear friends, sleep in peace. You can depend upon us. There will be no third party.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Readers of <strong>Labor Action</strong> are familiar with the arguments and the necessity for a political party of labor. We do not propose to go into them in this particular article. We merely wish to point out that this very article by Hillman, the necessity of his repeating with such insistence that the leaders of the PAC do not contemplate any third party is itself a sign of the times. Properly interpreted, it means that such is the pressure of the class struggle, such are the violent conflicts within the Democratic Party to which PAC is in reality attached. Whatever Hillman may say, the leaders of this organization are now in the situation of defending themselves against the social movement which is crying for a third party.</em></p>
<p>They may say what they please. The very energy with which they have to defend themselves shows the inevitability and perhaps the nearness of what they are so terrified of – the independent organization of the masses, the only way in which their demands can be satisfied.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
W.F. Carlton
PAC’s Hillman Repudiates
Need of the Hour – A Labor Party
(5 March 1945)
From Labor Action, Vol. IX No. 10, 5 March 1945, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for MIA.
Sidney Hillman, leader of the Political Action Committee, has addressed the American public on the future of the PAC. His analysis appeared in Liberty in the issue of February 24, which no doubt will be read by millions of people. A substantial part of the article is taken up with the question of a third political party. It is with this that we propose to deal here.
It is to be noted first of all that Hillman nowhere talks about a Labor Party. That is an idea he strives to keep from the minds of the workers and the great masses of the people. Why? Because it is too dangerous. For Hillman and his bureaucrats that is dynamite. Nevertheless, this question of the organization of labor into a political party of its own continues to intrude itself even upon the public meditations of the coy and timid Sidney Hillman.
Labor Skates Stand in Way
On page 17 of Liberty, he raises the question himself.
“Mr. Murray also answered as early as November 1943 ... the question that is being asked frequently today.”
Murray’s statement at the time, according to Hillman, was as follows:
“If is definitely not the policy of CIO to organize a third party but rather to abstain from and discourage any move in that direction.”
Hillman tells us why. He says that there were technical problems in placing such a party on the ballot in 1944 which were almost insurmountable. Let us accept that for the moment. But are they insurmountable for 1945? Are they going to continue to be insurmountable for 1948? Is the organization of a third party to remain forever impossible in the United States because of the “insurmountable” technical problems of placing such a party on the ballot?
Is the whole development of society to be deflected, postponed or rejected because of insurmountable technical problems in placing such a party on the ballot? Come, come, Sidney. You should be able to do better than that. That, my friend, will not fool the workers.
The second reason is the one that is always given. Such a party would serve only to divide labor and the progressive forces, resulting in the election of political enemies.
Some Past Experience
The argument is entirely false. In Germany, France and Great Britain parties similar to a Labor Party (in Britain, a Labor Party) have held governmental power in their hands. The failure of these parties was due not to the fact that they were “third” parties or Labor Parties, but to false programs and divisions within the labor movement.
In Canada, the Canadian Commonwealth Federation has broken with the capitalist parties and today is a political force infinitely more powerful than Political Action in this country. It has this power precisely because it rests itself boldly on the labor movement. No, Sidney, that won’t do. You have to get a new argument.
Reactionary Position
We go down a little further. And here we are again:
“In its former resolution endorsing the continuation of the Political Action Committee, the CIO convention reaffirmed the decision
“‘to abstain from and discourage any move in the direction of a third party.’”
You would think that this is enough about any third party in one little article in Liberty. But no. Sidney just can’t leave the subject. He tells us that the executive committee of the National Citizens Political Actjon Committee, also made a statement on the third party. And he quotes it:
“We reject any and all proposals to organize a third party. A third party would only act as a divisive force, splitting the progressive ranks at the very moment when close unity is our greatest need.”
Meanwhile Hillman has made it clear that the CIO is not going to ally itself with either of the two existing parties. At this stage in the article, however, the ridiculousness of the position forces itself home even to him. So he is compelled to ask the question which the reader is already asking. Says Hillman:
“The reader may well ask: ‘If you are not going to form a third party and if you reject all alliances with the existing major parties, what are you going to do?’”
Glory, glory, hallelujah! We have now reached the stage where Hillman has stopped telling us what he is not going to do and is going to tell us what he is going to do. And what is it that he WILL do? He proposes to continue and intensify the work of political education through pamphlets, radio, articles in the press; to collaborate with progressive organizations and to keep the organization informed on the political proposals which will be presented during the years to come. PAC and the National Citizens JPAC, will also maintain national unity and help to get out the vote, etc.
Now isn’t this disgraceful? Here we have the whole country interested in the future development of labor’s political organization. PAC has had a dramatic success in its impact upon the American public. In Great Britain it has awakened tremendous interest, and when Hillman and B.J. Thomas go to Britain, the British politicians inquire eagerly what is their next step. What are they going to do with all this political influence that they have gained?
Labor Needs a Lead
The country is now waiting a lead, a direct, powerful, confident lead on the tremendous issues which face it. Hillman’s article shows that a substantial section of the people of the U.S. are looking toward the Political Action Committee as the basis of a new political organization. Some may be for it. Some may be against it. The point is that the question is posed. His whole article shows that. And he and Murray at the head of the CIO, the most powerful mass organization in the country and one which in alliance with the AFL would be politically irresistible, these two instead of fighting for unity and putting forward a program of their own, can only bleat:
“We are not going to form a third party. We think a third party would be wrong. Above all, we are not going to form a third party. We shall keep the people informed. We shall use the organization to get out the vote. We shall support people who look forward instead of backward. But above all, dear friends, sleep in peace. You can depend upon us. There will be no third party.”
Readers of Labor Action are familiar with the arguments and the necessity for a political party of labor. We do not propose to go into them in this particular article. We merely wish to point out that this very article by Hillman, the necessity of his repeating with such insistence that the leaders of the PAC do not contemplate any third party is itself a sign of the times. Properly interpreted, it means that such is the pressure of the class struggle, such are the violent conflicts within the Democratic Party to which PAC is in reality attached. Whatever Hillman may say, the leaders of this organization are now in the situation of defending themselves against the social movement which is crying for a third party.
They may say what they please. The very energy with which they have to defend themselves shows the inevitability and perhaps the nearness of what they are so terrified of – the independent organization of the masses, the only way in which their demands can be satisfied.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Negro Masses and the Struggle<br>
for World Socialism</h1>
<h3>(28 April 1941)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1941/index.htm#la05_17" target="new">Vol. 5 No. 17</a>, 28 April 1941, p. 7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="fst">Marxism, on every fundamental issue, always seems to the bourgeois to be standing things on their heads. The bourgeois thinks that a man’s mentality shapes his environment; Marxism shows that it is his environment which shapes his mentality. The bourgeois thinks (<em>or pretends to think</em>) that Hitler caused the war and the crisis; Marxism points out that the First World War and the economic crisis caused Hitler. The bourgeois thinks that its own educated. and trained members are the leaders of society who must be looked to for leadership out of world chaos. Marxism knows that it is this group which forms the greatest social barrier to the solution of our difficulties today; that the class in society to whom we must look for a solution of war and economic ills are the workers, and particularly the most miserable, the most oppressed, the most enslaved, the most degraded, the most exploited. It is this which makes the Negroes, in Africa, in America, in the West Indies, of such enormous importance in the struggle for socialism.<br>
</p>
<h4>The System Must Be Overthrown</h4>
<p class="fst">This, like all Marxist deductions, rests not on psychology, but on the solid foundation of economic analysis and on the economic analysis, not of any single society, but of capitalist production on a world scale. What is the crying contradiction in society today? It is the contradiction between the capacity of production, actual and potential, and the consuming power of the masses limited by the fact that in modern society the masses are compelled to live on what is sufficient to maintain them alive and to reproduce another generation of workers.</p>
<p>That contrast is seen in America most clearly between the possibilities, for example, of cotton production and manufacture and food in the Southern states, and the semi-primitive conditions of life to which the millions of Negroes are condemned. To limit the example to the South for the moment, “prosperity” will never return to that area until the ten million Negroes have such housing, clothing, food, education and recreation as are fit for human beings in the twentieth century.</p>
<p>Transfer the problem to the international field. The world market includes nearly 400 million Indians, over 400 million Chinese, 120 million African Negroes. Today American industry or German industry or British industry, each by itself, can supply the needs of these workers as long as they continue to live at the rate of five or six cents a day, as the overwhelming majority of them do.</p>
<p>There is no solution to the world economic problem until their problems are settled. These hundreds of millions must be released from the vast slums in which they live. But who keeps them there? It is the ruling educated clasa, the imperialists; and those groups which hang on to imperialism. For these millions to be freed at all, they have to overthrow the present system. Poor; backward, degraded as they are, on the historical scale they are part of what Lenin called the Russian toiling and exploited masses, “the most advanced representatives of society.” Lenin knew the weaknesses and the deficiencies of the Russian people, but he knew that if Russia was to lift itself at all out of its barbarism, these very masses had to do it.</p>
<p>Today, so-called “educated” society will destroy civilisation unless the miserable, the oppressed, the degraded take the direction of society into their own hands. They want leadership. They will make many mistakes. But they must become in their own spheres, the motive force of the social transformation, or society will perish. The educated bourgeois despises the Negro. The revolutionaries, not from sentimentality, nor humanitarianism, but from sober calculation, knows what the Negroes mean in the struggle for a new society.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Masses Detest Imperialism</h4>
<p class="fst">From the theoretical point of view, the obvious question now arises. Is it obvious to the Negroes themselves or how soon will it be? Here again we must avoid psychological reasoning and examine instead what has happened during the last few years in the struggle against fascism and imperialist war. Both fascism and imperialist war are universally detested by the great majority of working people in every country.</p>
<p>When Mussolini attacked Ethiopia the Indian masses held a day of mourning to show their solidarity and sympathy. The social-democracy in Europe protested and called upon their imperialist governments to fight for the liberation of Ethiopia. Haile Selassie and his government trusted to social-democratic tomfoolery, to the League of Nations and to the treacherous assurances of Barton, the British minister. But the Ethiopian people themselves fought and never ceased to fight, Not for one single day did Ethiopian warriors cease a highly organized guerilla warfare against the fascist invaders.</p>
<p>The situation soon became unbearable for Mussolini and he made overtures to Haile Selassie asking him to come back as ruler under Italian domination. It was the only way Mussolini could see to pacify the new colony. Haile Selassie refused. Today the British have supplied Selassie with armed forces and have marched into Addis Abbaba with him. But the class conscious Negroes all over the world are profoundly suspicious of Britain’s rôle. It seems to them that one imperialism has been substituted for another.</p>
<p>But let us imagine for a moment that instead of British imperialism, a proletarian government in Britain, or in Italy for that matter, not necessarily well established but struggling to consolidate itself, had been able to send token detachments, perhaps not very large shipments of guns and ammunition; and a declaration of independence for all the Italian or British colonies in Africa, or both. Let us imagine that nightly on the radio a government, a proletarian government, called for revolution in Africa. The collapse of imperialism in large parts of Africa would follow with a speed which would surprise those who cannot see the hollowness inside the palatial facade.</p>
<p>The large masses of the African people have absolutely nothing to attach them to imperialism. They trace all the evils from which they suffer to the white man in Africa; “the devil is a white man.” There are some workers in western civilization who, think they have something to cling to. They vote for Roosevelt against Willkie. They think that even if America must keep out of war, they must send bundles to Britain and “we” must arm. There are a hundred million people in Africa to whom all this means absolutely nothing. The Ethiopians had arms and fought to a finish. The rest are beaten and demoralized, but they hope in secret. Their hopes are to drive the imperialists into the sea. That is why all over Africa the Ethiopian struggle is followed with such passionate intensity. They see in Ethiopian independence the symbol of their own emancipation.<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Task in America</h4>
<p class="fst">Let us now look at the Negroes in America and the present war. Today every imperialist government, and particularly the American government, has one task to perform, to prepare the country for war. This preparation as material: armaments and army; and it is psychological: war to defeat Hitler, war for “democracy,” to defend our liberties, the necessity for sacrifice, etc. A great part of the American masses as a whole accept the necessity for “defense.” They want the sacrifice to fall where it properly belongs, on the rich. They think that “defense” is one thing, but that fighting with Japan over China or sendinh an AEF to Europe is something entirely different from “defense.” The revolutionary task consists in showing the workers that when Roosevelt says “defense” he means American imperialist aggression and that if we consider imperialist aggression to be the cause of war, then we must begin here, against Roosevelt.</p>
<p>Now it is the masses of Negroes who understand this better than anyone else in America. At a mass meeting held for the purpose of developing the fight for Negro bus drivers in Harlem, one of the speakers referred to the fact that he had seen in a Harlem shop window a request for bundles for Britain. The mere statement evoked a tremendous response of derisive laughter and strong feeling from 5,000 people. Roosevelt’s propaganda had left them cold.. The average Negro simply cannot be made to feel excited over bundles for Halifax, Churchill and the enslavers of Africa and India. He may remain passive, but as seen, as the revolutionary point of view is placed before him he sees it at once. On the other hand we can be certain that if, at that meeting, historical circumstances had made it possible to appeal for a workers’ Britain, struggling against Hitler for the poor, oppressed and exploited of Britain who had issued a declaration renouncing imperialist domination over India and Africa, there would scarcely be a member of a family present who would not have gone to find some treasured garment or precious nickel to send.</p>
<p>Exactly the reverse is the case among the “educated” rulers. They are busy with their bundles and armaments for Britain and they only hesitate when they suspect that these bundles may ultimately find their way to a socialist Britain. At the first serious hint of it, they would throw every ounce of their available weight on the side of Hitler. There are a few petty bourgeois Negroes who clutch their $40 a week to their bosoms and feel social solidarity with J.P. Morgan. They talk a lot and write in to the newspapers. They “represent” Negro thought in their own stupid minds and in the minds of the American boobwahsie.<br>
</p>
<h4>Look to the Masses for a Way Out</h4>
<p class="fst">But the large majority of the Negroes, the overwhelming majority, are hostile to and, resentful of Roosevelt’s propaganda about a war for democracy. Like all masses, however, they can judge only by action. They want to see the socialist alternative. But once it is posed. concretely they will automatically prove themselves what Lenin called the Russian workers, “the most advanced representatives of society,”</p>
<p>Wall Street, Roosevelt and the rest, with their bundles (and armaments) for Britain are representative of all that is most backward, barbarous, and destructive in society today, class-conscious and cold-blooded. If the British workers tried to break away from imperialism tomorrow even in order to attack Hitler more fiercely, these lovers of Britain would turn against the British workers; intent on destroying them. The Harlem Negroes, who fight for jobs, thousands upon thousands, supporting the cause “on principle,” are fighting for a new order of society. A workers’ Britain officially denouncing imperialism in Africa., would set Harlem ablaze with revolutionary enthusiasm. Where then must we look for the way out? Where but to these and all who are like them, with nothing to lose but their chains and the whole world to gain.<br>
</p>
<h4>West Indians Showed Their Mettle</h4>
<p class="fst">What they want is leadership. Let us take a concrete recent example from the West Indies. Some years ago, a series of strikes and riots ran through the West Indian islands. In Trinidad there was a magnificent general strike. It began in big oil industrial plants at one end of the island – and. in a few hours all work had come to a standstill. In Port of Spain, the capital, which is situated at the other end, the school children ran out of school and went home and the domestic servants who work for white people, despite the fact that they got the best pay, all left their work and went home too. Why, exactly, many of them could not say. The West Indian population, chiefly agricultural laborers, stopped work on the big estates. All the working people simply drew together against the white ruling class.</p>
<p>The governor sent for cruisers and some marines landed. Airplanes cruised overhead, dropping leaflets and, of course, showing thereby that they could drop bombs just as easily. The people refused to be intimidated. It is reported, however, that some of the marines told the Negro workers, “We won’t shoot. We have nothing against you. We want you to win your strike.” The news spread in the same way as during the February revolution the news of the cossack who winked at the crowd spread among the St. Petersburg proletariat. How many marines were prepared to shoot or not to shoot is not important. What matters is this: the police force is Negro, chosen from among the masses of the people. Its loyalty during a crisis is in doubt and has been for over twenty years. If such a crisis existed and one revolutionary detachment of marines landed and joined the people, and said that it would fight with them, there is not one single West Indian island, not one single African colony (except the Union of South Africa) where the imperialist regime would not be doomed.</p>
<p>In India there is a force of reactionary Indian princes and Indian bourgeois; in China there is the Chinese bourgeoisie and landlords; in the Union of South Africa there is a comparatively large white population. But in French Africa, British Africa, Portuguese Africa and the West Indian islands, at any grave social crisis the revolutionary whites, if they can show force and clear leadership, can give an invincible impetus to the world revolution. What is curious is that the imperialists fear this more than the revolutionists expect it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Another Example from the West Indies</h4>
<p class="fst">The second West Indian example is more recent and more striking. It is the case of Martinique. When bourgeois France collapsed before the blitzkrieg, the Martinique Negroes awoke to world politics. They had to choose. The local government declared for Vichy; Roosevelt naturally wanted them to declare for de Gaulle. That would have enabled Britain to get the planes intended for France which were bottled up in the island and which might get to Hitler. But the Martinique Negroes, as <strong>PM</strong>’s special correspondent found out after an investigation, wanted neither Petain nor de Gaulle. They didn’t want America either, for French Negroes detest American race prejudice. The Negroes were overwhelming for an independent Martinique in a pan-American federation. They do not know it as yet but they will get independence of any value only under socialism.</p>
<p>Nationalism has not been strong in the West Indies, least of all in the French colonies. The Negro population thinks in terms of dominion status. Suddenly events in Europe faced these somewhat isolated Negroes with what seems to be two alternatives. <em>They chose a third almost overnight. Who doubts that if given a lead they will fight for it and sweep their oppressors into the sea?</em></p>
<p>Let us sum up. We face alternatives of socialism or an increasing barbarism. The solution of the problem requires, among other things, the release of the productivity of a billion colonials, among whom there are 150 million exploited Negroes. Their release necessitates the overthrow of capitalist wage slavery ... Having gained nothing but misery from capitalism, they are ready to fight it, instinctively, as a man is always ready to throw off someone who is sitting on his back and squeezing his life away.</p>
<p>The Negroes try to organize themselves and must be aided in their attempts to prepare a striking force. The decisive battles will be fought in the great centers of capitalist production, by the advanced and organized workers. There can be no lasting victory anywhere without victory there. But as we calculate forces and estimate chances let us remember that all those millions of colonials, and among them the Negroes, are our potential allies, who need only the stimulus of our own action and the sight of some representatives of the western proletariat ready to fight with them. They can fight without that, but with it they are invincible. It is true of Africa, it is true of the West Indies and it is true also of our own “colonial” South.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Negro Masses and the Struggle
for World Socialism
(28 April 1941)
From Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 17, 28 April 1941, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Marxism, on every fundamental issue, always seems to the bourgeois to be standing things on their heads. The bourgeois thinks that a man’s mentality shapes his environment; Marxism shows that it is his environment which shapes his mentality. The bourgeois thinks (or pretends to think) that Hitler caused the war and the crisis; Marxism points out that the First World War and the economic crisis caused Hitler. The bourgeois thinks that its own educated. and trained members are the leaders of society who must be looked to for leadership out of world chaos. Marxism knows that it is this group which forms the greatest social barrier to the solution of our difficulties today; that the class in society to whom we must look for a solution of war and economic ills are the workers, and particularly the most miserable, the most oppressed, the most enslaved, the most degraded, the most exploited. It is this which makes the Negroes, in Africa, in America, in the West Indies, of such enormous importance in the struggle for socialism.
The System Must Be Overthrown
This, like all Marxist deductions, rests not on psychology, but on the solid foundation of economic analysis and on the economic analysis, not of any single society, but of capitalist production on a world scale. What is the crying contradiction in society today? It is the contradiction between the capacity of production, actual and potential, and the consuming power of the masses limited by the fact that in modern society the masses are compelled to live on what is sufficient to maintain them alive and to reproduce another generation of workers.
That contrast is seen in America most clearly between the possibilities, for example, of cotton production and manufacture and food in the Southern states, and the semi-primitive conditions of life to which the millions of Negroes are condemned. To limit the example to the South for the moment, “prosperity” will never return to that area until the ten million Negroes have such housing, clothing, food, education and recreation as are fit for human beings in the twentieth century.
Transfer the problem to the international field. The world market includes nearly 400 million Indians, over 400 million Chinese, 120 million African Negroes. Today American industry or German industry or British industry, each by itself, can supply the needs of these workers as long as they continue to live at the rate of five or six cents a day, as the overwhelming majority of them do.
There is no solution to the world economic problem until their problems are settled. These hundreds of millions must be released from the vast slums in which they live. But who keeps them there? It is the ruling educated clasa, the imperialists; and those groups which hang on to imperialism. For these millions to be freed at all, they have to overthrow the present system. Poor; backward, degraded as they are, on the historical scale they are part of what Lenin called the Russian toiling and exploited masses, “the most advanced representatives of society.” Lenin knew the weaknesses and the deficiencies of the Russian people, but he knew that if Russia was to lift itself at all out of its barbarism, these very masses had to do it.
Today, so-called “educated” society will destroy civilisation unless the miserable, the oppressed, the degraded take the direction of society into their own hands. They want leadership. They will make many mistakes. But they must become in their own spheres, the motive force of the social transformation, or society will perish. The educated bourgeois despises the Negro. The revolutionaries, not from sentimentality, nor humanitarianism, but from sober calculation, knows what the Negroes mean in the struggle for a new society.
The Masses Detest Imperialism
From the theoretical point of view, the obvious question now arises. Is it obvious to the Negroes themselves or how soon will it be? Here again we must avoid psychological reasoning and examine instead what has happened during the last few years in the struggle against fascism and imperialist war. Both fascism and imperialist war are universally detested by the great majority of working people in every country.
When Mussolini attacked Ethiopia the Indian masses held a day of mourning to show their solidarity and sympathy. The social-democracy in Europe protested and called upon their imperialist governments to fight for the liberation of Ethiopia. Haile Selassie and his government trusted to social-democratic tomfoolery, to the League of Nations and to the treacherous assurances of Barton, the British minister. But the Ethiopian people themselves fought and never ceased to fight, Not for one single day did Ethiopian warriors cease a highly organized guerilla warfare against the fascist invaders.
The situation soon became unbearable for Mussolini and he made overtures to Haile Selassie asking him to come back as ruler under Italian domination. It was the only way Mussolini could see to pacify the new colony. Haile Selassie refused. Today the British have supplied Selassie with armed forces and have marched into Addis Abbaba with him. But the class conscious Negroes all over the world are profoundly suspicious of Britain’s rôle. It seems to them that one imperialism has been substituted for another.
But let us imagine for a moment that instead of British imperialism, a proletarian government in Britain, or in Italy for that matter, not necessarily well established but struggling to consolidate itself, had been able to send token detachments, perhaps not very large shipments of guns and ammunition; and a declaration of independence for all the Italian or British colonies in Africa, or both. Let us imagine that nightly on the radio a government, a proletarian government, called for revolution in Africa. The collapse of imperialism in large parts of Africa would follow with a speed which would surprise those who cannot see the hollowness inside the palatial facade.
The large masses of the African people have absolutely nothing to attach them to imperialism. They trace all the evils from which they suffer to the white man in Africa; “the devil is a white man.” There are some workers in western civilization who, think they have something to cling to. They vote for Roosevelt against Willkie. They think that even if America must keep out of war, they must send bundles to Britain and “we” must arm. There are a hundred million people in Africa to whom all this means absolutely nothing. The Ethiopians had arms and fought to a finish. The rest are beaten and demoralized, but they hope in secret. Their hopes are to drive the imperialists into the sea. That is why all over Africa the Ethiopian struggle is followed with such passionate intensity. They see in Ethiopian independence the symbol of their own emancipation.
Our Task in America
Let us now look at the Negroes in America and the present war. Today every imperialist government, and particularly the American government, has one task to perform, to prepare the country for war. This preparation as material: armaments and army; and it is psychological: war to defeat Hitler, war for “democracy,” to defend our liberties, the necessity for sacrifice, etc. A great part of the American masses as a whole accept the necessity for “defense.” They want the sacrifice to fall where it properly belongs, on the rich. They think that “defense” is one thing, but that fighting with Japan over China or sendinh an AEF to Europe is something entirely different from “defense.” The revolutionary task consists in showing the workers that when Roosevelt says “defense” he means American imperialist aggression and that if we consider imperialist aggression to be the cause of war, then we must begin here, against Roosevelt.
Now it is the masses of Negroes who understand this better than anyone else in America. At a mass meeting held for the purpose of developing the fight for Negro bus drivers in Harlem, one of the speakers referred to the fact that he had seen in a Harlem shop window a request for bundles for Britain. The mere statement evoked a tremendous response of derisive laughter and strong feeling from 5,000 people. Roosevelt’s propaganda had left them cold.. The average Negro simply cannot be made to feel excited over bundles for Halifax, Churchill and the enslavers of Africa and India. He may remain passive, but as seen, as the revolutionary point of view is placed before him he sees it at once. On the other hand we can be certain that if, at that meeting, historical circumstances had made it possible to appeal for a workers’ Britain, struggling against Hitler for the poor, oppressed and exploited of Britain who had issued a declaration renouncing imperialist domination over India and Africa, there would scarcely be a member of a family present who would not have gone to find some treasured garment or precious nickel to send.
Exactly the reverse is the case among the “educated” rulers. They are busy with their bundles and armaments for Britain and they only hesitate when they suspect that these bundles may ultimately find their way to a socialist Britain. At the first serious hint of it, they would throw every ounce of their available weight on the side of Hitler. There are a few petty bourgeois Negroes who clutch their $40 a week to their bosoms and feel social solidarity with J.P. Morgan. They talk a lot and write in to the newspapers. They “represent” Negro thought in their own stupid minds and in the minds of the American boobwahsie.
Look to the Masses for a Way Out
But the large majority of the Negroes, the overwhelming majority, are hostile to and, resentful of Roosevelt’s propaganda about a war for democracy. Like all masses, however, they can judge only by action. They want to see the socialist alternative. But once it is posed. concretely they will automatically prove themselves what Lenin called the Russian workers, “the most advanced representatives of society,”
Wall Street, Roosevelt and the rest, with their bundles (and armaments) for Britain are representative of all that is most backward, barbarous, and destructive in society today, class-conscious and cold-blooded. If the British workers tried to break away from imperialism tomorrow even in order to attack Hitler more fiercely, these lovers of Britain would turn against the British workers; intent on destroying them. The Harlem Negroes, who fight for jobs, thousands upon thousands, supporting the cause “on principle,” are fighting for a new order of society. A workers’ Britain officially denouncing imperialism in Africa., would set Harlem ablaze with revolutionary enthusiasm. Where then must we look for the way out? Where but to these and all who are like them, with nothing to lose but their chains and the whole world to gain.
West Indians Showed Their Mettle
What they want is leadership. Let us take a concrete recent example from the West Indies. Some years ago, a series of strikes and riots ran through the West Indian islands. In Trinidad there was a magnificent general strike. It began in big oil industrial plants at one end of the island – and. in a few hours all work had come to a standstill. In Port of Spain, the capital, which is situated at the other end, the school children ran out of school and went home and the domestic servants who work for white people, despite the fact that they got the best pay, all left their work and went home too. Why, exactly, many of them could not say. The West Indian population, chiefly agricultural laborers, stopped work on the big estates. All the working people simply drew together against the white ruling class.
The governor sent for cruisers and some marines landed. Airplanes cruised overhead, dropping leaflets and, of course, showing thereby that they could drop bombs just as easily. The people refused to be intimidated. It is reported, however, that some of the marines told the Negro workers, “We won’t shoot. We have nothing against you. We want you to win your strike.” The news spread in the same way as during the February revolution the news of the cossack who winked at the crowd spread among the St. Petersburg proletariat. How many marines were prepared to shoot or not to shoot is not important. What matters is this: the police force is Negro, chosen from among the masses of the people. Its loyalty during a crisis is in doubt and has been for over twenty years. If such a crisis existed and one revolutionary detachment of marines landed and joined the people, and said that it would fight with them, there is not one single West Indian island, not one single African colony (except the Union of South Africa) where the imperialist regime would not be doomed.
In India there is a force of reactionary Indian princes and Indian bourgeois; in China there is the Chinese bourgeoisie and landlords; in the Union of South Africa there is a comparatively large white population. But in French Africa, British Africa, Portuguese Africa and the West Indian islands, at any grave social crisis the revolutionary whites, if they can show force and clear leadership, can give an invincible impetus to the world revolution. What is curious is that the imperialists fear this more than the revolutionists expect it.
Another Example from the West Indies
The second West Indian example is more recent and more striking. It is the case of Martinique. When bourgeois France collapsed before the blitzkrieg, the Martinique Negroes awoke to world politics. They had to choose. The local government declared for Vichy; Roosevelt naturally wanted them to declare for de Gaulle. That would have enabled Britain to get the planes intended for France which were bottled up in the island and which might get to Hitler. But the Martinique Negroes, as PM’s special correspondent found out after an investigation, wanted neither Petain nor de Gaulle. They didn’t want America either, for French Negroes detest American race prejudice. The Negroes were overwhelming for an independent Martinique in a pan-American federation. They do not know it as yet but they will get independence of any value only under socialism.
Nationalism has not been strong in the West Indies, least of all in the French colonies. The Negro population thinks in terms of dominion status. Suddenly events in Europe faced these somewhat isolated Negroes with what seems to be two alternatives. They chose a third almost overnight. Who doubts that if given a lead they will fight for it and sweep their oppressors into the sea?
Let us sum up. We face alternatives of socialism or an increasing barbarism. The solution of the problem requires, among other things, the release of the productivity of a billion colonials, among whom there are 150 million exploited Negroes. Their release necessitates the overthrow of capitalist wage slavery ... Having gained nothing but misery from capitalism, they are ready to fight it, instinctively, as a man is always ready to throw off someone who is sitting on his back and squeezing his life away.
The Negroes try to organize themselves and must be aided in their attempts to prepare a striking force. The decisive battles will be fought in the great centers of capitalist production, by the advanced and organized workers. There can be no lasting victory anywhere without victory there. But as we calculate forces and estimate chances let us remember that all those millions of colonials, and among them the Negroes, are our potential allies, who need only the stimulus of our own action and the sight of some representatives of the western proletariat ready to fight with them. They can fight without that, but with it they are invincible. It is true of Africa, it is true of the West Indies and it is true also of our own “colonial” South.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>What India Means to the American Working Class</h4>
<h1>The Role of the Indian Capitalist Class</h1>
<h3>(4 January 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_01" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 1</a>, 4 January 1943, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong><a href="../../1942/12/india3.htm">(Continued from last issue)</a></strong></p>
<p class="fst">It is this increasing bankruptcy of the Indian peasant eepnomy which is the real drive of the nationalist movement. The unrest, the growing revolutionary feelings of the masses of peasants, the conditions of the proletariat, all this gives enormous power to the movement to throw out the British who are mainly responsible for what is essentially an economic question.</p>
<p>The leaders of this movement, however, are none other than the representatives, associates, friends, sometimes themselves members, of the Indian landlord and capitalist class. For these people to throw out the British they need the assistance of the Indian peasant and the Indian workers because intellectuals, landlords, politicians, writers cannot throw anybody out of anything. For that you need force. That force they do not have.</p>
<p><em>Force exists either in an organized army or in organised masses. They have no army, Britain sees to that. But if they organize the masses for the purpose of throwing the British out their sources of revenue, their control of labor, the very ground on which they walk, will be broken up under them. It is for this reason that Gandhi and Nehru and all those who support them are continually vacillating between playing at revolution on the one hand, and running to negotiate with the British on the other. They see the misery of the country. They see the economic mess that it is in. They realize quite clearly that something has got to be done. But they can do nothing except play see-saw between the masses on the one side and the British on the other.</em></p>
<p>Now Churchill and the British government have watched these Indian nationalists carry on in this way for the last twenty to twenty-five years. They are not afraid of them. We do not deny that there are different types of nationalists; on one hand, landlords and money-lenders, who are very satisfied with the British government; on the other, Indian capitalists, who wish to get more opportunity for Indian capital and who are more or less hostile to British capital, and students, intellectuals, etc., who cannot get work to do. We are dealing obviously with a situation that has many more aspects than can even be touched upon in an article of this kind. The basic question, however, is, as we have explained it, the economic situation of the peasantry, on which the whole Indian economy rests.</p>
<p>What is the solution? If you have correctly diagnosed a disease, you are half way on the road to cure. The solution is the destruction of all the burdens that rest upon the peasants. And, with this, the creation of conditions which, will give the Indian proletariat an opportunity to form trade unions and develop itself freely in a nation-wide association of workers who will work and develop themselves in accordance with the possibilities of modern production. <em>But British imperialism in the town as in the country is in a united front with the Indian exploiters to keep the workers down.</em></p>
<p><em>If the Indian disease is an economic disease, then the ideas around which the appeal to the peasants and workers should be made must have an economic character. The peasants should be told that their struggle would mean the abolition of debt, the abolition of the landlords and the money-lenders, and the reorganization of agriculture by means of modern technology. The workers must have the eight-hour day, workers’ control of production and the freest democracy.</em></p>
<p>But only a fool will expect the All-India Congress to agitate on such a basis. The Indian congressmen talk always about nationalism in the abstract and the necessity of throwing out the British but never, never, never do they ever raise on a national scale such slogans or ideas which would mobilize the masses around the things that are really pressing them. If the Indian Congress could do that, or had wanted to do that at any time during the last twenty years, the British would have been out of India already.<br>
</p>
<h4>Willkie’s Hypocrisy</h4>
<p class="fst">In the article which will follow this, some attempt will be made to show the possibilities of and the methods by which the economic situation in India can and will be changed. We want here, however, to link the economic situation we have described with the noisy “anti-imperialism” of Willkie.</p>
<p><em>At the present moment it is an undoubted fact that a substantial proportion of the miserable Indian production goes to Britain as profit and as payment of debts. Some of these debts are absurd to the last degree because every time Britain fought a war to add to the British Empire in India, they put the debt on the Indian budget. Once they entertained a sultan of Turkey or Egypt or somebody like that in London, said that it was for the benefit of India, and added the expenses to the Indian budget.</em></p>
<p>The British army in India eats up, some people say, 30 per cent of the Indian budget – others say 60 per cent. It is difficult to tell, because Indian investigators say that many expenditures that go for roads, railways, etc., have no relation whatever to the Indian economy or the Indian people, but are built for the sake of the British army and the British administration. These, however, are not placed under military expenditures so as to fool the people. Now, it is certain that if the Indian nationalists could get into power, Britain’s chance of getting interest on these debts would be very, very small. An Indian government would refuse to pay.</p>
<p><em>But what will happen? The Indian nationalists will make some loans from the United States. But it is impossible for any loans to make any serious change in the Indian economy as long as that basic situation which we have described exists. The result of any such transformation will simply be that what was going to Britain will now go to the U.S. That is all. When Churchill says: “We’ll hold our own,” all he is saying is that if any loot is going to come from India, he will see to it that it goes to London and not to Wall Street.</em></p>
<p>The basic economic situation will not be solved. Moreover, while there might be a growth in industrialization for a period and to a small degree, the misery of the peasant millions will be intensified to an extraordinary degree.</p>
<p>The only way out of this, and its close connection with the American working class, will be the subject of the <a href="india5.htm">next and concluding article</a> in this series.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
What India Means to the American Working Class
The Role of the Indian Capitalist Class
(4 January 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 1, 4 January 1943, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
(Continued from last issue)
It is this increasing bankruptcy of the Indian peasant eepnomy which is the real drive of the nationalist movement. The unrest, the growing revolutionary feelings of the masses of peasants, the conditions of the proletariat, all this gives enormous power to the movement to throw out the British who are mainly responsible for what is essentially an economic question.
The leaders of this movement, however, are none other than the representatives, associates, friends, sometimes themselves members, of the Indian landlord and capitalist class. For these people to throw out the British they need the assistance of the Indian peasant and the Indian workers because intellectuals, landlords, politicians, writers cannot throw anybody out of anything. For that you need force. That force they do not have.
Force exists either in an organized army or in organised masses. They have no army, Britain sees to that. But if they organize the masses for the purpose of throwing the British out their sources of revenue, their control of labor, the very ground on which they walk, will be broken up under them. It is for this reason that Gandhi and Nehru and all those who support them are continually vacillating between playing at revolution on the one hand, and running to negotiate with the British on the other. They see the misery of the country. They see the economic mess that it is in. They realize quite clearly that something has got to be done. But they can do nothing except play see-saw between the masses on the one side and the British on the other.
Now Churchill and the British government have watched these Indian nationalists carry on in this way for the last twenty to twenty-five years. They are not afraid of them. We do not deny that there are different types of nationalists; on one hand, landlords and money-lenders, who are very satisfied with the British government; on the other, Indian capitalists, who wish to get more opportunity for Indian capital and who are more or less hostile to British capital, and students, intellectuals, etc., who cannot get work to do. We are dealing obviously with a situation that has many more aspects than can even be touched upon in an article of this kind. The basic question, however, is, as we have explained it, the economic situation of the peasantry, on which the whole Indian economy rests.
What is the solution? If you have correctly diagnosed a disease, you are half way on the road to cure. The solution is the destruction of all the burdens that rest upon the peasants. And, with this, the creation of conditions which, will give the Indian proletariat an opportunity to form trade unions and develop itself freely in a nation-wide association of workers who will work and develop themselves in accordance with the possibilities of modern production. But British imperialism in the town as in the country is in a united front with the Indian exploiters to keep the workers down.
If the Indian disease is an economic disease, then the ideas around which the appeal to the peasants and workers should be made must have an economic character. The peasants should be told that their struggle would mean the abolition of debt, the abolition of the landlords and the money-lenders, and the reorganization of agriculture by means of modern technology. The workers must have the eight-hour day, workers’ control of production and the freest democracy.
But only a fool will expect the All-India Congress to agitate on such a basis. The Indian congressmen talk always about nationalism in the abstract and the necessity of throwing out the British but never, never, never do they ever raise on a national scale such slogans or ideas which would mobilize the masses around the things that are really pressing them. If the Indian Congress could do that, or had wanted to do that at any time during the last twenty years, the British would have been out of India already.
Willkie’s Hypocrisy
In the article which will follow this, some attempt will be made to show the possibilities of and the methods by which the economic situation in India can and will be changed. We want here, however, to link the economic situation we have described with the noisy “anti-imperialism” of Willkie.
At the present moment it is an undoubted fact that a substantial proportion of the miserable Indian production goes to Britain as profit and as payment of debts. Some of these debts are absurd to the last degree because every time Britain fought a war to add to the British Empire in India, they put the debt on the Indian budget. Once they entertained a sultan of Turkey or Egypt or somebody like that in London, said that it was for the benefit of India, and added the expenses to the Indian budget.
The British army in India eats up, some people say, 30 per cent of the Indian budget – others say 60 per cent. It is difficult to tell, because Indian investigators say that many expenditures that go for roads, railways, etc., have no relation whatever to the Indian economy or the Indian people, but are built for the sake of the British army and the British administration. These, however, are not placed under military expenditures so as to fool the people. Now, it is certain that if the Indian nationalists could get into power, Britain’s chance of getting interest on these debts would be very, very small. An Indian government would refuse to pay.
But what will happen? The Indian nationalists will make some loans from the United States. But it is impossible for any loans to make any serious change in the Indian economy as long as that basic situation which we have described exists. The result of any such transformation will simply be that what was going to Britain will now go to the U.S. That is all. When Churchill says: “We’ll hold our own,” all he is saying is that if any loot is going to come from India, he will see to it that it goes to London and not to Wall Street.
The basic economic situation will not be solved. Moreover, while there might be a growth in industrialization for a period and to a small degree, the misery of the peasant millions will be intensified to an extraordinary degree.
The only way out of this, and its close connection with the American working class, will be the subject of the next and concluding article in this series.
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h4>What India Means to the American Working Class</h4>
<h1>A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution</h1>
<h3>(11 January 1943)</h3>
<hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="info">From <strong>Labor Action</strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1943/index.htm#la07_01" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 2</a>, 11 January 1943, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade">
<p class="c"><strong><a href="india4.htm">(Continued from last week)</a></strong></p>
<p class="fst">Let us now sum up our conclusions so far:</p>
<ol>
<li>British imperialism and American imperialism are carrying on an inside struggle over who is to reap the profits of exploitation in India.<br>
</li>
<li>The Indian Congress, representing the landlords and capitalists, like all the native ruling groups in the Far East, runs from one imperialist group to another. At the present moment the Congress is seeking frantically to negotiate with Britain, hoping to use Roosevelt and American pressure to force concessions from Britain.<br>
</li>
<li>The central fact of the Indian struggle is the backwardness of the economy, whose agricultural production has been destroyed without the substitute of modernized industry. This gives drive to the nationalist movement but it is on the very backwardness of the country that Indian landlords, money lenders and capitalists thrive. They are therefore incapable of unleashing the only force which can throw the British out, because to do so would destroy their own position.<br>
</li>
<li><em>The most important political development of the war so far is the awakening: of the Oriental peoples. India is today the center. What the Indian workers and peasants do next may well be the final push which will unloose a revolutionary struggle in the Far East embracing nearly a billion people. All the ruling groups, in the Far East and out of it,. are acutely aware of this and all statements, silences, etc., must be closely watched and analyzed in relation to the particular interests of the parties involved.</em></li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The present leaders of the Congress hope to use the Japanese threat and the revolutionary ferment to force concessions out of Britain. Roosevelt and Willkie hope to pacify the Far Eastern masses and save face in Europe by backing sections of the Indian Congress as rulers of India. Churchill knows that this will throw the Congress right into the hands of the United States and gives notice, “We mean to hold our own.”<br>
</p>
<h4>What India Needs</h4>
<p class="fst">Isn’t it clear that the only way out of this mess for the poverty-stricken Indian peasants and workers is to realize that the emancipation Of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves? Whom can they trust? Every imperialist power, Axis or anti-Axis, every native ruling group, have but one purpose – to exploit India or use the Indian struggle for their own ends.</p>
<p><em>India needs the wiping out of the princes, landlords and money-lending parasites who suck the peasantry dry; it needs the development of industry to raise the productive capacity of the country, and to reorganize agricultural production on a higher technical level.</em></p>
<p>We must bear this constantly in mind, for if we do not we lose sight of the fact that merely driving out the British will not solve the Indian problem. True, the British are the main problem today; they loot and plunder India mercilessly. But if it were possible (and it is by no means absolutely impossible), that some Indian government was cooked up and placed in power, it would mean only that another imperialism would loot and plunder, and the country as a whole would continue on its road to ruin.</p>
<p><em>The proper reorganization of the Indian economy can be accomplished only by the destruction of ALL the exploiters, i.e., by a socialist India. This may seem remote. It is not so at all. When an Indian peasant or worker says: “The British must go. But I cannot trust Gandhi or Nehru any longer. What we have to do, we workers and peasants must do ourselves,” then he is a revolutionary socialist, whether he knows it or not. He will learn this, not from books, but in the experiences which history is crowding upon him and all. of as so rapidly today. It will mean years of civil war, complicated by the war and imperialist rivalries.</em></p>
<p>But none of those who are shouting so loudly in the newspapers and in council halls and congresses have anything to offer the starving millions and sooner or later these millions will find that out. The same holds good for the masses in China, the Dutch East Indies and the Malay States.</p>
<p>The American workers have to realize that they cannot stand aside and be merely interested spectators of the Indian struggle or “well wishers” of India. They must know, first, that it is the very poverty, backwardness and defenselessness of India and China that helped cause the imperialist war. As long as British (or Japanese) capitalists can make 20 per cent profit in India or China where they can make only two per cent at home, these wars will go on.</p>
<p>We have chosen to stress here the rivalry between British and American imperialism over India. For this shows us as clearly as anything else that the war will change nothing for India. Furthermore, this rivalry may have grave consequences for the length and conduct of the war. A successful revolution in India will light up the Far East, drive Japan out of China and Burma, loosen every joint in the unstable, economy of Japan, put an end to imperialism in the Far East and shake the whole of Western civilization.</p>
<p><em>Clearly and simply the word should go from American workers’ organizations to Indian workers and peasants; complete independence of India; all power to the organizations of workers and peasants in the struggle for their demands; for the international solidarity of labor. If some powerful union in the United States were to say that, the effect in India would be electrifying, and Roosevelt and Willkie would soon find the whole Indian question even hotter to handle than it is for them at present.</em></p>
<p>But there is still a deeper reason why the American working class cannot stand aside and let Roosevelt and Willkie speak on India in the name of America. It may have struck some of us as strange that organized labor in Britain – much closer to India than the American workers – has had nothing to say about India. Instead they have voted with Churchill and supported his plain statements; “We mean to hold our own.”</p>
<p class="c"><strong><a href="india6.htm">(Concluded next week)</a></strong></p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of the page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade">
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
What India Means to the American Working Class
A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution
(11 January 1943)
From Labor Action, Vol. 7 No. 2, 11 January 1943, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
(Continued from last week)
Let us now sum up our conclusions so far:
British imperialism and American imperialism are carrying on an inside struggle over who is to reap the profits of exploitation in India.
The Indian Congress, representing the landlords and capitalists, like all the native ruling groups in the Far East, runs from one imperialist group to another. At the present moment the Congress is seeking frantically to negotiate with Britain, hoping to use Roosevelt and American pressure to force concessions from Britain.
The central fact of the Indian struggle is the backwardness of the economy, whose agricultural production has been destroyed without the substitute of modernized industry. This gives drive to the nationalist movement but it is on the very backwardness of the country that Indian landlords, money lenders and capitalists thrive. They are therefore incapable of unleashing the only force which can throw the British out, because to do so would destroy their own position.
The most important political development of the war so far is the awakening: of the Oriental peoples. India is today the center. What the Indian workers and peasants do next may well be the final push which will unloose a revolutionary struggle in the Far East embracing nearly a billion people. All the ruling groups, in the Far East and out of it,. are acutely aware of this and all statements, silences, etc., must be closely watched and analyzed in relation to the particular interests of the parties involved.
The present leaders of the Congress hope to use the Japanese threat and the revolutionary ferment to force concessions out of Britain. Roosevelt and Willkie hope to pacify the Far Eastern masses and save face in Europe by backing sections of the Indian Congress as rulers of India. Churchill knows that this will throw the Congress right into the hands of the United States and gives notice, “We mean to hold our own.”
What India Needs
Isn’t it clear that the only way out of this mess for the poverty-stricken Indian peasants and workers is to realize that the emancipation Of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves? Whom can they trust? Every imperialist power, Axis or anti-Axis, every native ruling group, have but one purpose – to exploit India or use the Indian struggle for their own ends.
India needs the wiping out of the princes, landlords and money-lending parasites who suck the peasantry dry; it needs the development of industry to raise the productive capacity of the country, and to reorganize agricultural production on a higher technical level.
We must bear this constantly in mind, for if we do not we lose sight of the fact that merely driving out the British will not solve the Indian problem. True, the British are the main problem today; they loot and plunder India mercilessly. But if it were possible (and it is by no means absolutely impossible), that some Indian government was cooked up and placed in power, it would mean only that another imperialism would loot and plunder, and the country as a whole would continue on its road to ruin.
The proper reorganization of the Indian economy can be accomplished only by the destruction of ALL the exploiters, i.e., by a socialist India. This may seem remote. It is not so at all. When an Indian peasant or worker says: “The British must go. But I cannot trust Gandhi or Nehru any longer. What we have to do, we workers and peasants must do ourselves,” then he is a revolutionary socialist, whether he knows it or not. He will learn this, not from books, but in the experiences which history is crowding upon him and all. of as so rapidly today. It will mean years of civil war, complicated by the war and imperialist rivalries.
But none of those who are shouting so loudly in the newspapers and in council halls and congresses have anything to offer the starving millions and sooner or later these millions will find that out. The same holds good for the masses in China, the Dutch East Indies and the Malay States.
The American workers have to realize that they cannot stand aside and be merely interested spectators of the Indian struggle or “well wishers” of India. They must know, first, that it is the very poverty, backwardness and defenselessness of India and China that helped cause the imperialist war. As long as British (or Japanese) capitalists can make 20 per cent profit in India or China where they can make only two per cent at home, these wars will go on.
We have chosen to stress here the rivalry between British and American imperialism over India. For this shows us as clearly as anything else that the war will change nothing for India. Furthermore, this rivalry may have grave consequences for the length and conduct of the war. A successful revolution in India will light up the Far East, drive Japan out of China and Burma, loosen every joint in the unstable, economy of Japan, put an end to imperialism in the Far East and shake the whole of Western civilization.
Clearly and simply the word should go from American workers’ organizations to Indian workers and peasants; complete independence of India; all power to the organizations of workers and peasants in the struggle for their demands; for the international solidarity of labor. If some powerful union in the United States were to say that, the effect in India would be electrifying, and Roosevelt and Willkie would soon find the whole Indian question even hotter to handle than it is for them at present.
But there is still a deeper reason why the American working class cannot stand aside and let Roosevelt and Willkie speak on India in the name of America. It may have struck some of us as strange that organized labor in Britain – much closer to India than the American workers – has had nothing to say about India. Instead they have voted with Churchill and supported his plain statements; “We mean to hold our own.”
(Concluded next week)
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<h2>J.R. Johnson</h2>
<h1>Reconversion – I</h1>
<h3>(March 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info"><span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="../../../../../history/etol/newspape/ni/issue2.htm#ni45_03" target="new"><strong>New International</strong></a>, March 1945, pp. 40–45.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription:</span> Ted Crawford.<br>
<span class="info">Proofreading:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> (April 2016).</p>
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<h4>The Conflict in the Capitalist Class</h4>
<p class="fst">The battle over reconversion is on, and it is following classic lines. The workers have not yet expressed themselves in any organized fashion and therefore the bourgeoisie is waging an all-out battle as to how the problem is to be settled (within the well-defined limits of bourgeois society). That is the significance of the conflict between Jones and Wallace.</p>
<p>The actual crisis is not here as yet. When, as in the crisis of 1932, the great masses of the people begin to react to a situation fast becoming intolerable, the bourgeoisie will subordinate its disagreements behind a leader who has a mass basis powerful enough to enable him to control the nation. Such a leader was Roosevelt in 1932. But bourgeois society has moved a long way since then. The Roosevelt New Deal was tried, failed, and now is dead. But the problem of 1932 has grown. The war has so accelerated the economic and political development of the country that the defeat of Germany may overnight precipitate the opening battle not in words but in deeds, not in Senate committees, but in sit-downs like Brewster’s and other mass action.</p>
<p>It is no mere reconversion to peace-time production as at the end of the last war. At the very beginning we have to establish the fundamental fact that under the misleading title of Reconversion is hidden, and very imperfectly, the economic and social future of the United States. The workers must know this, for the bourgeoisie has known it, since 1939 at least. In that year the National Resources Board reported to the President on the structure of the National Economy. At the very beginning of the report (p. 3) the authors uttered this solemn warning:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The opportunity for a higher standard of living is so great, the social frustration from the failure to obtain it is so real, that other means will undoubtedly be sought if a democratic solution is not worked out. The time for finding such a solution is not unlimited.”</p>
<p class="fst">These gentlemen, knowing that a large official report was not likely to be read by the masses, discreetly but unmistakeably warned of social revolution:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Moreover, as people become increasingly aware of the discrepancy between rich resources and poor results in living and as the ineffectiveness in the organization of resources becomes more clear, a sense of social frustration must develop and be reflected in justified social unrest and unavoidable friction. Individual frustration builds into social frustration. And social frustration is quite as likely to work itself out in socially destructive as in socially constructive ways.”</p>
<p class="fst">At the very end of the report, in fact in a very short chapter, devoted almost entirely to this topic and entitled <em>Conclusion</em>, the reporters revert once more to the problem with which they began:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The serious failure to use these resources to the full is placing our democratic institutions in jeopardy. The maintenance of democracy requires that an adequate solution be found to the problem of keeping resources fully employed ...</p>
<p class="quote">“This is a problem so broad in its scope and so basic in its character that no simple solution is likely to be found in a day or in a year. If a democratic solution is to be worked out, it will be the product of many minds working through a period of years.”</p>
<p class="fst">It is obvious that, in 1939, they were not too certain that “a democratic solution” could be worked out, but that, a though the time was not unlimited, it was not too limited. Since then the contradictory elements which so scared them in 1939 have doubled and trebled themselves. In 1939 they could look back to a total production of 80 billions in 1929, a crash to 60 billions in 1932 and a return to the 1929 level in 1938 chiefly through government spending and preparation for war. Today in 1945, the annual production is approaching 200 billions. A fall from this to the old pre-war fluctuations would be the prelude to disaster. Furthermore, owing to the increase in technological development, the productive capacity per man hour, is far in advance of 1939. The problem therefore is much worse than it looks. What is infinitely more dangerous for them is that the great masses of the people, particularly the workers, have been indelibly educated by the achievements of the productive system and the social and political lessons of the war. That discrepancy between national resources and standards of living which the reporters of 1939 noticed is now the common experience of the workers. They will not stand for it a second time. That is the problem and there is no other problem. The bourgeoisie is not seeking a solution because its heart bleeds to see workers unemployed or living poorly. It seeks a solution because it knows that otherwise the workers will revolt. But if the workers will not tolerate mass unemployment, then the bourgeoisie equally will not tolerate social revolution. And to crush social revolution the bourgeoisie resorts to fascism. That is the background of the constant harping by the New Deal economists on the theme: “if a democratic solution is not worked out in time.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Democracy and Fascism</h4>
<p class="fst">Roosevelt, Wallace and the great mass of government politicians and bureaucrats do not want fascism. They know that fascism will sweep them and their political power and the administration boards into the dust-bin. But they know that that without the slightest hesitation big capital will exchange them for fascism if they lose the capacity to control the workers. To control the workers requires that the aforementioned discrepancy which has reached such frightening proportions must be closed. Hence today the frantic ones are the Roosevelt politicians, who may or may not worship big capital, but who know that their hides are at stake. That, so far, is the Reconversion problem, and to pose it in any other terms is to deceive not the bourgeoisie or the Roosevelt government but the workers.</p>
<p>Every responsible politician realizes that the opening battle, symbolized for the moment in the conflict between Wallace and Jones, is in reality a reflection of the struggle between the working-class and capitalist society. In his “State of the Nation” message to Congress (and having the Wallace recommendation to the Senate in mind), the President spoke plainly and directly to the capitalist class. “Our policy is, of course, to rely as much as possible on private enterprise to provide jobs.” Roosevelt is and always has been a pillar of capitalism, in the United States and all over the world. “But,” he continued “the American people will not accept mass unemployment or mere makeshift work.” On Saturday, January 27, Walter Lippmann, a reputable and sober bourgeois journalist, discussing the Wallace recommendation expressed himself with equal bluntness: “No one can doubt that the task must be undertaken; people who have seen that there can be overemployment in time of war will not tolerate underemployment in time of peace.” On the same Wallace question Eleanor Roosevelt has been equally plain. “We know, we people in the United States, that the world is facing new and unpredictable conditions ... at the same time we know that adherence to old and outmoded answers may lead to destruction.” We do not need to challenge the sincerity of Wallace. It does honor to the human race and advances his political career. But the milk of human kindness, faith, coverage, high wages, and decency, common or uncommon (see any editorial by <strong>PM</strong>, the <strong>Post</strong> or the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>) which flows so copiously front the lips of this Yankee Mahatma is not unseasoned with the vinegar of the class struggle. “We now must establish an economist bill of rights, not only out of common decency, but also to insure the preservation of our political freedoms.” Our political freedoms include the right of Henry Wallace to be Vice-President, Secretary of Commerce and, possibly, presidential candidate in 1948. “Let us not forget,” he adjured the Senate committee, “the painful lessons of the rise of fascism.”</p>
<p>These gentlemen know well that they are threatened from the right as well as from the left. “Let us remember,” he intones once more, “that political democracy is at best insecure and unstable without economic democracy.” Then he boldly unveils the overhanging nightmare: “Fascism thrives on domestic economic insecurity, as well as on lack of or divided resistance to external aggression. Fascism is not only an enemy from without, it is also potentially an enemy from within.” And with that admonitory outspokenness, verging continually from the belligerent to the lachrymose and back again, which is his special function in the Roosevelt bureaucracy, he draws the international implications of the employment question in the United States. Writing in the <em>New Republic</em> the week following his appearance before the Senate, he began his article with the following:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Other nations look at the tremendous economic power of the United States, at the violent fluctuations in the American business cycle, at the previously demonstrated ineptitude of the American government in dealing with this problem, and, after seeing all this and looking toward the future, they shudder and pray. They pray for full employment in the United States, not because they love the United States, but because they know that without full employment there is world-wide trouble.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is no sham battle. All sections of the bourgeoisie understand the nature of the coming crisis. The question is what to do. Wallace has, or thinks he has, a solution without which “the American way of life” goes to an inescapable crash. But the decisive sections of the capitalist class believe that his proposed solution will ruin capitalism. This is the issue. Behind the struggle of personalities and political maneuvers are two distinct lines of economic thought. Wallace proposes that the government bureaucracy manage capitalism in the interests of capital and labor. His opponents claim that it cannot be done. If there is to be any management of capital, it must be done by capital in the interests of capitalist profit. More particularly they ask Wallace: tell us exactly what you propose to do.<br>
</p>
<h4>Wallace on the Spot</h4>
<p class="fst">In his prepared statement to the Senate committee, Wallace stated his master’s plan for sixty million jobs. As usual, the preservation of capitalism came first. The industrial plant required “will be privately owned, privately operated and privately financed, but the government will share with the private investor the unusual and abnormal financial risks which may be involved in getting started.”</p>
<p>What could be nicer? You make all the profits possible and we share only risks. But Bailey, the chairman of the Senate Committee, was not to be put off with election propaganda and slogans. He pinned Wallace down:</p>
<p>We spent on war last year 90,000,000,000, and expect to spend this year about 75 or 80 billion. Now that makes a certain sort of prosperity. That is prosperity based on borrowing.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“You say we can produce the same condition in the post-war world. How much do you contemplate we borrow or how much would you raise by taxation to do that?”</p>
<p class="fst">It was a simple question, but it raised the fundamental problem. Production for war serves capitalist purposes and makes capitalist profit. When this is over, how does Commerce Secretary Wallace propose to keep the system going to continue a level of production whose stain basis of consumption has been destroyed? To call a capitalist a reactionary is good but is not sufficient. If there was a capitalist means of continuing prosperity, with profits and full employment (miserable though the condition of the majority still is) the capitalist would not have to be urged to do it. All Bailey asked Wallace was: tell us how. Wallace could not answer. The best he could say was that excess savings, which people could not spend owing to curtailment of civilian production, would amount to $100,000,000,000 at the end of 1944.</p>
<p>Bailey came at him again and made the central problem still more clear:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“You stated that whenever our number of gainfully employed people, on wages as good as those existing now, should fall below fifty-seven million <a href="#n1" name="f1">[1]</a> the Government should take steps. But you didn’t say what steps. I would like to know what steps.”</p>
<p>Wallace replied that various types of public works should be in the blue-printing stage “so that you could promptly throw them in at that time.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">The Chairman: You say in your statement that you propose a reduction of taxation.</p>
<p class="fst">Wallace rambled again. Bailey pulled him back: It wasn’t taxation?</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Then I gather that your plans contemplate continually increasing the national debt instead of reducing the national debt?”</p>
<p class="fst">Wallace could evade no longer. He said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Senator, I think that would require a very careful presentation that cannot be made in full at this time.”</p>
<p class="fst">But he had just presented a statement filling some nine columns of the New York <em>Times.</em> Chairman Bailey, with confident irony, waltzed Wallace around:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“As I got it, when you get around to it, you expect we could pay the interest, by using a lot of stock to finance it.”</p>
<p class="fst">Wallace never got around to it. Instead he gave a perfect exemplification of what happens to a man who is seeking to reconcile irreconcilable interests:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Senator, to some extent you are putting words in my mouth. Some of the words came out of my mouth undoubtedly ...”</p>
<p class="fst">He had indeed condemned himself out of his own mouth. Under fire he could only say that if we could have 170 billions worth of goods and services, the national debt would fare better than if we had less than 170 billion. To Bailey’s remorseless question: how, Wallace, after flopping around like a fish thrown up on shore, could only reply “<em>if</em> we have the plan, it will work out well.” A few seconds later Bailey said: “I have finished my questions.” It was no use wasting more time on this jack-in-the-box. As Bailey said before he cast his vote against Wallace: I shall not vote for anyone whose sole idea seems to be government borrowing and spending.</p>
<p>In his sketch of the American economy prefixed to the Living Thoughts edition of <strong>Capital</strong>, Trotsky wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">During 1938, which was a year of comparative economic revival, the national debt of the U.S. increased by two billion dollars past the thirty-eight billion dollar mark, or twelve billion dollars more than the highest point at the end of the World War. Early in 1939 it passed the forty billion dollar mark. And then what? ... The New Deal policy with its fictitious achievements and its very real increase in the national debt is unavoidably bound to culminate in ferocious capitalist reaction and a devastating explosion of imperialism.</p>
<p class="fst">Both the capitalist Senator and the revolutionary are seeing the same thing – the process of capitalist production. Each knows that all reconciliations and palliatives are temporary, that this is a struggle to be fought out to a finish, the system to be preserved or the system to be destroyed. In between is Wallace, deceiving not one single capitalist, unable to answer a single pertinent question, but devoted to capitalism and deluding the workers with his mirage of workers’ prosperity in capitalist decline.<br>
</p>
<h4>Marx and the Industrial Reserve Army</h4>
<p class="fst">It is not altogether disgusting but is also slightly amusing to see the bourgeois wise men breaking their wise heads against the stone wall of unemployment. Let us briefly re-state the Marxist position, best formulated by Marx in the chapter of <strong>Capital</strong> entitled: <em>The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation</em>. As always, no paraphrase can do service for Marx’s own words: “The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labor-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve-army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth.” There, over seventy-five years ago, was expressed the crisis which has racked American capitalism for sixteen years and is setting the arena for what Philip Murray calls the “years of decision.” For Marx <em>“This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.”</em></p>
<p>The clash with the theories embodied in Wallace is irreconcilable. The capitalist cannot raise wages or create full employment simply because these are desirable things. As Marx says: “The industrial capitalist always has the world market before him, compares and must continually compare his own cost-prices with those of the whole world, not only with those of his home market.” <a href="#n2" name="f2">[2]</a>< The capitalistic method of lowering costs is to increase constant capital, the mass of machinery, <em>at the expense of</em> the variable capital, the labor-force. The capitalist is constantly seeking by means of extended machinery to make fifty men do the work that 100 did previously. This law involves the whole national productive system. A motorcar is a commodity produced at a certain cost and selling at a certain price. But into it have gone the cost of other commodities, coal, steel, leather, etc. Thus it is impossible to distinguish where the cost of one commodity begins and the other ends. The system has to be seen as a whole, with every producer seeking to produce his own commodity as cheaply as possible. Given such a system, full employment is a patent absurdity; high wages for all is equally an absurdity. And when Wallace proposes to substitute for the eighty or ninety billion spent on war, high wages for all and public works, the capitalists refuse to have this muddle.</p>
<p>From the point of view of social development and human needs, the capitalistic necessity of unemployment and more or less subsistence wages is monstrous. But so are imperialist war and fascism – both equally necessary to preserve modern capitalism. But if, as Wallace insists, he wants to preserve private enterprise (capitalism), then certain conditions go with it, and you have to accept them, or abolish the system.</p>
<p>Does Wallace propose to increase wages so as to consume the eighty or ninety billions which were cheerfully consumed by capitalism for its own purposes? Then the cost of every commodity would swell to such proportions that only a steel wall of tariffs could keep out the cheaper goods of foreign countries? But the consequences of that no one knows better than Wallace himself. Speaking of the pre-1933 tariff he says: “I think it was the fundamental cause of the rise of Hitler, fundamental cause for the great deal of disturbances we have found in this land. I have felt that most deeply.” Whenever the Wallace type of politician feels something “most deeply,” we know he is solving by emotion what has proved insoluble by his intellect. For having felt the crisis of the world market most deeply he proposes in effect to cut America off from it on a still greater scale. If Wallace will not learn, then the workers must. The consumption of the masses in the capitalist system is limited by the necessities of capitalist production. To alter that you have to alter the system.<br>
</p>
<h4><em>The General Theory</em></h4>
<p class="fst">Wallace did not create his theory. It is now the doctrine of a majority of modern economists and the history of the theory will teach the workers much about its real value and <em>their own role in economic theory</em>. For a good hundred years, bourgeois political economists as a body refused to concern themselves with the specific question of unemployment. Ricardo, the greatest of them all, took up the question of the effect of machinery upon the workers only in a later edition of his <strong>Principles of Political Economy and Taxation</strong>, first published in 1817. For the decade following, the bourgeoisie discussed political economy in realistic terms, and, according to Marx, splendid tournaments were held. But in 1830 came the revolution in Paris and after that, bourgeois economic science rapidly eliminated from its various systems anything which would enlighten the workers as to the exploitative character of capitalist production and the transitory nature of the capitalist system. As one of them wrote three years ago: “The orthodox economists, on the whole, identified themselves with the system and assumed the role of its apologists, while Marx set himself to understand the working of capitalism in order to hasten its overthrow. Marx was conscious of his purposes. The economists in general were unconscious.” <a href="#n3" name="f3">[3]</a></p>
<p>Conscious or unconscious, they had assumed the role of what Marx contemptuously called “hired servants of bourgeois society,” and <em>that is precisely the same role they (and Wallace) are playing today</em>. The great difference is that whereas up to 1929 they boosted capitalist society and defended it only from its theoretical critics, today they are defending it against the threat of workers’ revolution.</p>
<p>The bourgeoisie, let us note, did not depend upon economists to solve the crisis of 1929. Each bourgeois national group cut off as much international trade as possible and tried to solve the crisis at the expense of the workers and other capitalist nations. The more hard-pressed ones, like Germany, turned to Fascism, in order to crush the workers completely and get a flying start in the inevitable rush for imperialist war, i.e., the solution of the crisis by force. Britain and the U.S., richer than the rest, attempted to pacify the unemployed by doles and Government spending. It is at this period that the economists, terrified by fascism and the approach of the war, began seriously to deal with the terrible realities around them. But hired servants of the bourgeoisie they were and hired servants of the bourgeoisie they have remained. For these wise men did not say: how shall we solve the crisis of unemployment. They said something else. They said: how shall we preserve the capitalist system from this (to them) new monster which threatens it. The narrowness of the problem they set themselves ensured the futility of their various solutions.</p>
<p>Out of their excessive cerebration emerged one distinctive effort, written by a learned and respected Englishman, J.M. Keynes, and its very title is significant. It is called, <strong>The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money</strong>. The workers had forced their way at last into the hitherto cushioned and carpeted floors of bourgeois economic science. If Marx were alive today, he could laugh uproariously.</p>
<p>We cannot here deal with the theoretical method (and substantial fallacies) of this epoch-making book. We have, however, to look at the purpose of the author and his conclusions. He is out to preserve capitalism. He says: “It is certain that the world [by the world he means the revolutionary workers – <em>J.R.J.</em>] will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which, apart from brief intervals of excitement, is associated – and in my opinion, inevitably associated – with the present-day capitalistic individualism.” So after a hundred years these gentlemen have learned Marx’s absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. <strong>The General Theory of Employment</strong> is but a bourgeois rephrasing of Marx’s particular theory of unemployment.</p>
<p>“But,” and here the hired servant (conscious or unconscious) speaks, “it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.” By efficiency and freedom he means bourgeois democracy. What is his main analysis? It can be stated in one word. Underconsumption. The workers do not consume enough. <em>Therefore</em> the capitalists do not invest. We must therefore raise the worker’s consumption in order to induce the capitalist to invest. But here Bailey and Jesse Jones ask: how. And Keynes can do little better than Wallace. He says that the government must do it. But sitting in his study Keynes, who is no fool, cannot help seeing where this theory of his must lead. In his moderate British manner he, so anxious to save capitalism, shows quite clearly that what he is proposing may doom the system altogether. (Emphasis has been added so as to bring out clearly the more startling statements of Keynes, who is a trusted adviser and representative of the British Government.)</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat <em>comprehensive socialization of investment</em> will prove the <em>only</em> means of securing an <em>approximation</em> to full employment ...”</p>
<p class="fst">The government will have to handle <em>all</em> investment. He tries to soften the blow:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But <em>beyond this</em> no <em>obvious</em> case is made out for a system of State Socialism which would embrace most of the economic life of the community. It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the state to assume.”</p>
<p class="fst">That is comfort, even if bleak. But then he adds:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“<em>If</em> the state is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the <em>basic rate of reward</em> to <em>those who own them, it will have accomplished what is necessary</em>. Moreover, the <em>necessary measures of socialization</em> can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society.”</p>
<p class="fst">The government will decide on investment and the government will decide what the interest and what the profit will be. (No wonder Jesse Jones is threatened with apoplexy!) In passing Keynes knocks down two long-standing pillars of capitalism. He declares that his system will mean the “euthanasia of the rentier,” in other words, the painless disappearance of all who live on bonds. Of the financier and the entrepreneur, he thinks that “they are so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present.” He proposes to cut their profits down, for they just love to work. In other words, despite the substantial blows that Keynes does give to the orthodox economic school, he thinks fundamentally that it is the capitalist desire to put profits in his pocket which drives him to activity and not the imperative need of the system as an organism to gather in as much profit as possible, profit being the life-blood of its existence. No wonder that when Wallace comes before the Senate and hasn’t the guts to put these nonsensical theories openly, Bailey and Jesse Jones, spokesmen for capitalism, say “We will see you damned first.”</p>
<p>It is not only that they are defending their profit and property and bonds (from euthanasia). They are as willing to save capitalism as anybody else. They, however, will save it with democracy (including Wallace) or without. They are not concerned with a “democratic solution.” Capital comes first, not democracy. Meanwhile (with Fascism in reserve) they ask: how. And nobody, neither economist nor politician, can answer.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Tower of Babel</h4>
<p class="fst">Professor Alvin H. Hansen is one of the foremost advocates of government spending, with a portfolio full of blueprints ready to “throw in.” He is special economic adviser to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and this Board believes that the Government must above all balance its budget, i.e, it must not borrow continuously to provide employment. But Hansen is also economic advisor to the National Resources Planning Board which believes that for this purpose the national debt can be limitless. No wonder Wallace complained of words being put into his mouth, some of which, however, had come from there. Far ahead of the others, like Achilles in battle, is Abba P. Lerner, a militant disciple of Keynes. In and out of season, he calls upon the Government to save capitalism by what the calls Functional Finance, sometimes known as Compensatory Fiscal Action. Spend in times of depression and decrease spending in times of prosperity. As for the debt, the “sky is the limit.” In his pamphlet, <em>Functional Finance,</em> he accuses Hansen of being an “appeaser” who opened the gates to the enemy by craven-heartedly capitulating on limitless debt. But Father Keynes is a capitulator. Writing in the <strong>New Republic</strong> (June 29, 1940) Keynes himself says that deficit spending failed to produce full employment under Roosevelt because of the “gigantic powers of production,” of modern industry, and he confesses: “It appears to be politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my case ... except in war conditions.” (Quoted from <strong>Post-War Monetary Plans</strong> by John H. William, p. 80) So that for that at least the “democratic solution” is hopeless. We ask the workers to ponder over this.</p>
<p>Not Marx but the Brookings Institute in <strong>The New Philosophy of Public Debt</strong> has shattered some of the liberties which these gentlemen are taking with elementary, in fact very rudimentary laws of capitalist economics. <em>If there was profit, then the private investor would invest and the politicians could be left to play their politics.</em> But “non-revenue producing public works cannot cover their operating, maintenance and replacement costs or interest charges ... It is obvious that most types of public works are useful or enjoyable ... Similarly, expenditures for veterans, consumption, doles, interest and so forth – necessary though they may be – provide no continuing source of public revenues.” (p. 62) As Harold Moulton, the author, says a little later (about war expenditures): They simply represent deadweight charges against the rest of the economic system.” (p. 81) They are useful and enjoyable, but they produce no profit. Their cost, in production, is passed on to the capitalist commodity, and the national capitalism is thereby less fitted for the competitive struggle on the world-market both in loss of profit and cost of production. As for the more general consequences to the capitalist system, we need only re-quote Marx’s quotation in reply to a similar proposal made many decades ago. “Try to create a national credit institute, which shall advance means to propertyless talent and merit, without, however, knitting these borrowers by compulsion into a close solidarity in production and consumption ... In this way you will accomplish only what the private banks accomplish even now, that is, anarchy, a disproportion between production and consumption, the sudden ruin of one, and the sudden enrichment of another ...” <a href="#n4" name="f4">[4]</a> his plan was a national credit institute to help workers and poor capitalists. But the whole Marxist analysis goes to prove the fantastic character of these schemes, all of which, as Marx so insistently points out, ignore the capital-labor relation in the process of production. Keynes himself has no confidence in them and the Roosevelt crisis of 1937 shows in practice what they lead to.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Stalinists</h4>
<p class="fst">Yet this is the type of economic thought that Wallace and the labor leaders are pumping into the workers as their salvation from the evils of capitalism in its death-agony. Why do they do it, the labor leaders in particular? It is because, consciously or unconsciously (that is for God and psychiatrists to decide) they identify themselves with the capitalist system and are terrified at the thought of what will face them if it is generally recognized by the workers that the system cannot solve the employment question. <em>At all costs the workers must be kept quiet and hopeful.</em> From beginning to end all this theorizing is directed at the workers.</p>
<p>If we want to see how extreme can be the ideas propagated by those whose main aim is to preserve capitalism from the gathering wrath of the working class, we can see it best in the Stalinist program. It is enunciated in Earl Browder’s <strong>Teheran</strong>. Browder, as every one else, diagnoses the malady accurately: “The central problem is represented by ... the eighty-five to ninety billion dollars of governmental war orders. With the end of the war, this market will suddenly and automatically disappear except to the degree that it is arbitrarily extended as a relief measure.” Now the Stalinists were at one time Marxists. They are not muddleheads. They know precisely what they are doing. <em>Their fundamental policy is to be of service to American capital against the American workers</em>. So Browder does not begin with the home market. He will expand the consumption by the foreign market. But, alas, as he himself says, “an examination of current estimates for America’s post-war trade reveals that the average is around four billions and the most optimistic: variants do not exceed six billion dollars per year.”</p>
<p>From here on Browder’s manner is as important as his matter. In fact both are of a piece. Browder’s base is Stalinist totalitarianism. His party is as totalitarian as it is possible to be in a democratic country. He therefore expresses himself in a manner similar to his political prototypes, Hitler and Stalin. If you read attentively the speeches of the totalitarian leaders, you will notice a certain realism bordering on cynicism. They state problems brutally. But reasonable solution they have none and therefore their promises to solve these problems are frequently comical, not to say ridiculous. However, as a counterpart to this absurdity there is a menacing ferocity which threatens all opponents who do not accept their comic-opera solutions. But whereas Stalin has real power over the Russian workers, this tin-pot totalitarian has no power over the American workers. For this reason and only for this reason his absurdity predominates over his ferocity. But both elements are present.</p>
<p>He has to find forty billions where all other economists have at most found six. He taps the billions off his typewriter as follows: Latin-America, six billions; Africa, six billions; Asia, twenty billions; Europe, six billions; Soviet Union, two billions. “Total new markets: $40,000,000,000.” There it is, as large as life, on p. 78.</p>
<p>So far the comedy. Now comes the totalitarian ferocity. If America proposed this, says Browder, “There is not a government in the capitalist or colonial world that would <em>dare</em> (my emphasis – <em>J.R.J.</em>) refuse or withdraw itself from such a partnership, once the United States made clear the benefits which would accrue to all concerned.” By this scheme in ten years Africa will have absorbed sixty billions of American capitalist development. How is not explained. If Browder had his way, no one would “dare” ask this question. He says so, and that is enough. Tomorrow is another day.</p>
<p>His proof is typical Hitler-Stalin logic. It is not difficult to prove, says he, that such a proposal is impossible (page 18). And indeed it is not. But if you do that, then you are in the embarrassing position of having proved that all hope of full employment in America after the war is an illusion, that our country is doomed to a catastrophic economic crisis ... In fact, that there is no hope except following the Soviet Union to “socialism.” But Browder begins from the premise that American capitalism must be preserved. So <em>therefore</em> it is as clear as day that forty billions of foreign trade per year is possible.</p>
<p>Now for the home market.</p>
<p>Browder has one magnificent plan. Produce the goods, let the rich buy them up “and simply destroy them.” This sounds like satire. It isn’t. That, he says, “would be politically very dangerous, almost as dangerous as permitting tens of millions to go without jobs, and would become the breeding ground for all sorts of social and political disorders.” God in his great heaven forbid any political disorders, so the great plan for increasing the home consumption by throwing forty billions into the sea every year must be cast aside. We must therefore raise wages. But one capitalist can’t do it, because the others will get an advantage. (Browder prefers not to see that <em>one</em> capitalist <em>nation</em> cannot do it either without drawing all sorts of consequences.) So the government, he says, will have to do it. But he brushes the problem aside. “It is not my purpose to attempt any detailed and complete answer... how to double the purchasing power of the main bulk of the population.” And on page 84 this menace to the American people shows where he really stands: “In the final analysis the American people cannot produce any more than they are able to consume.”</p>
<p>No American capitalist has yet dared to utter such ominous words, aimed at the workers. Behind the comicalities of Earl Browder’s “must and therefore can” economics lies a ruthlessness against the workers which he has learned from the totalitarian bureaucracy. Capitalism in America must be preserved. This is the decree of Stalin. And the Communist Party will preserve it <em>if it means limiting production to what it is possible capitalistically to consume</em>. The final proof of how conscious Browder is of what he is doing is his recognition that even the forty billions of foreign trade which, like Prospero, he conjured out of thin air, can <em>only</em> be paid for by returning goods, which can <em>only</em> be absorbed by home consumption. In other words, even with forty billions of foreign trade we would soon be back where we started. Browder shouts for Wallace but he knows as well as Bailey that Wallace’s plan has no basis in theory or in fact. Yet his very extravaganza is only a further proof that the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is the production of an industrial reserve army of labor in direct proportion to the potentiality of the productive power. Upon that rock these planners will break their necks.</p>
<p>We have given in mere outline the elements of the great problem of our time as it presents itself today. This is only a beginning. When the <strong>London Times</strong> says that this Wallace-Jones debate will probably take its place with the Haynes-Webster debate and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it is indubitably correct. In one form or another, this will be the economic and political axis of “the years of decision.” Old parties will break and new ones will be formed as the debate passes from the press and the political assemblies into the realities of the class struggle. The workers have to grasp clearly the fundamental issues at stake. For even today it is not only a debate. Wallace’s demagogy and his projected appointment are only one-half of Roosevelt’s strategy. <em>The other half is to use this windy plan as a lever for binding the workers to the bureaucratic machinery of government. The Wallace appointment is part of the bait for a National Service Act. The Roosevelt plan demands the disciplining of the workers: Wallace talks but Roosevelt acts</em>.</p>
<p class="c"><small>(In a succeeding issue of <strong>The New International</strong> we shall discuss the practical Marxian program which corresponds in our day to the fulfillment of the Marxian theoretical analysis.)</small></p>
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<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p class="note"><a name="n1" href="#f1">1.</a> The <strong>Times</strong> report says 75 million, an obvious mistake.</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n2" href="#f2">2.</a> (<strong>Capital</strong>, Vol. III, p. 396)</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n3" href="#f3">3.</a> <strong>An Essay on Marxian Economies</strong>, by Joan Robinson, p. 2.</p>
<p class="note"><a name="n4" href="#f4">4.</a> <strong>Capital</strong>, Vol. III, p. 7.</p>
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MIA > Archive > C.L.R. James
J.R. Johnson
Reconversion – I
(March 1945)
Source: New International, March 1945, pp. 40–45.
Transcription: Ted Crawford.
Proofreading: Einde O’Callaghan (April 2016).
The Conflict in the Capitalist Class
The battle over reconversion is on, and it is following classic lines. The workers have not yet expressed themselves in any organized fashion and therefore the bourgeoisie is waging an all-out battle as to how the problem is to be settled (within the well-defined limits of bourgeois society). That is the significance of the conflict between Jones and Wallace.
The actual crisis is not here as yet. When, as in the crisis of 1932, the great masses of the people begin to react to a situation fast becoming intolerable, the bourgeoisie will subordinate its disagreements behind a leader who has a mass basis powerful enough to enable him to control the nation. Such a leader was Roosevelt in 1932. But bourgeois society has moved a long way since then. The Roosevelt New Deal was tried, failed, and now is dead. But the problem of 1932 has grown. The war has so accelerated the economic and political development of the country that the defeat of Germany may overnight precipitate the opening battle not in words but in deeds, not in Senate committees, but in sit-downs like Brewster’s and other mass action.
It is no mere reconversion to peace-time production as at the end of the last war. At the very beginning we have to establish the fundamental fact that under the misleading title of Reconversion is hidden, and very imperfectly, the economic and social future of the United States. The workers must know this, for the bourgeoisie has known it, since 1939 at least. In that year the National Resources Board reported to the President on the structure of the National Economy. At the very beginning of the report (p. 3) the authors uttered this solemn warning:
“The opportunity for a higher standard of living is so great, the social frustration from the failure to obtain it is so real, that other means will undoubtedly be sought if a democratic solution is not worked out. The time for finding such a solution is not unlimited.”
These gentlemen, knowing that a large official report was not likely to be read by the masses, discreetly but unmistakeably warned of social revolution:
“Moreover, as people become increasingly aware of the discrepancy between rich resources and poor results in living and as the ineffectiveness in the organization of resources becomes more clear, a sense of social frustration must develop and be reflected in justified social unrest and unavoidable friction. Individual frustration builds into social frustration. And social frustration is quite as likely to work itself out in socially destructive as in socially constructive ways.”
At the very end of the report, in fact in a very short chapter, devoted almost entirely to this topic and entitled Conclusion, the reporters revert once more to the problem with which they began:
“The serious failure to use these resources to the full is placing our democratic institutions in jeopardy. The maintenance of democracy requires that an adequate solution be found to the problem of keeping resources fully employed ...
“This is a problem so broad in its scope and so basic in its character that no simple solution is likely to be found in a day or in a year. If a democratic solution is to be worked out, it will be the product of many minds working through a period of years.”
It is obvious that, in 1939, they were not too certain that “a democratic solution” could be worked out, but that, a though the time was not unlimited, it was not too limited. Since then the contradictory elements which so scared them in 1939 have doubled and trebled themselves. In 1939 they could look back to a total production of 80 billions in 1929, a crash to 60 billions in 1932 and a return to the 1929 level in 1938 chiefly through government spending and preparation for war. Today in 1945, the annual production is approaching 200 billions. A fall from this to the old pre-war fluctuations would be the prelude to disaster. Furthermore, owing to the increase in technological development, the productive capacity per man hour, is far in advance of 1939. The problem therefore is much worse than it looks. What is infinitely more dangerous for them is that the great masses of the people, particularly the workers, have been indelibly educated by the achievements of the productive system and the social and political lessons of the war. That discrepancy between national resources and standards of living which the reporters of 1939 noticed is now the common experience of the workers. They will not stand for it a second time. That is the problem and there is no other problem. The bourgeoisie is not seeking a solution because its heart bleeds to see workers unemployed or living poorly. It seeks a solution because it knows that otherwise the workers will revolt. But if the workers will not tolerate mass unemployment, then the bourgeoisie equally will not tolerate social revolution. And to crush social revolution the bourgeoisie resorts to fascism. That is the background of the constant harping by the New Deal economists on the theme: “if a democratic solution is not worked out in time.”
Democracy and Fascism
Roosevelt, Wallace and the great mass of government politicians and bureaucrats do not want fascism. They know that fascism will sweep them and their political power and the administration boards into the dust-bin. But they know that that without the slightest hesitation big capital will exchange them for fascism if they lose the capacity to control the workers. To control the workers requires that the aforementioned discrepancy which has reached such frightening proportions must be closed. Hence today the frantic ones are the Roosevelt politicians, who may or may not worship big capital, but who know that their hides are at stake. That, so far, is the Reconversion problem, and to pose it in any other terms is to deceive not the bourgeoisie or the Roosevelt government but the workers.
Every responsible politician realizes that the opening battle, symbolized for the moment in the conflict between Wallace and Jones, is in reality a reflection of the struggle between the working-class and capitalist society. In his “State of the Nation” message to Congress (and having the Wallace recommendation to the Senate in mind), the President spoke plainly and directly to the capitalist class. “Our policy is, of course, to rely as much as possible on private enterprise to provide jobs.” Roosevelt is and always has been a pillar of capitalism, in the United States and all over the world. “But,” he continued “the American people will not accept mass unemployment or mere makeshift work.” On Saturday, January 27, Walter Lippmann, a reputable and sober bourgeois journalist, discussing the Wallace recommendation expressed himself with equal bluntness: “No one can doubt that the task must be undertaken; people who have seen that there can be overemployment in time of war will not tolerate underemployment in time of peace.” On the same Wallace question Eleanor Roosevelt has been equally plain. “We know, we people in the United States, that the world is facing new and unpredictable conditions ... at the same time we know that adherence to old and outmoded answers may lead to destruction.” We do not need to challenge the sincerity of Wallace. It does honor to the human race and advances his political career. But the milk of human kindness, faith, coverage, high wages, and decency, common or uncommon (see any editorial by PM, the Post or the Daily Worker) which flows so copiously front the lips of this Yankee Mahatma is not unseasoned with the vinegar of the class struggle. “We now must establish an economist bill of rights, not only out of common decency, but also to insure the preservation of our political freedoms.” Our political freedoms include the right of Henry Wallace to be Vice-President, Secretary of Commerce and, possibly, presidential candidate in 1948. “Let us not forget,” he adjured the Senate committee, “the painful lessons of the rise of fascism.”
These gentlemen know well that they are threatened from the right as well as from the left. “Let us remember,” he intones once more, “that political democracy is at best insecure and unstable without economic democracy.” Then he boldly unveils the overhanging nightmare: “Fascism thrives on domestic economic insecurity, as well as on lack of or divided resistance to external aggression. Fascism is not only an enemy from without, it is also potentially an enemy from within.” And with that admonitory outspokenness, verging continually from the belligerent to the lachrymose and back again, which is his special function in the Roosevelt bureaucracy, he draws the international implications of the employment question in the United States. Writing in the New Republic the week following his appearance before the Senate, he began his article with the following:
“Other nations look at the tremendous economic power of the United States, at the violent fluctuations in the American business cycle, at the previously demonstrated ineptitude of the American government in dealing with this problem, and, after seeing all this and looking toward the future, they shudder and pray. They pray for full employment in the United States, not because they love the United States, but because they know that without full employment there is world-wide trouble.”
This is no sham battle. All sections of the bourgeoisie understand the nature of the coming crisis. The question is what to do. Wallace has, or thinks he has, a solution without which “the American way of life” goes to an inescapable crash. But the decisive sections of the capitalist class believe that his proposed solution will ruin capitalism. This is the issue. Behind the struggle of personalities and political maneuvers are two distinct lines of economic thought. Wallace proposes that the government bureaucracy manage capitalism in the interests of capital and labor. His opponents claim that it cannot be done. If there is to be any management of capital, it must be done by capital in the interests of capitalist profit. More particularly they ask Wallace: tell us exactly what you propose to do.
Wallace on the Spot
In his prepared statement to the Senate committee, Wallace stated his master’s plan for sixty million jobs. As usual, the preservation of capitalism came first. The industrial plant required “will be privately owned, privately operated and privately financed, but the government will share with the private investor the unusual and abnormal financial risks which may be involved in getting started.”
What could be nicer? You make all the profits possible and we share only risks. But Bailey, the chairman of the Senate Committee, was not to be put off with election propaganda and slogans. He pinned Wallace down:
We spent on war last year 90,000,000,000, and expect to spend this year about 75 or 80 billion. Now that makes a certain sort of prosperity. That is prosperity based on borrowing.
“You say we can produce the same condition in the post-war world. How much do you contemplate we borrow or how much would you raise by taxation to do that?”
It was a simple question, but it raised the fundamental problem. Production for war serves capitalist purposes and makes capitalist profit. When this is over, how does Commerce Secretary Wallace propose to keep the system going to continue a level of production whose stain basis of consumption has been destroyed? To call a capitalist a reactionary is good but is not sufficient. If there was a capitalist means of continuing prosperity, with profits and full employment (miserable though the condition of the majority still is) the capitalist would not have to be urged to do it. All Bailey asked Wallace was: tell us how. Wallace could not answer. The best he could say was that excess savings, which people could not spend owing to curtailment of civilian production, would amount to $100,000,000,000 at the end of 1944.
Bailey came at him again and made the central problem still more clear:
“You stated that whenever our number of gainfully employed people, on wages as good as those existing now, should fall below fifty-seven million [1] the Government should take steps. But you didn’t say what steps. I would like to know what steps.”
Wallace replied that various types of public works should be in the blue-printing stage “so that you could promptly throw them in at that time.”
The Chairman: You say in your statement that you propose a reduction of taxation.
Wallace rambled again. Bailey pulled him back: It wasn’t taxation?
“Then I gather that your plans contemplate continually increasing the national debt instead of reducing the national debt?”
Wallace could evade no longer. He said:
“Senator, I think that would require a very careful presentation that cannot be made in full at this time.”
But he had just presented a statement filling some nine columns of the New York Times. Chairman Bailey, with confident irony, waltzed Wallace around:
“As I got it, when you get around to it, you expect we could pay the interest, by using a lot of stock to finance it.”
Wallace never got around to it. Instead he gave a perfect exemplification of what happens to a man who is seeking to reconcile irreconcilable interests:
“Senator, to some extent you are putting words in my mouth. Some of the words came out of my mouth undoubtedly ...”
He had indeed condemned himself out of his own mouth. Under fire he could only say that if we could have 170 billions worth of goods and services, the national debt would fare better than if we had less than 170 billion. To Bailey’s remorseless question: how, Wallace, after flopping around like a fish thrown up on shore, could only reply “if we have the plan, it will work out well.” A few seconds later Bailey said: “I have finished my questions.” It was no use wasting more time on this jack-in-the-box. As Bailey said before he cast his vote against Wallace: I shall not vote for anyone whose sole idea seems to be government borrowing and spending.
In his sketch of the American economy prefixed to the Living Thoughts edition of Capital, Trotsky wrote:
During 1938, which was a year of comparative economic revival, the national debt of the U.S. increased by two billion dollars past the thirty-eight billion dollar mark, or twelve billion dollars more than the highest point at the end of the World War. Early in 1939 it passed the forty billion dollar mark. And then what? ... The New Deal policy with its fictitious achievements and its very real increase in the national debt is unavoidably bound to culminate in ferocious capitalist reaction and a devastating explosion of imperialism.
Both the capitalist Senator and the revolutionary are seeing the same thing – the process of capitalist production. Each knows that all reconciliations and palliatives are temporary, that this is a struggle to be fought out to a finish, the system to be preserved or the system to be destroyed. In between is Wallace, deceiving not one single capitalist, unable to answer a single pertinent question, but devoted to capitalism and deluding the workers with his mirage of workers’ prosperity in capitalist decline.
Marx and the Industrial Reserve Army
It is not altogether disgusting but is also slightly amusing to see the bourgeois wise men breaking their wise heads against the stone wall of unemployment. Let us briefly re-state the Marxist position, best formulated by Marx in the chapter of Capital entitled: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. As always, no paraphrase can do service for Marx’s own words: “The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labor-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve-army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth.” There, over seventy-five years ago, was expressed the crisis which has racked American capitalism for sixteen years and is setting the arena for what Philip Murray calls the “years of decision.” For Marx “This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.”
The clash with the theories embodied in Wallace is irreconcilable. The capitalist cannot raise wages or create full employment simply because these are desirable things. As Marx says: “The industrial capitalist always has the world market before him, compares and must continually compare his own cost-prices with those of the whole world, not only with those of his home market.” [2]< The capitalistic method of lowering costs is to increase constant capital, the mass of machinery, at the expense of the variable capital, the labor-force. The capitalist is constantly seeking by means of extended machinery to make fifty men do the work that 100 did previously. This law involves the whole national productive system. A motorcar is a commodity produced at a certain cost and selling at a certain price. But into it have gone the cost of other commodities, coal, steel, leather, etc. Thus it is impossible to distinguish where the cost of one commodity begins and the other ends. The system has to be seen as a whole, with every producer seeking to produce his own commodity as cheaply as possible. Given such a system, full employment is a patent absurdity; high wages for all is equally an absurdity. And when Wallace proposes to substitute for the eighty or ninety billion spent on war, high wages for all and public works, the capitalists refuse to have this muddle.
From the point of view of social development and human needs, the capitalistic necessity of unemployment and more or less subsistence wages is monstrous. But so are imperialist war and fascism – both equally necessary to preserve modern capitalism. But if, as Wallace insists, he wants to preserve private enterprise (capitalism), then certain conditions go with it, and you have to accept them, or abolish the system.
Does Wallace propose to increase wages so as to consume the eighty or ninety billions which were cheerfully consumed by capitalism for its own purposes? Then the cost of every commodity would swell to such proportions that only a steel wall of tariffs could keep out the cheaper goods of foreign countries? But the consequences of that no one knows better than Wallace himself. Speaking of the pre-1933 tariff he says: “I think it was the fundamental cause of the rise of Hitler, fundamental cause for the great deal of disturbances we have found in this land. I have felt that most deeply.” Whenever the Wallace type of politician feels something “most deeply,” we know he is solving by emotion what has proved insoluble by his intellect. For having felt the crisis of the world market most deeply he proposes in effect to cut America off from it on a still greater scale. If Wallace will not learn, then the workers must. The consumption of the masses in the capitalist system is limited by the necessities of capitalist production. To alter that you have to alter the system.
The General Theory
Wallace did not create his theory. It is now the doctrine of a majority of modern economists and the history of the theory will teach the workers much about its real value and their own role in economic theory. For a good hundred years, bourgeois political economists as a body refused to concern themselves with the specific question of unemployment. Ricardo, the greatest of them all, took up the question of the effect of machinery upon the workers only in a later edition of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, first published in 1817. For the decade following, the bourgeoisie discussed political economy in realistic terms, and, according to Marx, splendid tournaments were held. But in 1830 came the revolution in Paris and after that, bourgeois economic science rapidly eliminated from its various systems anything which would enlighten the workers as to the exploitative character of capitalist production and the transitory nature of the capitalist system. As one of them wrote three years ago: “The orthodox economists, on the whole, identified themselves with the system and assumed the role of its apologists, while Marx set himself to understand the working of capitalism in order to hasten its overthrow. Marx was conscious of his purposes. The economists in general were unconscious.” [3]
Conscious or unconscious, they had assumed the role of what Marx contemptuously called “hired servants of bourgeois society,” and that is precisely the same role they (and Wallace) are playing today. The great difference is that whereas up to 1929 they boosted capitalist society and defended it only from its theoretical critics, today they are defending it against the threat of workers’ revolution.
The bourgeoisie, let us note, did not depend upon economists to solve the crisis of 1929. Each bourgeois national group cut off as much international trade as possible and tried to solve the crisis at the expense of the workers and other capitalist nations. The more hard-pressed ones, like Germany, turned to Fascism, in order to crush the workers completely and get a flying start in the inevitable rush for imperialist war, i.e., the solution of the crisis by force. Britain and the U.S., richer than the rest, attempted to pacify the unemployed by doles and Government spending. It is at this period that the economists, terrified by fascism and the approach of the war, began seriously to deal with the terrible realities around them. But hired servants of the bourgeoisie they were and hired servants of the bourgeoisie they have remained. For these wise men did not say: how shall we solve the crisis of unemployment. They said something else. They said: how shall we preserve the capitalist system from this (to them) new monster which threatens it. The narrowness of the problem they set themselves ensured the futility of their various solutions.
Out of their excessive cerebration emerged one distinctive effort, written by a learned and respected Englishman, J.M. Keynes, and its very title is significant. It is called, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The workers had forced their way at last into the hitherto cushioned and carpeted floors of bourgeois economic science. If Marx were alive today, he could laugh uproariously.
We cannot here deal with the theoretical method (and substantial fallacies) of this epoch-making book. We have, however, to look at the purpose of the author and his conclusions. He is out to preserve capitalism. He says: “It is certain that the world [by the world he means the revolutionary workers – J.R.J.] will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which, apart from brief intervals of excitement, is associated – and in my opinion, inevitably associated – with the present-day capitalistic individualism.” So after a hundred years these gentlemen have learned Marx’s absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. The General Theory of Employment is but a bourgeois rephrasing of Marx’s particular theory of unemployment.
“But,” and here the hired servant (conscious or unconscious) speaks, “it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.” By efficiency and freedom he means bourgeois democracy. What is his main analysis? It can be stated in one word. Underconsumption. The workers do not consume enough. Therefore the capitalists do not invest. We must therefore raise the worker’s consumption in order to induce the capitalist to invest. But here Bailey and Jesse Jones ask: how. And Keynes can do little better than Wallace. He says that the government must do it. But sitting in his study Keynes, who is no fool, cannot help seeing where this theory of his must lead. In his moderate British manner he, so anxious to save capitalism, shows quite clearly that what he is proposing may doom the system altogether. (Emphasis has been added so as to bring out clearly the more startling statements of Keynes, who is a trusted adviser and representative of the British Government.)
“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment ...”
The government will have to handle all investment. He tries to soften the blow:
“But beyond this no obvious case is made out for a system of State Socialism which would embrace most of the economic life of the community. It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the state to assume.”
That is comfort, even if bleak. But then he adds:
“If the state is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished what is necessary. Moreover, the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society.”
The government will decide on investment and the government will decide what the interest and what the profit will be. (No wonder Jesse Jones is threatened with apoplexy!) In passing Keynes knocks down two long-standing pillars of capitalism. He declares that his system will mean the “euthanasia of the rentier,” in other words, the painless disappearance of all who live on bonds. Of the financier and the entrepreneur, he thinks that “they are so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present.” He proposes to cut their profits down, for they just love to work. In other words, despite the substantial blows that Keynes does give to the orthodox economic school, he thinks fundamentally that it is the capitalist desire to put profits in his pocket which drives him to activity and not the imperative need of the system as an organism to gather in as much profit as possible, profit being the life-blood of its existence. No wonder that when Wallace comes before the Senate and hasn’t the guts to put these nonsensical theories openly, Bailey and Jesse Jones, spokesmen for capitalism, say “We will see you damned first.”
It is not only that they are defending their profit and property and bonds (from euthanasia). They are as willing to save capitalism as anybody else. They, however, will save it with democracy (including Wallace) or without. They are not concerned with a “democratic solution.” Capital comes first, not democracy. Meanwhile (with Fascism in reserve) they ask: how. And nobody, neither economist nor politician, can answer.
The Tower of Babel
Professor Alvin H. Hansen is one of the foremost advocates of government spending, with a portfolio full of blueprints ready to “throw in.” He is special economic adviser to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and this Board believes that the Government must above all balance its budget, i.e, it must not borrow continuously to provide employment. But Hansen is also economic advisor to the National Resources Planning Board which believes that for this purpose the national debt can be limitless. No wonder Wallace complained of words being put into his mouth, some of which, however, had come from there. Far ahead of the others, like Achilles in battle, is Abba P. Lerner, a militant disciple of Keynes. In and out of season, he calls upon the Government to save capitalism by what the calls Functional Finance, sometimes known as Compensatory Fiscal Action. Spend in times of depression and decrease spending in times of prosperity. As for the debt, the “sky is the limit.” In his pamphlet, Functional Finance, he accuses Hansen of being an “appeaser” who opened the gates to the enemy by craven-heartedly capitulating on limitless debt. But Father Keynes is a capitulator. Writing in the New Republic (June 29, 1940) Keynes himself says that deficit spending failed to produce full employment under Roosevelt because of the “gigantic powers of production,” of modern industry, and he confesses: “It appears to be politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my case ... except in war conditions.” (Quoted from Post-War Monetary Plans by John H. William, p. 80) So that for that at least the “democratic solution” is hopeless. We ask the workers to ponder over this.
Not Marx but the Brookings Institute in The New Philosophy of Public Debt has shattered some of the liberties which these gentlemen are taking with elementary, in fact very rudimentary laws of capitalist economics. If there was profit, then the private investor would invest and the politicians could be left to play their politics. But “non-revenue producing public works cannot cover their operating, maintenance and replacement costs or interest charges ... It is obvious that most types of public works are useful or enjoyable ... Similarly, expenditures for veterans, consumption, doles, interest and so forth – necessary though they may be – provide no continuing source of public revenues.” (p. 62) As Harold Moulton, the author, says a little later (about war expenditures): They simply represent deadweight charges against the rest of the economic system.” (p. 81) They are useful and enjoyable, but they produce no profit. Their cost, in production, is passed on to the capitalist commodity, and the national capitalism is thereby less fitted for the competitive struggle on the world-market both in loss of profit and cost of production. As for the more general consequences to the capitalist system, we need only re-quote Marx’s quotation in reply to a similar proposal made many decades ago. “Try to create a national credit institute, which shall advance means to propertyless talent and merit, without, however, knitting these borrowers by compulsion into a close solidarity in production and consumption ... In this way you will accomplish only what the private banks accomplish even now, that is, anarchy, a disproportion between production and consumption, the sudden ruin of one, and the sudden enrichment of another ...” [4] his plan was a national credit institute to help workers and poor capitalists. But the whole Marxist analysis goes to prove the fantastic character of these schemes, all of which, as Marx so insistently points out, ignore the capital-labor relation in the process of production. Keynes himself has no confidence in them and the Roosevelt crisis of 1937 shows in practice what they lead to.
The Stalinists
Yet this is the type of economic thought that Wallace and the labor leaders are pumping into the workers as their salvation from the evils of capitalism in its death-agony. Why do they do it, the labor leaders in particular? It is because, consciously or unconsciously (that is for God and psychiatrists to decide) they identify themselves with the capitalist system and are terrified at the thought of what will face them if it is generally recognized by the workers that the system cannot solve the employment question. At all costs the workers must be kept quiet and hopeful. From beginning to end all this theorizing is directed at the workers.
If we want to see how extreme can be the ideas propagated by those whose main aim is to preserve capitalism from the gathering wrath of the working class, we can see it best in the Stalinist program. It is enunciated in Earl Browder’s Teheran. Browder, as every one else, diagnoses the malady accurately: “The central problem is represented by ... the eighty-five to ninety billion dollars of governmental war orders. With the end of the war, this market will suddenly and automatically disappear except to the degree that it is arbitrarily extended as a relief measure.” Now the Stalinists were at one time Marxists. They are not muddleheads. They know precisely what they are doing. Their fundamental policy is to be of service to American capital against the American workers. So Browder does not begin with the home market. He will expand the consumption by the foreign market. But, alas, as he himself says, “an examination of current estimates for America’s post-war trade reveals that the average is around four billions and the most optimistic: variants do not exceed six billion dollars per year.”
From here on Browder’s manner is as important as his matter. In fact both are of a piece. Browder’s base is Stalinist totalitarianism. His party is as totalitarian as it is possible to be in a democratic country. He therefore expresses himself in a manner similar to his political prototypes, Hitler and Stalin. If you read attentively the speeches of the totalitarian leaders, you will notice a certain realism bordering on cynicism. They state problems brutally. But reasonable solution they have none and therefore their promises to solve these problems are frequently comical, not to say ridiculous. However, as a counterpart to this absurdity there is a menacing ferocity which threatens all opponents who do not accept their comic-opera solutions. But whereas Stalin has real power over the Russian workers, this tin-pot totalitarian has no power over the American workers. For this reason and only for this reason his absurdity predominates over his ferocity. But both elements are present.
He has to find forty billions where all other economists have at most found six. He taps the billions off his typewriter as follows: Latin-America, six billions; Africa, six billions; Asia, twenty billions; Europe, six billions; Soviet Union, two billions. “Total new markets: $40,000,000,000.” There it is, as large as life, on p. 78.
So far the comedy. Now comes the totalitarian ferocity. If America proposed this, says Browder, “There is not a government in the capitalist or colonial world that would dare (my emphasis – J.R.J.) refuse or withdraw itself from such a partnership, once the United States made clear the benefits which would accrue to all concerned.” By this scheme in ten years Africa will have absorbed sixty billions of American capitalist development. How is not explained. If Browder had his way, no one would “dare” ask this question. He says so, and that is enough. Tomorrow is another day.
His proof is typical Hitler-Stalin logic. It is not difficult to prove, says he, that such a proposal is impossible (page 18). And indeed it is not. But if you do that, then you are in the embarrassing position of having proved that all hope of full employment in America after the war is an illusion, that our country is doomed to a catastrophic economic crisis ... In fact, that there is no hope except following the Soviet Union to “socialism.” But Browder begins from the premise that American capitalism must be preserved. So therefore it is as clear as day that forty billions of foreign trade per year is possible.
Now for the home market.
Browder has one magnificent plan. Produce the goods, let the rich buy them up “and simply destroy them.” This sounds like satire. It isn’t. That, he says, “would be politically very dangerous, almost as dangerous as permitting tens of millions to go without jobs, and would become the breeding ground for all sorts of social and political disorders.” God in his great heaven forbid any political disorders, so the great plan for increasing the home consumption by throwing forty billions into the sea every year must be cast aside. We must therefore raise wages. But one capitalist can’t do it, because the others will get an advantage. (Browder prefers not to see that one capitalist nation cannot do it either without drawing all sorts of consequences.) So the government, he says, will have to do it. But he brushes the problem aside. “It is not my purpose to attempt any detailed and complete answer... how to double the purchasing power of the main bulk of the population.” And on page 84 this menace to the American people shows where he really stands: “In the final analysis the American people cannot produce any more than they are able to consume.”
No American capitalist has yet dared to utter such ominous words, aimed at the workers. Behind the comicalities of Earl Browder’s “must and therefore can” economics lies a ruthlessness against the workers which he has learned from the totalitarian bureaucracy. Capitalism in America must be preserved. This is the decree of Stalin. And the Communist Party will preserve it if it means limiting production to what it is possible capitalistically to consume. The final proof of how conscious Browder is of what he is doing is his recognition that even the forty billions of foreign trade which, like Prospero, he conjured out of thin air, can only be paid for by returning goods, which can only be absorbed by home consumption. In other words, even with forty billions of foreign trade we would soon be back where we started. Browder shouts for Wallace but he knows as well as Bailey that Wallace’s plan has no basis in theory or in fact. Yet his very extravaganza is only a further proof that the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is the production of an industrial reserve army of labor in direct proportion to the potentiality of the productive power. Upon that rock these planners will break their necks.
We have given in mere outline the elements of the great problem of our time as it presents itself today. This is only a beginning. When the London Times says that this Wallace-Jones debate will probably take its place with the Haynes-Webster debate and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it is indubitably correct. In one form or another, this will be the economic and political axis of “the years of decision.” Old parties will break and new ones will be formed as the debate passes from the press and the political assemblies into the realities of the class struggle. The workers have to grasp clearly the fundamental issues at stake. For even today it is not only a debate. Wallace’s demagogy and his projected appointment are only one-half of Roosevelt’s strategy. The other half is to use this windy plan as a lever for binding the workers to the bureaucratic machinery of government. The Wallace appointment is part of the bait for a National Service Act. The Roosevelt plan demands the disciplining of the workers: Wallace talks but Roosevelt acts.
(In a succeeding issue of The New International we shall discuss the practical Marxian program which corresponds in our day to the fulfillment of the Marxian theoretical analysis.)
Footnotes
1. The Times report says 75 million, an obvious mistake.
2. (Capital, Vol. III, p. 396)
3. An Essay on Marxian Economies, by Joan Robinson, p. 2.
4. Capital, Vol. III, p. 7.
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<p class="title">CLR James 1937</p>
<h3>Introduction to Mary Low and Juan Bre�’s <em>Red Spanish Notebook</em></h3>
<hr class="end"><p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: Book published by Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1937. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers. </p><hr class="end">
<p>Mary Low and Juan Bre� did not go to Spain, notebook in hand, and having gathered enough material rush back to produce five shillings or seven and six-penny worth of revolution, hot from the press. Bre� joined the POUM militia, Mary Low joined the women’s militia and edited the English edition of the POUM publication, <em>The Spanish Revolution</em>. What they have done is to set down their experiences from day to day, the things they helped to do, the people they met, the crowds at meetings and demonstrations, conversations heard in the streets, days in the trenches. Every line they have written is a record of experience lived for the sake of the revolution and written down afterwards because such rare and vital experience needs to be communicated.</p>
<p>The pulse of the revolution beats through every page. Many of the active revolutionaries are there, Nin and Gorkin of the POUM, McNair of the ILP, Rous, the Paris representative of the Fourth International, Benjamin Peret, the famous French poet (tenacious of his overalls even when calling on a minister), Miravitlles, no longer Secretary of the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, but Minister for Propaganda, carefully putting on a record of Josephine Baker and holding the mouthpiece to it before he speaks to Paris on the telephone. From organising the massed strength of the workers to futile diplomatic manoeuvres of this sort, designed to impress the ‘democratic’ countries – that is the record of degeneration, beginning from the moment the Soviet Union demanded the democratic republic as its price for arms. When the bourgeois parties with this powerful aid had strangled the first phase of the socialist revolution, Bre� and Mary Low left Barcelona.</p>
<p>And yet this is not a depressing book. Far from it. Catalonia leads Spain, and for some few months at least the workers and peasants of Catalonia, politically inexperienced, thought that the new world had come. The flame has been lit and fascism can pour on it the blood of thousands of workers, can stamp upon it, and even stifle it for a time. But it will burn underground, is imperishable, and will blaze again. For Bre� and Mary Low, despite their eye for picturesque personalities, are proletarian revolutionaries, and their little book shows us the awakening of a people. The boot-black who good-humouredly but firmly refuses a tip, showing his union cards; the peasant who will not be kept waiting as of old because equality exists now; the hundreds of women stealing away from their husbands to join the women’s militia – and attend Marxist classes, throwing off the degrading subservience of centuries and grasping with both hands at the new life. They will conquer. They must. If not today, then tomorrow, by whatever tortuous and broken roads, despite the stumblings and the falls. There is no room for the democratic republic in Spain today. Either Spain must go back to a nightmare of reaction infinitely worse than the old feudalism, or on to the social revolution. And the guarantee of their victory is that for the eager thousands who march through these pages, smashing up the old and tumultuously beginning the new, worker’s power emerged half-way from books, became something that they could touch and see, a concrete alternative to the old slavery. We, who know how important to the emancipation of Europe and to the regeneration of the Soviet Union is the ultimate victory of the Spanish workers, will read this book and keep it, and the layman will get here, better than in all the spate of books on Spain, some idea of the new society that is struggling so desperately to be born.</p>
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CLR James 1937
Introduction to Mary Low and Juan Bre�’s Red Spanish Notebook
Source: Book published by Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1937. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Mary Low and Juan Bre� did not go to Spain, notebook in hand, and having gathered enough material rush back to produce five shillings or seven and six-penny worth of revolution, hot from the press. Bre� joined the POUM militia, Mary Low joined the women’s militia and edited the English edition of the POUM publication, The Spanish Revolution. What they have done is to set down their experiences from day to day, the things they helped to do, the people they met, the crowds at meetings and demonstrations, conversations heard in the streets, days in the trenches. Every line they have written is a record of experience lived for the sake of the revolution and written down afterwards because such rare and vital experience needs to be communicated.
The pulse of the revolution beats through every page. Many of the active revolutionaries are there, Nin and Gorkin of the POUM, McNair of the ILP, Rous, the Paris representative of the Fourth International, Benjamin Peret, the famous French poet (tenacious of his overalls even when calling on a minister), Miravitlles, no longer Secretary of the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, but Minister for Propaganda, carefully putting on a record of Josephine Baker and holding the mouthpiece to it before he speaks to Paris on the telephone. From organising the massed strength of the workers to futile diplomatic manoeuvres of this sort, designed to impress the ‘democratic’ countries – that is the record of degeneration, beginning from the moment the Soviet Union demanded the democratic republic as its price for arms. When the bourgeois parties with this powerful aid had strangled the first phase of the socialist revolution, Bre� and Mary Low left Barcelona.
And yet this is not a depressing book. Far from it. Catalonia leads Spain, and for some few months at least the workers and peasants of Catalonia, politically inexperienced, thought that the new world had come. The flame has been lit and fascism can pour on it the blood of thousands of workers, can stamp upon it, and even stifle it for a time. But it will burn underground, is imperishable, and will blaze again. For Bre� and Mary Low, despite their eye for picturesque personalities, are proletarian revolutionaries, and their little book shows us the awakening of a people. The boot-black who good-humouredly but firmly refuses a tip, showing his union cards; the peasant who will not be kept waiting as of old because equality exists now; the hundreds of women stealing away from their husbands to join the women’s militia – and attend Marxist classes, throwing off the degrading subservience of centuries and grasping with both hands at the new life. They will conquer. They must. If not today, then tomorrow, by whatever tortuous and broken roads, despite the stumblings and the falls. There is no room for the democratic republic in Spain today. Either Spain must go back to a nightmare of reaction infinitely worse than the old feudalism, or on to the social revolution. And the guarantee of their victory is that for the eager thousands who march through these pages, smashing up the old and tumultuously beginning the new, worker’s power emerged half-way from books, became something that they could touch and see, a concrete alternative to the old slavery. We, who know how important to the emancipation of Europe and to the regeneration of the Soviet Union is the ultimate victory of the Spanish workers, will read this book and keep it, and the layman will get here, better than in all the spate of books on Spain, some idea of the new society that is struggling so desperately to be born.
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