From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant

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Markin comment on this article:

The subject matter of this article details one leftist militant’s evolution from liberalism, the main starting place for virtually all militant leftists, including this writer (I have seen very few such “conversions” from those who started at the right-wing of the political spectrum), to revolutionary political back in the time of the great 1960s radical jail break-out from Cold War, red scare, white picket fence existence. While the particulars of her story may vary from mine, and others who came of political age during those heady times, the main points are very familiar. That is more evident today as, with the recent emergence of the Occupy movement, some old leftists have “risen from the grave” to show up at the various encampments to tell their “tales” of the struggle back in the day. I do note that there is something of a direct correlation between the distance from those long ago struggles and the size of the heroic role of the speaker in his or her “attic” memories. Worst many, while touting their exploits, have failed, and it can only be a conscious failure, to learn anything from our defeats and, in the end, we were defeated, defeated where it counted in the struggle for state power in order to create the “newer world” we were seeking.

A few other points. Certainly, unlike the speaker in this article, not all of us had a leg up as “red diaper babies” and grew up in a household, a Communist Party household, where the class struggle was articulated at a high level. However I have noted elsewhere when discussing my own youthful leftward political trajectory that I came out of a household that paid more than lip service to the tenets of the radical, plebeian, rank and file Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurras. I have further noted that the way that I found out about the very first political demonstration that I participated in, against nuclear weapons proliferation, at the age of 14 at the Boston Common was one called in the fall of 1960 by SANE that I learned about from an announcement in the Catholic Worker newspaper. Someone once said that lapsed Catholics make the best communists. Maybe there is something to that. However the more germane point is that some spark, some distance memory forgotten spark got each of us going. And that unspoken spark has sustained those of us who are still struggling for these many years so it must have been very powerful.

It can be written down as almost a truism that those of us who came of age in what I call the “generation of ’68,” almost to a person, cut our teeth on the black civil rights movement, or some aspect of the black liberations struggle. In my own case it was through a project to get books to black school children in Alabama sponsored by the local NAACP chapter in the very early 1960s. From there we moved on to aid the sit-in movement in the South and some of us, like the speaker, headed south. A key, a key for everyone who moved off dead-center and did not rest self-satisfied on their laurels, or Martin Luther King’s laurels, after various pieces of legislation were enacted granting black voting rights, was the rise of the Black Panthers, black nationalism in its various guises, and also the break from placid, turn the other cheek non-violence in the struggle for black liberation. Even today that divide among older political activists is apparent between those whose political development never advanced beyond fawning over King’s memory and those who went mano y mano with the black revolutionaries.

To a certain extent the division between liberal and radical perspectives over the black question found it’s parallel in the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement. (I feel compelled to name the war rather than use the generic “anti-war” so no reader gets confused about which of the myriad wars of the last half century I am referring to.). Those, including so-called revolutionaries, who opted for a mere attempt (unsuccessful) to stop that war rather than to stand in anti-imperialist solidarity with the Vietnamese can be directly held accountable for the lack of a serious anti-imperialist movement today when the American monster is ranging over the planet. It is almost a mantra among older radicals that “we stopped the war.” But, as on the black liberation question, some people refuse, consciously, refuse to learn the lessons of history. As the speaker correctly points out the way that war was stopped was when (finally and not without hesitation and political misdirection) the North Vietnamese/National Liberation Front forces swooped down Highway One in 1975.

The speaker makes many more germane points and tells some nice anecdotes (especially about that GM auto plant “invasion”) about some of the silly stuff we did and many mistakes we made before we got serious about the central role of the working class in the struggle for that “newer world.” Although I do not know if her talk was timed to take advantage of the ferment of the Occupy movement or not but the “lessons” from back in the day that we learned the hard way are ones that movement faces-if it ever gets off its porous dead-center populist collective butt.
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Workers Vanguard No. 990
11 November 2011

Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant

Part One

We print below the first part of a presentation, slightly edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at an October 15 forum in Los Angeles.

I’ve noticed that there is quite a bit of interest in and nostalgia for the activism and struggle of the 1960s. Well, that’s understandable. In the last few years, the world has plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by the Democratic Party administration of Barack Obama, following in the steps of George W. Bush. The working class, black people, Latinos and the growing mass of the poor have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable.

Every day you read of some new attack on the unions. Every day the fees go up for a college education. U.S. imperialism rampages around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, leaving death and destruction in its wake. And particularly here in the U.S., there has been precious little class struggle, social struggle, even student struggle, in response—with the notable exception of the longshore union in Longview, Washington. We are now seeing a little action from these “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, who are basically frustrated young liberals. But the bottom line is: capitalism cannot be reformed. What is needed is a Marxist perspective of international socialist revolution.

What I am going to do today is talk about the 1960s—the last time there was serious social struggle in the U.S.—and why some of us concluded that struggle, even quite militant struggle, is not enough. You need a Marxist working-class perspective and a Leninist vanguard party that can lead the working class forward to seize state power and establish socialized, collectivized property systems around the whole world.

After that long introduction, I’m going to play you an early Phil Ochs song, “I’m Going to Say It Now.” This was probably written not long after the 1964 Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley. It has a lot of the themes of that period—alienation, opposition to “in loco parentis,” etc. It’s a very liberal protest song, but it foreshadows things to come:

“Oh you’ve given me a number and you’ve taken off my name,
To get around this campus why you almost need a plane,
And you’re supporting Chang Kai-Shek, while I’m supporting Mao.
So when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now....

“I’ve read of other countries where the students take a stand,
Maybe even help to overthrow the leaders of the land
Now I wouldn’t go so far to say we’re also learnin’ how,
But when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now.”

From the 1960s up to the early ’70s, there developed a distinct generation of American leftists whose experiences were quite different from the preceding generation of leftists, whose main experiences were the Great Depression and the labor struggles of the 1930s. This generation called itself the New Left as opposed to the “old left,” which had been dominated by the pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party (CP). This New Left generation, of which I’m a part, makes up a lot of the cadre and leadership of not only the Spartacist League but also our left opponents: the Progressive Labor Party (PL), Revolutionary Communist Party, International Socialist Organization (ISO), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Workers World Party (WWP).

Let me first say a word about the 1950s. What a nasty period—the intensely anti-Communist climate after the Korean War, blacklisting, reds driven out of the unions, the Smith Act trials of CP members, deadening conformity, women forced back into the home after World War II. My parents were in the CP, and I remember when I was seven years old the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American Communists executed for supposedly betraying the “secret” of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. When I asked my parents why this was happening, they said it was because the Rosenbergs were “progressives” (a code word for CPers) and Jews. Even then I knew that this described my parents, too. Later, my mother told me that if they, my parents, were arrested, my grandparents would take care of my brother and me. Luckily, it never came to that, but this was my first encounter with the U.S. “justice system,” and I never forgot it.

The Left, Old and New

Under the immense pressure of Cold War anti-Communism, the old left—both the reformist CP and the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—suffered major right-wing defections. The SWP lost 20 percent of its membership in the Cochran-Clarke faction fight and the CP lost three-quarters of its membership in 1956-57. These ex-CPers didn’t mostly become right-wingers. Rather they mostly became liberals—they had been voting Democrat for years, anyhow. The hardcore Stalinists later became Maoists and influenced the New Left in the late ’60s, but I’ll get to that later.

These losses were heavily concentrated among the parties’ active trade unionists. This purging and defection of reds from the labor movement in the ’50s was the single most important negative factor shaping the outlook of what would become the New Left. When young political activists, white and black, entered the political scene during the civil rights movement, they encountered a labor movement with no left wing sharing their views on racial oppression or U.S. militarism. The labor bureaucrats were militant anti-Communists who had gotten their posts by working hand in glove with the government in driving the reds out of the unions and were gung ho for all of U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars.

No surprise there, but it was not just the bureaucracy. When I got a union job in the late ’60s after the New Left finally became interested in the working class, there wasn’t anybody older than me in the unions who had ever been a leftist. So what developed among the New Left was a real petty-bourgeois, anti-working-class elitism. For them, “those workers” were all “bought off” with their high wages, good union jobs, fancy pensions. Today that seems like a joke, but that was the view at the time.

Two things really brought the McCarthy period to an end: the civil rights movement and the Cuban Revolution. Castro and Che were not seen as hardline Stalinists. Well, originally they weren’t—they were petty-bourgeois nationalists. And, indeed, young would-be leftists often identified with them against the U.S. on a democratic basis of “national liberation” rather than on the basis of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact well-publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly outmoded as industrialization in the South around World War II drew blacks into the working class and the Southern cities. By the late 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society. It’s not as well known, but by the early ’60s there were huge demos in the North, too: boycotts of segregated schools, rent strikes against ghetto slumlords, protests against segregated housing and racist police brutality. These culminated in the late ’60s in a series of massive ghetto rebellions.

Radicalization of Civil Rights Militants

The first group I ever joined was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963-64 in San Francisco. I participated in various mass demos protesting job discrimination against black people—at the Sheraton Palace, at Lucky’s (now Albertsons) and on Auto Row. In retrospect, that last one seems kind of weird—for the right of blacks to be car salesmen? But these demos were huge, drawing thousands. The following summer, I decided to go down South for the second Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Summer. This was the year after civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney had been killed, but being 19 I wasn’t as fearful as I probably should have been.

When they tell the official story of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King was the undisputed leader whom everyone loved and followed. It’s not so! King’s vaunted nonviolence was really a way of trying to keep the movement liberal, respectable, reformist. His whole strategy was to appeal to the liberal Northern establishment to, please, help out black people. Pressuring the Democrats was to remain King’s consistent strategy throughout his life.

Seeking to refurbish its image, the bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to the demand for legal equality in the South. At the same time, the federal government sought to restrain the most militant elements of the civil rights movement and usually did little to prevent the violent suppression of civil rights activists by Southern authorities, often collaborating in that suppression. This could not help but bring the question of the class nature of the capitalist state, as an organ of repression, to the fore. SNCC was formed under the auspices of MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After some hard experiences in the South with the cops, Klan and Democrats (who ran the South, after all), SNCC moved to the left, increasingly frustrated with and eventually hostile to the Northern liberal establishment—and King himself.

When I was there in the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles Watts upheaval broke out. Martin Luther King said that “as powerful a police force as possible” should be brought to L.A. to stop it. SNCC activists on my project cursed King for that. SNCC had broken with mainstream liberalism but had not yet definitely latched onto black nationalism. I could see that SNCC was having a total political identity crisis, but I sure didn’t have the answers. By this time, I hated the Democrats and was convinced that racial oppression was integral to the capitalist system and wasn’t going to go away just because black people could ride at the front of the bus. So I decided I should spend some time in Berkeley checking out the socialist groups.

The early years of the 1960s in the South were a key moment. If the SWP, which had been the Trotskyist party, had remained a revolutionary party and concentrated its forces in the Southern civil rights movement, it may well have won to Trotskyism a large fraction of those young black militants who eventually became black nationalists. That would have really changed the political scene. But by the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and tailed non-proletarian class forces. Domestically, it abstained from the Southern civil rights movement. Internationally, the SWP was uncritically cheerleading for the petty-bourgeois radical-nationalist leadership of the Cuban Revolution.

Trotskyists should have been calling for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state and, at the same time, calling on the Cuban proletariat to establish a regime of workers democracy by sweeping away the Castroite bureaucracy through a political revolution. But the SWP refused to criticize Castro. These two questions—Cuba and the black question—which had decisively broken open the McCarthy period, were exactly the two questions the SWP couldn’t deal with. In the process, they abandoned the centrality of the working class and the necessity of building Trotskyist parties in every country.

It is during this period that the Spartacist League originated as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the SWP, fighting on these two questions. In an August 1963 document, “The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” the RT wrote: “We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.” After being expelled from the SWP, the small Spartacist forces intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North. Look at Spartacist Bound Volume No. 1—the SL, founded in 1966, was intervening on the black question all the time and calling on militants to break with the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans a capitalist party. The call for a Freedom Labor Party was an axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. In the mid ’60s, Spartacists were arguing the right line but lacked the numbers and, more importantly, the acquired political authority to decisively influence the internal factional struggles in SNCC. So the crucial moment was lost.

The Rise of Students for a Democratic Society

I could say a lot more about the civil rights movement, but I want to talk about how this massive ferment influenced the student movement. The most organized expression of the New Left was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Of course, that sentence is sort of a contradiction in terms given how deliberately disorganized SDS was: participatory democracy, every chapter going its own way, etc. Restarted in 2006, the new SDS is a liberal campus group that combines parochial campus activism with Democratic Party lesser-evilism. We have an excellent article about SDS headlined “From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again” (WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The original SDS went from liberalism to radicalism; the new group is running the film in reverse.

In well-publicized interviews, leaders of the new SDS push the myth that Communism destroyed the first SDS and call for such leftists to stay out of SDS. WWP and Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” and more about these reformists’ toothless politics and their own lesser-evilism. Here in L.A., during the 2008 election we saw FRSO as part of SDS busily holding a “no to McCain” campaign rally at UCLA, which in plain English meant “yes to Obama.” The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from.

The original SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and labor movement. Populated by “State Department socialists,” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members Victor and Walter Reuther—the labor traitors who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s—and Sidney Hook. Once close to the CP, Hook turned repentant and became a staunch supporter of American “democracy.” Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union. These types are the ones for whom the term “CIA socialist” or “State Department socialist” was invented.

But the youth were getting a little restive. In 1960, the Student League for Industrial Democracy changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society and began to grow. In 1962, in response to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—a failed attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolution—SDSers posed the question: “Whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways?” Obviously not! The SDS 1962 Port Huron Statement took tiny steps away from anti-Communism, opining that “the American Military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.”

Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. I recommend Kirkpatrick Sale’s book SDS (1973) if you want to know all the details. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ” (a reference to Lyndon Johnson) instead of the official Democratic Party slogan: “All the way with LBJ.”

But the times they were a-changin’, as the song by Bob Dylan said. In 1964 at UC Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement broke out in response to the administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. What happened was that a young activist from CORE, Jack Weinberg, had set up an unauthorized literature table in Sproul Plaza. For this terrible crime, he was arrested. I will just comment here that considering all the trouble and hassle the SL has these days in setting up literature tables on campuses for our sub drive, one has to conclude that not too much has changed!

In this case, 3,000 students converged on Sproul Plaza and blocked in the police car. For the next 32 hours, the police car served as an impromptu podium for those defending the right of students to “free speech.” Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown—the father of the current governor—FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.

A funny addendum here: Jack Weinberg, the guy in the police car, was the one who said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” I don’t know if right then, but certainly within a few years, he was in the International Socialists (the predecessor to the thoroughly reformist ISO). And by 1984 on the 20th anniversary of the FSM, the SF Chronicle reported that Weinberg and Mario Savio, the best-known leader of the FSM, were both registered Democrats. So they sure weren’t trustworthy when they got older.

The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Left

Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest to the moral outrage felt by student activists opposing American imperialist aims. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from LID entirely.

Now, I didn’t go to Berkeley from ’64 to ’68. Maybe I should have, but when I had to make my choice in ’62, Berkeley was politically dead as a doornail. I viewed Berkeley as huge and soulless, so I went to a small liberal arts school in New Mexico instead. But this did give me a sense of how quickly things can change, especially among the petty bourgeoisie. One minute Berkeley was all bouffant hairdos and “frat rats.” The next time I went there on summer vacation, it was a hotbed of student activism and everybody looked like a hippie. And the people were all the same, I could see that.

That first SDS-organized national antiwar march took place in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1965. It got 20-25,000 people, which totally amazed SDS. At the invitation of the SDS leaders, the rally was addressed by two liberal U.S. Senators. One of them denounced the “expansionist” policies of Communist China and called for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam. A few years later, it would be inconceivable for SDS to invite Democratic Senators to their antiwar protests, and anyone who spoke of Chinese expansionism would have been booed off the stage.

Let me comment first that many leftists and liberals claim that the Vietnam antiwar movement ended the war in Vietnam. No way! The Vietnamese won on the battlefield—that’s what ended the war. But this kind of liberal-pacifist antiwar movement has nevertheless become the model for all of the reformist left’s subsequent antiwar demos. If you don’t believe me, go to any PSL/ANSWER demo, where you will find exactly these same reformist politics.

We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, there was another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend it to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans such as “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution! No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”

The Split in the Antiwar Movement

As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” After all, the liberal establishment, including the Democratic president Johnson, backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam. This drove the radical student movement to the left and opened it to revolutionary politics. Soon those who had been calling for “part of the way with LBJ” were chanting: “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Here is a description of SDS circa 1967 from the novel Vida by Marge Piercy, who had been in SDS and is a bourgeois feminist. She refers to the group SAW, but I believe what she is describing is SDS:

“Every person in SAW had their own politics—anarchist, liberal, communist, democratic-socialist, syndicalist, Catholic-worker, Maoist, Schactmanite [sic], Spartacist—but what mattered was the politics of the act.… Everyone was accommodated in the vast lumbering movement. Vida was content to be of the New Left, without a fancier label. All that hairsplitting—that was what the poor Old Lefties had sat around doing in dreary meetings in the fifties nobody else attended while the resident FBI agent took notes. Now they knew that everything must be done and they must speak to everyone, through the poetry of the act, through the theatre of the streets,… SAW was a fiercely, totally democratic organization, open to anyone with or without the low dues, with an elected leadership usually galloping in one direction while the members marched in another. Chapters did as they pleased and projects happened because enough people did them. Program was hotly debated and then often coldly ignored, unless it really was up from the grass roots. SAW was uncontrollable and lush as a vacant-lot jungle.”

Spartacists sporadically intervened into SDS in the mid ’60s, and all I can say is I don’t envy the comrade trying to do an intervention into that “lush jungle.”

Now, there was a left-right split in the antiwar movement just as there had been in the civil rights movement, where MLK had been the right wing. SDS was the left here, and the right wing was the CP and the once-Trotskyist SWP. While the CP continued to preach its class-collaborationist program of electoral support to lesser-evil Democrats, the SWP became the main organizer of peace crawls designed to cater to liberal bourgeois spokesmen—that is, popular-frontist, class-collaborationist formations based on a liberal bourgeois program. One thing that the SWP was adamant on was that these rallies and demos absolutely could not call for the Vietnamese’s military victory. Oh no, that would upset the Democrats—so the slogans had to be kept to “Out now” or “Bring our boys home!”

As the war dragged on, there were some Democrats who thought the U.S. was spending too much on napalm and Agent Orange for Vietnam when it should be building its nuclear arsenal to fight the real danger, the Soviet Union. So Democrats became a regular feature of these antiwar rallies. Often these now-antiwar Democrats (bourgeois defeatists) were viciously anti-labor. You can easily imagine how violently anti-Spartacist the SWP would get when the SL called for “Bourgeoisie out of the antiwar movement” and “Labor strikes against the war!”

This came to a head at a 1971 conference in New York City. SL comrades attempted to put forward a motion to exclude ruling-class politicians from the conference. They said, this is an antiwar conference—how can you have representatives of the ruling class that’s prosecuting the war? When the SWP would not entertain the motion, our comrades together with supporters of PL and SDS heckled Democratic Senator Vance Hartke during his speech. Comrades chanted, “Labor strikes against the war” when Victor Reuther began his speech. The SL didn’t attempt to drive them off the stage or anything like that. In response, the SWP went ballistic and sent their goon squad on a vicious assault against the protesters, some of whom were beaten, with one PL member reportedly thrown through a glass door. Assisting the SWP thugs were the minions of Tim Wohlforth’s Workers League, now the Socialist Equality Party.

But it wasn’t just the SL versus the SWP. Literally thousands of radicalized students were repelled by the SWP’s reformism and pacifism. I came back to the Bay Area in late 1968, and for one of those Spring Mobilizations (in ’69 or ’70) I heard that New Leftists in Berkeley were setting up an “anti-imperialist coalition” to march in the SWP-initiated peace demo. This sounded great to me. Like many others, I hated the “give peace a chance,” liberal, pro-American quality of these demos. I had decided that “our boys” were the ones fighting on the other side, and I was rooting for them. When this anti-imperialist contingent marched up, it looked like the SWP marshals were going to physically exclude us. But I guess that they decided that the contingent was too large and doing so would create too much of a scene.

The SWP sure gave Trotskyism a bad name. I identified Trotskyism with the worst kind of liberal reformism. They were always chanting to keep it “peaceful, legal.” My friends and I were chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” This was a two-edged development, though, because let’s be clear that we were calling not only for military but also political support to the Stalinist bureaucracy in Vietnam.

By 1968, SDS had hundreds of campus chapters around the country. There was massive ferment on the campuses, particularly after the student strike, building occupation and massive arrests at Columbia University protesting racism and the Vietnam War in the spring of 1968. In his book, Sale gives a quote from the bourgeois press of this time on SDS:

“These youngsters, organized in the Students for a Democratic Society, (S.D.S.), are acting out a revolution—not a protest, and not a rebellion, but an honest-to-God revolution. They see themselves as the Che Guevaras of our society, and their intention is to seize control of the university, destroy its present structure, and establish the ‘liberated’ university as the redoubt from which to storm and overthrow ‘bourgeois’ America. This is what they say they are doing—they are the least conspiratorial and most candid of revolutionists—and this is what in fact they are doing.”

Noting that this gave SDS a whole lot of credit, Sale goes on to say: “The most ardently resistant SDSer couldn’t have put it better—and even he wouldn’t have been so convinced.”

Then there was the Democratic National Convention in fall 1968. Most of the protesters opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Sale describes, SDS activists rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDS members propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine. It had a huge impact nationally.
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Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011

Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant

Part Two

We print below the second part of a presentation, slightly edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at an October 15 forum in Los Angeles. Part One appeared in WV No. 990 (11 November).

At the same time that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was growing, the ghettos were exploding. With the civil rights movement unable to change the hellish conditions of black life in the North, there was a rising level of frustrated expectations. There were a whole series of ghetto upheavals in the mid to late ’60s that were repressed with extreme police/National Guard violence. Young militants were breaking from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism of MLK. The Black Panthers (BPP) were the best of a generation of young black activists who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. Unfortunately, the Panthers, along with most of the New Left, rejected the organized working class as the agent of black freedom and socialist revolution. The Panthers looked to black ghetto youth as the vanguard of black struggle.

The underlying ideology of the Panthers was that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary. But in fact the lumpenproletariat in the ghetto, removed from the means of production, has no real social power. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them more vulnerable to state repression. They faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Panther and talented journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” has been on death row on frame-up charges for decades now. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party (CP), its lawyers and concomitantly the Democratic Party.

But let me give some quotes from Black Panther leader David Hilliard’s speech to an antiwar demo in San Francisco in the fall of 1969. It says something that by ’69 and ’70 the speakers at these mass marches included a Black Panther and the Democratic mayor of SF. Hilliard says he had been warned by the BPP leadership not to curse and not to get mad because that would alienate the white liberals, but as you can see he did both. Like Hilliard, I usually try not to curse in speeches, but I will read this quote as it appeared in Phil Foner’s The Black Panthers Speak (1995):

“There’s too many American flags out here and our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, says that the American flag and the American eagle are the true symbols of fascism.…

“So then, we would like to ask the American people do they want peace in Vietnam. Well, do you? (audience) ‘Yes.’ Do you want peace in the Black communities? (audience) ‘Yes.’ Well you goddamned sure can’t get it with no guitars, you sure can’t get it demonstrating. The only way you’re going to get peace in Vietnam is to withdraw the oppressive forces from the Black communities right here in Babylon.”

As the crowd became restive and some started to boo, Hilliard got mad:

“We say down with the American fascist society. Later for Richard Milhous Nixon, the m-----f----r. Later for all the pigs of the power structure. Later for all the people out here that don’t want to hear me curse.… Because Richard Nixon is an evil man. This is the m-----f----r that unleashed the counter-insurgent teams upon the BPP.… This is the man that sends his vicious murderous dogs out into the Black community.… We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill any m-----f----r that stands in the way of our freedom. We ain’t here for no goddamned peace, because we know that we can’t have no peace because this country was built on war. And if you want peace you got to fight for it.”

While the liberals were booing, my friends and I were cheering his opposition to pacifism. The Panthers had become broadly popular. There was a real convergence between the white left and the black left. Black people are not a separate nation but an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom as a race-color caste. Hilliard was subsequently brought up on charges for threatening the life of the president. Later the charges were dropped—perhaps because it was obvious that no one plans an assassination attempt in a speech in front of upward of 150,000 people in Golden Gate Park!

The Limits of Student Radicalism

Just as the Panthers came up against the dead end of their lumpen vanguard strategy, SDS came up against the dead end of student vanguardism. As I said earlier, the New Left had been very anti-working-class. Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, who considered himself a classical Marxist, toured the U.S. in 1966, speaking at Vietnam antiwar protests. He was appalled by the intellectual elitism he found among young radicals who considered themselves anti-capitalist. Deutscher said:

“Do you really take such a contemptuous view of your working classes that you think that you alone are so sensitive or so noble as to be dissatisfied with this degrading society and that they cannot find it in themselves to be dissatisfied? Do you really believe that they are so much more prone, and by nature conditioned, to be corrupted by the meretricious advantages of this war-flourishing capitalism than you are?”

Well, that is pretty much what many did think. Deutscher also said something to the effect that he would exchange all the peace marches for one good dockworkers strike. Most of the New Left didn’t understand that, either.

What happened was that the very success of the student strikes demonstrated their impotence. In the spring of 1970, President Nixon ordered American troops in South Vietnam into neighboring Cambodia. In the ensuing campus protests, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State. Ten days later, cops killed two black students at Jackson State. Of course, the second murderous assault didn’t get as much coverage, black life being cheap for the bourgeoisie, then as now. These events triggered protests involving four and a half million students—half the U.S. student population—and many colleges remained shut through the rest of the semester. But this did not stop the Vietnam War.

If this protest demonstrated the impotence of “student power,” the May-June 1968 events in France demonstrated the actual power of the working class. Leftist student protest there triggered a workers general strike that shook the de Gaulle regime to its core. France was engulfed in a pre-revolutionary crisis that the French CP barely managed to stabilize and sell out. The incipient workers revolution in France reaffirmed in real life the revolutionary potential of the working class. This made a lot of us think twice, especially since there was a strike wave in the U.S. in ’69 and ’70—a General Electric strike, a nationwide postal wildcat strike (the first major strike against the federal government), a Midwest Teamsters wildcat and a General Motors strike.

Needless to say, this was not news to the Spartacist League. As Marxists, the SL understands that the motor force of history is the class struggle—today between the capitalist class and the proletariat. The capitalists own the means of production like the land, mines and factories, while the workers have nothing but their labor power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Because the working class turns the wheels of production, it has the social power and the organization to overthrow the capitalist rulers. But the working class has to understand its power in order to use it. For that you need a revolutionary vanguard party that can bring communist consciousness to the proletariat.

A key prop of capitalism is to keep the working class divided along ethnic and racial lines, which in this country means foremost the segregation of black people. The SL fights for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integrationism: the working class must fight against all instances of racist oppression and discrimination, while at the same time genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come about through socialist revolution that smashes capitalism. There will be no socialist revolution without the working class taking up the fight for black freedom.

Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. This was the greatest victory for the working people of the world: it gave the program of proletarian revolution flesh and blood. The proletariat seized power and created a workers state based on collectivized property and soviets (workers councils). The young workers state eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the right to self-determination of the many nations oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule. The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education.

The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia but was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The American rulers have always seen a connection between the Russian Revolution and the struggles of black people in the U.S.—and rightly so. The Bolshevik Revolution was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations of the time. “Black and Red” is the American bourgeoisie’s greatest fear.

The SL attempted to convey some of this understanding in various leaflets written at the time and in sporadic interventions into SDS. In 1967, as young radicals turned to confrontation with the cops, the SL wrote: “Personal sacrifice can never substitute for a mass movement…this does not mean reverting to the simple pacifist humanitarianism of the official peace movement in order to get middle-class liberals on the picket line. What it does mean is tapping the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American society; the black ghetto uprisings and rash of militant strikes indicate the depth and explosiveness of this discontent.”

The SL fought for a one-day general strike and raised the slogan: “Labor strikes against the war!” The SL also controversially opposed the draft resistance campaign and insisted that if drafted, young radicals should go. In a position paper put forward in SDS, we argued that the voluntary purging of radicals from the army would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. We said that young militants should go with working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation in the army.

Stalinism Versus Trotskyism

Another question that the SL took up in this period was the question of Maoism-Stalinism. The New Left didn’t want to deal with these old, musty debates, but these questions come after you. Stalinism versus Trotskyism, the nature of the workers states—these questions cannot be avoided. SDS liberals of the mid 1960s were poring over Mao’s “Little Red Book” of quotations by 1968.

One thing that caused this change was the tremendous authority of the Vietnamese Stalinists. They looked like they were going to and then did beat U.S. imperialism, and they made no bones about being old-line Stalinists. Since Ho Chi Minh didn’t claim to have his own ideology, it was Maoism that was the beneficiary of New Leftists looking for some kind of “new” Marxism that would be more radical than old-line Soviet Stalinism and its practice of “peaceful coexistence” with U.S. imperialism, which meant betraying social and class struggles internationally. China was under the gun of U.S. imperialism, so the Chinese Communist Party leadership was talking more left at that moment.

On a sociological level, some of the Stalinists in the American Communist Party who hadn’t simply quit to become liberals became Maoists—for example, Progressive Labor (PL)—and influenced the New Left. Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration but rather was what we called “Khrushchevism under the gun.” (Khrushchev was the Soviet premier at the time.) Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, the SL exposed the repeated attempts by the Chinese Maoists to form a reactionary anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes were raining death and destruction on Vietnam.

In the article “NLF Program: Fetter on Victory” (Spartacist supplement, May 1968) about the National Liberation Front (NLF) the SL wrote:

“There has been an understandable but nevertheless unfortunate tendency on the part of the American left to idealize Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the NLF, and for radicals to turn their correct demands for military victory against imperialism and its puppets into uncritical political support for these leaders and their politics. This is a grave error, for not only do these would-be revolutionaries not understand the deformities of those they support—and are extremely likely to feel personally betrayed when the inevitable occurs—but are likely to carry over the Stalinist hallmarks of class-collaboration and murderous opportunism into the American revolutionary movement. It is vitally necessary to keep in mind that Ho Chi Minh and his co-thinkers have already sold out the Vietnamese revolution twice before.”

This article also presciently predicted that in the best of circumstances the “NLF will simply bypass its program and will then set out to make a limited, distorted and bureaucratic revolution from the top.” That is exactly what they did. And this is also why the SL began to raise my favorite slogan of all time: “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” This slogan cut not only against liberal pacifism at home but also against the limits of Vietnamese Stalinism. Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos.

And that point from the Spartacist article, about the carrying over of class collaborationism and opportunism into the American movement, was so true. One of my old friends went to a conference in Vancouver in ’67 or ’68 and met with Vietnamese women, not only women in the CP of Vietnam but also women combatants in the NLF of South Vietnam. Of course, she was very impressed by the presence of these women who were actually fighting U.S. imperialism with gun in hand. And, of course, the Americans wanted advice on how to build an American revolutionary movement.

But the Vietnamese kept steering the conversation away from that subject. Instead, all the Americans got were reformist clichés about building the biggest possible movement on the broadest possible basis—watch out when people start telling you that, it’s code for class collaboration—and helping elect whomever would help end the war, i.e., the Democrats, who else. My friend was very disappointed by this, as were the people like myself whom she told this to. We couldn’t figure it out and filed it away as one of those things that you better not think about too hard.

The New Left Turns to the Working Class

I do want to give one example of the New Left meets the working class from my own history. In 1969, I was in a women’s liberation group, and we were so impressed by the working-class struggle in France and so frustrated by student struggles and peace marches that we decided that we had to get out of Berkeley and organize the workers. We got together a group of men and women, husbands, boyfriends, friends in the movement (as it was called). We were planning on organizing white workers because we were very much imbued with the black nationalist idea of polyvanguardism—that blacks should organize blacks, whites should organize whites, and so on.

We did a demographic study of the Bay Area and decided that the place where we could find the most young white workers was Hayward. What a boring suburb, but we all moved there, 20 or 30 of us. Later, one of our people got a job at the General Motors auto plant in Fremont, and we decided that we would start a radical caucus there. We thought you had to do something flashy to get working people’s attention, start off with a bang. So we printed up a leaflet about the birthday of BPP leader Huey Newton, which we thought was very appropriate to jolt white people out of their racism. And there were a lot of blacks working there, too, who probably did know who Huey Newton was.

We took the plant’s tour train with the leaflets stuffed under our coats. At a pre-arranged moment, we leapt off and ran around like maniacs, handing out leaflets and throwing them in the cars. Whether the workers were convinced by our politics, I don’t know, but they thought it was wild. The bosses stopped every assembly line in the plant and proceeded to chase us around. Workers hid us and showed us where to go. They figured that as long as we were there the lines would stay down. Assembly line work is hard and boring, and we were an interesting diversion that had never been seen before. It took a long time before management could round us up. They didn’t even think to stop us when we announced that we were leaving and walked out and got in our cars.

Meanwhile, during this exact period in ’69, SDS was splitting due to the real inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late 1960s. In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of PL’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When this didn’t work, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference.

The SL remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS due to its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. The SL referred to PL, more leftist at this time than now, as “Trotskyists with a prefrontal lobotomy.” The SL issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (reprinted in “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008). PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice.

The SL’s Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the 1917 Russian Revolution and Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of its bureaucratic degeneration.

The Futile Strategy of the Weathermen

Even in Hayward, we felt the effects of the SDS split. We had been organizing the working class for at least six months and had put out a ton of leaflets. Actually, there was more interest in our politics than you might imagine, the working class being very restive. We did some high school organizing at a working-class high school in Hayward. After passing out some leaflets protesting the war in Vietnam, we stood outside the school with a bullhorn and shouted: “Come out of your prisons!” The most surprising part was that several hundred did, and we led a march all over Hayward.

But some of the people in the Hayward Collective began to feel that the working class just wasn’t responding sufficiently. So they got ahold of the Weathermen, who were part of the anti-PL side of the split in SDS. The Weathermen—named, I believe, after a Bob Dylan song which includes the line: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—had a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state. They practiced terrorism in the name of Third World nationalism.

Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, the Weather Underground would conduct acts of individual terrorism that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism but a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to government crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile. At the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. While politically opposing the Weathermen, the SL fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” The rest of the left turned its back on them.

The Weathermen came to visit the Hayward Collective to win us to their variety of Third World nationalism, arguing that the American working class was totally bought off and could never make a socialist revolution. They presented their views, and then they sang us some songs. You think I’m kidding. Believe me, I’m not. First they sang, “We all live in a Weatherman machine” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.” Then they sang “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather” sort of captured their perspective. Those of us who believed in the revolutionary potential of the American working class decided maybe our theme song should be the Creedence song “Lodi” about the small, remote California town, as in “stuck in Lodi again” boring. This forum seems to include a lot of discussion about music—maybe it should have a soundtrack to go with it.

Since there was a minority of us who were not convinced, several others from our collective and I went to meet Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weathermen who was on the “Ten Most Wanted” list in the U.S. I had seen her “Wanted” picture up in the local post office. We were supposed to meet on Telegraph Avenue in front of Cody’s Bookstore. Dohrn was late, and everyone was worried. She claimed that she had been up the street stealing a pair of earrings. Meeting in such a public place as Telegraph Avenue was dumb enough, but even I thought that was crazy when you were underground. But it was all a part of the “outlaw” image.

Finally, we sat down to meet, and she asked me what I was going to do when the North Koreans sailed in to Puget Sound, presumably to take over since the American working class was supposed to be so bought off. Perhaps not answering this on a very deep level—and I was kind of intimidated since she was a big shot—I just said that I didn’t think that was going to happen. She said that just showed what an American-chauvinist racist I was. So I didn’t join the Weathermen, and Dohrn and her hubby Bill Ayers eventually went back to Chicago, where they hang out in liberal circles and know such unsavory people as Barack Obama.

Breaking with Feminism

The women, two others and myself, who didn’t join the Weathermen then began a sort of feminist working-class organizing collective in East Oakland together with women we had known from the Berkeley Women’s Liberation group and others. Why we became more feminist, since the Hayward Collective certainly did not split along gender lines, I’m not quite sure. In any case, we had our East Oakland Women’s Collective, and we worked with other women to set up a citywide Oakland Women’s Liberation Group, which probably included a couple hundred women over the years. I was among those who went to work in a glass-bottle-blowing factory in East Oakland, and others went to work as operators at the phone company. There are a million more ridiculous stories from this period—“socialist feminists meet the working class”—but you don’t want to be here until midnight.

At the phone company, we saw in living color where feminism led—that is, right across the class line. We were radical feminists with a working-class bent, but the bottom line is that Marxism and feminism are counterposed. Feminism is a bourgeois ideology that asserts that the main division in society is between men and women rather than class versus class. Its logic is that all women have more in common with each other than they do with men, regardless of class. Feminism is politically incapable of resolving the most basic aspects of women’s oppression because it functions entirely within the framework of bourgeois rule. In contrast, Marxism looks to the power of the working class as the motor force for social progress. The private property system, backed by the capitalist state, and the family are the most basic and deeply intertwined aspects of class society. They cannot be “reformed” away. The inescapable conclusion is that the entire capitalist system must go.

Our collective was working through the Operators Defense Committee, which featured an eclectic combination of New Left, Maoist and workerist politics, with a heavy overlay of feminism and male exclusionism. But we were quite shaken up when there was a strike of electrical workers, who were mostly men, at the phone company. We saw that many of the women whom we had helped to recruit to women’s consciousness were recruiting others to cross the picket lines, using all the feminist arguments we had told them. “Well, we’re more oppressed, what have they ever done to fight for women’s rights? So, therefore, it’s OK to cross the picket line.” We were horrified. We were somewhat ambiguous on unions, but we knew one thing: you never cross a picket line. We had been following a feminist strategy of organizing women around their own oppression, and it didn’t lead them to a broader understanding or socialist consciousness. It led to strikebreaking.

There was a Spartacist-supported caucus in the Communications Workers of America (CWA) called the Militant Action Caucus (MAC). The MAC was based on class-struggle politics and a series of transitional demands, which are designed to link current consciousness to the necessity of the conquest of power by the proletariat. Over a period of a couple of years, culminating in the 1971 national CWA strike, we were able to test out in action our feminist strategy versus the revolutionary strategy of the SL and the class-struggle politics of the MAC. Having had some negative experiences with other groups like PL and the Revolutionary Union (predecessor of the Revolutionary Communist Party), I came grudgingly to the conclusion that only the Trotskyists of the SL seemed to know how to do working-class organizing.

Finally, even in the feminist Oakland Women’s Liberation Group, the dreaded question of Maoism versus Trotskyism came up when we helped set up what was essentially a Marxist study group. With some push from women around the SL, Trotskyist works like The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs were included as readings. What an eye-opener! Stalinism led to the bloody defeat of the Chinese Revolution of the late 1920s and betrayed many other revolutionary opportunities, as did Maoism. All that Maoist class collaborationism, the belief that in the underdeveloped countries you should work with your own bourgeoisie—whether called the “bloc of four classes” or the “united front against imperialism”—could no longer be ignored. Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution really is the only alternative to placing confidence in the backward, imperialist- dependent bourgeoisie of an oppressed country as the vehicle for liberation.

A bunch of us East Oakland women, after hard, sometimes bruising, political discussions with the SL, decided in the summer of 1972 that we needed to join an internationalist Leninist vanguard party, embodied, at least in its nucleus, in the SL. Our eclectic wanderings on the path to Leninism are mainly important in the context of the SL’s call in 1969 for revolutionary regroupment. Here the Spartacist League called for “political and theoretical polarization of the ostensibly revolutionary groupings, leading ultimately to a left-communist regroupment of all organizations, factions, tendencies and individuals who stand on an anti-revisionist Marxist program, toward the formation of a Leninist vanguard party.”

What was proposed was not a non-aggression pact but, if anything, an intensification of political struggle. This perspective embodied the Leninist conception that a party is built through a series of splits and fusions. It worked. The SL tripled in size between 1971 and 1974, regrouping with subjectively revolutionary elements breaking from Maoism, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) reformism and New Leftism: for example, the Communist Working Collective of L.A., the Buffalo Marxist Caucus, elements of the Leninist Faction of the SWP and the Mass Strike group in Boston, as well as assorted feminists and former black nationalists, among others.

Today is not 1972, and there aren’t many subjectively revolutionary organizations or groupings around. I don’t think we are going to regroup with “Occupy Wall Street,” and there don’t seem to be any inchoate revolutionary tendencies in the International Socialist Organization or Workers World Party. Recruitment of thoughtful, unusual individuals is the order of the day, and it is hard mental work. But things change, capitalism breeds class struggle. However, the precondition for a socialist revolution is a party. As Trotsky said in Lessons of October (1924): “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.” We urge you to join us in the struggle to build the party necessary to lead international proletarian revolution.

From #Occupied Boston (#TomemonosBoston)-Day 60-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-The Max Daddy (or Mama) Document Of Working-Class Revolution-Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto"-"A spectre is haunting Europe (and America) -- the spectre of communism."

Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:

There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call themselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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Markin comment October 22, 2011

As part of my comment, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:

“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”

A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world aborning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)

I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.

And as always-everybody, young or old, needs to stand by this slogan - An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers Everywhere! Hands Off Occupy Boston !

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Markin comment October 26, 2011:

Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early Soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and early antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37:

“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”

In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear-crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France.
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The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels


A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.


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Bourgeois and Proletarians [1]


The history of all hitherto existing society [2] is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: [4] here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France); afterward, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general -- the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.

Constant revolutionising of 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 opinions, 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 condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.

They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.

The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.

It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production.

Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production.

In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labor increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.

Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, in the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first, the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the work of people of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois condition of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labor, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so.

At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more.

The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating.

The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the Ten-Hours Bill in England was carried.

Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole super incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.

The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law.

It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Proletarians and Communists

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In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the 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 mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:

(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.

(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Let us now take wage labour.

The average price of wage labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage labourer appropriates by means of his labour merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.

You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage labour when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode of production and form of property -- historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production -- this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading civilized countries at least is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."

"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.







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[1] By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition] [Back]

[2] That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Family, Private Property and the State, [Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthumus und des Staats], second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels] [Back]

[3] Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild. [Engels] [Back]

[4] "Commune" was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the "Third Estate". Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country, for its political development, France. [It] was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels] [Back]

Note on the Text: Text from the Marxist Internet Archive. Some extra paragraph breaks have been added to make it easier to read.