VULPES VELOX

Swift. Red. Foxy.

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Lincoln had emerged as a major political figure in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which sanctioned the extension of slavery to new territories in the West. From that moment on, his career was inseparable from the slavery issue and the determination, as he put it in the Gettysburg Address, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” “They have now at last found out that he was a man, neither to be browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favour, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humour, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as Heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.” 150 years since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln http://bit.ly/1DNzcd8

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You've gotta see this.

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Nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in Jim Crow South, report finds

Between the years 1877 and 1950, 3,959 lynching of black men, women and children took place in 12 states of the American South, according to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative released last week.

The data, based on five years of research in archives and on interviews with survivors and historians, reveals the extent of the racist terror that ruled in the American South for nearly three quarters of a century—between Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Post card with lynching victims

The impact of lynching on blacks in the South, much like pogroms against Jews in czarist Russia, went far beyond those actually killed and their immediate families. “Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials,” the report explains. The authors stress fear of lynching, for example, as a major factor in the Great Black Migration of millions of African Americans from the South to the urban centers of the North. They do not mention the lure of industrial jobs, but in fact the struggles for economic security and social dignity were two sides of the same coin.

The authors decry “an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching.” This is unsurprising in an area of the US still covered with monuments to racist politicians and the “heroes” that led the Confederacy of slaveholding states out of the union and into the Civil War (1861-1865). One aim of the Equal Justice Institute is to counter this prejudiced history by erecting memorials to the victims of lynching near the locations where they took place throughout the region.

Lynching of Laura Nelson in Oklahoma, 1911

The report distinguishes among six types of lynching: “1) those that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; 2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; 3) lynchings based on allegations of a serious violent crime; 4) public spectacle lynchings; 5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and 6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment.”

All of these had as their central aim the maintenance of the system of racial segregation known in the US as Jim Crow, which was fully implemented by the first years of the 20th century, and whose legal structures were not dismantled until the 1960s.

Most traumatic were the public spectacle lynchings. These were large spectator events that drew crowds sometimes numbering in the thousands, where souvenirs of body parts were often sold, alongside postcards and other mementos. The report describes several of these, among them the gruesome 1904 lynching in Doddville, Mississippi of Luther Holbert and his wife, who were accused of killing a wealthy white planter:

Both victims were tied to a tree and forced to hold out their hands while members of the mob methodically chopped off their fingers and distributed them as souvenirs. Next, their ears were cut off. Mr. Holbert was then beaten so severely that his skull was fractured and one of his eyes was left hanging from its socket. Members of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore holes into the victims’ bodies and pull large chunks of ‘quivering flesh,’ after which both victims were thrown onto a raging fire and burned. The white men, women, and children present watched the horrific event while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.

Any effort to draw attention to America’s history of racial violence merits praise, and this report offers new and valuable data. However, the authors interpret this important research in the framework of contemporary identity politics, an outlook that, in its principal American iteration, assigns social and political interests to groups of people based on race. The problem with this approach when it comes to history is that, as horrible and as clearly racist as the system of “Judge Lynch” was in the South, it is impossible to understand it outside of an analysis of the social order it upheld. It was not simply racism that gave rise to lynching, but a social system that underlay racist ideology.

The word “sharecropping,” the impoverished crop lien system that replaced slavery as the dominant form of Southern labor after the Civil War, appears only once in the report. Slavery and sharecropping were both answers to what was once commonly called the “labor question.” This reality—that the racist Southern social order was built on extreme labor exploitation—once a basic conception even for American liberals, does not figure in the report.

“My thesis is essentially that slavery—the evil of slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude,” report director Bryan Stevenson stated in an interview. “It was this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy. And so when [R]econstruction collapsed, to restore the racial hierarchy you had to use force and violence and intimidation. And in the South that manifested itself with these lynchings.”

In other words, slavery was not a system of forced labor and all that flowed from it— the selling apart of families and children, the driver’s lash, and so on—but “this narrative of racial difference.” Likewise, racial violence in the Jim Crow South was not about extreme labor exploitation and separating blacks from the white poor, much less maintaining the one-party dictatorship of the Democratic Party—which is referred to but once in the 27-page report summary—but about maintaining “White southern identity.”

A victim of a Jim Crow lynching, 1925

To assert that racism caused racist violence, and to go no further, is a mere tautology. With such a perspective one cannot, for example, account for events like the murder of more than 35 blacks in Thibodaux, Louisiana in 1887. The Thibodaux Massacre came in response to a strike of some 10,000 sugar cane workers organized by the Knights of Labor. Perhaps 10 percent of the strikers were white. As the state geared up for the slaughter, Louisiana Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery, himself a sugar planter, declared, “God Almighty has himself drawn the color line.”

The study also does not consider the lynching of whites or immigrants. There were, for example, a number of Italian immigrants lynched in the Jim Crow South, including 11 Sicilians killed in New Orleans in 1891; and in 1915 came the brutal public spectacle lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, in Georgia. But to the authors these murders are not worthy of study because they were done “to make the white community feel safe,” as Stevenson asserts.

Stevenson also dismisses the many lynchings that took place in the US West as examples of “frontier justice” that happened because “you didn’t have a functioning justice system … so people took things in their hands.” This is simply a cliché. In a 2006 study, Ken Gonzales-Day counted 352 lynchings in California alone between 1850 and 1935. Most of the victims were workers, the great majority Mexican, Chinese or American Indian.

In their summary, the authors make no effort to analyze periods in which the numbers of lynchings spiked markedly. To do so raises interesting questions.

The greatest number of lynchings took place between 1890 and 1895, about 600 in all. This was precisely the period when the Farmers Alliance and the Colored Farmers Alliance organized hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers around a shared program that was hostile to the interests of the big planters, the new industrialists and the Democratic Party. It was only after the defeat of this southern arm of the Populist movement that the full force of segregation came to the fore in the wake of the notorious 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson.

The next largest number of lynchings occurred between 1915 and 1920, when over 500 blacks were murdered. This corresponded to the largest strike wave in US history (1916-1922), the Russian Revolution (1917), US mobilization for WWI (1917-1918), the Great Black Migration, anti-immigrant hysteria and the First Red Scare.

The report summary does not analyze the areas where lynching was most common. The data shows, however, that they were concentrated in the Deep South, and there in a relatively small number of counties. Out of all of the thousands of counties studied, a single one, Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta, accounted for over 6 percent of all lynching, 243 in all.

Phillips County was the site of the 1919 Elaine Massacre in which an estimated 237 blacks were killed by a marauding mob of armed white men. At the time, black sharecroppers in the area were seeking to organize as the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in order to demand better prices from white land owners for the cotton they produced. Phillips County was majority slave in 1860 and is today over 60 percent African American.

Number four on the lynching list, Tensas County, Louisiana, in 1910 had a population that was only 8 percent white.

Lynchings were least frequent in areas of the South removed geographically from the old plantation economy and most heavily white—North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, etc. The whites of these largely mountainous areas—tellingly, these were also zones of militant resistance to the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War—are nonetheless lumped in by the report with the rest of the “White South” and equally implicated in its racial terror.

What happens if we consider lynching from the standpoint of social class? If sharecropping and wage labor in the South are considered as an extremely exploitative labor regime justified by a racist ideology and enforced by extreme violence, then the period of the authors’ study, 1877 until 1950, has interesting implications.

Their starting point, the year 1877, came in the same year as the “Great Uprising,” a sudden wave of general strikes and urban riots that swept the country from coast to coast in solidarity with striking trainmen. That struggle announced a period of extremely violent class warfare in the North, the West, and the South, that also counted its victims in the thousands. The last great labor massacre occurred on Memorial Day in 1937, when Chicago Police gunned down 10 striking steel workers.

What we then see in the period 1877 to 1950 is an extremely bloody class struggle, in the very country whose political parties, trade unions and academicians have always proclaimed more loudly than in any other that there are no social classes.

The report concludes with a political argument. It asserts that lynching did not really vanish, but now takes the form of the state executions so common in the US South. “Capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror, ‘a direct descendant of lynching,’” the report states, noting that while blacks make up 13 percent of the US population, since 1976 they have made up roughly 34 percent of all victims of the death penalty.

Race remains an undeniable factor in the American system of police repression. But just as was the case in the epochs of slavery and Jim Crow, it is ultimately an instrument of class exploitation. What has changed so markedly from those earlier periods is that today it is those who would don the mantle of “progressivism” who seek to promote the conception that race, and not class, is the decisive factor in American society.

The reactionary implications of this position are given away by the authors’ prescriptions. The problem with the death penalty, they write, is that “capital trials today remain proceedings with little racial diversity.” This is not a call for the abolition of the death penalty, but an appeal for more black leaders in its implementation. It simply ignores the legions of black mayors and police chiefs that have, since the 1960s, taken the reins of police repression in America’s cities, or for that matter, the fact that the chief law enforcement figure in the country, Barack Obama, is an African American.

Under the capitalist state, the police, prisons and death chambers are instruments of class oppression. The increasingly violent deployment of this repressive apparatus, and the threat that fascistic vigilante violence might reemerge, must be met with a unified response from the working class of all races and ethnicities.

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Five Ways To Kill A Man

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to hammer the nails home. Or you can take a length of steel, shaped and chased in a traditional way, and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears. But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at least two flags, a prince, and a castle to hold your banquet in. Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, blow gas at him. But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches, not to mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs and some round hats made of steel. In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and dispose of him by pressing one small switch. All you then require is an ocean to separate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath and land that no-one needs for several years. These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there. Edwin Brock

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This speech was given by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), to open the International Online May Day Rally hosted by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WSWS on Sunday, May 4.

The capitalist crisis and the fight for socialist internationalism

On behalf of the International Committee of the Fourth International, permit me to welcome working people and youth from all over the world who are participating in this first online international celebration of May Day. The extraordinary response to this event—with listeners representing more than 60 countries—testifies to the immense political and historical significance of this rally. It represents a milestone in the development of a new international revolutionary movement of the working class for socialism. Those who are taking part represent a vast cross-section of the international working class. The great diversity of the world’s population finds expression in this global audience. But in this meeting, all the differences employed by the ruling elites to divide the masses—those of ethnicity, religion, nationality, language, gender and even that of age—dissolve in the face of the inescapable reality of the world capitalist crisis, the political imperatives of the class struggle, and the objectively revolutionary role of the international working class in modern society.

This rally demonstrates that a new mood of social opposition to capitalism is emerging. There is a growing realization that the existing economic system is not only incapable of finding viable solutions to the problems that beset mankind, it is driving the entire planet toward a catastrophe.

May Day is the appropriate occasion for the working class to challenge the daily propaganda of the establishment media and to deliver its indictment of capitalist society. Rosa Luxemburg fondly recalled, and adopted as her own motto, the precept of Ferdinand Lassalle, who declared that the most revolutionary act consists of always proclaiming aloud “what is.” This is the principle that guides our actions today. At this rally, the International Committee will expose the reality of contemporary capitalism and imperialism.

The political organization of society seems more and more to assume the structure of a prison for the criminally insane. But in this global prison, it is the sane—the great mass of the people—who are behind bars, while the madmen—consisting of capitalist politicians, the professional killers of the state intelligence agencies, corporate gangsters, and the swindlers of high finance—patrol the walls of the penitentiary, shotguns in hand.

Nearly 25 years ago, following the dissolution of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the ideological apologists of the ruling class proclaimed the irreversible triumph of capitalism over socialism. This triumphalism was based on the lie that Stalinism—the reactionary nationalist falsification of Marxism—represented socialism. The perpetuation of this lie required that the entire history of socialist opposition to Stalinism, of which the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International was the most advanced expression, be distorted, falsified and even suppressed.

The most delusional of the capitalist triumphalists proclaimed the “End of History.” The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, they claimed, proved that bourgeois democracy, based upon the capitalist organization of economic life, is the unsurpassable and final stage of human progress. What a mockery history has made of these myopic soothsayers! The last 20 years have witnessed the relentless and accelerating breakdown of capitalist society. The signs of societal dysfunction are everywhere. Since the early 1990s, the world capitalist economy has staggered from one crisis to another. Speculative booms that have enriched a miniscule fraction of the world’s population have been followed again and again by devastating financial crashes that have shattered the lives of hundreds of millions.

The financial collapse of 2008—in which the criminal practices of the Wall Street elite played a major role—has left the world mired in an unending recession. Entire cities and even countries have been bankrupted. As unemployment rates remain at levels unknown since the Great Depression of the 1930s, a generation of young people has been shut out of the “labor market” and faces a future without opportunities or hope. For middle-aged and older workers, the gains won and concessions extracted in the course of decades of struggle have been repudiated. In the United States, the corrupt bastion of “free enterprise,” pensions are being gutted. Elderly workers, in their seventies and even their eighties, who should be enjoying the fruits of their past labors, are now being compelled to haul their tired bodies to work, for which they are paid the minimum wage. In the meantime, the government and employers work relentlessly to substantially reduce, if not eliminate, the access of working people to decent medical care.

Amidst mounting social misery, staggering wealth is being concentrated in an infinitesimal segment of the world’s population. A study released by Oxfam, the international confederation of anti-poverty organizations, revealed that the richest 85 people in the world possess greater wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population, that is, 3.5 billion human beings. This means that, taken as an average, each of these 85 richest individuals possesses as much wealth as that of approximately 41,176,000 people. Is any further commentary necessary on the irrationality and perversity of modern capitalism?

Every aspect of the existing social structure and political order is corrupted by the power that such disgusting levels of wealth confer on a handful of billionaires. Ensconced in their world of unlimited wealth and privilege, these self-styled “masters of the universe” have themselves become detached from any sense of a social reality beyond their own desires. Karl Marx long ago described the mentality that prevails among the possessors of unfathomable wealth. If you were privy to their deepest thoughts, this, wrote Marx, is what you would hear:

I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me from the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless?… Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capabilities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

The political principle that governs contemporary capitalist society is that of oligarchy, not democracy. The oligarchs in the United States and Britain have nothing to learn from their lesser imitators in Russia and China. The social pressures generated by the malignant growth of social inequality—bound up with intensified exploitation of the working class—cannot be managed within the traditional structures of bourgeois democracy. Within the United States, the invocations of democracy clash ever more openly with reality. Not a single banker went to jail for the sociopathic behavior responsible for the economic meltdown of September 2008. But a deeply corrupted legal system shows no mercy to the poorest and most vulnerable sections of American society, whose desperate conditions are the direct consequence of the economic system that enriched the financial speculators and rewarded their criminality.

In “the land of the free,” more than two million people are imprisoned within the sprawling network of state and federal penitentiaries that comprise the American gulag. All the inhumanity inherent in American capitalism finds its concentrated expression in the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Last week, the entire world could not conceal its revulsion in the face of the hideous state murder of an inmate in Oklahoma, whose horrible death by poisoning evoked images of medieval torture.

Since 2001, the “War on Terror” has served as a pretext for the evisceration of democratic rights within the United States. Constitutional safeguards have been systematically dismantled. American citizens have been, by order of the president, deprived of life and liberty, without due process of law. The United States has become the most ruthless practitioner of the imperialist lawlessness and violence that, during the last fifteen years, have introduced into the world’s vocabulary, as synonyms for boundless brutality, such words as Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, drone, rendition, and water-boarding. The crimes of the US government have been aided and abetted by a spineless media that defines “freedom of the press”—to cite the words of former New York Times editor Bill Keller—as the right of the press not to publish information. Those who seek to warn the public of the threat to its democratic rights by exposing the crimes of the state are subjected to brutal persecution. Julian Assange has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than two years. Edward Snowden has been compelled to seek asylum in Russia. Chelsea Bradley Manning has been sentenced to decades in prison.

The grotesque accumulation of private wealth by a money-mad few at the expense of the great mass of the world’s population exposes the irrationality of an economic system that is based upon and sanctifies private capitalist ownership of the world’s productive forces. But alongside the archaic irrationality of the capitalist market, the escalating pattern of military conflict throughout the world—in which, once again, the United States plays the dominant role—provides more and more evidence of the historical bankruptcy of the nation-state system.

This is a year of anniversaries. In 2014, mankind is observing the centenary of the outbreak of World War I (in July-August 1914) and the seventy-fifth anniversary of World War II (in September 1939). These two wars resulted in the violent deaths of approximately 80 million people. According to the theorists of history’s end, such catastrophes belong to the past and can never be repeated. And yet, the crisis in Ukraine has, within the space of just a few months, once again raised the specter of a world war—a war that could be fought with nuclear weapons and lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

Other speakers—in particular, Comrade Chris Marsden—will examine in greater detail the development of this crisis. He will explain that the Ukrainian crisis was instigated deliberately by the United States and Germany through the orchestration of a coup in Kiev. The purpose of this coup was to bring to power a regime that would place Ukraine under the direct control of US and German imperialism. The plotters in Washington and Berlin understood that this coup would lead to a confrontation with Russia. Indeed, far from seeking to avoid a confrontation, both Germany and the United States believe that a clash with Russia is required for the realization of their far-reaching geopolitical interests.

For German imperialism, the confrontation with Russia is welcomed as a pretext for the repudiation of the constraints on militarism imposed in the wake of the unspeakable crimes committed during the years of Hitler’s Third Reich. In recent months, the German media has been engaged in an increasingly frenzied propaganda campaign directed against not only Russia, but also against the deeply rooted anti-war sentiments of the German working class. The time has come, the media declares, for the German people to abandon the pacifist and anti-war sentiments of the “post-heroic” (i.e., post-Hitler) age. Along with the propaganda for a revival of militarism, an increasingly vocal segment of German professors is devoting its energies—with the encouragement of the media—to the refurbishment of Hitler’s reputation.

Behind the propaganda stand definite economic and geopolitical interests. The German president has declared that his country’s weight in the world economy requires that it obtain the military force necessary to secure its broader geopolitical interests. As in the twentieth century, Germany is once again gazing longingly upon the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Central Asia and the vast land mass of Russia.

As for American imperialism, Washington is once again employing the cynical rhetoric of “human rights” to justify yet another military operation. But this exercise in hypocrisy is encountering growing skepticism from the public. Too many wars have been waged on the basis of lies. The contradictions in the Ukrainian narrative are particularly blatant. As Washington orchestrated the putsch in Kiev, employing shock troops provided by fascist and anti-Semitic organizations, the Obama administration condemned as morally unconscionable and politically unacceptable measures taken by the elected Ukrainian government to defend itself. However, once President Yanukovych had been overthrown, Obama dispatched CIA Director Brennan and Vice President Biden to demand and oversee preparations for the ruthless repression of mass popular opposition to the Kiev regime among the people in eastern Ukraine.

In 2011, the Obama administration justified its military operations against the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi—who was eventually murdered—as necessary to defend the people of Benghazi, in eastern Libya, against a government assault. But now Washington demands that the Kiev regime dispatch tanks and troops to crush the growing rebellion in eastern Ukraine. The media, as is to be expected, takes no notice of the contradiction between the past and present positions of Washington.

Even if this crisis is resolved without war, it will be followed by others. For the past 20 years, the United States has been involved almost continuously in war. During the last 12 months, the United States has been engaged in escalating conflicts with Iran, Syria, and now Russia. And in the midst of the on-going confrontation with Russia, Obama traveled to Asia to incite Japanese militarism and intensify pressure against China. There is an extraordinary level of recklessness in the conduct of American foreign policy. One or another of the confrontations provoked by Washington could spiral out of control with disastrous consequences for the United States and the entire planet.

But Washington’s reckless brinksmanship is, in the final analysis, the manifestation of the extreme crisis of American capitalism. The imperialist strategists in Washington see no other means to counteract the protracted decline in the global economic position of American capitalism other than through the mechanism of war. The fact that China, according to the most recent reports, is poised to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by the end of 2014 will increase Washington’s propensity to use military force to shift the balance of power in its favor. A no less significant factor driving the American ruling elite toward war is the buildup of social tensions within the United States. As anger mounts over economic stagnation, declining living standards, deteriorating social services, and the concentration of obscene levels of wealth within the richest one percent, the ruling elite looks to war as a means of deflecting popular anger away from social protest against capitalism.

Mankind confronts immense dangers. But, as Marx and Engels, the great founders of modern scientific socialism, explained long ago, history poses no task for which there is not a solution. The world socialist revolution is the means by which the great problems of our age can and must be solved. No doubt, the position of the working class, exploited and oppressed, is difficult. But that of the ruling class is, in a historic sense, hopeless. It is incapable of offering the people any progressive way forward out of the impasse at which capitalism has arrived. Its program is that of irrational violence. Its perspective is one of mindless greed, contempt for human life, and, ultimately, utter despair.

The perspective of socialist internationalism, upheld by the International Committee of the Fourth International, is based on a scientific assessment of the contradictions of the world capitalist system. The crisis of American capitalism is the concentrated expression of not merely national, but global contradictions. The breakdown of capitalism is international and systemic. For this very reason, the solution to this crisis can be realized only through the coordinated struggle of the international working class on the basis of the program of world socialist revolution.

It would be a politically fatal error to believe that workers in different countries can resist the attacks of capitalism, let alone secure the victory of socialism, on the basis of programs that take national conditions as their basic point of departure. Such an approach—characteristic of all opportunist organizations—leads inevitably to capitulation and defeat. The bitter lessons of the class struggle in the Twentieth Century demonstrated again and again the decisive significance of an international strategy and program to guide the struggles of the working class in all countries.

History has not ended. Indeed, the working class is faced with the task of resolving in this new century all the unsolved historical problems of the Twentieth Century. Of those problems, the most critical of all is that to which Leon Trotsky called attention in the very first sentence of the founding program of the Fourth International. “The world political situation as a whole,” he wrote in 1938, “is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.”

The entire history of the Fourth International and of its leadership, the International Committee, is the record of the difficult struggle, spanning decades, to resolve the crisis of leadership. All the efforts of the sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site are concentrated on this strategic task. There is no other movement in the world today, outside the International Committee of the Fourth International, which can plausibly claim to advance the struggle for international socialism. Our movement bases its work on an immense heritage of the most advanced theoretical and political thought.

We call upon you to join us and take forward the struggle for international socialism. Make the necessary political, intellectual and moral commitment to the struggle for humanity’s future. Study the writings of Leon Trotsky, the greatest strategist of world socialist revolution in the Twentieth Century! Read attentively the daily postings of the World Socialist Web Site ! We call upon our listeners to join the Socialist Equality Party of the country in which you live. To those in our audience who live in countries where such parties do not yet exist, we urge you to contact the International Committee and initiate the fight to establish a new section of our world movement.

This rally is undoubtedly a milestone in the fight for the renewal of socialist internationalism in the working class. But the success of this rally depends not simply on what we say today, but what we all do, collectively, in the days, weeks and months ahead to bring the Marxist program and principles of the Fourth International into the struggles of the working class all over the world.

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Proclamation by Mayor Harrison on May 5, 1886, forbidding any gatherings or processions in Chicago following the previous night’s bombings, now known as the Haymarket Riot or more recently as the Haymarket Tragedy.

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www.bit.ly/1hiBErt Amid imperialism's wild orgy, the world proletarian holiday is celebrated once again. (The Idea of May Day on the March)

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May Day Manifesto of the The Executive Committee of the Communist International

www.internationalmayday.org

ANOTHER year has passed and in not a single country in the whole world apart from Russia can the working class boast of victory. The capitalists of every country are rejoicing. They feel more sure of themselves than they did last year and behave as though convinced of their final triumph. “Yet another year has passed by and we have still not shaken off our yoke” – say the workers.

A year has passed during which the helm still remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Over this period the bourgeoisie could have shown what it was capable of creating. The world more than at any other time previously resembles a smoking ruin. In the defeated capitalist countries — in Germany, Austria and Hungary — poverty has surged. These countries are increasingly becoming the victims of the international predators who buy up the last meagre belongings of the defeated with cheap foreign currency. The local exploiters thereby do some good business while the want of the working masses grows daily. High prices have long since exceeded wages, and despite the shops being crammed with goods, millions of people do not know how to feed their children or to cover their nakedness.

Any day there can come a moment when workers will no longer be willing to put up with the suffering and torment that moribund capitalism dooms them to.

What then is the situation in the victor countries? Four million out of work in America and two million in Britain. In France economic chaos is growing. In Britain, the most triumphant country in the world, one strike wave follows close on another. Lloyd George is forced to gather together entire hordes which will have lead and iron at the ready for the striking coal-miners should the latter bring out the railwaymen and transport workers on strike. The mobs of tyrants of the Paris, London and New York stock exchanges thought that they would be able to turn the population of half the world into beggars and continue calmly to hold sway. They have made a mistake. Beggars cannot spend money; but then neither can Armstrong, Vickers, Schneider-Creusot nor the Bethlehem Steel Corporation grow fat on the products of their industry. More than two and a half years have passed and world capital has proved incapable of organizing the world economy. On the contrary the only thing it has known how to do is to add new contradictions to the old ones. Foch crosses the Rhine in order to grab the German bourgeoisie by the scruff of the neck and fleece its pockets under the guise of compensation for crimes during the war for which Entente capital feels itself as innocent as a new-born babe. The consequences of the world war are not yet liquidated and yet a new war is being prepared. With growing disquiet and distrust the British bourgeoisie follows the naval armament program of the United States of America. Against whom are they arming themselves? Against Britain or against Japan? Britain and Japan for their part are getting ready too. The wild beast of world war is preparing for a new leap; it is baring its claws and stretching out its paws towards fresh proletarian prey. If the world proletariat does not brace itself, if it does not seize capitalism by the throat, then it will not only go to meet its ruin and enslavement but it will also have to be convinced that it will once again be dragged to the battlefield and forced to shed blood in the interests of world capital. The traitors to the working class, the Scheidemanns, Renaudels and the Hendersons again make the discovery that it is a question of the “defence of the fatherland and democracy”. Only recently Vandervelde, the leader of the Second International and a minister of the crown of Belgium, cynically and openly gave his consent for France to dispatch Senegalese troops across the Rhine against the blood-drenched German people. Meanwhile the heroes of the Two-and-a-Half International are again finding opportunities to discuss what “special conditions” of each country make the betrayal of the proletariat explicable and how and why the proletariat must save its gunpowder for better times rather than hurl a bomb at the heart of dying capitalism.

But the question is not posed in the way that capitalists and social-democrats think. The world proletariat is not defeated, the world revolution goes forward. Its advance, consisting if only in the fact that capitalism shows itself increasingly incapable of assuring the proletariat even an orderly life of slavery, also consists in the fact that yet broader, stronger and more conscious masses are gathering under the banner of the Third International. Precisely because the bourgeoisie proves in practice its incapacity to order the world, yet more new masses press forward along the road of revolution and more firmly close their ranks. Soviet Russia, the haven of revolution, does not let world reaction conquer it. Britain, the stronghold of counter-revolution, has been obliged to conclude a trade agreement with the “Moscow robbers and plunderers”. And though seven years of war have seriously weakened Russia, though the want of the proletarian masses is great in Russia too, their vanguard stands loyally under the banner of the Soviet government and from the wavering and weary masses it is able to mobilize new fighters. This vanguard is doing everything that its heroic organization is capable of to destroy the new weapon of the counterrevolution – the weariness of the Russian people. The White Terror reigning in Spain and Serbia proves how unsure of themselves the local masters feel.

The increase in unemployment, the growing brazenness of counter-revolution, and the danger of new wars will not permit the revolutionary stirrings of the toiling masses to cease.

In Italy the bourgeoisie, by unleashing fascist bands, is sowing a storm. The German Orgesch serves as a perpetual reminder to the German workers: “Arm yourselves! Don’t lose heart from your defeat! Strike if you don’t wish to be struck!” In Poland 7,000 communists are sitting behind bars but strike follows strike: this shows that there will be no calm until a bridge is thrown across from revolutionary Russia to revolutionary Germany. In France, the land drunk with victory, the land of nationalist inebriation, hundreds of thousands of workers have become familiar with communism. No amount of persecution will stop the triumphal march of communist ideas in the country where the idea was not only born but has been sanctified with the blood of the victims of July and the martyrs of the Paris Commune. The Communist International is preparing for its Third Congress. This congress will not be concerned with the melancholic contemplation of the successes of world reaction as the leaders of the Two-and-a-Half International, the Adlers, the Bauers, the Longuets, the Dittmanns, the Hilferdings and the Wallheads were in Vienna, but will be devoted to the steeling of the weapon and to the destruction of all those elements who are seeking to blunt that weapon.

No softening of our attacks, but an offensive by broad columns along a still broader front: that is the slogan with which we appeal to you on May Day. It is vital everywhere to place ourselves at the head of the masses outside the party in their struggle to better their condition. In the course of this struggle the working masses will come to see how the reformists and centrists are daily deceiving them. They will see that the Scheidemanns and the Hilferdings, the Turatis and the D’Aragonas, the Renaudels and the Longuets, the Hendersons and the MacDonalds do not wish to, and are incapable of fighting either for the dictatorship of the proletariat or even for a crumb of stale bread for the workers. The workers will recognize that the communists are not splitting the proletariat but represent its unifiers in the fight for a better future. They will recognize that the capitalists cannot, nor wish to, allow the workers even what the peasant allows his horse: sufficient rest and an adequate amount of bread, the necessary to recover strength for more work. In this way the desire of workers to overthrow capitalism and to smash its power will grow every day. Any day there can come a moment when workers will no longer be willing to put up with the suffering and torment that moribund capitalism dooms them to.

Any day there can come a moment when the brave assault movement of the communist vanguard will carry with it the broad masses of the working class and when the struggle for the conquest of power will become the task of the hour. The Communist International calls on you for the maximum concentration of forces, and for the greatest unity and readiness for battle. We are moving not towards a period of slow agitational and propaganda work but a period of ever sharpening mass revolutionary battles. The increase in unemployment, the growing brazenness of counter-revolution, and the danger of new wars will not permit the revolutionary stirrings of the toiling masses to cease. The task of communists in every country is to be their strike battalion, to be that cadre which unites them in struggle. The function of our blood-soaked banner consists not in being the symbol of a future struggle standing ahead of us in the distance but in going forward to great revolutionary conflicts today and tomorrow.

On May Day we wish to show our readiness to do battle with the world bourgeoisie.

On May Day we shall hoist our red banner on the factories and works; we shall carry it forward in mass demonstrations so that its inscription will radiate far and wide proclaiming to the oppressed proletarian masses:

“Close your ranks, all oppressed and tormented, all those exploited and under attack!

“Down with the open and the secret servants of the bourgeoisie!

“Long live the Communist International, the red army of the world revolution!

“Down with the capitalist state, down with the bourgeoisie!

“Long live Soviet Russia, the stronghold of the world revolution!

“Long live the world revolution and the international union of proletarian Soviet Republics!”

The Executive Committee of the Communist International Pravda, No.86, April 21, 1921

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US Eastern Time (EDT): 11:00 am - 3:00 pm Los Angeles, California (PDT): 8:00 am - 12:00 pm Mexico City, Mexico: 10:00 am - 2:00 pm London, England (BST): 4:00 pm - 8:00 pm Berlin, Germany: 5:00 pm - 9:00 pm Cairo, Egypt: 5:00 pm - 9:00 pm Moscow, Russia: 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm India and Sri Lanka: 8:30 pm - 12:30 am Beijing, China: 11:00 pm - 3:00 am Sydney, Australia: 1:00 am - 5:00 am (Monday, May 5)

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Tsar to Lenin: A Call for American Socialism

It’s important to know this history, what it was, and how the working class came to power in Russia. It’s really relevant to students today given the high levels of inequality in America. Revolution is at forefront of people’s minds. It is important for people to see the film and see the parallels in America, the Egyptian revolution and the 2011 protests in Madison.

Interview with Niles Niemuth of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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In the “red carpet” prelude to the ceremony, one of the show’s producers commented to ABC’s Robin Roberts, “Anything can happen.” Could there be less true words?

Aside from the actual distribution of the awards, the three-and-a-half-hour program was empty and predictable from beginning to end. Host Ellen DeGeneres, making her second appearance at the Academy Awards, was, as one anticipated, bland, unfunny and self-satisfied. I am not the only one who felt this way. One online entertainment commentator noted the comic “had absolutely nothing biting or memorable to say.” DeGeneres’ most important comic bit, a running gag about having pizza delivered to the pampered audience members, was so sophomoric, it’s not worth discussing.

The theme of the evening, although one might have been forgiven for not realizing it, was “Heroes in Hollywood,” and that occasioned a few montages of disparate and even mutually antagonistic film clips.

There are no doubt many accidental and arbitrary factors in the awards voting process in Hollywood, where money, careerism and intense subjectivity create an unholy, unsavory mix. However, the final choices, when looked at with some perspective, make a certain amount of social and intellectual sense.

The upper-middle class layer of film industry liberals, like their counterparts throughout the country (and the world), are obsessed, above all, with race and gender. Such concerns go hand in hand with the belief on their part that they are the most high-minded and somehow “spiritually” oriented individuals, who really—given half a chance—could do without large incomes, large houses, swimming pools or cars altogether!

Thus, academy voters could honor 12 Years a Slave, a “brutal” and “unflinching” film, which sheds little light on slavery as a social phenomenon, and Dallas Buyers Club, with its gay theme, a perfectly worthy film in and of itself, and entirely exclude Nebraska, which treats social life in contemporary America with a certain bluntness. Social misery and the conditions of the working class are of little interest in Hollywood, especially in so far as they might, at least by implication, reflect unfavorably on the Obama administration.

2014 Academy Awards: Life versus the film industry

(Top: Omar, Bottom: Nebraska, both very good films overlooked at the award ceremony.)

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Report to the Workers Inquiry into the Bankruptcy of Detroit: Art and the Working Class

(Top: Diego Rivera mural on north wall of the courtyard in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Bottom: October 2013 rally in defense of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the assets of which have been appraised by Christie's in preparation for auction)

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The struggle against centrism and the founding of the Fourth International

(Part two)

The characteristics of centrism

Centrism by its very nature is vague and ill defined, oscillating now to the left, now to the right. It is characterized as much by what it lacks in terms of clear ideological groundings and political principles as by what it espouses.

Nonetheless, in 1934, Trotsky spelled out in his article “Centrism and the Fourth International” [2] some of the fundamental traits of these organizations. Reading it today calls to mind the saying—the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Theoretically,” Trotsky wrote, “centrism is amorphous and eclectic; so far as possible it evades theoretical obligations and inclines (in words) to give preference to ‘revolutionary practice’ over theory, without understanding that only Marxist theory can impart revolutionary direction to practice....”

He continued, “In the sphere of ideology, centrism leads a parasitic existence. It repeats against revolutionary Marxists the old Menshevik arguments...usually without suspecting this. On the other hand, the main arguments against the right it borrows from the Marxists, that is, first of all from the Bolshevik Leninists, dulling, however, the sharp edge of criticism and avoiding practical conclusions, thereby rendering their criticism meaningless....”

Because of their inability to clearly define their political positions, Trotsky said, the centrist “views with hatred the revolutionary principle: state what is. He is inclined to substitute for a principled policy personal maneuvering and petty organizational diplomacy.”

And, in an observation that anyone with any experience in our movement will find quite familiar and contemporary, he stated, “The centrist frequently covers up his dawdling by referring to the danger of ‘sectarianism’ by which he understands not abstract propagandist passivity, but an active concern for purity of principles, clarity of position, political consistency and organizational completeness.”

Also of immense significance was Trotsky’s assessment of centrism’s role on the international arena. The centrist, he wrote, “does not understand that in the present epoch, a national revolutionary party can be built only as part of an international party. In the choice of his international allies, the centrist is even less discriminating than in his own country.”

Indeed, this aspect, or rather this essential characteristic, of centrism would emerge again and again in the context of the struggle between the nascent Fourth International and the parties orbiting around the London Bureau.

For example, in 1933, just a year after the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) had disaffiliated from the Labour Party and made a sharp shift to the left and towards the Fourth International, the party published an English edition of Trotsky’s powerful speech delivered in Copenhagen, “In Defense of the October Revolution.”

The edition included an introduction by party leader James Maxton, recommending it to socialists, but insisting that the issues in the struggle between the Left Opposition and the Stalinist bureaucracy were ones about which “only Russian socialists are competent to decide.”

While Trotsky saw the ILP as standing on the left wing of the London Bureau and at that point was publicly seeking a discussion of the program and principles of the Fourth International with this group, he responded with characteristic intransigence to this hands-off approach to the struggle against Stalinism.

“By these few words the international character of socialism as a scientific doctrine and as a revolutionary movement is completely refuted,” he wrote. “If socialists (communists) of one country are incapable, incompetent, and consequently have no right to decide the vital questions of the struggle of socialists (communists) in other countries, the proletarian International loses all rights and possibilities of existence.... [Maxton] expressed himself in hidden form on the essence of the dispute and, in effect, in favor of the Stalinist faction, since our struggle with it concerns precisely the question as to whether socialism is a national or international matter.” [3]

Trotsky’s prescience in this matter was soon born out. The ILP ended up opposing the demand for an international commission of inquiry on the Moscow Trials, with its leader Brockway instead proposing a commission of social democratic scoundrels to investigate the political activity of Leon Trotsky. By 1938 the national reformist perspective that Trotsky had detected in Maxton’s introduction 5 years earlier found completed expression in the ILP leader’s delivering a public speech in which he thanked Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for saving the “peace of Europe” by reaching an accommodation with Hitler at Munich.

While not every one of the centrist parties around the London Bureau sunk so deeply into political reaction, all of them ended up opposing the Fourth International on similar nationalist grounds.

Andres Nin

The tragic consequences of the attempt to steer a middle course between revolutionary Marxism on the one hand and Stalinism and Social Democracy on the other found full expression in the equivocal policy of Andres Nin and the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) in Spain, which contributed decisively to strangling the Spanish revolution and led to the POUM’s destruction and Nin’s murder. The POUM’s role, in the final analysis, was to provide a left cover to the popular front, while actively isolating the revolutionary Marxists from the masses. In this sense, it functioned—despite Nin’s intentions—as the principal obstacle to the building of a party capable of leading the Spanish revolution to victory.

The politics of the POUM—its electoral maneuvers with the Spanish People’s Front and the ultimate entry of Nin into a bourgeois government—were supported by the London Bureau, and the illusions that it promoted about the POUM’s revolutionary potential found a certain resonance within the ranks of the Trotskyists as well as sections of revolutionary workers.

Despite his denunciations of the Stalinist repression in Spain and his immense sympathy for the personal fate of Nin, Trotsky insisted on telling the truth about Nin’s policies—that he had carried out the greatest conceivable political crime of joining a bourgeois government under conditions of socialist revolution.

This became the basis for a split with various left centrists both in and around the Fourth International who either openly or shamefacedly defended Nin’s record.

Among the former was to be found Pivert, of the French PSOP. In response to Trotsky’s statement that the POUM’s bowing before the popular front was one of the main causes of the defeat in Spain, Pivert proclaimed that the cause of defeat was not any capitulation by the POUM, but rather “the efforts of British-French imperialism, of Italian German imperialism and also those of the Stalinists.”

In response, Trotsky wrote, “One can neither expect nor ask for a movement of greater scope, greater endurance, greater heroism on the part of the workers than we were able to observe in Spain. The imperialist ‘democrats’ and the mercenary rabble of the Second and the Third Internationals will always behave as they did towards the Spanish revolution. What then can be hoped for? He is criminal who instead of analyzing the policy of bankruptcy of the revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary organizations invokes the ignominy of the bourgeoisie and its lackeys. It is precisely against them that a correct policy is needed!” [4]

This is an exchange that has found persistent echoes to this day. Similar things were said at the recent congress in Madrid on the 70th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, with an entire school of bourgeois historians insisting that the cause of fascism in Spain lay not in the absence of revolutionary leadership, but the perfidy of London and Paris. In every defeated revolution since—one could cite the cases of Bolivia in 1971 and Chile in 1973—centrists have always sought to curtail any examination of the role played by quasi-revolutionary organizations—that is, centrist parties—in preparing the defeats, laying the blame instead on imperialism and the CIA.

Pivert also leveled the accusation that the “sectarian methods” of the Trotskyists were responsible for the weakening of the revolutionary vanguard. He accused them of “brutalizing the intelligence of the militants” and “interpreting with no indulgence whatever the inevitable fumblings in the search for revolutionary truth.” The combination of opportunism, wounded subjectivism and slander evinced by Pivert are the hallmark of countless individuals and tendencies that have broken from the Fourth International while trying to disguise their own right-centrist politics. [5]

As Trotsky pointed out, similar charges were leveled against Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg: that they were too sharp or lacked sensitivity and diplomacy in dealing with their political opponents. This was to be explained, he said, by the fact that centrists, who had failed to break with bourgeois public opinion and felt the duplicity of their own position, did not like criticism. On the other hand, revolutionaries, acting on the basis of an objectively determined revolutionary perspective, are prone towards confronting centrists who try to evade the implications of the political situation and their own positions.

Within the Trotskyist movement itself, the leader of the Belgian section, George Vereeken, took the position that the Fourth International was as much to blame as POUM because its sharp criticism of the Spanish party’s entry into the government had pushed Nin away. Here was a classic hallmark of centrism: attributing political differences to issues of personal friction or problems of regime, rather than questions of fundamental principle.

Henk Sneevliet

Ultimately, the dispute over Spain led to a break with Vereeken as well as with Henk Sneevliet, whose RSAP (Revolutionair Socialistische Arbeiderspartij [Dutch], Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party) was among the largest parties signing the 1935 call for the Fourth International. While taking the form of a split and an apparent organizational crisis, this battle against centrism constituted the essential political preparation for the founding of the new world party.

The founding of the FI

The Fourth International was founded in September 1938 under conditions in which Trotsky and his followers were subjected to the most intense persecution, assassinations and even mass murder on the part of both the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy and fascism.

It came just six months after the third of the Moscow Trials, whose defendants included Nikolai Bukharin, former editor of Pravda and head of the Communist International; Alexei Rykov, official head of the Soviet government for five years after the death of Lenin; Christian Rakovsky, former head of the Ukrainian government; and N.N. Krestinsky, former secretary of the Central Committee and Politburo member.

The trial was accompanied by what can only be described as an exercise in political genocide, in which all those Communists who continued to defend the principles and program of the October 1917 revolution, that is the Trotskyists, were systematically exterminated. After a decade of repression, Stalin feared Trotsky and his followers more than ever, recognizing that the threat of war carried with it the threat of renewed revolution.

The killings were not restricted to the Soviet Union. The months leading up to the founding conference of the Fourth International were marked by the assassinations of Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov, murdered in a medical clinic in Paris, the brutal slaying and dismemberment of Trotsky’s German secretary Rudolph Klement, who was to chair the conference, and the abduction and murder in Spain of Trotsky’s other international secretary Erwin Wolff.

This repression and the defeats suffered by the working class led some in the Trotskyist movement to oppose the founding of the Fourth International up to and including at the founding conference itself. One of those was Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, who subsequently was to provide a revisionist theory of Stalin’s role as a kind of Soviet Napoleon, a theory that provided a key ideological inspiration for the Pabloite liquidationism that attacked the Fourth International in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Deutscher in the third part of his trilogy on Trotsky, The Prophet Outcast, cites the objections to the founding of the Fourth International made by the delegates of the Polish Trotskyist group, whose arguments he had helped formulate.

“They pointed out that it was hopeless to try to create a new International while the workers’ movement as a whole was on the ebb, during ‘a period of immense reaction and political depression,’ and that all previous internationals had to some extent owed their success to the fact that they had been formed in times of revolutionary upsurge.”

He goes on to quote the Polish delegates as saying, “No significant section of the working class will respond to our manifesto, it is necessary to wait.” While proclaiming that they agreed with Trotsky that the Second and Third Internationals were “morally dead,” they “warned the conference that it was frivolous to understate the hold these Internationals had on the allegiance of the working class in many countries....” [6]

These arguments were typical of those centrists who had drawn closest to the Trotskyist movement. They insisted that they agreed with Trotsky on many questions, but not the practical conclusion that a new international party had to be built to assemble the Marxist cadres that were indispensable for a successful socialist revolution. Their objections that the time was not ripe only served as a cover for their own orientation towards and awe before the existing social democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies.

Trotsky’s starting point in the struggle to found the Fourth International and in the method that permeates its founding document, the Transitional Program, is that of a principled and scientific estimation of the objective crisis, class relations and political forces on an international scale. He grasped the founding of the Fourth International as an objective historical necessity based on the crisis of capitalism and the betrayals of the existing bureaucratic leaderships in the workers movement.

The centrist critics who opposed the founding of the Fourth International, however, based their own arguments on wholly subjective considerations. While they insisted on their agreement with Trotsky over the nature of Stalinism and Social Democracy, they nonetheless began from their own assessment of the grip of these bureaucracies over the masses—abstracted entirely from the struggle of the revolutionary party to break that grip—and concluded that the launching of the Fourth International was merely a futile gesture.

The parties adhering to Trotskyism were too small and isolated, they insisted, to “proclaim” a new international. Only a new “great event” like the October Revolution could create the conditions for launching a new world party.

Against centrists like Deutscher, Trotsky insisted that the new international was founded on great events—the greatest defeats in the history of the international workers movement—in Spain, Austria, Germany, China, Italy and elsewhere—together with the extermination of socialists in the Soviet Union—events that had established the bankruptcy and counterrevolutionary character of the old bureaucracies dominating the workers movement. If humanity was not to suffer a worldwide catastrophe, the working class had to build a new revolutionary international party.

The centrists who opposed the founding of the Fourth International on the grounds that the Stalinists were still too strong or that the masses would not understand were in fact only contributing to the stranglehold exercised by the old bureaucracies, condemning the working class to a political blind alley. Trotsky dismissed with scorn this fixation with the supposed “subjective causes” for not building a new international.

He wrote: “And what else is the task of Marxists if not to raise the subjective factor to the level of the objective and to bring the consciousness of the masses closer to the understanding of the historical necessity—in simpler terms, to explain to the masses their own interests, which they do not yet understand? The ‘profound problem’ of the centrists is profound cowardice in the face of an undeferrable task. The leaders...do not understand the importance of class conscious revolutionary activity in history.” [7]

The centrists also conveniently ignored the fact that Lenin issued his call for the Third International in the wake of the great betrayal carried out by the Second, in which the social democratic parties of Europe all went over to the support of their own bourgeoisies in the First World War. At the time, Lenin had admitted that those socialists adhering to the perspective of revolutionary defeatism that he championed constituted a minority within a minority that could have fit into a single railway car. And they remained a small minority of the socialist movement up until the victory of the October Revolution.

Writing half a year before that revolution, in his “April Thesis,” Lenin insisted on the immediate founding of a new International. This was not only because of the betrayal carried out by the social chauvinist leadership of the Second International, which, as he said, constituted the class enemy, but also to draw a sharp dividing line between revolutionary Marxists and what he termed the “centrists” of the Zimmerwald International, those who vacillated between social chauvinism and genuine socialist internationalism, who supported internationalism in words, but not in deeds.

“It is we who must found, and right now, without delay, a new, revolutionary, proletarian International, or rather, we must not fear to acknowledge publicly that this new International is already established and operating. 

“This is the International of those ‘internationalists in deed’.... They and they alone are representatives of the revolutionary, internationalist mass, and not their corrupters. 

“And if socialists of that type are few, let every Russian worker ask himself whether there were many really class-conscious revolutionaries in Russia on the eve of the February-March revolution of 1917. 

“It is not a question of numbers, but of giving correct expression to the ideas and policies of the truly revolutionary proletariat. The thing is not to ‘proclaim’ internationalism, but to be able to be an internationalist in deed, even when times are most trying.”

Concluding his thesis with a withering critique of those who resisted a definitive break with social democracy, summed up in the proposal that the Russian party rename itself as the Communist Party, Lenin concluded, “It is time to cast off the soiled shirt and to put on clean linen.” [8]

To be continued

Notes:

2. Writings of Leon Trotsky [1933-44] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), pp. 232-37.

3. Trotsky’s Writings on Britain, vol. 3 (London: New Park Publications, 1974), “The ILP after Disaffiliation,” p. 67.

4. “Centrism and the 4th International,” Letter to Daniel Guerin, March 10, 1939, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/03/psop.htm.

5. Ibid, Letter from Marceau Pivert to Leon Trotsky, Jan. 26, 1939.

6. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast (London: verso, 2003), p. 341.

7. Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), “Centrist Alchemy or Marxism,” pp. 262-63.

8. V.I. Lenin, The April Thesis (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 48-54

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WSWS interviews children and grandchildren of the Left Opposition Tatiana Smilga, Zorya Serebryakova, Yuri Primakov, and Tatiana Isaeva.

Top: Lenin and Trotsky on the Red Square in Moscow in 1919

Bottom: Members of the Left Opposition in 1927. Sitting: Serebryakov, Radek, Trotsky, Boguslavsky, Preobrazhensky. Standing: Rakovsky, Drobnis, Beloborodov, Sosnovsky

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Image: James Ensor - Skeletons fighting over a pickled herring (1891)

US, Europe step up threats against Russia over Ukraine

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stepped up pressure on the Russian government after a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

“We expect other nations to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and avoid provocative action,” Hagel declared. “That’s why I’m closely watching Russia’s military exercises along the Ukrainian border, which they just announced yesterday.”

Hagel’s warning comes a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry issued his own threat against Russia. “Any kind of military intervention that would violate the sovereign territorial integrity of Ukraine would be a huge, a grave mistake,” he told reporters in Washington. “The territorial integrity of Ukraine needs to be respected.”

Kerry and Hagel’s threats were echoed by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen before the NATO meeting: “The situation in Ukraine, especially in Crimea, fills us with great concern. The situation is very confusing and difficult, and it is now important that especially a breakup of Ukraine is prevented and the moderate forces will be strengthened in the country.”

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World War I Guilt: Culpability Question Divides Historians Today - SPIEGEL ONLINE

The current revival of German militarism, in which propaganda of the national socialist era has returned--the whitewashing the role of German imperialism in WWI, and the development of national socialism as an inevitable response to Bolshevism--is the historical and political context of this article.

The political significance of the attacks by academics like Service and Baberowski on Bolsheviks and Bolshevism since the collapse of the USSR is increasingly clear.

It is not incidental that historical revisionism and negation has made its official return after decades of postmodernist denials of historical truth--either our ability to know it, or its existence per se.

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