upliont

With this issue, we are initiating a monthly magazine of revolutionary socialism continuing the best of the bimonthly International Socialist Review and the monthly Young Socialist. We are happy to be able to bring out once again in the United States a theoretical and polemical magazine of genuine Marxism every month. The revolutionary movement in this country has not been able to publish a magazine of this nature on a regular monthly basis since 1947, when growing reaction and the downturn in the class struggle forced the Fourth bzternational, predecessor of the [nternationa[ Socialist Review, to adopt a bimonthly schedule. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthyite witchhunt, a further retrenchment to a quarterly schedule was unavoidable. The radicalization which began at the end of the 1950s, and has since deepened and expanded, has led to a strengthening of the revolutionary movement and an upsurge in interest in the ideas of that movement. The step forward we are now taking with this new periodical is indicative of the growth in size and influence of the Marxist component of the new radicalization. We are convinced that the time is right for a publication aimed at the growing numbers of people who are being drawn into action against the capitalist government and its policies, and who are beginning to grapple seriously with revolutionary politics and Marxist ideas. The Interrzat ionalS()ciaiist Reuiew will discuss and analyze the key issues faced by all the growing movements for social change, bringing to these questions the Marxist method

and the lessons and experiences of the world revolutionary movement. The [international Socialist Review incorporate the Young Socialist, which was the monthly magazine of theYoung Socialist Alliance, and the bimonthly Internationa[ Socialist Reuiew, which was published by members of the Socialist Workers Party. The uniting of these two publications provides both the material resources and personnel that make possible the publication of a much expanded monthly magazine. And the collaboration of the members and supporters of the YSA and SWP in promoting and distributing the magazine will, we are confident, guarantee that the ideas of revolutionary socialism will reach the broadest possible audience. The name International Socialist l&view represents the continuation of a tradition of revolutionary Marxism in the United States which dates back to 1900. In that year the lnternationaf Socialist Review first appeared. Until 1918, when it was forced to cease publication, it was utilized by the left wing of the socialist movement as a weapon in the fight against opportunism and in defense of revolutionary principles. The list of contributors to the International Socialist Review in that period encompasses the full range of Marxist thinkers and revolutionary fighters of the socialist movement: Gene Debs, Bill Haywood, Vincent St. John, John Reed, Louis C. Fraina, .James P. Cannon, and many others. Articles by European revolutionaries also appeared, including works by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring. The February 1918 issue featured the preface to Trotskys book, The Bolsheuiki and World Peace. This was enough for the Wilson administration in Washington to bar the magazine from the mails, and it was forced to cease publication after that issue.

The International Socialist Review thus has its origins in a revolutionary socialist tradition dating back seventy years. It has always been a magazine of principled Marxism and we are proud to carry that name into the 1970s.
The article in this issue by Ernest

Mandel is based on a lecture he gave to the combined economics and philosophy classes at St. Olaf College in North field, Minnesota, in September 1968, during a tour he made of the United States. Mandel has since been twice barred from returning to visit the United States by the INixon administration. The law under which the ban has been institutedis the notorious 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. This law, among other things, excludes from the United States certain categories of foreigners who are members of proscribed organizations on a secret list drawn up by the Justice Department. Mandels previous visits (in 1962 and 1968) were allowed because the prohibition had been waived. ,Vixons attorney general John Mitchell, however, refused to make this concession again. In so deciding, he chose to ignore a recommendation from the State Department that Mandel be allowed in. In response to this attempt to resurrect witchhunt policies, six American scholars have decided to force Mitchell and Secretary of State William Rogers to grant Mandel a visa. Their suit was
CONTINUED ON PAGE I I

MAY 1970 VOL. 31 No. 3

12

THE SCIENCE OF REVOLUTIONS ART OF MAKING THEM

A n assessment of the in

AND THE

By George Novcsck

scious plonnlng
philosopher,

role of empiricism and of conrevolutions by o leading Morxisf

By Ernest Mondel

18

THE MARXIST THEORY OF ALIENATION Mon. Is alienation a permanent condition of mankind?

de/gives the Marxistanswer. 24

TEN YEARS OF THE NEW LEFT By lorry Seigle
in / 960, prom What did it Leninism,

The New Left mode

accomplish ?

its appearance and

ising to surpass Marxism

30

LENINS

SUPPRESSED

SPEECH ON ULTRALEFTISM

By Leon Trotsky

An article tenary

from the archives published here far the ftrst time in English on the occasion of the Lenin cen-

34

TROTSKY IN COYOACAN
Joseph Hansen, secretary editor to

By Joseph Hansen
and the

former 39 51

IntercontinentalPress Trotsky, gives an account of

of life in Mexico.

exiled revolutionary

BUT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?

A ploy of the wor~]enrs IIber OtIOrI

By Myrna Lamb

movement.

BUILDING

A MASS MOVEMENT

FOR BLACK LIBERATION

By Elizabeth Barnes

A r evlew of o new book by Robert Alletl.

2 4 6
5:
EDITOR:

UP FRONT EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES ON WORLD REVOLUTION READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT BOOKS
Larry Selgle EDITOR: EDITORS:

MANAGING ASSOCIATE

DickRoberts
Elizabeth Marty Barnes, Nelson Blackstock, George Navack,

Lee Smith, Tony Thomas BUSINESS MANAGER: DESIGN:

0 Intermtio.ol ternationol

Rudenstein

Nelson

Blackstock
Re~iew 1970. Published rmo.thly (except during July-August when bimonthly) 10003. by ln-

socialist

Socialist Review Publishing Association, 873 Broadway, New York, N,Y.

Second Class post-

age paid at New York, N.Y. and Latin America, domestic or foreign. Write

SUBSCRIPTION RATES: I year ( I I issues) 55.00, Add $1.00 per year for Canada rates. Single copy 50 cents, bndles 35 cets a copy for five or more copyright 01969 by Myrna Lamb, reprinted with

for overseos

But What Have You Done For Me Lately? Trotsky in Coyoacan copyright

Cover Photo:V. 1. Lenin.

with authors

permission.

@ 1970 by Pathfinder

Press, Inc., reprinted

publishers consent,

Whtond
As this first issue of the new monthly International Socialist Review goes 10 press, an ominous escalation of the Vietnam war is taking place on a scale that encompasses all of former French Indochina: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, as well as neighboring Thailand. These developments give new urgmcy to the antiwar movements central demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U. S. forms from Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia. The war in Southeast Asia will continue to escalate as long as there is a U. S. military presence. And it is an escalation when Saigon armies enter Cambodia in support of the new military regime there, or when Bangkok armies enter Laos to prop up the crumbling Royal Laotian government. The armies of these regimes, as well as the regimes themselves, only exist because of massive U. S. military and financial support. They will fall, and the peoples of these nations will finally be able to determine their own future, free of foreign military intervention, only when U. S. forces are completely withdrawn. In defense of its Vietnamization policies, which specifically call for maintaining U. S. troops in South Vietnam until the Saigon regime is stabilized, in defense of the massive bombing of Laos, in defense of providing whatever military support it considers necessary for the new military oftlcialdom in Cambodia, in defense of its multi-billion dollar network of bases in Thailand, the Nixon administration resorts to an old line. It blames the foreign aggression of North Vietnam. That is the same line Lyndon B. Johnson used six years ago when he ordered the massive escalation of the U. S. attack on Vietnam by the genocidal bombing of North Vietnam, ultimately saturating its two major population centers, Hanoi and Haiphong, with millions of tons of anti-personnel cluster fragmentation bombs. But the Vietnamese people have taught the world a lesson that may not have been so clear in 1964. This is that they are engaged in a revolutionary war. Their masses are mobilized in a struggle to the death to throw off, once and for all, the cliques of landlords and generals who rule them, and the ferocious attack of the U.S. military. The overwhelming support of the Vietnamese people for this revolutionary war, is the sole explanation for that tiny nations ability to withstand and stalemate the most highly perfected machine of counterrevolutionary warfare, the U. S. invasionary force. This revolutionary tide is not new, nor did it start six years ago with the escalated U. S. attack on Vietnam, nor is it limited to Vietnam. It has its roots in the revolutionary wave that swept Asia during and after the second world war, a wave thatswept French Indochina, British India, Malaysia and Burma, Dutch Indonesia. And that wave has not subsided as the old colonial regimes have been replaced by neocolonial dictatorships. In fact there has not been one single month without gunfire in Southeast Asia since the end of World War II. The war in Indochina entered a temporary period of quiescence after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the subsequent Geneva accords were signed by both sides. But this era of pea@ could not be maintained. The division of Indochina into two independent monarchies (Laos and Cambodia ) and the partition of Vietnam, leaving an independent monarchy in Saigon; the decision of the Eisenhower administration to place South Vietnam (and Thailand ) within the framework of the SEATO military alliance to defend the Free Worldthese military and governmental stopgaps did not bottle up the wellsprings of revolution caused by a century of imperialist oppression. A single set of medical facts from the United Nations Statistical Yearbook for 1964, a decade of neocolonial rule later, reveals much. It gives the numbers of the population per single medical physician: United States, 760; France, 910; Thailand, 10,000; Cambodia, 25,000; South Vietnam, 29,000; Laos, 38,000. A change in the form of imperialist rule did not change the content of that rule. It forced the revolution onto a new plane. The subsequent history of Vietnam is well known. By 1958, the civil war in Laos had been resumed. In that year the Pathet Lao refused to bow to a CIA-concocted military regime in Vientiane under Phoumi Nosavan. In 1962, Geneva accords flowing from a summit agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev onm again attempted to quell the revolutionary war. A small portion of Laos was left to the control of the Pathet Lao; neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma was reestablished as the ruler in Vientiane. But in 1966, Washington had escalated the Vietnam aggression into Laos. A dispatch from Washington Post reporter Stanley Karnow, August 19, 1966, has a current ring about it: In Lopburi Provina+ he reported, greenbereted U. S. Special Forces instructors are setting up camps to train Thai guerrillas, possibly for harassment of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. And U. S. bombing of Laos began about this time not, as certain Democratic politicians would have one believe,only when Nixon took office. In Cambodia, Sihanouk tried in vain to steer his regime free of the torrents of revolution and counterrevolution en-

circling that nation. Claiming neutrality, Sihanouk cut off U. S. military and economic aid and refused to support the Vietnamese and Laotian revolutions in a meaningful way. The course was doomed to failure from the start. Sihanouks half-hearted capitalist economic reforms failed totally to raise the standard of living of the Cambodian masses. It was inevitable that the Vietnam war, which had overflowed geographically into Cambodia, would also overflow politically, picking up revolutionary adherents on one side of the class barricade and frightening the old ruling classes on the other. On March 18 of this year, Sihanouks own generals seized the initiative to restore capitalist law and order in Cambodia while the prince was being feted in Moscow and Peking. In their first hours of rule, the new military leaders left no doubt about how they intended to stay in power: through immediate dependence on and firm alliance with the Washington-Saigon axis. The fact that they did not publicly demand U. S. military support only shows how carefully they had been briefed on the state of ,Nixons public relations problems. The authoritative French daily, IA) A40n&, refused to buy the story that the Cambodian events could be separated from the class struggle in Cambodia itself. In an editorial in the March 15-16 issue, I.e .Iforzde declared: [he complacent image of a Cambodia without grave difticuIties and without social classes, which is very widespread in the world, is beginning to fade. The mass of Khmers feel more and more alienated from the festivities and intrigues of the court. They are momentarily being manipulated by the right. But if their condition does not improve, they may come to think that the guerrilla movement is not just the foreign intervention the official communiques talk about. Along with the whole of Southeast Asia, Cambodia is experiencing spillovers from the Vietnamese conflict. Many of its inhabitants are sincere when they say they fear that their powerful neighbor may be tempted to try to dominate them. But the same thing is true of the Khmer kingdom as

of Laos its problems are not confined to the unrest on its frontiers. The Nixon administration has made it crystal clear hoth in words and in deeds where it stands on the Southeast Asian revolution. Nixon spelled out the basics of this policy in the so-called State of the World message he delivered to Congress, February 18. After piously recalling that Three times in a single generation, Americans have been called upon to cross the Pacific and fight in Asia, Nixon asked, Does it mean that the United States should withdraw from Asian affairs? The answer left no room for doubt. We remain involved in Asia. We are a Pacific powcr. The key elements of this approach, said .Nixon, were: q The United States will keep all its treaty commitments. q We shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us, or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security and the security of the region as a whole. q In cases involving other types of aggression we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested and as appropriate. Nixon explained that Vietnamization . . . is a program to strengthen the ability of the South Vietnamese Government and people to defend themselves. It emphasizes progress in providing physical security for the Vietnamese people and in extending the authority of the South Vietnamese Government throughout the countryside. Translated from diplomatic doubletalk into the substance of reality, .Nixons speech simply reiterated the Iongstanding policies of U. S. imperialism in the Asian-Pacific arena. These call for a network of nuclear-armed military bases surrounding revolutionary China and supporting the coteries of military bosses and wealthy landlords who rule from Bangkok to Manila and from Saigon to Seoul. Their purpose is counterrevolution. In fact, according to Nixon, military intervention will be forthcoming as appropriate, that is, as Washington deems fit in the interest of national [U. S.] security. The South Vietnamese regime will be maintained and its control will be extended throughout the countryside,

meaning by crushing the National Liberation Front. ( Saigons usefulness to Washington in areas extending outside the boundaries of that nation has recently been demonstrated in the use of Saigon Army bombers and troops on the battlefields of Cambodia. But Nixon had already massively bombed that area. For example, the New York Times Encyclopedic Almanac for 1970 records that on April 24, 1969, Lnited States B-52s drop ped almost 3,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian border area northwest of Saigon, by far the heaviest bombing concentration of the Vietnam War.). In this context, it is utopian to believe that if it is left to the White House, the Pentagon and Congress, the war in Southeast Asia will come to a close soon, or even in the next years. LJ. S. troops and military materiel are there and the bombs continue to fall. In fact, the war is tending to widen from \ietnam to neighboring Laos and Cambodia, and eventually to Thailand. That is because the U. S. military intervention is the mainspring of counterrevolution, of the long and bloody attempt of imperialism to superimpose its repressive regimes on peoples who some time ago said enough, and who have demonstrated that they mean what they say. This war will end and the peoples of Southeast Asia will finally determine their own affairs when the American people have massively repudiated the Nixon Doctrine the latest cosmetic for U. S. imperialism in Southeast Asia and have forced total withdrawal of U. S. military support to Southeast Asian dictatorships. The slogan of immediate withdrawal of b-. S. troops corresponds to both the urgent and longrange needs of the American people and the Southeast Asian masses. Bringing about that withdrawal is the paramount aim of the antiwar movement and the key task for revolutionaries.

,.

I
5

perspectives o 1 fevolutlon Wofd

INTERCONTINENTAL PRESS, P. O. Box 635, Madison Square Station, New York, N. Y., 10010. $15 for one year. ($7.50 for 6 mos. ) One of the most important components of the international revolutionary press is Intercontinental Press. Its editors, Joseph Hansen, Pierre Frank, Livio Maitan, Ernest Mandel and George Novack, are among the outstanding leaders of the world Trotskyist movement. The magazine provides a weekly report on world events from a Marxist perspective. Special attention is devoted to the socialist, antiwar, labor and national liberation movements as well as the struggle for workers democracy in the workers states. In addition to articles written specifically for Intercontinental Press, the magazine carries translations of articles from other publications and documents of the world movement that would be otherwise unavailable to its readers. A typical issue, the March 9 p, contains fifteen articles on events in the Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, Laos, the Middle East, South Africa, Pakistan, France, AJgeria, and Belgium. Also in this issue is material by Trotsky, previously unpublished in English, on Stalins purges of the Soviet Red Army. One of the most informative of the articles is an interview with Nayef Hawatmeh, a leader of the Democratic Front for the I,iberation of Palestine. The Democratic Front was organized in February 1969 as the result of a split in the Popular Front for the Liberation of PaJestine. The interview is translated from Africasia, a magazine published in Paris. In the interview, Nayef Hawatmeh outlines his position on the need for a Marxist party, on the Israeli state and on Stalinism. The Democratic Front favors the construction of an Arab Marxist-Leninist party as an alternative to the Arab Stalinists, and sees itself in the preparatory stage of forming such a party. It sees as its current task mounting a revolutionary struggle against the reactionary Arab governments and against Israel. Hawatmeh explains that the Democratic Front calls for the formation of a multinational sociaJist state in Palestine, including both Arabs and Jews as part of an eventuaf Arab federation. In the interview he condemns the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the reformism of the internation~ Stalinist movement: In particular he denounces the Israeli Communist Party which is split into Zionist and pro-soviet wings. In fact, Hawatmeh explains, there is no fundamental difference between them because they both propose a reactionary solution based on maintaining Israel, an oppressive usurper state li*ed to imperialism. At present there is only one small group in Israel, the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen), which is evolving toward a progressive solution of the question. One of the pivotal questions being discussed by revolutionary youth on a world scale is the question of how students can relate to workers struggles. One line of argument says that students are of no importance as a social force and therefore radicals should leave the campus and join the work force. This view, represented in the movement primarily by the Maoists, rej~ts any independent role for students. The opposite view is put forward by revolutionary socialists. We feel that the student movement can play an important role in the struggle against capitalism. We are in favor of organizing the vanguard of the students into revolutionary youth organizations, like the Young Socialist Alliance in the United States. The red university strategy is designed to use the student base as a weapon in the struggles of the working class and oppressed national minorities. ( For an explanation of the red university strategy, see The Worldwide Youth Radicalization and the Tasks of the Fourth International published by the YSA, available from Pathfinder Press, 873 Broadway, New York 10003. ) The intervention of the Belgian Trotskyist youth (the Jeune Garde Socialiste/ Socialistische .Jonge Wacht Socialist Young Guard) in the recent Belgian miners strike sheds some new light on this problem, and confirms in practice the position of the revolutionary socialists. Two articles based on an interview with Francois Vercammen, a leader of the Socialist Young Guard, appeared in Intercontinental Press, March 2 and March 9, 1970. In January, the miners of Lirnbourg, Flanders, went on a wildcat strike after union leaders refused to press for pre viously agreed upon wage increases. By the end of the first week of the strike, 23,000 of 25,000 miners in the Campine region were out. The strike continued for sever~ montis and was marked by mass confrontations with the government, the companies, and the union officials, After bypassing the officiaJ union leadership, the miners organized a democratically elected Permanent Strike Committee to lead thestrike. The two main student groups which played a role in the strike were the Socialist Young Guard and the MaoistSpontaneists. The struggle quickly revealed the contrast between the serve the people approach of the latter and the revolutionary socialist line of the former. The starting point of the intervention for the Trotskyist youth was the base it had on campus. As Francois Vercammen explains it: We believe that students around the world have shown themselves to be a social force with a new weight, and that they can intervene in struggles . . . we organized meetings of solidarity at many universities and

schools . . . giving the strike leaders the opportunity to speak to the students about the issues involved and to appeal for support. We helped bring out students. They joined the demonstrations and picket lines, distributed leaflets, and so on . . . There have been two demonstrations in support of the miners one in Hasselt and the other in Genk which students helped to build. Actually, the students have been a key factor in spreading the strike and, according to the workers, in maintaining it in the Campine. The Maoists, with their superproletarian orientation, deny these facts they hold that students can only serve the people and are not an important force in their own right. The Maoists began by refusing to recognize the Permanent Committee be cause some of its members supported the Volksunie, a Flemish right-wing party. The Maoists set up their own committee, Force des Mineurs (Miners Power), in an attempt to substitutethemselves for the miners leadership. Vercammen expIains that the Trotskyist youth rejected this course because they knew they had to be with the real movement in order to effectively counter the Volksunie. A genuine strike committee is always representative of all tendencies which exist in the ranks. By refusing the sectarian course and by mobilizing broad student support, the Socialist Young Guard was able to play a positive role in the strike, working directly with the leaders of the Permanent Committee. The revolutionary students played a central role in organizing mass demonstrations against the companies, the union bureaucrats and the government. They put out hundreds of thousands of leaflets to miners and students, and used their national and international connections to spread solidarity actions. At strike meetings, they were able to raise their ideas not only on the strike itself, but on workers control of industry, the fight against the union bureaucrats, and other issues. They were also able to play a role in countering the rightist forces that the Maoists were so quick to run away from. The rightists tried to use the rank and file spirit of the workers to get them to break with the unions. The Trotskyist youth replied by explaining that it is essential to oppose the misleadership

of the union bureaucracy, but to quit the unions would only weaken the miners. They explained the necessity of staying and fighting within the unions against the bureaucracy. This perspective was adopted by the Permanent Committee. Interestingly enough, the Maoist-Spontaneist slogan, Down with the Unions, was the same slogan raised by the right wing. Using their base as a revolutionary socialist youth vanguard, mobilizing the campuses and utilizing the experiences of the revolutionary movement, the Socialist Young Guard was able to make a decisive intervention in the strike, and at the same time to build its organization both on and off campus. LABOR CHALLENGE, Box 5595, Station A, TORONTO 1, Canada. $3 for one year. ($1 for 4 mos. ) In Canadq there is mounting opposition to U. S. domination of the Canadian economy. Foreign capital, mainly from the United States, controls thebulk of heavy industry in Canada, including 46 per cent of manufacturing, 74 per cent of petroleum and naturaf gas, and 59 per cent of mining and smelting. The complicity of Canadas capitalist government with this and other aspects of United States imperialist policies (especially the Vietnam war) has become a main target of attack for radicalizing Canadian workers, students and intellectuals. The Socialist or waffle caucus of the New Democratic Party has developed largely around this issue. The New Democratic Party is Canadas counterpart to the British Labour Party; it is based on both membership branches (riding associations) and the affiliation of trade unions. Recent issues of Labor Challenge, a biweekly English Canadian socialist publication, chart the development of the caucus. It was formed at a September conference in Toronto organized around the manifesto For an Ind& pendent Socialist Canad~ written chiefly by Toronto professor Melville Watkins. At the conference, Watkins outlined his strategy which is reported in the Workers Vanguard (predecessor to Labor Challenge) for October 6, 1969:

1) The American Empire is the major threat to world peace and progress, and the only way to roll back U. S. domination of Canada is through socialism, the means to an independent Canada, since the Canadian ruling elite has been emasculated and absorbed into the U. S. Empire; 2 ) socialism means the nationalization of all major industries; 3 ) solidarity with the antiimperialist struggle in Quebec; 4 ) industrial democracy which Watkins de scribed as workers control; and 5) for the NDP, electora! politics alone is no longer sufficient. Since that conference, the caucus has been able to effectively challenge the pro- U. S. reformist leaders of the NDP. At the NDP convention in November, the caucus submitted a number of proposals. It won support from 25 riding associations of the NDP, the New Democratic Youth, and roughly one-third of the 1,100 delegates at the convention. The caucus decided to continue as a permanent group in the NDP. While the Canadian socialists of the I.eague for Socialist Action/ Ligue Socialist Ouvriere (the Canadian section of the Fourth International) support the caucus, they have criticisms of elements within it. Firstly, the caucus is ambiguous on the expulsions of left-wing militants by the NDP leadership. The Toronto section of the caucus barely passed a motion condemning the expulsion of four NDPers accused by the leadership of being members of the I,SA Melville Watkins voted against the anti-exclusion motion. Secondly, some elements within the caucus tend to minimize the importance of the NDPs trade union base, arguing that the unions are a conservatizing influence in the NDP. This position, which fails to distinguish between the union officialdom and the ranks, constitutes a retreat from the perspective of winning over the working-cIass adherents of the New Democratic Party. Thirdly, the caucus itself has failed to deveIop a program for the trade unions. Finally, a tendency exists within the caucus to break away from the NDP a PersP@ive which would isolate the caucus from worker ranks of the NDP and play into the hands of the union bureaucrats and reformist NDP leaders.
TONY THOMAS

1445 basically Weinsteins outlook, although SOCIALIST REVOLUTION, Stockton St., San Francisco, Calif. he occasionally attempts, as he does in the Socialist Revolution article, to 94133. $6 for one volume. Slightly more than ten years ago, in extend what he says about the Lnited the fall of 1959, a group of graduate States to also include the advanced students at the [University of Wisconsin Western European countries. The bulk brought out the first issue of a new, of his arguments and the historical data quarterly radical magazine. Ike young he has marshaled to make his case scholars who edited Studies on the Left have particular reference to the United counted themselves part of the .\Tew States. Weinsteins book laments the premaLeft, but they never aligned as a group with any particular tendency or orga- ture split in 1919 of the American Sonization. Some of them believed they cialist Party which led to the formation should, and this conviction contributed of the Communist Party and longs for to the dispute among the editors which the return of a mass party like the party led them to discontinue publication in of Debs, Hillquit and Berger. rhe 1967. Studies folded with the promise Underdevelopment of Socialism in Adthat there would be new publications to vanced Industrial Society repeats the same plaintive appeal. succeed it. From the standpoint of the progress I%ree years later, the first successor has appeared. The editors of Socialist of American Marxism the 1919 split Revolution, several of whom are former was anything but a tragedy or a seteditors of Studies on the Lejt, have back. The old Socialist Party had inmade their politics crystal clear, at least eluded revolutionaries like Debs side by on the question of organization, in the side with centrists like Morris Hillquit first issue. lhey are opposed to build- and right wingers like Victor Berg,er. ing a revolutionary party. Such a formation which had grown one article especially stands out in out of a more primitive stage of L.S. demarcating the politics of Socialist socialism proved under the leadership Revolution from revolutionary social- of the latter figures to be an obstacle ism a piece by .J ames Weinstin, one to united action not only in the United of the editors, called The Underdevel- States, but internationally. Weinstein opment of Socialism in Advanced In- contends that the split in the United dustrial Society. States did not logically parallel the split Weinstein, a former Studies editor, in the world movement with which it is representative of a trend of radical was concurrent. The lines crossed over, thought known as American exception- he says, between the right wing and the alism. He is the author of numerous left wing on all of the main issues: the other articles and The Decline of So- first world war, the Russian revolution cialism in AmericG 1912-1925, pub- and reform versus revolution. On a world scale the right-wing social Iished by Monthly Review Press, in which he tries to make essentially the democratic leaderships of the Second same points he takes up in this latest International had capitulated to their and supported article. American exceptionalism is the national bourgeoisie view that the [Jnited Statesis an excep- the war in 1914. These same leaders tion among the worlds nations; that opposed the Soviet dictatorship when it the unfolding of the class struggle here faced armed assault by the very ruling follows its own unique pattern; that classes they had supported in the war. trends and principles which may be lhose who supported the war and opsaid to hold true in other countries do posed the Russian revolution were also not apply on home ground. This is those who followed an orientation toward the gradual and peaceful reform of capitalism.

On all of these issues the right-wing leaderships were opposed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The most class-conscious and revolutionary workers in every country were inspired by the 1917 victory of the Russian revolution and welcomed the formation of the Communist International in 1919. Breaking with the parties of the Second International whose bankruptcy had caused such disorientation, they formed new parties that would speak Russian to their own ruling classes. Weinstein asserts, and attempts to prove with quotations, that these issues did not affect the American party in the same way. Virtually the entire party had opposed the war, according to him. Not quite comfortable with lumping together the forthright and principled opposition of Debs with the half-hearted and barely audible protest of the r~ formist right wing which dominated the party, Weinstein adds that it was not quite so important anyway because the United States entered the war late and the party did not occupy an important position in the trade unions. Moreover, the lack of electoral success meant that the question of a parliamentary road to power was not seriously raised in the American party. The party was never able to properly assess this question or its trade union strategy because the founding of the Comintern imposed an artificial split. Weinstein quotes the correspondence of Hillquit and Berger in which Berger takes Weinsteins own position that revolution in Russia was one thing, revolution in the L~nited States something else againto demonstrate that the right wing supported the revolution. In Weinsteins eyes the right wing failed to falf into the foolish trap that snared the left wing, that is accepting the principle of immediate insurrection in the West. In his report to the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921, Leon Trotsky stated, I believe that our successes as well as our failures have demonstrated that the dif-

tkrence between us and the Independent Social Democrats does not consist in our having said that we shall make the revolution in the year 1919 while they kept maintaining that the revolution would come much later. No, thats not where the difference lies. The difference lies in this, that the Social Democracy and the Independent Social Democrats support the bourgeoisie against the revolution under any and all circumstances. Whereas we were and are ready to utilize every situation, no matterwhat changes it may undergo, for the revolutionary offensive and for the conquest of political power. The differences in the United States consisted in exactly that. The right wing dominating the party was of a kind with the whole social democracy, as the development of the Socialist Party subsequent to the split illustrated. The further development of the Socialist Party also illustrated the weaknesses of the method of organization Weinstein advocates in the kind of party he wants to resurrect. A loose and all-inclusive party is not a suitable vehicle for revolutionary struggle. A disciplined and centralized vanguard party based on ,Marxist principles is required. This is the organizational lesson driven home by every revolutionary situation that has been aborted since the failure of the German revolution in 1918. When the working class launched offensives it was defeated because of the absence of a principled leadership prepared to lead events to the seizure of state power. By contending that the left wings adoption of Leninism in 1919 was a blunder, Weinstein is attempting to strengthen his exceptionalist argument that a combat party, while needed elsewhere, is inappropriate in the United States. He reinforces this argument with another error common to centrisk and social democrats. This is the confusion of Leninism with Stalinism often and certainly in this case a deliberate confusion the purpose of which is to avoid confronting the real doctrines of Leninism head-on. Weinsteins use of this familiar device is doubly insidious because he employs it not only to reject Leninism in the United States but also to apologize for Stalinism in the Soviet Union. According to Weinstein, the measures adopted by the Soviet bureaucracy were correct in the specific historical circumstances of backward Russia. The error of the bureaucracy, in his

view widently unrelated to its other concluded, we will defend the USSR crimes, was imposing on the other par- with all our might. ties a glorflcation of the Soviet LTnion Anyone who is interested can read as an ideal embodiment of socialist state about this and much more in the three power. Weinstein seems unaware that volumes of Trotskys biography writthis was a very conscious error in- ten by Isaac Deutscher, whose lecture tended to transform the Communist on internationalism is printed in the parties into border guards for the bu- same first issue of Socialist Revolution as Weinsteins article. .Nowherein Deutreaucracys privileges and power. The confusion of Leninism with Stal- schers pages will one find any evidence inism also facilitates Weinsteins dismis- to support the allegation that Trotskysal of Trotskyism as an ahistoric and km is anti-Sovietism. In a box at the front of the first issue ideological anti-Sovietism. Bracketing the Trotskyist attitudetoward the Soviet of this new magazine, the editors state: Union with that of the social democrats, The development of socialist ideas canhe thus echoes the stale slander of the not be separated ~om the development Stalinists. He may contend that the of a class< onscious socialist move problems of the development of the So- ment. The beginning represented by viet Union since 1917 have little rel~ Weinsteins article gives us compelling vance in the highly industrialized Unit- doubts about just how seriously the ed States. Such a judgment is simply editors take this statement. The revolution in this country as else wrong. But it is dishonest to falsify as he does the views of the Trotskyist where will be carried forward by more movement. than the crises of capitalismor the Under the monstrous accusation of episodic intervention of dillettantishradanti-Sovietism Stalin framed up and ical journalists. It requires the painsmurdered tens of thousands of devoted taking task of organization, not only communists, including all the surviving after the masses have spontaneously members of Lenins politburo except formed themselves to battle for power, himself. Trotsky broke with hundreds but in advance of their upsurges. one of his followers over the years on this of the indispensable preconditions for a very issue because they refused to sup- successful socialist revolution is the asport his position that, despite the abom- sembling and training of a cadre eminations of the StaIinist bureaucrats, the bodying the historical consciousness of Soviet Union remained a workers state the working class, a cadre welded towhich had to be defended against im- gether in a revolutionary combat party. perialist attack. The articles he wrote CHALLENGE, 1 Union Square West, opposing the minority which split from Room 617, New York, N.Y. 10003. the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 on $2 for one year. this question are contained in a book At First We Couldnt Believe Our Eyes called In DefEnse of Marxism ( available Department. I%e kebruary issue of tkom Pathfinder Press). Far from being Challenge, published by the lrogresahistoric and ideological, this book sive Labor Party, carries a one column continues to be used by the revolution- feature on page 12 called rlalking with ary movement as a text on dialectical Women by [;inger and Ann. The feature includes such items as shopping and historical materialism. In 1937 a collection of Trotskys t ips and recipes! When we first saw the February ChaL writings on the same subject, entitled In Defm.se of the Soviet Union, was 1 enge at the SMC Cleveland conference, published in the United States. In .May we were astonished by this approach of 1940, just months before his assas- to a column for women. Apparently the sination, Trotsky addressed a message b awkwardness of the bourgeois male to Soviet workers, farmers, soldiers and chauvinist stereotype reflected in Talksailors, warning them that the infamies ing with Women was too much even of the Stalinist bureaucracy were the for some members of P],. A few weeks main source of danger to the Soviet 1ater we observed the same issue of Union and advising them never to sur- Challenge being sold in New York with render the nationalized and collectivized a leaflet attacking the articles male economy because upon this foundation chauvinism inserted between pages 12 they can build a new and happier so- and 13. The leaflet was signed, CCNY ciety. Against the imperialist foe, he PI, Collective. The leaflet itself, couched in the familiar ultraleft and sectarian

rhetoric to which Maoists are addicted, makes a number of its own errors on the woman question. For example, it fails to recognize the value and importance of women organizing as women to mobilize and struggle for demands affecting all women. Nevertheless, it scores Challenge for this grossly insulting feature and attacks PI,s leadership for it: That this column was printed in Challenge reveals a male chauvinist weakness in the Progressive I,abor Party. LEV~THAN, 2700 Broadway, hew York, N.Y. 10025 and 330 Grove St., San Francisco, Calif., 94102. $5 for one year. In a statement explaining why they had left SDS and joined the YSA(From Rebellion to Revolution, in the December 1969 Young Socialist), fifteen YSAers wrote, Perhaps what clinched our discontent was the increasingly undemocratic organization of SDS on a local level. Participatory democracy ignored the fact that any organization has leadership, official or unofficial, democratic or bureaucratic. I,ocal SDS leadership was characteristically controlled by personality cliques, based on personal alliances rather than political orientation. The November 1969 Leviathan carried an article by Marge Piercy, Ihe Grand Coolie Dam, containing a perceptive analysis which fleshes out and gives real body to the YSAers shorthand characterization of participatory de mocracy. The typical movement institution, she writes, consists of one or more men who act as charismatic spokesmen, who speak in the name of the institution and negotiate and represent that body to other bodies in and outside the move ment and who manipulate the relationships inside to maintain his or their position, and the people who do the actual work of the institution, much of the time women. The articles weakness rests in Piercys inability to satisfactorily or correctly identify the source of the male chauvinism and related subjectivist weaknesses she describes. The major contributing factors to the ego-tripping and manipulative style of New Left politicians have been the lack of a coherent program and the lack of a democratic centralist organization. The men and women who enter the revolutionary movement are not fundamentally different from the reachers Piercy tends to identify as the :ause of the problems she discusses or

the servants they victimize. The reasor male chauvinism and subjectivism dc not distort the work or restrict the worn. en in the Trotskyist movement to tht extreme extent they have in the New Left and it is definitely the case thai they do not is not that the same corrupting bourgeois pressures and poi. sons do not also affect and infect thos( who become Trotskyists they do. Bui a revolutionary organization carrying out activity around a principled pro gram provides the best framework fo] consciously combating and minimizing the problems these pressures manifest. This theoretical weakness, however, does not detract from the perspicacity with which Piercy analyzes the move ments and organizations in which she haa been involved. Here are some more examples of what she has to say: Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of what passes for common practice in many places. A man can bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up, or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent with her . . . The male supremacist . . . has all the strength of the American tradition ,.. to draw upon in defense of his arrogance. Not only are women losers, but for a woman to think about herself is bourgeois subjectivity and inherently counter-revolutionary. Now, dear, of course you find your work dull. What the movement needs is more discipline and less middle-class concern with ones itty-bitty self! The most extreme form of this hypocrisy, the absurdity of which Piercy exposes, has no doubt been achieved by the Weathermen as part of their breakthrough from politics to psychosis. Barbara Hendrickson, reporting on the Flint, Michigan War Council in the January 5, 1969, Great Speckled Bird, gives the following account: The Weatherwomen put down Womens Liberation groups for their interest in abortion, birth control and other issues which iust reinforce our privilege as white women . . . The Weatherwomens liberation cry is Smash monogamy . . . and everybody goes down for the Weatherbureau.

BLACK SCHOLAR, P.O. BOX San Francisco, CalM., 94131. $10 for one year. One of the needs of the Black liberation movement is a publication in which activists can discuss and debate their various ideaa. The publication of Z7ze Black Scholar, edited by Nathan Hare, should help satisfy this need. In the December 1969 issue, the second to appear, Hare says: Its pages will be open to all points of view which express the ideas of Black people . . . and out of the play of ideas there will evolve an ideology around which Black people can rally for freedom. This issue contains articles by individuals from a variety of political points of view Bobby Scale of the Black Panthers; Floyd McKissick, former national director of CORE; James Turner, director of Afro-American studies at Cornell; Hare himself, and Chuck Stone, a former aide to Congressman Adarn Clayton Powell. Chuck Stones article, Black Politics, argues for a combination of the third force strategy and the formation of a Black party. Stone feels that Blacks can gain political power if they stop relying on the Democratic Party alone and jockey more between the Democrats and the Republicans to obtain concessions. He also favors the formation of a Black political party, but he views it only as a way of exerting pressure rather than as an agency to challenge the two parties. He argues that such aparty should support Black and other candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties. Stone fails to see that the reason Blacks lack political power is not their reliance on a single party, but their reliance on two capitalist parties. The Republicans and Democrats are out to maintain this system which is based on the oppression of Blacks. Far from aiding the cause of Black liberation, Black politicians in the bourgeois parties help to keep Blacks within the confines of the system. They seek to prevent independent political action and organization aimed at solving the problems of the Black community. The only way to assert the political power of the Black community is for Blacks to build an independent mass Black political party whose task would be, not putting pressure on the Democrats and Republicans, but fighting both parties for the political allegiance and benefit of Black people.
31245, LEE SMITH

THE

10

valuable material available to OLO filed in Federal Court in Brookly readers in the future. This particular March 19 by Leonard B. Boudin, ger article is a damning condemnation o: eral counsel of the National Emergenc the phony Lenin centenary campaign Civil Liberties Committee, with the SUJ being conducted by the Soviet bureau. port of the American Foundation fo crats who negate in practice what the Social Justice and the Socialist Scholar Bolshevik leader fought for. Conference. If its challenge is successful We intend to publish more material the lawsuit will eliminate the provisio] this year commemorating the IOOthanof the McCarran-Walter Act under whicl niversary of Lenins birth. One article Mandel and many others have bee] of this nature is Lenin and the Problems refused visas. of Proletarian C[ass Consaousness by But What Have You Done for M Ernest Mandel, which will be printed Lately? is printed here with a specia in a forthcoming issue. The photograph on page 18 is by introduction by the author. ( The pla: also appears in Aphra, Vol. 1, No. 1 Pamela Starsky, who is currently the YSA organizer in Phoeni~ and a stua womens liberation magazine. ) It wa ient at Arizona State University. produced originally at the Martiniqu A number of radical magazines have Theater in 1969 by the New Feminis Theater. The performance referred tt been launched over the past year. This by Myrna Lamb in the introduction] is one indication of the deepening radicalization in the United States. We are was given at a February 7, 1970, rail! !or the New York State SWP electio~ glad to see these competitors of ours :ampaign. Another play, this one c appear, since a confrontation of differnusical, written by Myrna Lamb, wil ,ng views is a positive thing for the revolutionary movement. We will at>pen May 1 at the New York Shake ipeare Festival Public Theater in New :empt to make clear where we differ with these other radical magazines, and York City. Entitled The Mod Donna hey in turn, we hope, will also express t is being produced by Joseph Papp heir attitudes towards the International ivith music composed by Susan Bing ~ocialist Review. lam. There is one major difference that The article by George Novack if hould distinguish us from virtually ased on a speech given at the opening .11of our rival publications: The Inf the new headquarters of the Socialisl ?mationa[ Socialist Review is not deiorkers Party and Young Socialist Al igned for a restricted audience. We ance in Chicago, January 30, 1970, m not setting out to become a good korge Novack is an editor of the Inter. ittle magazine of the left; we are out ational Socialist Review. His most reJ reach the largest possible number mt book is Empiricism and its Evof serious radicals who want to know ~tion (Merit Publishers, New York, or a week by week accountof ow to tight this system on all fronts. 968. ) He has also recently written a whats4appening in the antiwar, he theory and ideas of Marxism are amphlet, The Revolutionary Dynamvomens liberation, Black and Chiot the domain of the few. Our goal :s of Women Liberation. Both are :ano movements, take advantage af ~DJ to make them as popular and accesvailable from Pathfinder Press, 873 his special offer to new readers. Or, ible to the masses as possible. In this roadway, New York, New York letter yet, subscribe now to a full wk we need energetic salesmen and 0003. (ear of The Militant. Send your istributors. And we solicit your supTrotsky in Coyoacan is excerpted noney ta: The Militant, 873 Broadom the introduction written by Joseph >ort in this ambitious undertaking. vay, New York N. Y. 10003. We invite correspondence, which [arisen for a new Pathfinder Press edion of Trotskys autobiography, My ;hould be sent to International Socialife. Publication date is June 15. The st Review, 873 Broadway, New York, New York 10003. Manuscripts, which rice will be $3.95 for the paperback ire also welcome, must be typed tripleIition, and $12.50 for the cloth. Larry Seigle, author of the article on ~paced. Financial contributions are nore than welcolme and, we can assure u Encfosed is $4.00 for one year. [e New Left, is the national chairman u Encloaed is $1.00 for three months, f the Young Socialist Alliance and the IOU, will be put to good use in proName liter of the [international Socialist Re- noting and producing a better and Address jetter magazine. klv. City The article by Trotsky which we are state Zip rinting here is one of many which ive never appeared in English. We ]pe to be able to make much of this
UP

FRON1/CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2

I Q :

11

THE SCIENUE
WREVOLUTIONS ANDTHE ART oil MAKIHG THEM BY GEORGE NOVACK

Empiricists

deny

appropriate preparation,

the existence of a science of revolution. But while empiricism was the method and favored philosophy of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and planning play a qualitatively greater role in socialist revolutions. Few on either side of the contending class camps would dispute the judgment that Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Castro and Guevara to name only three of the top teams exercised considerable influence upon the thought and action of their time and have all shaped the destiny of modern society. These men were preeminent practitioners of the science of revolution, proletarian-style. Before the October 1917 revolution the Mensheviks used to deride the Bolsheviks as mere technicians of revolution because their leadership insisted that the cadres persistently prepare for a decisive confrontation with the regime. However, when that showdown came, Lenins school of Bolshevism demonstrated that constant study, acquisition of skills and organizational preadapt ation to the demands of revolutionary struggle pay off. The December 6, 1969, New Yorker magazine carried a two-page advertisement by Olin, one of the huge multinational corporations that control the United States and a large part of this planet. One page featured a bust of Karl Marx; the headline on the opposite page read: If Africa, Asia and South America go communist, dont blame him. The copywriter went on to say: Karl Marx is not responsible for famines in Asia or epidemics in Africa. Its not his fault that the average South American earns 75 cents a day. All he did was predict the consequences. That a population living in misery will turn to communism as a way out. Unless something is done to alleviate these conditions. But the countries themselves dont have the economic resources to make these changes. The U. N. doesnt. Even the United States doesnt. They need the help of world industry. Particularly U. S. industry.

he tremendous tasks of combating the colossus of imperialism on its home grounds and promoting the socialist transformation of society require a revolutionary party equipped with a T Marxist policy. Revolutionary policy has to do with the practical aspects of carrying forward the class struggle. It seeks the most effective ways and means of speeding up the processes of revolutionary change and conducting them to a victorious conclusion on a nationaland world-historical scale. The solution of such problems depends upon another equally important side of the revolutionary movement the theory of the class struggle which has been most correctly and comprehensively formulated by Marxism. The whole art of working-class leadership consists in harmonizing scientific inquiry into the social and political conditions of our time with revolutionary practice. Even though existentialists, irrationalists, spontaneists and empiricists would deny its existence or efficacy, such a branch of knowledge as the science of revolution does exist. This sort of learning does not bear a special name, like biology, the science of life, or sociology, the science of social development. Very few if any courses on this subject are given by the faculties of the universities and I have yet to hear of a professor with a PhD in this specialty. Fortunately for the emancipation of mankind, not all the knowledge about social and political phenomena is confined to or concentrated in official institutions of learning. There have been and there are today experts in this line of endeavor, people who have devoted a lifetime of study to its intricacies and applied themselves to putting into effect what they found out. Some have met with conspicuous success.
Top: liberty Leading the Peoplem by Eugene Delacroix center section Bottom: Man at the Crossroads, fresco by Diego Rivera,

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This advertisement explicitly counterpoises the gospel of monopolist domination and capitalist counterrevolution to the socialist science of revolutionary mass struggle. However, in the injunction to leave the job of defusing the colonial revolution to the corporate profiteers, this arms manufacturer neglects to mention that big business could not carry on the good deeds of industry Olin boasts of without the constant surveillance and occasional military interventions in Africa, Asia and Latin America of its chief consumer, the Pentagon. he science of revolution is a branch of the science of politics. I need hardly say that this has very faint resemblance to the political science courses taught in the colleges. Real politics deals with the class struggle and the power of the state, not with efforts to deny and obfuscate these crucial factors. Theoretical reflection on this important activity of civilized humanity is fairly old as social sciences go, dating back to the ancient Greeks of the sixth to the fourth centuries B. C. Nowadays the science of politics pivots around the making or the breaking of the proletarian struggle for supremacy which is aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a new social order. This epoch of socialist revolutions, which began with the Russian revolution of October 1917 and has already passed the half-century mark, is still in its early stages. Its decisive battles on a global scale have yet to be fought and won. Those who are going to participate in the most crucial of these battles, which will take place on North American soil, need a deeper understanding of the job ahead of them. In order to counter and beat the most powerful and cunning of all the adversaries of socialism, American revolutionists have to be armed with the very best methods of thought and action. This means among other things that they must become more historical-minded, more aware of what they have to do and more expert in doing it. In an anthology of Trotskys writings, Isaac Deutscher and I designated the century which began with the first world war and the Russian revolution as The Age of Permanent Revolution. But it is essential to point out that the twentieth century round of revolutions was preceded by another series of revolutions which stretched over four centuries. That was the historical period of the bourgeois democratic revolutions which was inaugurated with the successful struggle for the Dutch Republic against Spanish dominion in the sixteenthcentury. There are many dissimilarities between these two eras of revolution. They differ in their historical tasks and in the class agencies delegated to accomplish them. The first promoted the development of capitalist society and was led by bourgeois forces. The second seeks the abolition of capitalist relations and the creation of socialist ones and is being led by the working class and its allies. The contrast between these two periods and kinds of revolutionary activity is no less pronounced on the subjective than on the objective side. This is especially true in the field of ideology. From its origin the socialist movement has been far more conscious, far more theoretically motivated than its democratic predecessor.

A close study of the development of the bourgeois revolutions in Holland, England, France and North America makes it clear why empiricism was the appropriate method and favored philosophy of so many of its foremost figures. All these revolutions ran their course in a most empirical manner. Almost without exception their principal proponents did not foresee their outbreak, anticipate or mark out their main line of march, formulate their chief objectives in advance, and work out a program and course of action to attain them in the most expeditious way. On the contrary, the participants were usually taken by surprise by the eruption of the showdown with the old regime, improvised measures to organize their forces for the revolutionary combat, and were reluctant to state openly and unequivocally what alternatives they proposed to the established institutions being defended by the counterrevolution. In most cases the leaders of the revolution did not before its outbreak build any organized party with well-defined principles which expressed the interests of their constituents. They had to form their grouping, or re-form and redirect it, in the very midst and heat of the conflict. The empiricism of the bourgeois radicals in the confrontation with the feudalists was evidenced, for example, in their vacillations over the key political question, What kind of government should replace the monarchy? The only consistent and principled answer from the standpoint of a revolutionary democracy was a republic. However, the bourgeois oppositionists, especially those speaking for the upper crust, were extremely hesitant about openly proclaiming this political goal or going ahead to set it up. They preferred a remodeled and domesticated monarchy with a new figurehead to the daring and untried innovation of a republic and did everything to forestall the abolition of the throne in Holland, England and France. Even when, at the peak of revolutionary intensity, the bourgeois revolutionists were forced to behead the king and illegalizethe monarchy, they did so with a very heavy heart and, as soon as the class commotions subsided and their immediate aims were secured, they restored it. England is the classic example. After the Cromwellians cut off King Charles head in 1649 and established a republic, the Restoration put Charles II on the throne in 1660. The triumphant bourgeoisie and their aristocratic associates substituted a more compliant dynasty in 1688. Following its successful bourgeois revolution, Holland got along without a king or queen for one hundred and fifty years or so andthenthe monarchy, which is still reigning there, was installed at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury. y contrast, the revolutionary socialist movement occupied from its birth a far wider vantage point of insight and foresight into social and political developments. It was placed on an incomparably B higher level of scientific theory by its founders, Marx and Engels. They explained, as early as the Corn munist Manifesto of 1848, the necessity and inevitability of the proletarian revolution as a deduction from the whole historical development of the productive forces at the disposal of mankind, the structure and operation of

14

capitalism, the intensification of its contradictions, the insuperable antagonism of interests between the capitalist exploiters and the industrial wage workers, and the increasing organization and understanding of the proletariat. This document has been the most important and influential of all political pronouncements ever written. Leon Trotsky emphasized the qualitatively greater role played by preparation and planning in the socialist revolution as compared with the presocialist political struggles in the Lessons of October. This essay on how to prepare for revolutionary mass action leading to the conquest of power originally appeared in 1924 as an introduction to two volumes of his Collected Works dealing with 1917. Here is what he said: Consciousness, premeditation, and planning played a far smaller part in bourgeois revolutions than they are destinedto play, and already do play in proletarian revolution. In the former instance the motive force of the revolution was also furnished by the masses, but the latter were much less organized and much less conscious than at thepresenttime. The leadership remained in the hands of different sections of the bourgeoisie, and the latter had at its disposaf wealth, education, and all the organizational advantages connected with them (the cities, the universities, the press, etc.). The bureaucratic monarchy defended itself in a hand-tomouth manner, probing in the dark and then acting. The bourgeoisie would bide its timeto seizea favorable moment when it could profit from the movementof the lower classes and throw its whole sociaf weight into the scale, and so seize the state power. The proletarian revolution is precisely distinguished by the fact that the proletariatin the person of its vanguard acts in it not onfy as the main offensive force, but afso as the guiding force. The part played in bourgeois revolutions by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, by its education, by its municipalitiesand universities, is a part which can be fdled in a proletarian revolution only by the party of the proletariat. The role of the party has become all the more important in view of the fact that the enemy has also become far more conscious. (See Lessons of October, in The Essential Trotsky. Unwin Books, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1963, p. 170.). The latter point has acquired far greater force since Trotsky made that observation. World imperialism has become better organized and more sensitized to the threat to its rulership emanating from the working class and its revolutionary allies. Washington, for example, was taken off guard by the victory of the anticapitalist revolution in Cuba. It is determined to forestall its repetition elsewhere in Latin America and is taking the most extensive measures to insure that, as the tragic outcome of Che Guevaras last stand in Bolivia illustrated. The revolutionary vanguard there now has to take that development into account in working out its strategy and tactics. The greater degree of clarity and foresight attending the struggle for socialism has two main sociological sources. One is the special nature of the prime social force at the head of the anticapitalist camp. The working class is situated in the center of modern economy, acts as its principal productive force, and is indeed its most important product. It is a highly socialized, centralized, compactly organized, technically skilled and educated class. The achievements of science and the applica-

tions of technology are integral elements of its culture and familiar instruments of its everyday labor activity. They make autos and drive them; they make TV sets and watch them. All these factors give the working class an outlook which is worldwide, and even cosmic in scope, since we have observed the first flights to the moon over TV. The theoretical principles and ideological outlook which express the social position, historical functions and destiny of this class must be correspondingly far-ranging and penetrating. In order to arrive at their dialectical materialist philosophy and socialist views, Marx and Engels had to go through the entire inventory of prior human knowledge, subject it to critical review, sift out what was valid from what was incorrect and obsolete, and fuse their findings with the new ideas they had arrived at. They applied this process of creative criticism or critical creativity first and most of all to earlier discoveries about history, sociology, economics and politics. Their epoch-making achievement, as Engels explained, consisted in converting socialism from a utopia into a science. What did this mean? Up to their time socialism had been a dream, an aspiration, an ideal of many people discontented with class society and bourgeois life. While these critics and idealistic pioneers recognized the desirability of a fundamental reorganization of the existing social system, even the most perspicacious among them were unable to see how humanity had arrived at its impasse, how it could get out of it, and pass over from bourgeois to socialist relations. They did not know what social force could liberate humanity from oppression and exploitation and along what Iines the job could be done.

arxs theory of historical materialism demonstrated that the mainspring of social progress was the development of the productive forces; that social revolutions and their associated political changes were engendered by the growing conflict between expanding forces of production and obsolete relations of production; that capitalism was rendering itself parasitic and reactionary by its feverish expansion of the productive forces; and along with it producing and provoking the antagonistic social and political power of the proletariat that was destined to supersede its system. By exposing to full view the nature, course and inevitable outcome of the confrontation between the capitalists and wage workers, Marx blew away the mists enshrouding the next necessary stage of human evolution and made apparent the road leading to it. The new social order could be brought into being, the founders of scientific socialism asserted, only through the anticapitalist movement of the working masses which would culminate in a revolutionary showdown with the upholders of the old order. Until 1917 these conclusions set forth in The Communist Manifesto and further writings of the Marxists were still only working hypotheses which served to guide the most advanced elements of the proletarian cause but had yet to be realized. The overthrow of czarism and capitalism by the Russian workers and peasants led by the Bolsheviks converted the propositions of scientific socialism regarding the transition from capitalism to socialism from well-founded speculations into ven~ied laws

INTERNATIONAL

SOCIALIST

REVIEW/MAY

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of the contemporary class struggle. The victory of 1917 effected a qualitative transformation in the status of Marxism as a theory of social transformation and a guide to revolutionary practice. It placed Marxism in an altogether different category from all other theories of social and political development either in the labor movement or in bourgeois academic circles. Marxism had demonstrated in real life its capacity to predict, prepare, direct and bring forth the most profound changes ever known in social relations and political institutions. These changes denoted a new chapter in human history. This is something which none of the rival theories have been able to do. These adversary schools may outbid the Marxists here and there and for a time, in their pretensions, their claims, even in their popularity. What they have failed to do is match Marxism in performance. That difference is all-important because allideas, all theories must prove their worth and their truth by passing the decisive tests of experiment and practice. In the last analysis, that is what counts the most in all departments of science. In transforming revolutionary politics from a utopia into a science, Marxism followed the path taken by other branches of knowledge. In all fields of science the period of conscious theorizing and of ascertaining definitive laws, has been preceded by an earlier, more primitive, more groping phase of a more or less protracted character. That is the time of blind experimentation, of hit and miss methods, of fumbling around for the right line of investigation and the key to the situation. Such a period of looking for the right road and determining what it is is inescapably dominated by empiricism. This pioneering lays the basis and paves the way for the next and higher phase where theoretical insight, foresight and control, based upon the correct concepts corresponding to the essential objective facts, play a larger and ultimately a dominant role. Every science has passed through such a development. The alchemists, for example, tried many ways to convert baser metals into gold and sifver. They didnt succeed, although today chemists can turn carbon into diamonds. But the kinds of apparatus they devised, like retorts and filters, the techniques they developed, the properties of the chemical reactions they studied, and even certain ideas they advanced, contributed to the creation and advancement of the present genuine science of chemistry. The science of politics has gone through comparable phases. Before it acquired a solid scientific foundation and methods of procedure through Marxism, it was largely empirical and descriptive in nature. This will become clearer if we trace some of the steps it took along the way. he ancient Greeks were the first to study politics in a systematic way. Aristotles Politics is still a valuable handbook of information on the subject. He and his school collected historical data T about 158 city-states and analyzed their institutions to find out which had the best features and could provide the maximum stability. These philosophers, and others such as the Sophists, were impelled to inquire into the causes, 16

characteristics and consequences of political changes and the different forms of sovereignty, because of the turbulent character of the class conflicts which shook the Greek citystates. Unlike the Oriental societies based upon agriculture, where despotisms and dynasties continued to rule for centuries without being challenged or superseded, the commercial Greek cities were subjected to tremendous changes, disorders and upheavals whereby one form of rulership would rapidly and convulsively be replaced by another. In addition, out of excess of population and commercial enterprises, the Greeks had to set up colonies which posed to them the practical problem of what pattern the constitutions of these outposts should have. These Greek thinkers were the first probing investigators of revolutions and counterrevolutions. They endeavored to find out why they happened, what social forces were involved and benefited from them, and what constitutional changes issued from them. As spokesmen for the aristocracy, Plato and Aristotle did not favor democratic regimes nor desire to promote popular revolutions. To the contrary, they wanted to find out and teach how to prevent these from occurring and recurring, or at least to limit their consequences by restraining the democratic forces from doing too much damage to the property and power of the patricians. In the fifth book of his politics Aristotle discuss= many aspects of the problems of revolution and counterrevolution. He takes up the causes of dissensions and revolutions in both the democracies and theoligarchies. He quite correctly asserts that inequality was a main source of revolutionary feeling among the lower classes. That is still true in the class societies of today. He then goes on to consider how constitutional stability can be preserved. Revolution, he says, breaks out wherever there is a disturbance of the established balance of power between the aristocrats andthedemocrats, the patricians and the plebians. His formula for avoiding revolutions and for the best political community is a golden mean between the rule of the rich and the poor in which the middle class, the possessors of moderate and sufficient property, holds the balance of power and can mediate between the oligarchs and the lower orders. This part of Aristotles treatise is a most instructive account of how one of the greatest intellects of the Greek aristocracy looked at the political overturns occasioned by the class conflicts of his time. Numerous other astute individuals studied revolutions and the recoils against them over the two and a half millennia separating Aristotle from Marx. Prominent among them were: Polybius, the Greek historian of the rise of the Roman empire; Ibn Kahldun, the eminent Arab founder of sociology in the fourteenth century; the Italian, Machiavelli (it has been said that The Prince is a commentary on the last chapters of Aristotles work dealing with the theory of revolutions); the seventeenth century English political theorists, Hobbes, Barrington and Locke; the Frenchmen, Montesquieu and Condorcet in the eighteenth century; Jefferson and Tom Paine (the international revolutionary who participated in both thf American and French revolutions and tried to promote one in England as well); and finally, the French historians of the Restoration period in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Through the commentaries of these writers and others Western mankind amassed a considerable fund of information and ideas about the phenomena of social and political revolution. Yet, for all their observations and insights, the most profound motive forces of revolutionary change remained hidden from these theorists. The explanations they offered and the books they wrote were more descriptive than deeply analytical. They dealt largely with the superstructural factors and features of revolutionary movements and failed to reach down to bedrock to uncover the fundamental causes of structural changes in society. These were lodged in the domain of the productive relations and property forms which were then studied by the economists rather than by the historians and political theorists. he unsurpassed merit of Marxism as a method, as a system of principles and a body of knowledge, is its success in exploring and explaining the reasons for the motion, the progress and the stagT nation of societies. It has most profoundly elucidated those qualitative leaps in history when peoples have passed from one level of development to a higher, more productive and efficient one. Marxism is a doctrine of social evolution which gives a set of directives for class struggle, political revolution and the reconstruction of human relations. This is not always understood. Ever since Marxism became the predominant ideology in advanced political and intellectual circles, a profession known as trimming Marxs beard has come into vogue. This is a chore comparable to what Delilah, the Philistine, did to Samson. An assortment of literary, professorial and reformist tendencies have tried to make Marx over into an image conforming to their particular antirevolutionary predilections. They have made him into a philanthropic spiritual humanist (see Erich Fromm), a red professor, an academic economist, a nationalist, a reformed revolutionary, even in two bizarre cases, into an anti-Semite and a male chauvinist. In a recent collection of his essays entitled Marxism and the Intellectuals (Doubleday, New York, 1969) Professor Lewis Feuer depicts Marx as an individual who hated his mother, the Jews and capitalism, in that order, but did worthy work as an empirical research sociologist much like Feuer himself. Marx and Engels were many-sided personalities. They were philosophers, economists, historians, sociologists, cultural critics and military strategists. But they were above all practicing socialist revolutionaries. They were the original and foremost representatives of a new breed of specialists who, throughout their careers, have integrated the theory and practice of making the proletarian revolution in the happiest combination. Unlike the anarchists, spontaneists and New Lefts, Marx and Engels not only believed in the necessity of building a vanguard political organization but worked tirelessly at it until their dying days. They were not national-minded like the labor and Stalinist bureaucrats, but internationalists to the core who devoted their energies to launching and strengthening a flesh-andblood international, uniting the national revolutionary leaderships of the world working class and all the oppressed. Here is the true Marx and Engels, the quintes-

sential Marx and Engels who served as the mentors and models for Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and lesser figures, including ourselves. These founders of our movement and their best disciples were primarily concerned with developing the strategy and tactics of the class struggle which could lead the workers to the conquest of power in their country and in the rest of the world. They asked, they kept asking, What kind of methods, what system of measures could insure success in that task? All the rest of their activities, their studies and their writings, were designed to clarify and answer the problems of making a socialist revolution. For them the science of revolution incessantly passes over and merges with the techniques for promoting revolution. Antiquity knew quite a few illustrious makers of popular revolutions such as the Gracchi, the leaders of the Roman plebians, and Spartacus, the hero of the Roman slave insurgents. The bourgeois democratic movements brought forth such figures as Cromwell and Lilburne, Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Jacques Roux, Gracchus Babeuf, Toussaint LOuverture and Nat Turner. Sam Adams was regarded by his contemporaries on both sides of the battlefield as the foremost organizer of the American war of independence. In London he was acclaimed as the foremost politician in the world, who was without a peer in the business of forwarding a rebellion. He fully deserved that reputation. These bourgeois democratic revolutionists edited journals, served in legislatures, mobilized and inspired masses, led armies, overturned governments and created new republics. What they did not have was a well-grounded scientific understanding of social development and political strategy nor a revolutionary party organized beforehand and based on a principled program directed toward explicit objectives. They had to sink or swim as best they could when they were lifted up and carried along with the revolutionary torrent. When the New Lefts and spontaneists inveigh against Marxism or Leninism because it advocates preparing and organizing in advance for the revolutionary struggle, they are unknowingly trying to pull the most advanced and enlightened elements back into a bypassed and benighted prescientific state and onto a level of understanding or lack of it proper to a bourgeois but not to a socialist revolutionand they are doing so in advanced capitalist countries at that!

he purpose of science is to know what reality is in order to foresee its operations and development correctly and thus to act to realize human aims most effectively and opportunely. That is T its irreplaceable value in practice. Man has recently gone to the moon, not by guess and by God, but by learning among other things the rules of mathematics and telecommunications, applying the laws of aerodynamics, conforming to the properties of the atmosphere and of space, utilizing the characteristics of metals and checking the capacities of the human organism under unusual stress. The entire project was planned to the finest detail and pretested by computer simulation. Marxism holds that scientific methods which have produced such triumphs can be put to work,
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THEORY OF ALIENATION
BY ERNEST MANl)EL

Marx rejects the idea of alienation as an inherent and ineradicable curse of mankind. He says that alienation oflaboris notbound to human existence in all places and for all future time. It is a specific result of specific forms of social and economic organization.
t was by studying Hegel that Marx first came across the concept of alienation. But, oddly enough, it was not the theory of alienated labor that he I originally picked up from Hegels works. It was the alienation of man as a citizen in his relationship with the state that became the starting point of Marxs philosophical, political and social thought. The social contract theory maintained that in organized society the individual must forfeit a certain number of individual rights to the state as the representative of the collective interest of the community. Hegel especially had developed this idea which was so strongly enunciated by the theoreticians of the natural rights philosophy. That also served as the starting point of Marxs critique of Hegel and his beginning as a critical social thinker in general. Some small incidents which happened in the Rhine province of western Germany around 1842-43 (the increase in the number of people who stole wood and the intervention of the government against these people) led Marx to conclude that the state, which purports to represent the collective interest, instead represented the interests of only one part of the society, that is to say, those who own private property. Therefore the forfeiture of individual rights to that state represented a phenomenon of alienation: the loss of rights by people to institutions which were in reality hostile to them. Starting from that political-philosophical platiorm, Marx, who in the meantime had been expelled from Germany and gone into exile in France, got in contact with the first socialist and workers organizations there and began to study economics, especially the classical writers of British politicrd economy, the Adam SmithPhoto by Pamela Starsky

Ricardo school. This was the background for Marxs first attempt in 1844 at a synthesis of philosophical and economic ideas in the so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscnpts of 1844, also called the Parisian Manuscnpts. This was an attempt to integrate his ideas about labor in bourgeois society with ideas about the fate of man, mans position in history, and his existence on earth. This initial youthful attempt at synthesis was carried out with very inadequate means. At that period Marx did not yet have a thorough knowledge of political economy; he had ordy started to acquaint himself with some of the basic notions of the classical school in political economy; and he had little direct or indirect experience with the modern industrial system. He would obtain all that only during the next ten years. This unfhished early work was unknown for a very long time. It was first published in 1932, nearly one hundred years after it was written. Accordingly, much of the discussion which had been going on in economic as well as philosophic circles, about what he thought in his youth and how he arrived at a certain number of his basic concepts, was very much distorted by an ignorance of this specific landmark in his intellectual development. Immature as parts of it might seem and are, especially the economic part, it nevertheless represents both a major turning point in Marxs intellectual development and in the intellectual history of mankind. Its importance, which I will try to explain, is linked with the concept of alienation. Alienation is a very old idea which has religious origins and is almost as old as organized religion itself. It was taken over by nearly all the classical

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philosophical trends in the West as in the East. This concept turns around what one could call the tragic fate of man. Hegel, who was one of the greatest German philosophers, took over the idea from his predecessors but gave it a new slant and a new basis which denoted momentous progress. He did this by changing the foundation of that concept of the tragic fate of man from a vague anthropological and philosophical concept into a concept rooted in labor. Hegel, before Marx, said that man is alienated because human labor is alienated. He gave two explanations for this general alienation of human labor. One is what he called the dialectics of need and labor. Human needs, he said, are always one step ahead of the available economic resources; men will therefore always be condemned to work very hard to fulfdl unsatisfied needs. However, the attempt to equalize the organization of material resources with the necessity of satisfying all human needs is an impossible task, a goal which can never be attained. That was one aspect of what Hegel called alienated labor. The other side of his philosophical analysis was a bit more complicated. It is summarized in a difficult word, the word externalization (Enttiusserung). Though the term is complicated and sounds foreign, its content is easier to understand. Hegel meant by the philosophical concept of externalization the fact that every man who works, who produces something, really reproduces in his work an idea which he initially had in his head. Some of you might be astonished if I immediately add that Marx shared that opinion. You will find this same idea, that any work which man performs lives in his head before being realized in material reality, in the first chapter of Capitzzl. Hegel, as well as Marx, thereby drew a basic distinction between men and, let us say, ants or other creatures which seem to be busily at work but do things purely on instinct. Man, on the other hand, first develops an idea about what he aims to do and then tries to realize that idea. Hegel goes a step farther when he asks, what do we do in reality when we try to express, in material, what first lives in us as an idea? We inevitably separate ourselves from the product of our labor. Anything which we project out of ourselves, anything which we fabricate, anything which we produce, we project out of our own body and it becomes separated from us. It cannot remain as much part and parcel of our being as an idea which continues to live in our head. That was for Hegel the main, let us say, anthropological, definition of alienated labor. He therefore arrived at the conclusion that every and any kind of labor is alienated labor because in any society and under any conditions men will always be condemned to become separated from the products of their labor.

hen Marx takes up these two definitions of alienated labor given by Hegel, he contradicts both of them. He says that the discrepancy between needs and material resources, the tension between needs and labor, is a limited one, conditioned by history. It is not truethatmans needs can develop in an unlimited way or that the output of his collective

labor will always remain inferior to these needs. He denies this most emphatically on the basis of a historical analysis. He especially rejects Hegels idealistic identification of externalization with alienation. Marx says that when we separate ourselves from the product of our labor it does not necessarily follow that the product of our labor then oppresses us or that any material forces whatsoever turn against men. Such alienation is not the result of the projection of things out of our body as such, which first live in us as ideas and then take on a material existence as objects, as products of our labor. Alienation results from a certain form of organization of society. More concretely, only in a society which is based on commodity production and only under the specific economic and social circumstances of a market economy, can the objects which we project out of us when we produce acquire a socially oppressive existence of their own and be integrated in an economic and social mechanism which becomes oppressive and exploitative of human beings. The tremendous advance in human thought which I referred to in this critique of Hegel consists in the fact that Marx rejects the idea of the alienation of labor as being an anthropological characteristic, that is, an inherent and ineradicable curse of mankind. He says that the alienation of labor is not bound to human existence in all places and for all future time. It is a specific result of specific forms of social and economic organization. In other words, Marx transforms Hegels notion of alienated labor from an eternal anthropological into a transitory historical notion. This reinterpretation carries a message of hope for mankind. Marx says that mankind is not condemned to live by the sweat of his brow under alienated conditions throughout his whole term on earth. He can become free, his labor can become free, he is capable of self-emancipation, though only under specific historical conditions. Later I will define what specific social and economic conditions are required for the disappearance of alienated labor. Let us now pass from the first systematic exposition of his theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to his main work, Capital, which was published over twenty years later. It is true that the word alienation hardly appears there. A new profession has sprung up in the last thirty years which is called Nfarxology. Its practitioners read through the works of Marx and put on small index cards all the words he uses in his books and then try to draw some conclusions about his thought from their philological statistics. Some people have even used computers in this type of formal analysis. These Marx-philologists have so far discovered six places in Capital where the word alienation is used either as a noun or as a verb. I certainly will not dispute that colossal discovery though somebody may find a seventh spot or there could be some dispute about the sixth one. On the basis of such an analysis of Capital, done in a purely verbal and superficial way, it could be concluded that the mature Marx did not have a real theory of alienation. Marx would then have discarded it after his youth, after his immature development, especially when, around 1856-57, he became thoroughly convinced

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of the correctness of the labor theory of value and perfected that labor theory of value himself. When the Economic andPhilosophicManuscnpts of 1844 were published for the fwst time in 1932, a big controversy arose around these issues. At least three trends can be distinguished in the debate. I wilI not cite the names of all the authors who have participated in it since more than a hundred people have written on the subject and the controversy is far from having ended. Some said there is a contradiction between the youthful and the mature works and Marx abandoned his original theories when his own views were fully developed. Others said the opposite. The real Marx is to be found in the youthful works and he later degenerated by restricting the scope of his understanding to purely economic problems. He thus fell victim to the deviation of economism. Still other people tried to deny that Marxs ideas underwent any significant or substantial evolution whatsoever. Among these are the American Erich Fromm, the French Marxist scholar Maximilian Rubel, and two French Catholic priests, Fathers Bigo and Colvez. They maintain that the same ideas are contained in his early as in his later works. I think all three of these opinions are wrong. There was an important evolution, not an identical repetition, in Marxs thought from decade to decade. Any person who thinks, and continues to think and live, will not say exactly the same thing when he is sixty as when he was twenty-five. Even if it is conceded that the basic concepts remain the same, there is obviously some progress, some change. In this concrete case the evolution is all the more striking, as I said before, because the Marx of 1844 had not yet accepted the labor theory of value which is a cornerstone of the economic theory he developed ten or fifteenyears later. One of the pivotal questions in this continuing debate is whether the mature Marx held a theory of alienation or whether he altogether abandoned his original theory of alienation. This dispute, which can be resolved on a documentary basis, would not have gone on so long and inconclusively if it had not been for another unfortunate accident.

t happened that another major work of Marx, Griindnsse oh- Kntik der Politischen Okonomie (Fundamental Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy), a thirteen-hundred-page work written in 1857-58, which is a kind of laboratory where all the major ideas of Capital were first elaborated and tested, was also not published until a century after it was written. Its first publication occurred at the beginning of the second world war in Russia, but most of the copies were destroyed as a result of the war. I believe only two copies arrived in the United States and none were available in Western Europe. The Russians under Stalin were not eager to reproduce it a second time. Thus it was not until the nineteen-fifties, almost a century after it had been originally written, that the book was reprinted and became known to a certain number of experts in a few countries.

Sad to say, this major work of Marx has still to be translated into English, although one has been announced. It appeared in French only a short time ago. So some of the participants in this dispute did have the excuse that they did not know that key work. For anybody who reads it can at once see that a Marxist theory of alienation exists because in the Griindrisse the word, the concept, and the analysis appear dozens and dozens of times. What then is this theory of alienation as it was developed by the mature Marx, not by the young Marx? And how can we relate it to what is set down in Capital? There is first a purely formal difficulty here because Marx uses three different terms in this connection and he uses them in an interchangeable manner. One is the concept of alienation; another is the concept of reification, a complicated word; and a third is the concept of commodity fetishism, which is still more complicated. However, these three concepts are not so d~lcult to explain, and I will try to clarify their meaning for you. Let us start this analysis with a definition of economic alienation. I must immediately state that in the comprehensive Marxist theory of alienation, economic alienation is only one part of a much more general phenomenon which covers practically all fields of human activity in class society. But it is the most de cisive element. So lets start from economic alienation. We will approach it in successive stages. The first and most striking feature of economic alienation is the separation of men from free access to the means of production and means of subsistence. This is a rather recent development in human history. As late as the nineteenth century free access to the means of production in agriculture survived in some countries of the world, among others, in the United States and Canada. Until after the American Civil War it was not impossible for masses of people to find some unpreempted spot of land and to establish themselves on that acreage as free farmers, as homesteaders. In Europe that possibility had ceased to exist for two hundred years, and in some countries there even three or four hundred years earlier. That historical factor is the starting point for any theory of alienation because the institution of wage labor in which men are forced to sell their labor power to another person, to their employer, can come into existence on a large scale only when and where free access to the means of production and subsistence is denied to an important part of society. Thus the first precondition for the alienation of labor occurs when labor be comes separated from the basic means of production and subsistence. I said this is a relatively new phenomenon. A second example may illuminate this more sharply. The classical historical criticism made by liberal thought in the nineteenth century about the society of the middle ages, feudal society, was the lack of freedom of the cultivators of the soil. I wont take exception to that criticism which I think was correct. The direct producers in that society, the peasants and serfs, were not free people. They could not move about freely; they were tied to the land. But what the bourgeois liberal critics of feudal society forgot was that tying men to the land was a two-sided phenomenon. If man was tied to the land,

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the land was also tied to man. And because the land was tied to man, there wasnt any important part of the people living within feudal relations who could be forced to become wage laborers and sell their labor power to owners of capital. They had access to the land, they could produce their own means of subsistence and keep part of it for themselves. Only people outside organized feudal society, in reality outlaws, because that is what they were originally, could become the starting point for new social classes-wage laborers on the one hand, merchants on the other. The second stage in the alienation of labor came about when part of society was driven off the land, no longer had access to the means of production and means of subsistence, and, in order to survive, was forced to sell its labor power on the market. That is the main characteristic of alienated labor. In the economic field it is the institution of wage labor, the economic obligation of people who cannot otherwise survive to sell the only commodity they possess, their labor power, on the labor market.

hat does it mean to sell your labor power to a boss? In Marxs analysis, both in his youthful and his mature work, behind this purely formal and legal contractual relation you sell your labor power, part of your time, to another for money to live on is in reality something of deepgoing consequence for all human existence and particularly for the life of the wage laborer. It first of all implies that you lose control over a large part of your waking hours. All the time which you have sold to the employer belongs to him, not to you. You are not free to do what you want at work. It is the employer who dictates what you will and will not do during this whole time. He will dictate what you produce, how you produce it, where you produce it. He will be master over your activity. And the more the productivity of labor increases and the shorter the workweek becomes, the stricter will be the control of the employer over every hour of your time as a wage laborer. In time and motion studies the ultimate and most perfected form of this control the boss even tries to control every second, literally every second, of the time which you spend in his employ. Alienation thereupon acquires a third form. When a wage earner has sold his labor power for a certain part of his life to his employer, the products of his labor are not his own. The products of his, labor become the property of the employer. The fact that the modern wage earner owns none of the products of his own labor, obvious as it may appear to people who are accustomed to bourgeois society, is not at all so self+wident from the viewpoint of human history as a whole. It was not like that for thousands upon thousands of years of human existence. Both the medieval handicraftsman and the handicraftsman of antiquity were the proprietors of their own 22

products. The peasant, and even the serf of the middle ages, remained in possession of at least 50 per cent, sometimes 60 and 70 per cent, of the output of their own labor. Under capitalism not only does the wage earner lose possession of the product of his labor, but these products can function in a hostile and injurious manner against him. This happened with the machine. This remarkable product of human ingenuity becomes a source of tyranny against the worker when the worker serves as an appendage of the machine and is forced to adapt the cadence of his life and work to the operation of the machine. This can become a serious source of alienation in shift work when part of the working class has to work during the night or at odd hours in conflict with the normal rhythm of human life between day and night. Such an abnormal schedule causes all sorts of psychological and nervous disorders.. Another aspect of the oppressive nature which the products of labor can acquire once society is divided into hostile classes of capitalists and wage workers are the crises of overproduction, depressions or, as it is nowadays more prudently put, recessions. Then people consume less because they produce too much. And they consume less, not because their labor is inadequately productive, but because their labor is too productive. We come now to a final form of alienated labor in the economic field which derives from the conclusions of the points I have noted. The alienation of the worker and his labor means that something basic has changed in the life of the worker. What is it? Normally everybody has some creative capacity, certain talents lodged in him, untapped potentialities for human development which should be expressed in his labor activity. However, once the institution of wage labor is prevalent, these possibilities become nullified. Work is no longer a means of self-expression for anybody who sells his labor time. Work is just a means to attain a goal. And that goal is to get money, some income to be able to buy the consumer goods necessary to satisfy your needs. In this way a basic aspect of mans nature, his capacity to perform creative work, becomes thwarted and distorted. Work becomes something which is not creative and productive for human beings but something which is harmful and destructive. Catholic priests and Protestant pastors who have worked in factories in Western Europe, the so-called worker-priests, who have written books about their experiences, have arrived at conclusions on this point that are absolutely identical with those of Marxism. They declare that a wage earner considers the hours passed in factories or in offices as time lost from his life. He must spend time there in order to get freedom and capacity for human development outside the sphere of production and of work. Ironically, this hope for fulfillment during leisure time turns out to be an illusion. Many humanitarian and philanthropic reformers of liberal or socialdemocratic persuasion in the nineteenthand the beginning of the twentieth centuries thought that men could become liberated when their leisure time would increase. They did not understand that the nature of leisure was likewise determined by the nature of wage labor and by the conditions of a society based on commodity production and wage labor.

Once socially necessary labor time became shorter and leisure time greater, a commercialization of leisure took place. The capitalist society of commodity production, the so-called consumer society did its utmost to integrate leisure time into the totality of economic phenomena at the basis of commodity production, exploitation and accumulation. At this point the notion of alienation is extended from a purely economic to a broader social phenomenon. The first bridge to this wider application is the concept of alienation of the consumer. Thus far we have spoken only about the consequences of alienated labor. But one of the cardinal characteristics of capitalist society, as Marx understood as early as 1844, is its builtin contradiction regarding human needs. On the one hand, each capitalist entrepreneur tries to limit the human needs of his own wage earners as much as possible by paying as little wages as possible. Otherwise he would not make enough profit to accumulate. On the other hand, each capitalist sees in the work force of all the other capitalists not wage earners but potential consumers. He would therefore like to expand the capacity of consumption of these other wage earners to the limit or otherwise he cannot increase production and sell what his own workers produce. Thus capitalism has a tendency to constantly extend the needs of people.

p to a certain point this apansion can cover genuine human needs, such as the elementary requirements of feeding, housing and clothing everybody in more or less decent circumstances. Very quickly, however, capitalism in its efforts to commercialize everything and sell as many gadgets as possible, goes beyond any rational human needs and starts to spur and stimulate artificial needs in a systematic, large-scale manner. Some of these are absurd and grotesque. Let me give one example. An American author, ,Jessica Mitford, has written an amusing book, called the Ammcan Way of Death. It describes the practices of morticians who seek to induce people to buy more expensive coffins so that the beloved dead can rest not only peace+ fully, but lightly, on foam mattresses. The sales pitchmen say this satisfies, not the corpse, but the feelings of the consumer. Is it necessary to observe that no real need is involved in this grotesque attempt of the burial business to make money? It is scandalous to feed in this mercenary manner upon the feelings of grief of people who have lost members of their family. Such alienation is no longer purely economic but has become social and psychological in nature. For what is the motivation of a system for constantly extending needs beyond the limits of what is rational? It is to create, purposely and deliberately, permanent and meretricious dissatisfactions in human beings. Capitalism would cease to exist if people were fully and healthINTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW/MAY 1970

ily satisfied. The system must provoke continued artificial ~ssatisfaction in human beings because without that dissatisfaction the sales of new gadgets which are more and more divorced from genuine human needs cannot be increased. A society which is turned toward creating systematic frustration of this kind generates the bad results recorded in the crime pages of the daily newspapers. A society which breeds worthless dissatisfaction will also breed all kinds of antisocial attempts to overcome this dissatisfaction. Beyond this alienation of human beings as consumers, there are two very important aspects of alienation. One is the alienation of human activity in general. The other is the alienation of human beings in one of their most fundamental features, the capacity to communicate. What is meant by the extension of the concept of alienation to human activity in generaI? We live in a society based on commodity production and a social division of labor pushed to the limits of overspecialization. As a result,- people in a particular job or doing a certain type of activity for a living will incline to have an extremely narrow horizon. They will be prisoners of their trade, seeing only the problems and preoccupations of their specialty. They will also tend to have a restricted social and political awareness because of this limitation. Along with this shut-in horizon will go something which is much worse, the tendency to transform relations between human beings into relations be tsveen things. This is that famous tendency toward r& ification, the transformation of social relations into things, into objects, of which Marx speaks in Capital. This way of looking at phenomena is an extension of this theory of alienation. Here is an example of this transformation which I witnessed the other day in this country. The waiters and waitresses in restaurants are poor working people who are the victims and not the authors of this process of reification. They are even unaware of the nature of their involvement in this phenomenon. While they are under heavy pressure to serve the maximum number of customers on the job imposed upon them by the system and its owners, they look upon the customers solely under the form of the orders they put in. I heard one waitress address herself to a person and say, Ah, you are the corned-beef and cabbage. You are not Mr. or Mrs. Brown, not a person of a certain age and with a certain address. You are cornedbeef and cabbage because the waitress has on her mind the orders taken under stress from so many people. This habit of reification is not the fault of the inhumanity or insensitivity of the workers. It results from a certain type of human relation rooted in commodity production and its extreme division of labor where people engaged in one trade tend to see their fellows only as customers or through the lenses of whatever economic relations they have with them. This outlook finds expression in everyday language. I have been told that in the city of Osaka, the main commercial and industrial capital of Japan, the common mode of addressing people when you meet is not how do you do? but how is business? or are
CONTINUED ON PAGE 49

23

BY LARRY SEIGLE

The collapse of SDSwas notadisaster. New Leftism can now be seen in its true light, not as a new gospel but an episode in the education of a new generation of revolutionaries.
ostrnortems on the New Left are as common today as postmortems on the Communist Party were in the 1950s. Some of the liberal obituary writers, venting their own wishes, have predicted P a decline in radical activity as a result of the downfall of the New Left. Hundreds of thousands of student activists will not buy this. But it is impossible to avoid the palpable fact of the demise of Students for a Democratic Society. The SDS split and the subsequent disintegration of its splintered factions forces consideration of the questions. What happened and why? What is to be done now? One answer, which reflects the thinking of some veterans of SDS, was presented by the January 17, 1970, Guardian in an editorial entitled Beyond the New Left. SDS, the Guardian observes, symbol and substance of what had been known during the past decade as the new left, has ceased to exist. This is a tough thing to admit for a paper which has been such an enthusiastic and virtually uncritical supporter of SDS for most of the past decade. (And its a sad state of affairs for the Guardian which aspired to become the weekly voice of SDS. Now the paper must seek to play that role for some other grouping-but which one?) The Guardian, expressing the thinking of some individuals around the Revolutionary Youth Movement II faction, offers three reasons for SDSs collapse: 1) its failure to relate in a consistent way to the struggle against white supremacy; 2) SDSs male supremacy and the failure to deal with the vital issues of womens liberation; 3) SDSs failure to master the importance of the united front tactic in opposing the war . . . The Guardian goes on to criticize SDSs rampant opportunism and adventurism and concludes that those young radicals who have gone through the past decade can now draw the lessons of their experience and build a new organization. But to the key question of what type of organization, based on what program, the Guardian proposes nothing more specific than: we must build . . . a new left! The New Left is dead. Long live the new New Left! After ten years of trying and failing to build a New Left, anyone who proposes that the movement should go back and try all over again cannot have learned very much. However, this is not the place to explain the political blinders which burden the Guardian. Their editorial is instructive because it so clearly discloses the impasse which those who maintain undiminished faith in the New Left and its prospects are in today. Fortunately, the Guardians position rep resents only one response to the default of the New Left experiment of the sixties. Another broad current of young people has shown itself capable of drawing some correct positive conclusions from that negative experience. This has resulted in the pronounced strengthening of the revolutionary-socialist tendency of the radical movement, most clearly indicated by the recent spurt in the growth of the Young Socialist Alliance. The New Left began this decade with the claim that it would surpass Marxism and replace it as a theory and a movement for social change. It did not claim to have all the answers at the outset, but it did hold out the promise that it would develop a full, coherent and workable program if given a chance. No one can argue that it didnt get that chance. The New Left became a popular force in the

25

1960s. It drew around it and won as partisans some of the best of the young intellectuals on American campuses, along with tens of thousands of determined and enthusiastic activists. It was given wide coverage in the mass media; it was news. It was afforded the opportunity of relating to mass movements on concrete social issues: the antiwar movement, the Black struggle, the womens liberation movement, the student movement and others. Moreover, it was not faced with the difficulties of dealing with competing tendencies which outnumbered it and which could block its development. More propitious conditions for growth and development could not have been asked for. If it was ever to succeed, the 1960s was the time. Yet at the beginning of 1970, the New Left in the United States is in a shambles. SDS, the predominant organization, split three ways last June and none of its factions has been able to recover the glory that was SDS. There are now no outstanding political thinkers and writers of the New Left. Much of what was said and written by New Left intellectuals in the past ten years has been rejected even by those who wrote and spoke it. Of course, some are attempting to reconstruct the New Left; the Guardian editorial shows that. And it is quite possible that some individual or group can succeed in pulling together a neo-SDS. But such a facsimile will never be equal to theoriginal, and it will never dominate the political landscape the way SDS once did. The New Left has not lived up to its promise. SDSs failure cannot be attributed to unfavorable objective conditions in the United States since, in fact, radicalism mounted as SDS fell to pieces. The causes of the failure lie in the methodology and the ideology of the New Left itself,

his doss not mean that there was not a great deal that was positive in New Left writings and positions during the early sixties. Its positive T elements constituted a signitlcant break away from the then prevailing politics of cold-war liberalism on one side, and Stalinist and social democratic reformism on the other. Key elements in this advance were contained in C. Wright Mills famous 1960 Letter to the New Left, which marks the starting point of the New Left in the United States, although the piece was originally published in England. Mills saw clearly the need to break with the cold war and witchhunt mentality which had suffocated critical thinking for so long. He took a forthright stand in favor of defending the right of Marxists to be heard. In fact, he saw a debate with Marxists as necessary to break the iron grip of the establishment liberals on American intellectual and academic life. While this stand may nowadays not seem so very bold and significant, at that time the vestiges of McCarthyism were still powerful forces with which radicals had to contend. That same year, for example, the National Committee For a Sane Nuclear Policy, then the most influential peace group, buckled urider government pressure to purge itself of all Communists and Communist influence. And SDS, which was launched under social26

democratic patronage, didnt formally delete its anti-communist clause until December 1965. Mills and much of the New Left found themselves to the left of the Communist Party and the Social Democracy. They criticized the establishment nature of these two tendencies, concentrating especially on the failure of the Labor Party in England to change the nature of capitalist society, and on the crimes and conservatism of the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. Although they made many blunders, they did point accurately to the utter reformism and bankruptcy of these two tendencies on a world scale. Mills perceptively noted that the radicalization beginning to take hold in 1960 was mainly a phenomenon of the campuses. Students and faculty were playing a centrally important role in the political life of diverse sectors of the world. Mills. and his colleagues correctly polemicized against those who ignored or rejected the role of the rebellious students in social struggle. If these ideas are widely accepted today by radicals and others, in 1960 they represented a qualitative break with the dominant thinking in this country. Mills especially was a scholar of integrity who was not timid in the face of the conservatizing pressures upon American intellectuals. In 1960 he travelled to Cuba and wrote a book (Listen, Yankee) which came out solidly in defense of the Cuban revolution. This book along with others by Mills and some of his cothinkers played a positive educational and inspirational role at that initial stage of student radicalization. Mills and other New Lefters emphasized that they didnt possess a complete theory or a rounded program. In fact, they considered this deficiency to be an asset. Many of them viewed their special function as one of working out, in collaboration with the informal network of radical intellectuals then emerging around the country, a theoretical position and program of action that would go beyond the limits of Marxism and supersede it as a theory and a movement of social progress. The revolutionary movement a decade later should evaluate the progress they made in this endeavor. Three basic assertions were put forward by the New Left: 1) Leninism and Leninist parties are irrelevant to advanced capitalism, making necessary new organizational forms to lead the revolutionary struggle; 2) workers are conservatized, or simply de-politicized altogether, and alternative agencies of social change have to be sought; 3) Marxism is a Victorian theory and outdated as a theoretical framework. This means revolutionaries must go beyond the principles and positions of Marxism to elaborate new and more relevant economic, political and sociological theories. Let us examine the actual achievements of the New Left in each one of these controversial areas.

rom the very outset, the New Left rejected the concept of a democratically centralized combat organization armed with a revolutionary program. The New Left felt that a disciplined, comF bat party must inevitably be undemocratic: minority points of view have no genuine rights and individuals are forced to take positions or engage in actions whether or not they agree with them.

There were two sources of this misconception. First, the only organization representing itself as Leninist with which most New Lefters had any experience was the Communist Party, U. S. A., a party that has been completely undemocratic, at least since 1928, suppressing and outlawing any and all meaningful political discussion within its ranks. This bureaucratic centralism of the Stalinist school was mistaken for Leninism in ignorance of the fact that the Bolshevik Party under Lenins leadership was the exact opposite of the CP. It had a rich and vibrant internal life, with full rights for the expression of minority points of view and freedom for its members to engage in political discussions on all aspects of party policy. The only provisions for such discussion were that it must be held within the party and not with political forces outside the party, and that the discussion be undertaken in an organized way, with periods of time specifically set aside for such purposes. These conditions were required in order to facilitate democratic decision-making and to avoid paralyzing the party by endless discussion which could prevent it from deciding and acting on the basis of majority rule. This is the way the Bolshevik Party functioned and the way the Socialist Workers Party in the United States and the sections of the Fourth International around the world function today. The second source of the New Lefts opposition to a disciplined party was subjective. To many petty-bourgeois intellectuals, the idea of belonging to a party which requires commitment to activity and subordination of ones individuality to the needs and decisions of the whole organization is repugnant. It runs against the grain of a mode of thinking and a life style they have which extolls the virtues of uninhibited individualism and independence. The New Left argued that a Leninist party inevitably stifles freedom and humanity and is just as alienating as the society against which it is fighting. This objection stems from the erroneous conception that the revolutionary vanguard can itself become the prototype of the new society, as well as the political instrument for helping to bring that society into being. It is an idealist and utopian notion which boils down to thinking that the revolution will be won by changing what is in individual heads rather than by overthrowing and defeating the capitalist class. Insofar as individuals can and do develop satisfying interpersonal relationships within a revolutionary party they do so because they share with their comrades a common view of life and they are engaged in a united effort to prevent the destruction of the entire human race, It is not because they are able to isolate themselves from the pressures or the alienation of capitalist society. Along with other anti-Marxist forces, the New Left believed that Leninism, if not tantamount to Stalinist bureaucratism, inevitably leads to it. In this argument they accepted one of the cardinal doctrines of liberalism: that a socialist revolution guided by a vanguard party can only lead to tyranny. They ignored the actual history of the Russian revolution. They denied the fact that Stalin had virtually to destroy the leaders and ranks of the Bolshevik Party who had made the revolution and to exterminate the defenders of Leninism in the Soviet Union and abroad. The New Lefters blotted out of their minds the history and lessons of the entire struggle of
INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW/MAY 1970

the Trotskyist Left Opposition against Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the CPS around the world. They missed the crucial point: that counterrevolutionary Stalinism was and is the antithesis of Leninism, not its logical successor. Let us set aside arguments of a historical character and pose the question in another way: Practically speaking, what new forms of organization were developed by the New Left in the 1960s? New Lefters during the past decade found three forms which suited their needs. None of these was new. First, there have been and continue to be numerous groups of individuals whose common ground is support for or participation in one or another publication of the New Left. In fact, many of the intelligentsia of the New Left have no affiliation other than such loose literary ties. But these types of literary circles are one of the oldest and most primitive types of o~ganizational association and are useful and fruitful only insofar as they pave the way for the formation of more advanced, durable and effective forms with a mass base. Second, in the wake of the SDS debacle, there have emerged ~ number of revolutionary collectives in cities across the country. These are composed of people, usually ex-SDSers, who find themselves in broad political agreement, although occasionally they are porous groupings of all the radicals in the vicinity. Some have connections with collectives in other cities (this is what RYM II amounts to) but more often than not they are isolated units. They are the debris left over from the sinking of SDS: provincial, narrow groups, without any perspective of programmatic clarity or coherence or of nationally coordinated action. The third and final form is or was SDS. The simple and incontrovertible fact that SDS no longer exists should be sufficient argument, one would think, that the organizational concepts on which it was based leave something to be desired. But this lesson had also been learned by the most advanced contingents of the revolutionary movement long before the New Left came on the scene, whether or not SDS cared to learn it. The history of the Socialist Party in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century clearly demonstrated that a radical organization without a definite program which tries to embrace divergent tendencies becomes paralyzed by internal division under the pressure of events and is eventually torn apart. Participatory democracythat popular slogan of the New Left actually resulted in neither democracy nor participation, but in cynical manipulation of a powerless rank and file by cliques of self-appointed leaders. Thats all. That is the sum total of the New Lefts attempts to advance beyond Leninism in the sphere of organization.

hat about the promise of the New Left to supersede Marxism in the reaIm of theory? Serious challenges to Marxism mounted by the New Left are few and far between. Despite the tone set by Mills in 1960, the great bulk of what passes for theoretical work by New Lefters has been, in reality, nothing more than a dabbling in ideas, an eclectic compilation of anti-Marxist and pseudo-Marxist ideas from 27

whatever source was handy and popular at a given time. Theoretical work of SDS never got beyond this stage. In fact, most of what passedfor theoretical argument in SDS, especially in its last two or three years, was simply a pragmatic search for answers to political pressures on the New Left, which came in particular either from the Maoists of Progressive Labor operating inside SDS, or the Trotskyists of the YSA and SWP operating independently of SDS. Thus the New Left National Office Collective went rapidly through the following gyrations: after espousing the theory of the new working class and Marcuses disqualification of the industrial workers as a revolutionary force, they became Guevarists and advocated guerrillaism and ended up by trying to out-Mao the American Maoists. (Paradoxically, certain elements in SDS, after having rejected Marxism and Leninism, suddenly turned about and embraced one or another variety of pseudo-Marxism. Thus, one grouping kowtowed before Mao Tse-tung thought and another, led by Bob Avakian, trumpeted the revolutionary virtues of Stalin years after these had been disclaimed even by his Kremlin successors. ) The sum total of all this intellectualactivity at the end of the decade hardly amounts to a challenge, let alone a successful attempt to displace Marxism. Indeed, the landscape of New Left political writing of the sixties is surprisingly barren considering the talent that was placed at its disposal. There are, of course, intellectuals who influenced SDS whose writings are a more serious and consistent challenge to the basic tenets of Marxism. Paul Sweezy, for example, has tried to prove through economic theory what Mills suggested on the basis of his sociology: that the organized industrial working class has been so integrated as consumers into the capitalist system and so ideologically conditioned to accept this society, that they constitute no threat in the foreseeable future to the stability of the advanced capitalist countries. This argument has been countered on two levels: in theory, by the works of such Marxist economists as Ernest Mandel; and in practice, by the actual course of events, such as the revolutionary upsurge of ten million organized industrial workers in France in May of 1968. Marcuse, who as the guru of the New Left also denied the revolutionary potential of the working class, rapidly lost his following in the wake of events like the French general strike. The decisive weakness of the New Left was its reliance on pragmatism as a method. In its early years this was proudly set forth as one of the virtues of the movement. That was, after all, what was supposed to be new. But pragmatism and empiricism do not represent an advance over nineteenth century Marxism; they are a retreat to pre-Marxist methodology. The inadequacy of the pragmatic approach to politics was once again demonstrated by the New Left. Pragmatism played a central role in the biggest single political error committed by SDS. In late 1965 Lee Webb and Paul Booth authored a position paper entitled, The Antiwar Movement: from Protest to Radical Politics. Booth was then national secretary of SDS and Webb had held that post previously. Essentially, they wrote, we think that the movement against the war in Vietnam is working on 28

the wrong issue. And that issue is Vietnam. We feel that American foreign policy, and thus the war in Vietnam is impervious to pressure placed directly on it. Secondly, we feel that the issue of the war in Vietnam cannot involve masses of people here in the United State-s. (Emphasis added. ) They went on to say that the antiwar movement is small, it is politically vulnerable, it is politically isolated, etc., etc. The movement is small, and will remain so because few do or will see the issue of Vietnam as critical to their lives. From this failure to understand the potential for growth and development of the antiwar movement and its pivotal importance to the world revolution, which stemmed from their superficial impressions of the scene as it looked in 1965, SDS decided to withdraw as a national organization from the antiwar movement. Contrast this prediction with the opposite analysis made by the YSA and the SWP in that same year: that the antiwar movement had the potential of developing into a genuine mass movement directed against the capitalist government on the fundamental issue of imperialist war. Which of these assessments proved capable of providing a correct orientation, capable of mobilizing masses in action against the policies of the ruling class? The answer has been given by the past five years of the ~~pansion of the antiwar forces. In large part it explains what happened to the New Left.

nother example of New Left pragmatism was its rejection of the role assigned to the industrial working class by Marxism. The New Left set out to find substitute agencies of social change. Mills and his colleagues suggested that this new agency would be radicalized intellectuals: the professors, students, writers, scientists, and other categories of people who worked with ideas. This was the principal reliable force, thought Mills, that could stop the drift towards reaction and World War III and possibly revolutionize society. Mills position prevailed in the early years of SDS. Why intellectuals? For two reasons. First, intellectual circles and the academic community constituted the home ground for the New Left. The university was where they lived and worked, where they had been educated and where their friends and collaborators were. And second, the New Left was overly impressed by the peculiar form of the radicalization of the 1960s that it began with students. In his Letter to the New Left, Mills accurately noted the fact that the student population was destined to play an increasingly important role in politics. In 1960, Turkish and South Korean student demonstrations led to the toppling of the regimes in those countries. In Japan, students initiated actions which succeeded in preventing Eisenhowers visit to that country. In England, students led mass actions against the H-bomb, In the United States, black and white students were organizing and demonstrating against Jim Crow laws. Mills pointed to the major role played by students in the Cuban revolution. Continuing ferment on campuses in the

United States, especially the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, tended to reinforce the New Left thesis that intellectuals and apprentice-intellectuals on the campus would be the primary force of revolution. Mills felt they were the only social grouping capable of going beyond a narrow, restricted view to an objective and informed survey of the world which could produce solutions for the major problems of society. Mills seems not to have understood that this notion that intellectuals alone are capable of objective intelligence is not a new idea but is a basic tenet of the elitist liberalism he rejected. It is far older than Marxism; it goes back to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. But the history of revolutions in the twentieth century revealed in practice what Marxism teaches in theory: that the monopoly held by intellectuals on thinking about social problems and devising solutions to them is broken during periods of revolutionary upsurge. Then the masses move to center stage. They not only grapple with the idea of social revolution, but they become conscious of their ability to implement revolution. Events since 1960 (which Mills unfortunately did not live to see) incontestably showed that students and intellectuals lack the leverage to bring about the overthrow of capitalism by themselves. Student explosions toppled a regime in South Korea, for example, but the failure of the proletarian and peasant masses to intervene with their own power meant that no social revolution could be carried through. The civilian dictator Rhee was replaced with the military dictator Park. While student action in France acted as a detonator in 1968, the question of state power was not posed until the working class began to move on its own account, ten million strong. And it was the Stalinist stranglehold on the masses of French workers that choked off a successful revolution. (This experience has led to a weird twist in the thinking of some New Lefters. After their illusions about the power of the students to make a revolution were shattered, they reacted by rejecting work on campuses altogether. They still failed to understand the dynamic of the radicalization and the specific interactions among its component parts. Students by their own initiatives and struggles not only in France but subsequently in such disparate nations as Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and Mexico showed that they have a key role to play in drawing broader social forces into action. ) Other variant conceptions about the agency of social change were taken up by SDSers for a time. Still viewing the industrial working class as permanently politically housebroken, economically integrated and intellectually sterile, the leaders of SDS tried to replace the role of students in their schema with the poor. Community organizing projects, where radical students went to the people became popular. The SDS leadership adopted community organizing projects as its central area of activity on a national scale. Frequently, these projects were counterpoised as arenas of work to the independent antiwar committees. In spite of the radical rhetoric which accompanied them, however, they were nothing more than glorified settlement-house work in fact, some of these projects became intertwined with government poverty agencies. This was hardly an advance over the methods of Marxism. It was a retreat to a romanticized populism, with
INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW/MAY 1970

striking similarities to the going among the people of the Russian Narodniks in the 1870s and 1880s. The Bolsheviks had polemicized against this tendency and it was eventually swept aside by the victory of Marxism in the course of the Russian revolution. Not one of these community organizing projects exists today; and who in the New Left even mentions them anymore?

n its basic objectives, then, the New Left failed completely. It did not turn out to be a momentous advance over Marxism and Leninism but a diversion which resurrected positions already tried and rejected by the revolutionary fiovement. But this does not mean that these ten years have been wasted. Much can be and has been learned out of that experience. While SDS went from bad to worse, the ideas of revolutionary socialism have found receptivity and support of significant proportions. The misconception that the New Left was the only legitimate tendency within the current radicalization has been shattered. While it had been popular in the past to claim that SDS was the organization of the entire new generation of young radicals and New Leftism its ordained ideology, it has become clear that the New Left is only one current within a much broader development. The chief rival is the revolutionary socialist tendency, the Marxists and Leninists of today, the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party. This revolutionary vanguard is assuming a more and more central position in the left. It represents a fusion of two powerful forces: that section of the young radicals who have been able to learn from their experiences and to overcome the anti-Marxist ideology and prejudices dominant in the United States; and the Marxist veterans of years of class warfare who have turned towards the new generation of radicals in order to win fresh forces to the revolutionary movement. This Marxist wing of the radicalization does not yet speak for a majority of young radicals, although on certain issues, such as the strategy for the antiwar movement, its position is accepted by a majority. But the break-up of SDS, the decline of the New Left and the recent growth of the YSA have significantly altered the relationship of forces within the radical movement in favor of Marxism. The decline of the New Left has not been accompanied, as some feared and others hoped, by a decline in radical activity or energy; the opposite has been the case. The collapse of SDS was not a disaster for the movement. It was merely a sign that the widespread illusions about the New Left were being punctured. New Leftism can now be seen in its true light, not as a new gospel but a passing episode in the education of a new generation of revolutionaries. Its dominance over radical politics in the 1960s is giving way to the increased influence of genuine Marxism as the 1970s begin.

29

lenins centenary this year is serving as an occasion for the bureaucratic ruling caste in the Soviet Union and other workers states to parade themselves in big celebrations as the true inheritors of Lenin legacy. Yet these parasites, while praising an iconic Lenin, still fear the real Lenin and continue to try to suppress those of his works they deem dangerous to their power and privileges. The article we are publishing here offers proof of this. This is the first time it has appeared in English. fThe translation is by Tom Scott.) 0 first appeared in the Russian Bulletin of the Opposition in December 1932 as an unsigned article. Prepared by Trotsky, its main contents are excerpts from a speech by Lenin on June 17, 1921, to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) at the plenum preceding its Third Congress. This speech of Lenins has been omitted from his Collected Works published in the Soviet Union. The Life and Work of V./. Lenin Outstanding Dates (December 1920-August 1921), the chronology contained in Volume 32 of Lenins Collected Works, contains a note on page 579 confirming that Lenin spoke to the ECC/ on fhaf date. But the speech itself does not appear in the collection. The bureaucracy chooses fo keep concealed from the masses in its domain the words of Lenin which appear below. The Third Congress of the Cominfern convened in Moscow from June 22 to ./u/y 12, 1921. This congress marked an important conjuncture for the world Communist movement. The first and second congresses had laid out the general principles of Comintern policy, demarcating fhe Third International from the reformist Second /nternationa/ and the centrist Independent Social Democrats. The Third Congress took place in the context ofa shifl in the world

situation. Trotsky, as the reporter on The World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International, poinfed out that the world situation and the future perspectives remain profoundly revolutionary, but the bourgeoisie had gained breathing space and renewed self-confidence after the postwar upsurge and the proletariat is nowadays everywhere on the defensive. Our task is to extend this defensive sfruggle of the proletariat on the economic plane, to deepen it, to enlighten the consciousness of the embattled proletariat by clearly and precisely formulating the conditions of sfruggie, to invest it with political forms and to transform if into the struggle for political power. It was at this congress that the tacfic of the united fronf was first articulated as a means to wage these defensive struggles and break away masses of militant workers from the reformist leadership of the Social Democrats in the process. The question of ulfraleftism was a key problem af the congress. Lenin remarked fhat at the Third Congress he belonged fo the Right Wing. However, the line of Lenin and Trotsky of preparing for a longer-range perspective and building up the strength of the Communist parties prevailed at the congress. As Trotsky mentions, the German March events had occurred only a few months before the congress. The March events were a series of spontaneous uprisings in the central provinces of Germany in isolation from any actions by the workers in the rest of the country. The United Communist Party of Germany, the party aligned with the Cominfern in Germany, intervened in these uprisings and attempted to carry them further fhan the situation allowed. The German delegation was anxious to have the congress gloss over fhe adventurisfic errors of the German party and approve the role if had played in these events. Members of the French delegation, representing the younger, more militant ranks of the party, were crifical of the policies of Frossard, the leader

Lenink Suppressed speech onultrabftism

BY LEON TROTSKY
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of the French party, and Marcel Cachin, Frossards chief collaborator. Frossard and Cachin came from a parliamentary background in the old French socialist party and tended to substitute agreements in the deputies chamber for mass mobilizations. One of the French delegates, Laporte, whom Trotsky mentions as a future fascist, was at that time the /eader of the French Young Communist League. In The First Five Years of the Communist International, Trotsky gives the following account of the exchange referred to by Lenin in his speech: On that occasion / asked (Laporte): What is your opinion, should the draftees resort to armed or purely passive resistance? And the comrade vehemently replied: Naturally, with revolver in hand. He supposed that he was thus manifesting his complete agreement with the Third International; that he was thus giving the Third /international the greatest revolutionary happiness and that he was fulfilling his duty by s,oeaking as he did. He meant it quite seriously and he was unconditionally ready to fight the draft with revolver in hand. Naturally we poured a bucket of ice water over him and / believe the comrade wi// learn better. Bela Kun, who Trotsky says was pushed forward by Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, and to whom Lenin opposes himself in his speech, was a leader of the Hungarian revolution in 1919 and headed the shortIived Hungarian Soviet Republic. /n contrast to the Russian Bolsheviks, Bela Kun and the other Hungarian Communist leaders proceeded immediately upon the establishment of the Soviet Republic (March 21, 1919) to socialize all the land. By thus ignoring the bulk of the peasantry, these leaders aided the work of the counterrevolution in the rural areas and thereby helped to speed the fall of the republic (August 1, 19)9). Bela Kun later became a rabid anti-Trotskyist. Trotsky chose to write this article in 1932 because of the disastrous consequences of third period Sta/inism, particularly in Germany, where the fascists were on the eve of coming to power. The third period theory was Stalins innovation to veil the reactionary bureaucratic betrayal of the revolution with hollow super-revolutionary rhetoric. It

postulated that the Communist parties everywhere were about to come to power, and it scrapped the tactic of the united front in favor of the united froni from below which essentially meant exclusive work in sectarian formations composed only of Communists. This theory, by dividing the working class, facilitated the rise of fascism. It led to the lunacy of equating the Social Democracy with fascism and sloughing off the threat of Hitlerism with the slogan: Hitler will not last long and after Hitler we come to power! Nearly forty years after Trotsky prepared the article and nearly fifly years after Lenin delivered his speech, the question of ultraleftism remains a burning issue in the contemporary struggles of the new generation of young radicals in the Third World liberation, women liberation and antiwar movements. Even the specific issue of how to best resist capitalist conscription, raised at the Third Congress, is stil/ LEE SMITH being debated today.

T he Third Congress of the Comintern assembled in Moscow three months after the March days of 1921 in Germany. The young leadership of the German Communist Party, which hadnt yet cooled down after the March battles, was arguing in approximately the following fashion: Since this is a revolutionary epoch then we, the revolutionary vanguard, must march forward, not stopping for any obstacles and inspiring the working class by example. This meant proceeding not from the concrete circumstances or from the real condition of the proletariat, with all its varied groupings, but from the general characterization of the period as revolutionary. Such is the

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general historico-philosophical basis of revolutionary adventurism. In 1921, this philosophy was sketched only in timid strokes. Ten years later, it is developed, canonized, bureaucratized under the name of the theory of the third period. It is all the more important to recall Lenins attitude toward this theory since one of his clearest speeches is still being hidden away from readers in the Cominterns archives. We have in mind Lenins speech of June 17, 1921, at a session of the ECCI on the eve of the Third Congress. In order to clarify the extracts from this speech, which are quoted below, it is necessary to recall that ultra leftism at that time was to be found in almost all the parties. A section of the French delegation, for example, was advocating though after the event refusal of military service by those subiect to the draft in 1919. The delegate from Luxemburg accused the French party of not hindering the occupation of Luxemburg by French troops. Trotsky, in speaking against the opportunist policies of Cachin-Frossard, was forced, as he explained, to preface his speech with criticism of the ultra leftists. He showed that it was impossible to conquer militarism by the passive opposition of one military age-group (the class of 191 9, as the French say); but what was needed was the active intervention of the whole working class. He showed that if the proletariat as a whole was not ready for a complete revolutionary overthrow, then it could not prevent the military occupation of Luxemburg. Attempts to solve these kinds of private problems by a show of strength when that strength was insufficient for solving the basic problem, i.e., the seizure of power, lead to adventurism a path that could prove fatal for young Communist parties. Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek were on the side of the ultraleftists. But since they didnt know whose

side Lenin would take, they themselves refrained from an open struggle. They pushed forward Bela Kun who defended not only the March strategy in Germany (for this strategy he personally bore a significant share of the blame), but also the ultraIeftists criticism of the Luxemburg delegate and of a section of the French delegation, including Laporte, a future fascist. Lenin was not present at that session. Having found out about the debate that was developing, he sent for a verbatim transcript and then appeared at the session of the ECCI and made a powerful speech against the ultra leftists: Comrade Bela Kun contends that only the opportunists are mistaken but in actual fact the leftists too are mistaken. I have the verbatim transcript of Comrade Trotskys speech. According to this report, Trotsky says that leftist comrades of this kind, if they continue along the same path, will destroy the Communist movement and the workers movement in France. (Applause.) I am deeply convinced of this. I have therefore come here to protest against the speech of Comrade Bela Kun, who has opposed comrade Trotsky instead of defending him which he should have done had he wanted to be a genuine Marx ist. . . . Comrade Bela Kun thinks that to be a revolutionary means defending the leftists always and everywhere. Preparation for revolution in France, one of the biggest countries in Europe, cannot be carried out by any party alone. The French Communists winning the leadership of the trade unions that is what would please me most. . . . When I look at the magnificent work of the Communist Party, when I see all these cells in the trade unions and other organizations, I say: The victory of the revolution in France is assured if the leftists dont do anything stupid. And when someone says, as does Bela Kun, that coolness and discipline have not proven correctthat is idiocy in the spirit of the left wing. I came here to say to our left-wing comrades: If you follow such advice you will destroy the revolutionary movement. . . .

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Passing to the question of the French partys opportunist mistakes, Lenin said: Let us take another example Marcel Cachin and others who, in the French Chamber of Deputies, refer to Anglo-French cooperation and say it is a guarantee of peace. This is opportunism, and a party which allows this is not a Communist party. Of course, in our resolutions we must show that such and such a statement cannot be tolerated, that this is not the Communist way. But it is necessary that the criticism be concrete. We must brand opportunism. But the real opportunism of the party, reflected in the speech of Cachin, is not subiected to criticism. Instead of criticizing it they criticize this statement (of Trotskys), and give new advice. This is what Comrade Trotsky said in his speech (the German version of Trotskys speech is read). Therefore comrade Laporte was completely wrong and Comrade Trotsky, who protestpd against this, was completely right. Perhaps the behavior of the French party was not thoroughly Communist. 1 am ready to admit this. But at the present moment such an idiocy (refusal of military service, etc.) would destroy the Communist movement in France and England. Revolution is not made by an appeal to those facing the 1919 draft. Comrade Trotsky was a thousand times right when he repeated this. But we still have the comrade from Luxemburg who rebuked the French party for not sabotaging the occupation of Luxemburg. Well! He thinks that this is a geographical question, as Comrade Bela Kun contends. No, this is a political problem, and Comrade Trotsky was completely right to protest against this. This is a very left-wing, a very revolutionary idiocy, and one very harmful for the French movement. . . . 1 know, continued Lenin, that among the Communist youth there are genuine revolutionaries. Criticize the opportunists on concrete grounds, point out the mistakes of official French Communism, but dont do silly things yourselves. When the masses come more and more toward you, when you are approaching victory, then it is necessary to take control of the trade unions. The maiority of trade unions yield wonderfully to preparatory work, and if we succeed in this it will be a great victory. Bourgeois democracy has no standing any longer, but in the trade unions the bureaucratic leaders from the Second and the Twoand-a-half Internationals still prevail. In the trade

unions we must first of all gain a reliable Marxist maiority. And then we will begin to make the revolution, military not with the help of an appeal to the 1919 age-group and not with the help of those

idiocies in which Bela Kun specializes, but on the contrary, through the struggle against opportunism and against the idiocies perpetrated by the left wingers. Perhaps this will be not so much a struggle as a warning against the speeches of Marcel Cachin together with an openly declared struggle against the traditions of opportunism and a warning against left-wing idiocies. That is why I considered it my duty to support fundamentally all that Comrade Trotsky said and to declare that the policy defended by Comrade Bela Kun is unworthy of defense by any Marxist or any Communist whatsoever.

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hen Trotsky agreed in the midsummer of 1937 to the proposal made by the leadership of the American movement that I join his small staff of secretaries and guards, the first assignment I got was to bring a new Dodge sedan from Ohio, where it had been purchased, to Mexico. Max Sterling, the husband of Rae Spiegel, Trotskys Russian secretary at the time, came along. We reached Mexico City well after dark and I was for waiting until the next morning to go out to Coyoac&n. Max, however, had been there before, knew the streets, and was anxious to find Rae, who might be at the house. Avenida Londres was very dark. The high walls, some of them capped with broken glass that glittered in our headlights, and the shuttered windows barred with iron in the Spanish tradition, hardly looked hospitable. Dogs barked as we passed. Others picked up the cry from a distance. We had to wait a long time in the deserted street before our ring was answered. Maxs voice was recognized and the small door set in the huge double one swung open sufficiently for the person on duty to slip out. It was Jean van Heijenoort who had been with Trotsky for a number of years. Rae, it turned out, was staying in an apartment in the city. Jean suggested we come back in the morning. I felt rather relieved, for to tell the truth I felt diffident about meeting Trotsky. Trotskys name had come into my consciousness when I was eight or nine years old. It was after World War I in the Utah farming town of some 3,000 people where my father worked as a tailor. Even here the Russian Revolution, which had ended Czarism, was regarded favorably and was much discussed, at least among the immigrant families, who were mostly from Scandinavia. The politics of the town was a reactionary mixture of Republicanism and Mormonism; and the weekly paper, the Richfield Reaper, was decidedly anti-Bolshevik even though the editor was something of a pariah, being a Democrat. I can still remember his headlines about Trotsky and the Red Army on the verge of defeat. It was a headline that was repeated a number of times. For a child turned early in thedirection or rebellion, it was natural to favor Trotsky and the Red Army. I began to take an interest in politics, and the campaigns and debates associated with it, when I was ten, the year Cox ran against Harding, an election I remember well, since I happened to read a pamphlet in the public library probably slipped among the books by a migrant Wobbly. It was an exposure by Daniel De Leon of the tariff, a key issue in Utah with its sugar beet industry. De Leon used the case of low-cost Cuban sugar to drive home his socialist arguments against the tariff. I repeated these in the school yard. The lesson of how easy it is to gain notoriety and how hard it is to overcome it has served me ever since. While I thus became known as a socialist and bomb thrower at a tender age, it was not until I was at the University of Utah during the catastrophe of the Great Depression that I began to study Marxism and the different currents in the radical movement in a serious way. After two years of this, I passed up all the other tendencies to join the Trotskyists, organized at that time in the Communist League of America. I had some

reservations, particularly concerning what appeared to me to be the obscure way many things were presented in the Trotskyist press, but its honesty and above all the clarity and searching nature of its reasoning on the big issues were absolutely convincing. The way in which the Stalinists broke up a meeting where Max Shachtman, a speaker from New York on a national tour, was explaining the German events and Stalins role in paving the way for Hitler also played a role in bringing me into the Trotskyist movement. That was in Salt Lake City in 1934. Trotsky was then in France where he had succeeded in winning temporary asylum and somewhat greater security than in Prinkipo which lay in the shadow of the Soviet Union and Stalins GPU. Soon the French government, responding to Soviet pressure and its ?wn fears of Trotskys possible influence in the crisis-ridden domestic political scene, made the conditions of his asylum intolerable and finally revoked his asylum altogether. Trotskys situation was desperate. For us, the rebel youth of that time, who had joined his cause and were eager for action, it was anguishing not to be able to do much. Then Norway granted asylum to the man on the planet without a visa. This likewise proved to be but a temporary haven, as Stalin put pressure on the Norwegian shipping industries and exporters of fish products. Trotsky was placed under virtual house arrest as the first great Moscow show trial was staged in 1936, with him and his son Leon Sedov named in absenha a:, the main defendants. For a time, it appeared that Trotsky might even be deported from Norway, that is, turned over to Stalins executioners. The decision of the Mexican government to grant asylum to Trotsky came just in time. President Ltlzaro CMrdenas made the decision to admit Trotsky because he really believed in bourgeois democracy, and because Diego Rivera, Mexicos leading artist and a follower of Trotsky, came to him personally. The decision also showed that the tradition of the 1910 Mexican revolution was still alive. Now Trotsky was in Coyoac an. How long would this last before Stalins killers sought to close in again? All this was in my mind. That and my measure of the stature of Trotsky. In my eyes, Trotsky was one of the giants of history, looming so large that he seemed like a remote figure, belonging to another age. Besides that I had been forewarned by people in position to know, that Trotsky could be very difficult to get along with. n the morning in the bright sun, Coyoaci4n looked much different from the night before. Tall eucalyptus trees soared above walls draped with purple bougainvillea. In the patios one caught glimpses I of geraniums. The smell of burning charcoal coming from the adobe huts of the poor had a pleasant fragrance. Coyoaciin was even picturesque, not having changed much since the time of Cortes, who lived there. The blue walls of Frida Kahlos house on Avenida Londres which had been turned over to the Trotskys might enclose a garden, secluding it from the dust of the unpaved street.

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This proved to be a correct impression. know by what means the GPU would seek to carry it out. No matter how the rules and schedules were made to In the patio were rose bushes and an orange tree, still fresh and sparkling from being watered. We went up the conform to defense needs, the inmates, as we sometimes four steps or so leading to the walk with its balustrade called ourselves, became inured to it as part of the way connecting the rooms laid out on three sides of the patio. of life, a routine that dropped out of the center of attention. This was where I first saw Trotsky. He . Periodically we tried to break this up by vigorous meacame out of the secretarys room that connected with the sures of one kind or another. Sometimes this was met by considerable resistance. Inertia is a problem even for bedroom used by him and Natalia. Trotsky was not a small, highly devoted, self-sacrificing group even a as tall as I had expected. His walk was very energetic as he came toward us. He was pleased, as could be seen group of revolutionists. The truth is that Trotskys major interest from his face, and he threw his arms around us. He wanted to know about our trip and, was not in this particular armed combat, although he was how the comrades were in New York. I relaxed immethe central figure involved. He participated in it as a disdiately, feeiing astonished that he must have anticipated ciplined Bolshevik and army man, but it did not preoccupy him. Trotskys central interest lay in the Fourth Internawe might be uncertain or nervous and that he had welcomed us in this way to help ease things. tional: there was no question whatever about this. AbThe main source of information today sorbed by it, he gave it his liveliest atlention. about Trotskys life in Coyoac an is the last volume of Isaac Deutschers biography, The Prophet Outcast. Deutscher relied almost exclusively on what he could find in the archives at Harvard. Natalia made it possible for rticles for the general press were undertaken rehim to examine the closed sections and he was thus able luctantly. When finances were low and someto read material not yet available to the general public. times they were very lowhe wrote something Some of this is brought into the final volume, providing almost as if it were a potboiler, regretting the time us with valuable new facts of a personal nature. However, lost. A check from a publisher gave him another reprieve. His attitude toward writing books of the kind Deutscher could only guess at the meaning of some of it. There are other reasons, too, for indicating some reservalikely to interest publishing houses was much the same tions about the chapter. as toward articles. He agreed to do a biography of Stalin Deutscher chose not to seek material from only after considerable resistance and only after his colcertain of Trotskys close collaborators in that period laborators overcame his objections with the contention who were still living. He did not visit Mexico. Although that he could include material of special interest to the he came to the United States, he did not get in touch Fourth International. I argued with him, for instance, with the Socialist Workers Party, whose leaders played that he could use Stalin as a foil for putting the record a special role in the last years of Trotskys life. straight about the history of the Bolshevik Party and that Later, in London, Deutscher showed me this was very important for the generation I belonged to. He continually deferred work on his biogthe final chapter of his biography only in the page proofs. raphy of Lenin because of his absorption in internal de On the whole, I found it excellent but it contained various velopments in the Fourth International. inaccuracies. It was not easy to rectify these at this point. Deutscher viewed Trotskys preoccupation And of course Deutscher could not do much with any new information. A clear example of the difficulty of making with the Fourth International as a deplorable weakness in this otherwise preeminent genius. We who were living alterations in the page proofs can be found in the caption with Trotsky considered it evidence of his singleness of for the photographs facing page 480: Two views of the purpose and capacity to put the proper priority on his littie fortress at Coyoaci4n. Actually they arephotographs projects. not of one house but of two different houses Trotsky lived For the guards and secretaries, Coyoac an in, one after the other. Deutscher did not know about this. On other, more important, items involving was a school of the Fourth International. All of us followed personal studies which Trotsky, we were aware, noted Deutschers interpretation of this period in Trotskys life without intervening he would unexpectedly drop in on it was pointless to engage in much argument. I debated us in our rooms, or ask about a book we happened to be with Deutscher briefly and let the items go as things on reading in the patio. Also we held classes where we took which we have a difference. up various subjects, including Spanish for the American Deutschers picture of the years in Coyoguards. In a more encompassing way, Trotsky utilized acan is of virtually unrelieved gloom, life in Trotskys the entire situation, including the organization of our dehome as he interpreted it being overcast by a hopeless fense, diplomatic relations with the outside, arriving at battle against the Kremlins executioners. This was not political decisions, answering the heavy correspondence, the way it was. even the articles he wrote, to pass on as much as he The struggle remained in thebackground could to us from the tradition of the past. There appeared a p~ of the daily life, but not continuously intruding to be no deliberate pedagogy about this; it was just the into immediate attention. As a matter of fact, one of the pattern in which everything was discussed, decided, and problems was to maintain alertness. This held true for carried out. everyone. Even Natalia grew impatient at times with the He could be a severe taskmaster. Life security measures to the point of not adhering to them quickly became miserable for anyone around Trotsky completely. Stalins decision to murder Trotsky was underwho found it difficult to break with bohemian habits or stood by everyone in the household, but none of us could

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who found it insurmountably difficult to learn preciseness, thoroughness, workmanship. The best days were those that brought news of encouraging developments in one section or another of the Fourth International, successes however modest. The biggest occasions were visits of members of the Fourth International from other countries. This meant conferences, discussions, sometimes very lively debates for with Trotsky, none of his followers, none who had absorbed his spirit, hesitated to express differences. If they did not express differences, they could expect to be pressed for their opinions just the same. For weeks after, a visit of this kind still echoed in the household, one of the indications being a surge of production on Trotskys broad writing desk. It was following just such a visit by James P. Cannon and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party that L. D. wrote the key document for the forthcoming founding congress of the Fourth International in 1938, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, a document that came, under the name of The Transitional Program, to play an increasingly central role in the programmatic concepts of the world Trotskyist movement. The discussions that inspired Trotsky to write this document were not recorded the tape machine still lay in the future. However, the highlights of part of the discussions were jotted down in shorthand by one of Trotskys secretaries and the tl-anscription of these notes is now available in English, the language in which the conversations were conducted. [See Wntings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, Merit Publishers, New York, 1969. ] They provide a good indication of the nature of a conference with Trotsky in the Coyoacan period. The exchange of opinion was actually more extended than the transcript might lead one to guess. In this instance, ten days or more, if I recall correctly. It included a number of purely personal get-togethers. These really provided for the freest kind of discussion on all kinds of problems current in the Fourth International, since no matter how the informal conversations started they always ended with politics, especially the politics of the Fourth International.

mong the friends of the household in 1937, the closest were probably the Riveras. Both Diego and Frida came to the house frequently, and the Trotskys reciprocated, visiting the Riveras in their home in San Ang61, which was not far from Coyoacan. This close relationship extended to the secretaries and guards, with whom Frida and her sister Cristina were particularly close, since they belonged to the same younger generation. Diego, who had just entered his fifties, came closer to the generation to which L. D. and Natalia belonged. Joint excursions into the countryside were organized as relaxation, for Diego was continually on the go and liked to show the Mexico he knew to his friends. These trips sometimes involved four or five automobiles for long distances over some very rough mountain roads. L. D. was strongly attracted to Diego, to

the imagination, charm, transparency, and geniality of the great artist. For Diego and Frida, of course, the house hold was absorbing because of the intellectual stimulation to be found talking with L. D. and Natalia, and not only them but the secretaries and guards and the visitors from other countries. Eventually, as is well known, this relationship was broken off. On the personal level, Natalia was not without fault in this. The extreme tension under which she lived, the barbaric blows she had suffered, the expectation of fresh ones, sometimes showed up in the form of irritability. Natalia was well aware of this and sought to keep it under control, as she told me one time on a trip the two of us took together from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo where I crossed the border to reregister the Dodge. She could not always manage it, however, and there would be a flareup. Vari6us persons in the household ran into this. If they appreciated what was involved, they did not blame Natalia. Yet they sometimes permitted themselves to make an angry retort despite their better judgment. It seemed particularly hard for some of the women comrades, who were rebels and revolutionists, not to respond in kind in defense of their dignity. After the harsh words, Natalia, deeply remorseful, would try to make up in an almost excessive way. In some instances, those caught in such a situation felt even more repelled by this turn than by the previous aggressiveness that had seemed on the surface so unjustified and uncalled for. This happened with Frida. Bewildered and outraged, she drew away. In a very unhappy frame cf mind in the following weeks, Frida told me what the situation was, how she felt. Unfortunately, not much could be done to restore this relationship to what it had been. More important than this, however, was the way Diego became involved in supporting a bourgeois candidate in an election. Under the circumstances, the stand Diego took could easily be twisted by the Stalinists to make it appear that Trotsky was Diego Riveras mentor in the move and that it was aimed against Cardenas. Trotsky had to make a public disavowal in order to show that he had nothing to do with an action that for him would have been in violation of the condition of his asylumnot to intervene in Mexican politics and in violation of his basic principles. In short, Trotsky had to break with Diego Rivera politically. I dont think that Trotskys personaf regard for Diego was changed in the least. His admiration and appreciation remained and he still talked about him as if their friendship had not been affected. Trotsky didnt really consider Diego to be wholly responsible in politics; his imagination tended to run away with him.

n February 1938, the relations between the Riveras and the Trotskys were still close. It was Diego who called us one afternoon to ask if we had heard that Leon Sedov had died in a Paris hospital. We did not even know that he was in a hospital. Diego said the news still remained to be confirmed and he would do everything to find out as soon

INTERNATIONAL

SOCIALIST REVIEW/MAY

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as possible if it were really true, if necessary putting a call through to Paris. Natalia was in her room. Trotsky was not in the house at all. During the previous weeks, the Stalinists had stepped up their press campaign against Trotsky. We had taken this, along with other indications, as proof that they were preparing a new attempt against Trotskys life. Consequently, we had increased our precautions. In fact, we had become so convinced that another effort to assassinate Trotsky was being prepared that we had resorted to a special measure. We had smuggled him out of the house and taken him to the villa of a sympathizer where he could remain in hiding for a time. In case an attack were carried out on the house, the assailants would not find Trotsky there. Under the circumstances, we decided not to tell Natalia about the report that had been relayed to Diego. Early in the evening, he came to the house himself to tell us the bitter news. It was true. Diego was very close to all of us. He was as deeply affected as we were and as troubled about how to tell Natalia and L. D. The best course, we thought, was still not to tell Natalia, but to break it first to L. D. As to which one of us should undertake this task, opinion at first leaned in my direction. After thinking about it, it appeared to me that it would be best to sound out Diego. Diego was of the same generation as Trotsky and was probably closer to the inner man than we who were in our late twenties. Diego considered it and agreed. If you think it best . . . I drove to the villa, which was some distance away. Diego lifted his huge bulk out of the car and moved toward the gate. We could hear the bell when he pushed the button. The electric light came on, converting him into a broad silhouette at the gate. A servant let him in. It was a half hour or more before Diego returned. Trotsky was with him. Without a word, Trotsky climbed into the back seat. Quietly, clearing his throat a little, Diego said in English, We drive back to the house. He got in beside Trotsky and closed the door. During the whole trip back, no one spoke a word. At the house, the guards were on the alert, and as we came they swung open the double doors in accordance with our routine so that we could drive in rapidly without stopping, thereby giving a possible sniper a more difficult shot. Trotsky immediately got out of the car, strode through the guards patio to the main patio and went to Natalia. The suffering of the couple in the following days could be seen especially in Natalias face, swollen from weeping, when she emerged occasionally from their darkened bedroom. We did not see Trotsky for several days. I became very worried over them. The thought came to me of the impact the suicide of Paul and Laura Lafargue (Marxs daughter) had had on the revolutionary socialist movement in 1911 when the couple, at the age of seventy, decided that their usefulness had ended. Lenin spoke at their funeral in Paris. Krupskaya said that Lenin told her, If one cannot work for the

Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues. Perhaps it would have been wiser for the young generation of revolutionists to have questioned themselves as to what role they had sought to make for the Lafargues. In any case that suicide pact deeply stirred the socialist movement at the time and echoes of it were still to be heard when I joined the movement. I pushed back the thought, telling myself that it most likely arose from some obscure reaction of my own; or that the idea reflected the convictions I had heard others express. Then Rae, who was very close to Natalia, and who was making sure that meals were brought to them, and that anything they might want was attended to, confessed the same fear to me. Especially worrisome was the small automatic pistol which L. D. generally left lying on his desk like a paperweight. We decided to remove it. After all, it probably needed cleaning and oiling. Severaf days later, coming into the patio on an inspection tour, I saw that the folding doors of the bedroom had been opened. L. D. had moved a small table there for the light. He was seated at the table writing. In the evening he was still there working under a lamp he had set up. I watched him for a while, his high forehead illuminated by the light in the otherwise dark patio. There could be no doubt about it; he was working on a manuscript. He worked very late. The feeling that a new catastrophe was impending suddenly left me. They were safely out of the abyss. What the Old Man was writing, in fact, was his farewell to his son, Leon Sedov Son, Fnend, Fighter. The wound of Leons death remained very raw for a while. Even small things could touch off an explosive reaction. The translation of the farewell, for example, brought a dressing down from L. D. Half of the translation was done in Coyoacan and half in New York because of his insistence on speed. Neither text measured up to his expectations. No doubt he was right the English did not, could not, meet the nuances of the Russian in the way he wanted. Other small changes were to be noted. Before Leons death, the Old Man and Natalia had often sat in the dining room, reading with the relefunken radio turned to a locaf station that broadcast classical music. They now gave this up. I do not know why. Of the two, Natalia was the one who most appreciated music. After a time, I noticed a rather marked change in the Old Man. It was hard to state what this was precisely. The word that occurred to me then was mellowness; yet that was not quite right. He did not seem to drive others as hard as he had before. He had more consideration, I felt, for weaknesses in his collaborators. It was subtle but definitely there so that it became a new element in the relationships within the household. Perhaps it is even detectable in the tone in the parts of the biography of Stalin that were completed before he was finally struck down by the assassin.

38

When I sat down to write But What Have You INTRODUCTION: aB Done For Me Lately?, the teeth of a long-continuing rage had found a new hold in my throat. My daughter, then nineteen, suspected she might be pregnant. I knew I could probably help her. There were numbers I could call, and I had made preliminary essays into the fund-raising part of it. My husband had to be lll}~lllil spared this knowledge, and a friend promised cash and comfort. But what I wanted, as I wrote, was not only to tell them off, but to put them in my place and in my daughters, make them understand in a way they could not escape. And so for five or more hours, I wrote a polemic, a diatribe, a piece of agitprop. The Restocking Rap at Washington Square Church in New York City came into our ken shortly after I had brought the piece into the fledgling New Feminist Repertory theater to read and develop into a genuine theater piece. Temporarily so we thought-we abandoned rewriting in order to concentrate on getting an effective reading ready. We were doing it as a contribution to a cause we fervently supported. Our idea was to use the play as a general introduction to the particular testimony that was to follow. The audience response was overwhelming and the rest of the program had an effective foundation for its own drama. Tell me where is capitalism nursed? How many pockets for competitiveness to hide in? Would anyone in his right mind believe someone might see competition between the polemic and the vox populi? Not I, said the poor fish. But the poor fish was wrong. Competition was seen by at least one sister, and she had a pen (read that kn~e) in her handboth Dr. Nathan Rapaport and my playlet shared one line of opprobrium on page one of the ~llage Voice: more diatribe than dialogue. That escutcheon emblazoned itself on my forehead, and I tried to work off its curse by making a play of the diatribe. My solution was to include the SOLDIER and GIRL, since it satisfied my sense of justice to represent the plight of the young male who is denied control of his life by his government in company with the young female who is similarly denied control of her life and her own body. It played beautifully, and was a proper ampliti cation of a demand for redress of just grievance, since it underscored the original dramatic intent. New sisters appeared and volunteered cop-out as a corsage for this version of the diatribe. Which brings me to my desired destination, the New York Socialist Workers Party 1970 Campaign Kick-Off Rally. The play was done in a modest fashion with the addition of a device I substituted later for the despised SOLDIER: the use of the audience as the jury to which the liberal legislator appeals. And the beautiful miracle of that evening was that I heard my argument again as I had written it, as though the intent had transmitted itself intact to that amazingly receptive and sexually integrated audience. It was as if they heard the mere words as though they had thought or said them many times, and as though they derived satisfaction from hearing them said all at once and in that particular situation the same satisfaction that I had felt upon writing them. I want to thank each and every one of the marvelous components of that pluperfect audience, including Ruthann Miller who arranged the performance and the man who walked away before I had a chance to respond to his extravagant expression of appreciation. Thank you all very much for giving me back my original vision of the play. I really enjoyed it. Myrna Lamb

lllal}~

ID\~

I:lIIIID

39

Time: whenever.

Place: a space, silent, encapsulated.A man lies with his head angled up and center stage,
feet obliquely toword audience. His couching, which is by all means psychiatric in flavor, should also be astronautic and should incline him acutely so that he almost looks as though he is about to be launched. An almost perpendicular slantboard comes to mind or a simple sliding pond or seesaw. There is a simple table or desk, angled away from man, and a chair placed toward desk that will keep the occupants back toward man in orthodox (approximate) psychiatric practice,

but will give profile or three-quarter view to audience.

At rise man in business suit is situated as delineated. Woman in simple smock (suggestive of surgical smock) comes on upstage and crosses without looking at man. He does not see her. He sits silently. Some time elapses. A soldier, in green beret outfit, complete with M-1 rifle, comes to stage center. He faces audience.

MAN: Where am I? What have you done to me? Where am I? What have you done to me? Where am 1? What have you done to me? (SOLDIER stands at attention.) WOMAN (her voice dehumanized by amplification): Dont worry. Dont worry. We have not done that to you. MAN: That? What do you mean, that? WOMAN: We have not taken anything. MAN: Oh. (Pause. ) But where am I? What have you done to me? WOMAN: Are you in pain? MAN: Yes. I think I am in pain. WOMAN: Dont you know? MAN: I havent been able to consider it fully. The whole procedure . . . strange room anesthetic nurses? Sisters in some order? WOMAN: Nurses. Sisters. In some order. Yes, that would cover it. Yes, anesthetic. MAN: Anesthetic. WOMAN: Yes. We didnt want you thrashing about. Or suffering psychic stress. Yet. (SOLDIER executes left turn and salute. ) MAN: I am suffering abominable psychic stress now. (SOLDIER stands at attention through next speeches.) WOMAN: Yes, I know. But the physical procedure is at an end. You are in remarkably good health. Arteries. Heart. Intestinal tone. Very good. Good lungs too. Very good. I suppose thats due to the electronically conditioned air and the frequent sojourns to unspoiled garden spots of nature. MAN: What has that to do with it? Was I too healthy? Was that it? Did some secretsociety deity decide I should be given a handicap to even up the race? WOMAN: Well, that is an interesting conjecture. MAN: It cant be! That I was considered too healthy? Thats preposterous. WOMAN: Yes, it is. You couldnt really have been too healthy. MAN: Then . . . what have you done? Was there a handicap? ( Left turn and salute by SOLDIER.)
40

WOMAN: To even up the race. I believe that was your phrase. I approve. Very compressed. Very dense. The race that we run . . . the race of man, as we shorthandedly express it . . . and somewhere in my memory, a line about the race going to the swift . . . yes, and then the association with handicap . . . a sporting chance for the less swift. MAN: Handicap . . . some kind of tumor . . . some kind of cancer . . . (Young woman hereafter referred to as GIRL crawls onstage. ) Is that it? What have you done to me? WOMAN: No, no. Calm yourself. friend. Parasitic life. No cancer. No tumor. Not parasitic death, my

MAN: I dont understand you. What have you done to me? Parasitic life? (Pause. ) Parasitic life. Pseudoscientific claptrap. Parasitic life. Witchdoctor mumbojumbo. Parasitic life. Wait a moment. There is a meaning to that phrase. It cant apply to me not to me not (GIRL pulls on SOLDIERs leg. She is still in crawling position. SOLDIER stands at rigid attention throughout next speeches with no obvious awareness of GIRL. She rises and approaches him, reaching out to him. ) WOMAN: Yes, it can apply to you. We have given you an impregnated uterus. Implanted. Abdominal cavity. Yours. Connections to major blood vessels were brought in very quickly. As a matter of fact, it was destined for you. It has achieved its destiny. MAN: I dont believe it. I cant believe this nightmare. WOMAN: Well, that is how many people feel upon learning these things. Of course, most of those people have been considered female. That made a difference, supposedly. Weve managed to attach abitofovary to the uterus. I dont think it will do any real good, but I will give you a course of hormonal and glandular products to maintain the pregnancy. MAN: Maintain the pregnancy, indeed! How dare you make that statement to me! ( Using outreaching arm of GIRL and foot leverage, SOLDIER flips her over and throws her to floor. ) WOMAN: I dare. There is a human life involved, after all. MAN: There is a human life involved? You insane creatures, Im fully aware that there is a human life involved. My human life. My human life that you have decided to play with for your own despicable purposes, whatever they are. WOMAN: Do you think you are in the proper frame of mind to judge? My purposes? (SO I,DIER does pushups with sexual-soldier connotations over outstretched body of GIRL. ) Your ultimate acceptance of what you now so vociferously reject? The relative importance of your mature and realized life and the incipient potential of the life you carry within you? Your life is certainly involved. But perhaps your life is subsidiary to the life of this barely begun creature which you would seek to deny representation. MAN: Why should I give this . . . this thing representation? (SOLDIER rises and kicks GIRL aside. Walks to rifle. Walks around GIRL, pacing. right shoulder arms. ) It is nothing to me. I am not responsible for it or where it is nor do I wish to be. I have a life, an important life. I have work, important work, work, I might add, that has more than incidental benefit to the entire population of this world
41

and this this mushroom which you have visited upon me in your madness has no rights, no life, no importance to anyone certainly not to the world. It has nothing. It has no existence. A little group of cells. A tumor. A parasite. This has been foisted upon me and then I am told that I owe it primary rights to life, that my rights are subsidiary! That is insanity! I do not want this thing in my body. It does not belong there. I want it removed. Immediately. Safely. WOMAN: Yes, I understand how you feel. But how would it be if every pregnancy brought about in error or ignorance or through some evil or malicious or even well-meaning design were terminated because of the reluctance or the repugnance of the host? Surely the population of the world would be so effectively decimated as to render wholly redundant the mechanisms of lebensraum, of national politics, of hunger as a method, of greed as a motive, of war itself as a method. (SOLDIER lunges and stabs at the invisible enemy, accompanying movements with the appropriate battle grunts and cries. There is hatred and despair in the sounds. ) Surely if all the unwilling human beings who found motherhood forced upon upon them through poverty or chance or misstep were to be given the right to choose their lives above all else, the outpouring of acceptance and joy upon the wanted progeny of desired and deliberate pregnancies would eliminate forever those qualities of aggression and deprivation that are so necessary to the progress of society. After all, you must realize there are so many women who find themselves pregnant and unmarried, pregnant and unprepared, with work that cannot bear interruption, with no desire to memorialize a casual sexual episode with issue. So many human beings whose incidental fertility victimizes them superfluously in incidents of rape and incestuous attack. ( Following the lunges, stabs, and grunts, SOLDIER slams the rifle against the stage in vertical butt strokes. ) So many creatures confounded by sexual desire or a compelling need for warmth and attention who find themselves penniless, ill, pitifully young and pregnant too. (Finally SOLDIER simply stands, lifts rifle to shoulder. ) And so many women who with the approval of society, church and medicine have already produced more children than they can afford economically, psychically, physically. Surely you can see the overwhelming nature of the problem posed by the individuals desire to prevail as articulated by you at this moment. If one plea is valid, then they might all be. So you must learn to accept societys interest in the preservation of the fetus, within you, within all in your condition. MAN: Do you know that I want to kill you? That is all I feel. The desire to kill you. (SOLDIER points rifle at GIRLs head. ) WOMAN: A common reaction. The impregnated often feel the desire to visit violence upon the impregnator. Or the maintainers of the pregnancy. MAN: You are talking about women. (SOLDIER spreads GIRLs legs with butt of rifle. Nudges her body with rifle.) Pregnancy, motherhood is natural to a woman. It is her portion in life. It is beneficial to her. It is the basic creative drive that man seeks to emulate with all his art and music and literature. It is natural for a woman to create life. It is not natural for me. (SOLDIER kicks and rolls GIRLS body in sharp rhythm corresponding with beginning of WOMANs sentences in next speech so that GIRL, in three movements, is turned from her back to her stomach to her back again. SOLDIER then turns away. Freezes.) WOMAN: The dogma of beneficial motherhood has been handed down by men. If a woman spews out children, she will be sufficiently exhausted by the process

42

never to attempt art, music, literature or politics. If she knows that that is all that is expected of her, if she feels that the fertility, impregnation, birth cycle validates her credentials as a fernale human being, she will be driven to this misuse of nature as a standard of her worth, as a measure of the comparative worthlessness of those who breed less successfully. That will occupy her sufficiently to keep her from competing successfully with male human beings on any other human basis. MAN: You cannot dismiss natural as an inappropriate term. My body cannot naturally accommodate a developing fetus. My body cannot naturally expel it at the proper moment. WOMAN: Females cannot always naturally expel the infant at term. (SOLDIER turns, rests butt of rifle on GIRLS stomach, and presses. GIRL pants. ) The pelvic span is a variable. Very often, the blood or milk of a natural mother is pure venom to her child. Nature is not necessarily natural or beneficial. We know that. We alter many of its processes in order to proceed with the exigencies of our civilizations. Many newly pregnant women recognize that the situation of egress is insufficient in their cases. In your case, there is a gross insufficiency. The caesarian procedure is indicated. MAN: But that is dangerous, terribly dangerous even to contemplate. I tell you I am terrified almost to the point of death. WOMAN: Others have experienced the same sense of terror. Their kidneys are weak, or they have a rheumatic heart, or there is diabetes in the family. As I have told you, you are quite healthy. And you will have excellent care. You will share with others a lowered resistance to infection. But you will not go into labor and you will not risk a freak occurrence in which strong labor produces a suction through the large blood vessels that bring particles of placental detritus and hair and ultimate suffocation to the laboring womans lungs . . . MAN: Your comparisons There isnt room. are obscene. My body isnt suitable for carrying a child.

(SOLDIER slams rifle between GIRLS legs. Hard. ) WOMAN: Many female bodies are as unsuitable for childbearing as yours is. (SOLDIER stands at attention again. ) Modern science has interceded with remedies. Your internal circumstances will be crowded. Not abnormal. Your intestines will be pushed to one side. Your ureters will be squeezed out of shape. Not abnormal. Your kidneys and bladder will be hard pressed. All within the realm of normality. Your skin will stretch, probably scar in some areas. Still not abnormal. MA,N: But I am a man. WOMAN: Yes, to a degree. That is a trifle abnormal. But not insurmountable, MAN: But why should anyone want to surmount the fact of my being a man? Do you hate all men? Or just me? And why me? (SOLDIER executes present arms maneuver.)

WOMAN: At one time I hated all men. MAN: I thought

SO.

43

WOMAN: I also hated you most particularly. I am not ashamed of it. (She turns toward him. ) You may guess the reason. MAN: I recognize you, of course. (SOLDIER tical butt.) comes violently to attention and slams rifle against stage, ver-

WOMAN: And you understand a little more. MAN: But that was so long ago. So so trivial in the light of our livesyour life mine so trivial! Surely your career, your honors, the esteem in which you are held . . . surely all of this has long since eclipsed that that mere episode. Surely you didnt spend all those yearstrainingresearch dedicationto learn how to do this . . . to me! (SOLDIER adopts caricature of at ease position. )

WOMAN: Surely? No, I cannot apply that word to any element of my life. Trauma is insidious. My motives were not always accessible to me. That mere episode. First. Then certain choices. Yes. Certain directions. Then, witnessing the suffering of others which reinforced memories of suffering. Then your further iniquities, educated, mature, authoritative iniquities in your role of lawmaker that reinforced my identification of you as the . . . enemy. All those years to learn how to do this . . . to you. MAN: You really intend to go through with this, then? WOMAN: (silence . . . looks at him . . . even through him) MAN: What will become of me? Ill have to disappear. Theyll think Ive died. Absconded. My work. Believe me, lives, nations, hang in the balance. The fate of the world may be affected by my disappearance at this moment. I am not stating the case too strongly! (SOLDIER squats, staring out at audience. ) WOMAN: I recognize that. However, those arguments are not held validhere. MAN: Why not? They are valid arguments anywhere. Here or anywhere. WOMAN: I think you are rather confused. MAN: Wouldnt you be under these circumstances? (Realizes. ) (During speech that follows SOLDIER and GIRL circle counter-directionally in blind panic, looking to see where the danger is coming from as SOLDIER aims rifle fruitlessly in several directions. ) WOMAN: Yes. Would be and was. So were many others. Couldnt approach friends or relatives. Seemed to run around in circles. Time running out. Tried things. Shots. Rubber tubes. Tricky. Caustic agents. Quinine. Wire coat hanger. Patent medicine. Cheap abortionist. Through false and real alarms, through the Successful routines and the dismal failures, our minds resided in one swollen pelvicorgan. Our work suffered. Our futures hung from a gallows. Guilt and humiliation and ridicule and shame assailed us. Our bodies. Our individual unique familiar bodies, suddenly invaded by strange unwelcome parasites, and we were denied the right to rid our own bodies of these invaders by a society dominated by righteous male chauvinists of both sexes who ident~led with the little clumps of cells and gave them precedence over the former owners of the host bodies. (GIRL drops to ground, her face hidden in her arms. SOLDIER simply stands. )

44

MAN: Yes. I understand. I never thought of it in that way before . . . Naturally . . . WOMAN: Naturally. And yet, you were my partner in crime, you had sex with me and I had sex with you when we were both students . . . MAN: Did you consider it a crime? WOMAN: Not at the time. Did you? MAN: I never did. WOMAN: When did the act between two consenting adults become a crime in your mind? MAN: I tell younever. WOMAN: Not your crime? MAN: Not anyones crime . . . WOMAN: So you committed no crime. You did not merit nor did you receive punishment. MAN: Of course not. WOMAN: Of course not. You continued with your studies, law wasnt it? (SOLDIER pushes GIRL all the way down with rifle. He gets up and kisses rifle.) You maintained your averages, your contacts. You pleased your family, pursued your life plan. You prospered. Through all of this, you undoubtedly had the opportunity to commit many more non-crimes of an interestingly varied nature, did you not? MAN: Non-crimes? Your terminology defeats me. Yes. Yes to all of your contentions. I led a normal life, with some problems and many satisfactions. I have been a committed man, as you know, and have done some good in the world . . . (SOLDIER kisses own arms. ) WOMAN: Yes. I know. Well, the non-crime that you and I shared had different results for me. Do you remember? MAN: I do remember . . . now. But I wasnt in a position then . . . I wasnt sure. I recognize my error, my thoughtlessness now . . . but I was very young, I had so much at stake . . . WOMAN: And I? Everything stopped for me. My share of the non=crime had become quite criminal in the eyes of the world. (There is a shot offstage. SOLDIER cries out. He is wounded in the belly. He falls. The GIRL falls and cries out simultaneously. )

Wherever I went for help, I found people who condemned me and felt that my punishment was justified, or people who were sympathetic and quite helpless. I had no money, no resources. My parents were the last persons on earth I could turn to, after you. I dropped out of sight; for a while I hid like an animal. I finally went to a public institution recommended by a touch-me-not charity. I suffered a labor complicated by an insufficient pelvic span and a lack of dilation. I spent three days in company with other women who were carried in and out of the labor room screaming curses and for their mothers.

45

(SOLDIER and GIRL are lying head to head on their backs. They are wounded and they cry out inarticulately for help as the amplified voice overpowers their cries. Their downstage arms reach up and their hands clasp. ) My body was jostled, invaded, exposed as a crooning old man halfheartedly swept the filthy floor. Many of my fellow unfortunates would come fresh from their battles to witness the spectacle of my greater misfortune. Three days and that cursed burden could not be released from the prison of my body nor I from it. (The GIRL screams. She begins to pant loudly as though she can not catch her breath. The SOLDIER moans. ) Finally there was a last-ditch high forceps, agreat tearing mess, and the emergence of a creature that I fully expected to see turned purple with my own terrible hatred. and ripped to shreds by the trial of its birth. What I saw, iristead, was a human being, suddenly bearing very little relationship to me except our common helplessness, our common trial. I saw it was a female, and I wept for it. I wept and retched until my tired fundus gave way and there was a magnificent hemorrhage that pinned me to that narrow bed with pain I shall never forget, with pain that caused me to concentrate only on the next breath which seemed a great distance from the one before. Some kind fellow-sufferer and my own youth saved me. I awoke to tubes spouting blood from insecure joins. The splattered white coats of the attendants made it a butcher shop to remember. I never held that baby. (The arms drop. They lie still to end of speech. ) For some days I was too ill. And then the institution policy decreed it unwise. There was a family waiting to claim that female creature, a family that could bestow respectability and security and approval and love. I emerged from that place a very resolved and disciplined machine. As you know. I worked. I studied. I clawed. I schemed. I made my way to the top of my profession and I never allowed a human being to touch me in intimacy again. MAN: It was it was criminal of me tohavebeen the author of so much suffering . . . (SOLDIER sits up. ) to have been so irresponsible . . . but I was stupidly young. I never could have imagined such things. Believe me. WOMAN. Yes, you say you were young. Stupidly young. But what was your excuse when you were no longer young and stupid? MAN: Im sorry. Im tired. I dont understand you. WOMAN: Your daughter and mine grew to womanhood. And she and all her sisters were not spared the possibility of my experience and those of my generation. (GIRL sits up. GIRL and SOLDIER face each other. SOLDIER stands and becomes speechmaker, rifle arm behind his back, other hand sincerely across his heart. ) Because there you were. Again. This time, not perpetrating unwilling motherhood upon a single individual, but condemning countless human females to the horrors of being unwilling hosts to parasitic life. You, for pure expediency, making capital of the rolling sounds of immorality and promiscuity which you promised accession upon relaxation of the abortion laws. Wholesale slaughter, you said, do you remember? Wholesale slaughter of innocent creatures who had no protection but the law from the untimely eviction from their mothers sinning wombs. (GIRL crouches at his feet, in attitude of supplication. She rests her head on his boot-tops and lies still.)
46

You murdered. You destroyed the lives of young women who fell prey to illegal abortion or suicide or unattended birth. You killed the careers and useful productivity of others. You killed the spirit, the full realization of all potential of many women who were forced to live on in half-life. You killed their ability to produce children in ideal circumstances. You killed love and self-respect and the proud knowledge that one is the master of ones fate, ones physical body being the corporeal representation of it. You kiIled. And you were so damned self-righteous about it. MAN: I cannot defend myself (GIRL crawls off to stage right. ) WOMAN: I know. MAN: But, I beg you, is there no appeal from this sentence? (SOLDIER cradles rifle. ) WOMAN: As it happens, there is. We have a board before whom these cases are heard. Your case is being heard at this moment, and their decision will be the final one. The board is composed of many women, all of whom have suffered in some way from the laws which you so ardently supported. There is a mother who lost her daughter to quack abortionists. There is a woman who was forced to undergo sexual intercourse on the examining table by the aborting physician. There is a woman who unwittingly took a fetus-deforming drug administered by her physician for routine nausea, and a woman who caught German measles from her young niece at a crucial point in her pregnancy, both of whom were denied the right to abortion, but granted the privilege of rearing hopelessly defective children. There is an older woman who spent a good part of her childrearing years in a mental institution when she was forced to bear a late and unwanted child. There are others. You won t have too long to wait, now. For the verdict. MAN: I promise you, that if I the harm I have ignorantly no other learning process time I can truly . . . identify am spared, that I will be able to do much to undo done. This experience has taught me in a way that could . . . I am in a position to . . . For the first . . . it would be to the advantage of all.

(SOLDIER leaves rifle and stands as a human being, without pose. ) WOMAN: That is being taken into account. (Someone brings report or WOMAN goes to side of stage where she emerges with it from a cubicle. ) MAN: Is that the decision? WOMAN: Yes. The board has decided that out of compassion for the potential child MAN: No, they cant! (SOLDIER turns to audience. ) WOMAN: Out of compassion for the potential child, and regarding the qualities of personality and not sex that make you a potentially unilt mother, that the pregnancy is to be terminated. (BLACKOUT)

INTERNATIONAL

SOCIALIST REVIEW/MAY 1970

47

REVOLUTIONS/CONTINUED

FROM PAGE

17

with due regard to the differences between coping with physical and social phenomena, in the politics of revolutionary change. The paramount objective of our age is not to go from the earth to the moon or to Mars but from capitalism to socialism. And all the knowledge accumulated by mankind in its past struggles, which Marxism puts at our disposal, is required to accomplish that difficult transition. Only part of the conditions necessary for creating a revolutionary situation or opening are subject to conscious direction and control by the vanguard. Such major factors of development as the state of the productive forces, the interrelations of the contending classes, the functioning of the economy and the world-historical context in which the class struggle unfolds have their own path and pace of development under capitalism. The subjective elements of the movement are, however, in a quite different category from these more objective ones. They are amenable to a degree of foresight, to a measure of control and calculation. They can be prepared for and strengthened by deliberated action. The central subjective factor in the making of a proletarian revolution is the party which embodies the historical memory and highest collective consciousness of the working class. This is codified in its program and exemplified in its methods of organization and action. The foremost school of revolutionary strategy in our century was provided by the Bolsheviks whose leadership demonstrated what to do and how to do it from 1917 to 1921. The lessons of that experience are contained in the writings of Lenin, Trotsky and their associates. They are set forth in a masterful manner in Trotskys Histoq o/ the Russian Revolution. An objective measure of how much the scientitlc understanding of revolutions progressed from ancient Greece to the modern Marxists can be obtained by comparing what Aristotle and Thucydides wrote about the processes of revolution in their works with Trotskys treatment of the problems of the first socialist victory. After Lenins death in 1924 and the ensuing recession of the Russian and world revolutions over the next two decades, Trotsky more than anyone else carried forward and enriched the theory and traditions of Marxist policy. His crowning contribution to the strategy of the world revolution was the Transitional Program which he drafted for adoption by the founding congress of the Fourth International in 1938, two years before his death. It summarizes his maturest thinking on the ways and means of promoting the struggle for w-orking-class power and socialism in the epoch of the decline of capitalism and the flourishing of labor bureaucratism, in all its variants from social democratic reformism to Stalinism. For the Marxist, foresight and planning are not methods which are reserved for running the economy after capitalism has been abolished; they are equally indispensable for preparing and furthering the forces and movement for its overthrow. Through the Transitional Program of the Fourth International the revolutionary party can introduce elements of conscious planning which give direction to the unconscious and spontaneous movements of the insurgent masses. The masses act and react in response to

weighty objective conditions produced by the development and crises of the capitalist-colonialist system which are beyond the control of any party or leadership. A sensitive and alert vanguard can sometimes perceive premonitory signs of changes in the moods and movements of the masses and adjust to them in time. But the reflexes of the masses are in most cases ungovernable and unpredictable because they are not planned or anticipated by those who initiate or participate in them. The general strike of the French workers, which took everyone by surprise in May-June 1968, is a fresh case in point. However, if any specific upsurge or outburst of the masses is unforeseen and confronts the revolutionary vanguard as a given fact, the possibility, the probability, even the inevitability of such large-scale anticapitalist offensives can be anticipated and prepared for thanks to the precedents already at hand and an understanding of the convulsive nature of our epoch. The spontaneists and anarchists bank everything on the independent and unplanned actions of the rebellious masses. Marxists not only foresee and welcome these occurrences but go much beyond that to take the necessary steps to intervene in their development, organize them, and direct them toward the desired goals. Otherwise, without adequate guidance and direction, the energy of the upsurge can become exhausted, permitting the class enemy to rally its forces, counterattack and push back the masses. This syndrome has happened many times since 1917. The MayJune events in France likewise demonstrated how the most promising and powerful insurgence of the masses can be derailed by the opportunism of the Communist parties and aborted by the absence of an adequate alternative leadership firmly rooted in the working class.

est these generalizations appear too far removed from everyday politics, let me indicate how the theory and practice of a revolutionary Marxist strategy have been combined and applied to the L antiwar movement of the United States since 1965. The organization of the fight against American intervention in Vietnam has been an acid test of the character and capacities of all groups on the left. Here is how the American Trotskyists met this formidable challenge of contending with the warmakers on their home grounds. First, we characterized and condemned Washingtons war as imperialist and counterrevolutionary and supported the cause of the Vietnamese freedom fighters as just. On the basis of this analysis we worked out the following line of opposition to the aggressors: 1) We sought to bring together the broadest masses in largescale antiwar demonstrations. 2) These protests were to be initiated and organized by a coalition of forces whose sole required ground of agreement was a willingness to oppose the warmakers in action. 3) The masses were to be mobilized under the central demand Withdraw the American troops now which could unify the biggest forces, while recognizing the democratic right of self-determination of the Vietnamese. Nowadays, these three points of policy

48

are evident and acceptable to most antiwar activists. Yet all along the way since 1965 every one of them has been resisted and rejected by one or all of the other poli;ical tendencies who put forward alternative courses of antiwar action and fought for them against us. Some counterpoised individual and isolated deeds to mass action; others tried to narrow down the movement and its appeal by exclusionist regulations and maneuvers or by trying to impose multi-issue programs or opportunist electoral moves on the coalition. The moderates advocated negotiations instead of withdrawal while the ultralefts and sectarians have insisted on acceptance of the National Liberation Front program and positions as a precondition for participation. We have had to combat all these incorrect proposals and procedures unremittingly in order to sustain the antiwar movement and make it grow as it has. The controversy over military policy was equally arduous and instructive. At first many pacifists, members of the Students for a Democratic Society and other New Lefts stigmatized the conscript soldiers as mercenaries and murderers, turned their backs upon them and advised individual draft resistance, conscientious objection or moving to Canada. We Marxists pointed out that every mass army reflects, sometimes in more intense forms, the features of its society, and that the reluctant draftees were not immunized from the antiwar feelings and ideas agitating the civilian population from which they had so recently come and to which they were still tied. It was therefore preferable for socialist opponents of the war to enter the armed forces, if drafted, and to fight there to exercise the right to express their opinions on this and related political issues among their fellow GIs. There was nothing original in this line of conduct; it accorded with the doctrines of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It was not an individualist, pacifist, neutralist, petty-bourgeois, anarchist policy but an activist, militant, proletarian and revolutionary course. Today the antiwar movement not only in the United States but elsewhere recognizes the results and rightness of this orientation followed by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance and so ably carried out by the antiwar GIs under their inspiration in the army bases. The achievements registered in these campaigns were ratified by the majority of the 4,000 antiwar activists at the Student Mobilization Committee Conference in Cleveland, February 14-15, 1970. They are a tribute to scientific analysis and foresight as against the methods of improvisation, impressionism and guesswork encouraged by empiricism and emotionalism. They testify to the value of Marxist principles and methods compared with the inconsistent hit-or-miss notions propounded by other political currents who are opposed to them or depart from them. The poster announcing the successful Young Socialist National Convention held in Minneapolis in December 1969 rightly proclaimed that it takea revolutionaries to make a revolution. I would propose a few amending adjectives. It takes informed and experienced revolutionaries to make a successful revolution. And thats what our movement is all about.

ALIENATION/CONTINUED

FROM PAGE 23

you making money? This signifies that bourgeois economic relations have so completely pervaded ordinary human relations as to dehumanize them to an appreciable extent.

come now to the ultimate and most tragic form of alienation, which is alienation of the capacity t. communicate. The capacity to communicate has become the most fundamental attribute of man, of his quality as a human being. Without communication, there can be no organized society because without communication, there is no language, and without language, there is no intelligence. Capitalist society, class society, commodity-producing society tends to thwart, divert and partially destroy this bas~c human capacity. Let me give three examples of this process at three different levels, starting with a most commonplace case. How do men learn to communicate? While they are infants they go through what psychologists call a process of socialization and learn to speak. For a long time one of the main methods of socializing young children has been through playing with dolls. When a child plays with dolls, he duplicates himself, projects himself outside his own individuality, and carries on a dialogue with that other self. He speaks two languages, his own language and the language of the doll, thereby bringing into play an artificial process of communication which, through its spontaneous nature, facilitates the development of language and intelligence. Recently, industry started to produce dolls which speak. This is supposed to be a mark of progress. But once the doll speaks, the dialogue is limited. The child no longer speaks in two languages, or with the same spontaneity. Part of its speech is induced, and induced by some capitalist corporation. That corporation may have hired the biggest educators and psychologists who make the doll speak more perfectly than any of the babble which could come out of the childs mind itself although I have some doubts on that subject. Nevertheless, the spontaneous nature of the dialogue is partially thwarted, suppressed or detoured. There is less development of dialogue, of capacity for communication, and therefore a lesser formation of intelligence than in more backward times when dolls did not speak and children had to give them a language of their own. A second example is taken from a more sophisticated level. Any class society which is divided by social-material interests and in which class struggle goes on suppresses to a certain extent the capacity for communication between people standing on different sides of the barricades. This is not a matter of lack of intelligence, of understanding or honesty, from any individual point of view. This is simply the effect of the inhibitive pressures that substantial divisive material interests exercise on any group of individuals. Anybody who has ever been present at wage bargaining where there is severe tension between workers and employers representatives Im talking about real wage bargaining, not sham wage bargaining will understand what I am referring to. The employers

49

side simply cannot sympathize with or understand what the workers are talking about even if they have the utmost good will and liberal opinions, because their materialsociaf interests prevent them from understanding what the other side is most concerned with. There was a very striking example of this inhibition on another level (because workers and not employers were involved) in the tragic strike of the United Federation of Teachers in New York in 1968 against the decentralization of control over the school system. People of bad will, fools or stupid people were not so much involved. Indeed, most of them would have been called liberal or even left some time ago. But through very strong pressures of social interest and social milieu, they were simply incapable of understanding what the other side, the Black and Puerto Rican masses who wanted community control over the education of their children, was talking about. Thus the Marxist notion of alienation extends far beyond the oppressed classes of society, properly speaking. The oppressors are also alienated from part of their human capacity through their inability to communicate on a human basis with the majority of society. And this divorcement is inevitable as long as class society and its deep differentiations exist. Another terrible expression of this alienation on the individual scale is the tremendous loneliness which a society based on commodity production and division of labor inevitably induces in manyhumanbeings. Ours is a society based on the principle, every man for himself. Individualism pushed to the extreme also means loneliness pushed to the extreme. It is simply not true, as certain existentialist philosophers contend, that man has always been an essentially lonely human being. There have been forms of integrated collective life in primitive society where the very notion of loneliness could not arise. It arises out of commodity production and division of labor only at a certain stage of human development in bourgeois society. And then unfortunately it acquires a tremendous extension which can go beyond the limits of mental health. Psychologists have gone around with tape recorders and listened to certain types of dialogues between people in shops or on the street. When they play these dialogues afterwards they discover that there has been no exchange whatsoever. The two people have talked along parallel lines without once meeting with each other. Each talks because he welcomes the occasion to unburden himself, to get out of his loneliness, but he is incapable of listening to what the other person is saying. The only meeting place is at the end of the dialogue when they say goodbye. Even that farewell is saddening because they want to save the possibility of unburdening themselves of their loneliness the next time they meet. They carry on what the French call dialogue de sourds, dialogues between deaf people, that is, dialogues between people who are incapable of understanding or listening to other people. This is of course an extreme and marginal illustration. Happily, the majority of members of our society are not yet in that situation or otherwise we would s be on the brink of a complete breakdown of social relations. Nonetheless, capitalism tends to extend the zone of this extreme loneliness with all its terrible implications.
50

his looks like a very dim picture, and the dim picture undoubtedly corresponds to the dim reality of our times. If the curve of mental sickness has climbed parallel with the curve of material T wealth and income in most of the advanced countries of the West, this dismal picture has not been invented by Marxist critics but corresponds to very deep-rooted aspects of the social and economic reality in which we live. But, as I said before, this grim situation is not at all without hope. Our optimism comes from the fact that, after all this analysis of the roots of the alienation of labor and the specific expressions of the alienation of man in bourgeois society is completed, there emerges the inescapable conclusion that a society can be envisaged in which there will be no more alienation of labor and alienation of human beings. This is a historically produced and man-made evil, not an evil rooted m nature or human nature. Like everything else which has been made by man, it can also be unmade by man. This condition is a product of history and it can be destroyed by history or at least gradually overcome by further progress. Thus the Marxist theory of alienation implies and contains a theory of disalienation through the creation of conditions for the gradual disappearance and eventual abolition of alienation. I stress gradual disappearance because such a process or institution can no more be abolished by fiat or a stroke of the pen than commodity production, the state, or the division of society into classes can be eliminated by a government decree or proclamation. Marxists understand that the social and economic preconditions for a gradual disappearance of alienation can be brought about only in a classless society ushered in by a world socialist revolution. And when I say a classless socialist society, I obviously do not mean the societies which exist in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe or China. In the best cases these are transitional societies somewhere halfway between capitalism and socialism. Though private property has been abolished, they have not yet abolished the division of society into classes, they still have different social classm and different social layers, division of labor and commodity production. As a consequence of these conditions, they still have alienated labor and alienated men. The prerequisites for the disappearance of human alienation, of alienated labor and the alienated activities of human beings, can only be created precisely through the continuation of those processes I have just named: the withering away of commodity production, the disappearance of economic scarcity, the withering away of social division of labor through the disappearance of private ownership of the means of production and the elimination of the difference between manual and intellectual labor, between producers and administrators. All of this would bring about the slow transformation of the very nature of labor from a coercive necessity in order to get money, income and means of consumption into a voluntary occupation that people want to do because it covers their own internal needs and expresses their talents. This transformation of labor into all-sided creative human activity is the ultimate goal of socialism. Only when that goal is attained will alienated labor and all its pernicious consequences cease to exist.

BUIIDINGA MASS MOVEMENT FOl?BlllCKllBEIUliiON

BY ELIZABETH BARNES he opportunities and potential for organizing a powerful independent Black movement are greater now than ever before. The past decade has been one of unprecedented radicalization in the Black T community. The mass rebellions, the widespread acceptance of nationalist ideas, the struggles which have been waged on the campuses, in the schools and communities, in the unions, even in the Army all these testify to the tremendous revolutionary potential which exists. Yet, after more than a decade of ferment and struggle, there is still a wide gap between the revolutionary potential of the masses and the actual strength of the organized Black movement. Black Liberation forces around the country are dispersed and divided, and some organizations have undergone severe repression. Most important, no mass Black political organization has been built which is capable of coordinating and giving direction to the various struggles going on and of projecting the type of program and perspective necessary to mobilize the full power of Black people. Why is this the case? Why is it that none of the organizations which grew up during the 1960s has been capable of giving the leadership which is needed? And what strategy will overcome this weakness in the period ahead? These are the basic questions which Robert L. Allen grapples with and attempts to answer in Black Awakening in Capitalist Amerzca (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1969. 239pp. $5.95.). Although there are a number of important weaknesses in Allens book, and he is by no means able to come up with all the answers, this is one of the most sericus and insightful discussions of these problems to come out of the movement in recent years. The bulk of the book is devoted to a factual history and analysis of the upsurge of the 1960s, focusing on the role of such nationalist organizations as SNCC, CORE and the Black Panther Party. In assessing the contributions of these movements, Alien stresses the fact that although important beginnings have been made in understanding the basic nature and goals of the Black liberation struggle, the job of developing a workable strategy and tactics is far from complete. His explanation for the decline of SNCC, for example, is that while SNCC played a role in educating a layer of college students on the basic concepts of revolutionary nationalism, it never went much beyond the stage of rhetoric. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Allen traces the ideological development of SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, showing how he changed his political positions from month to month, without giving serious consider@ion to developing a consistent and coherent program. The ideological confusion and vacillation of Carmichael is contrasted to the revolutionary courage and seriousness of Malcolm X, whom Allen correctly sees as most responsible for laying the ideological foundation of the current Black liberation movement. Allens analysis of the Black Panther Party is not as useful as his discussion of SNCC. Part of the reason for this may be that he wrote the book a year ago, when the political direction in which the Panthers were moving was not as clear as it is now. In summing up his judgment of the role of the Panthers, Allen returns to the question of program: Revolutionary rhetoric is no substitute for a thorough radical analysis upon which a program can be constructed. Both SNCC and the Pantherstried to provide an analysis, but because of the uncertaintiesand ambivalences of their own leaders, thebasic contentvaried from month to month, sometimes even contradicting previous formulations. The panthers produced the beginnings of a full program [The Ten Point Program], and while this was of great importance, it was only incidentally tied in with a specific analysis and strategy. Hence, the continuing main task for the Black radical is to construct an interlocked analysis, program, and strategy which offers Black people a realistic hope of achieving liberation. In the final chapter, Allen presents his own ideas about what the future strategy and program of the movement should be. His perspective is best summarized by quoting a few key paragraphs: . . . it is necessary for t,}e Black liberation movement to devise a transitional program, which will operate until such time as conditions develop that will make possible full liberation through social revolution. This program must be aimed at building a mass revolutionary organization, and it must facilitate community developmentand offer constructive interim reforms. . . What is called for is an independentBlack political party 5/

capable of providing militant leadership. To the degree that the proposed party is successful in implementingthe program sketched above, it will grow in strength and experience, gradually establishing itself as the effectivegoverning power of Black America. . . With respect to encounters with white America, a Black party should not rely on exclusively legal campaigns, nor should it restrict itself to all-out street warfare. Instead it must devise a strategy of calculated confrontation, using a mixture of tactics to fit a variety of contingencies. The object of this strategy should be to abolish, by any means necessary, the real control of white society over the Black community, and to extract needed reforms. Tactical innovation should be the order of the day, and anything workable goesdependent on specific conditions and the relation of forcesfrom legal struggle, to electoral politics, to direct action campaigns, to force. . . Under the aegis of a militant political partya party which acts not as an occasional votegetting machine but as a continuously functioning governing instrumentality diverse activities, from efforts to establish rank-and-file labor union caucuses to struggles for community control of the schools, can assume a cohesiveness and meaning, independentof their immediate success or failure. Within the framework of the party, these activities can become integrated into a unified strategy for winning Black selfdetermination. Over the long run, they could well become the individual building blocs of social revolution in America. By focusing on the need to build a mass Black political party, Allen pinpoints the next crucial step which the Black liberation movement must take if the full potential power of Black people is to be effectively realized. His insights into just how such a party will be built go a long way beyond those of any existing Black organizations. The emphasis on mass struggle, on the essential nature of revolution as a process of building up the power of the workers over time, his understanding of the need to combine electoral challenges with mass action are all important clarifications of the type of organizing job which needs to be done. Unfortunately, on some of the basic questions of just what the political program of a Black party should be, Allen is less clear. One such question concerns the demand for Black control of the Black community which has been raised spontaneously in struggles around the country during the past several years. Because this is such an important issue and because there is a great deal of confusion about it, it is worth taking up in some detail. A common argument against raising the demand for Black control of the Black community is that this will simply mean substituting for the present direct white control an equally oppressive control by a Black elite, which would in turn remain under the domination of white capitalism. The analogy of neo-colonialism is often used to suggest that winning of political independence is of no consequence in and of itself and that it can be easily coopted by the ruling class. In some parts of the book, Allen seems to agree with this point of view. For example, in the introduction he writes, Black America is now being transformed from a colonial nation into a neo-colonial nation. . . . Under neo-colonialism an emerging country is granted formal political independence, but in fact remains a victim of an indirect and subtle form of domination

by political, economic, social and military means. And in a later section he adds further confusion to the question by referring to COREs militant rhetoric but ambiguous and reformist definition of Black Power as Black control of the Black communities.

s the demand for Black control a simple reform which can easily be granted in capitalist America? Has the fight for self-determination and political independence entered a stage analogous to neo-colonialism abroad? Allen continually points out that one of the basic goals of the ruling class is to create a Black elite of professionals, executives and politicians, who can act as agents of wbite capitalism in the Black community. And it is true that there are now a lot of Black faces in positions of authority in the Black community where before there were only whites. But this does not mean that the BIack communities in this country have anything approaching the formal political independence which characterizes the neo-colonial countries. Black people havent even broken with American capitalism to the extent of having their own political party, much less gained control of the basic institutions in the Black community, such as schools and the police force. Moreover, when Black people do begin to break from the domination of the white ruling class, and to fight effectively for control of the Black community, it will have an immediate revolutionary logic. This is because the Black bourgeoisie is not strong enough, by itself, to act as a serious brake on the masses. It has to have outside help. The Black community is predominantly working class in composition and there is almost no genuine Black bourgeoisie. For this reason, when the struggle in this country builds up to the point where Black people begin to gain actual power of control of the communitiesto make the basic decisions about housing, schools, poverty programs, welfare, police, and other questions it will have profoundly revolutionary implications. It will mean that the most proletarianized and revolutionary sector of the population is beginning a fight for political power. Within the context of the general radicalization that is taking place in this country, the fight for political self-determination through the creation of a Black party and through the struggle for Black control of the Black community will also play a crucial role in spurring other sectors of the population into motion. A mass Black political party would seriously undermine the two-party system in this country, which is at present the basic mechanism used by the ruling class to control, manipulate and deceive the masses of the American people. The fight for Black control of institutions and agencies within the Black community can serve as an example of how to build centers of power counter to the ruling class in the principal cities of the United States. Allen is certainly not unaware of all this. He himself expresses the essence of what is involved when he refers to such struggles as the individual building blocs of social revolution in America.

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books
ART AND REVOLUTION by John Berger. Pantheon Books, New York, 1969. 192 pp. $5.95 (paper $1.95). Artist and author John Berger poses some of the most important theoretical questions of Marxist esthetics, in this book about a dissenting sculptor struggling against the Soviet bureaucracy. The questions revolve around the various functions of art in a postcapitalist society, and the role of the revolutionary artist. The concreteness of Bergers approach the center of which is the work of Ernst Neizvestny, liffle known outside and hardly acknowledged within the USSRprovides a fresh analysis. The question of art is fundamentally a question of the superstructure: the social realm in which literature, morals, ideology, esthetics and laws appear. The superstructure is, of course, limited, conditioned and ultimately determined by the class formations and the economic base. Neizvestnys art evolved in the Soviet Union with all the peculiar contradictions of a society in transition between capitalism and socialism. The visual arts in Soviet society remain under the control of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Union of Artists, little changed since Stalins death. But one also tinds artists among the most privileged in the society, living on an extremely lavish scale, far above that of certain government ministers. Even the averagely successful live far better than, say, the average engineer or university teacher. Neizvestny, however, shares none of these privileges. Bergers book is dedicated to the late Isaac Deutscher, biographer of Leon Trotsky, and Berger applies Trotskys analysis of the evolution of the USSR: the 1917 revolution laid the foundations for socialism, but after a healthy period of proletarian democracy accompanied by rapid achievements on the cultural front, the isolated and be leaguered young workers state suffered a serious bureaucratic degeneration. The spirit of revolutionary art was de stroyed by the denial of egalitarianism and the approved growth of privilege, by the unnecessary savagery withwhich the collectivization of the farms was being carried out, by some of the temporary but terrible consequences of the crash program of industrialization. Berger terms the result of Stalinist cultural policies Socialist Naturalism. Berger credits this concept of naturalism (as opposed to realism) to the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs. Naturalism is a submissive worship of events just because they occur, and realism is the confident inclusion of them witbin a personally constructed but objectively truthful world view. Berger uses his discussion of Socialist Naturalism to make several points. One is that in using art for purposes of propaganda, it is important not to confuse short-term orders of the day works with the more enduring kinds. Works which are intended to have a long-term effect need to be far more complex and to embrace contradictions. Berger sup plies evidence that Lenin probably made this important distinction, and that Stalin deliberately ignored it. Bergers short, light book is more artistic than scholarly. It provides new insights, although it operates within the traditional Marxist view of culture. It represents a new revival of interest in Marxist esthetics. The question of art in the Soviet Union is key to understanding art and revolution. Bergers book provides an excellent introduction.
ALAN WALD

THE PEASANTS OF NORTH VIETNAM by Gerard Chaliand. Penguin Books, Baltimore,1969.247 PP. $1.65. Gerard Chaliand, Belgian-born sp~ cialist in underdeveloped countries, sets out in this book to explain the Vietnamese peasants seemingly exceptional powers of resistance. Why has the United States been unable to defeat them in spite of its overwhelming military superiority? The author includes interviews with peasants in the Red River delta. Seventy-five per cent of the population of the DRV lives in the delta. Among the interviews are facts, sometimes presented in tables, lending weight to the peasants assertions that life has improved immeasurably since the defeat of the French. Clearly, the peasants appreciation of the fruits of a collectivized and planned economy has given them incentive to fight to protect these gains. Other writers have visited North Vietnam and reported on their trips, for example Mary McCarthy. But whereas Mary McCarthys Hanoi is full of her personal reactions to the Vietnamese people, Chaliands description deliberately avoids that kind of subjective approach. He lets the peasants themselves provide the emotional impact. One after another individual depicts a past full of dying relatives, starvation and disease; of debts and mortgages on property; of the arrogance of the Japanese and French imperialists. Each peasant describes the victory of the Vietminh, the defeat of the French and his own involvement in that struggle. Each describes the concrete gains he has witnessed and experienced since that time. Chaliand backs up such personal testimony with facts: where there used to be one doctor, now there are

53

sixty-eight. Where 90 per cent of the population then was unable to read, illiteracy now haa been eliminated. Most peasants attribute their own support for the revolutionary forces to the land reform which was initiated almost immediately after the defeat of the French. The transition from individual to collective ownership was broached around 1960. The early cooperatives were the first to set up dikes to control the widespread flooding, thereby making it possible to initiate a second crop per year and to increase the yield per crop. As other peasants saw the gains reaped from collectivization, they joined the cooperatives. Infants in the cooperatives are cared for so that mothers are free to work as well. Farming still has not been completely socialized. Peasants are permitted a small plot of land for private use. After they sell 80 per cent of the produce from these private plots to the state at state-controlled prices they can sell the rest on the market. ( Statecontrolled prices have not changed in spite of the wars impact on the economy, but market prices have soared rapidly. ) While the war has in some sense made easier the winning of the ideological battle, it obviously has hampered the revolution severely. The potential for complete mechanization of farming, for example, has had to be diverted to increased production of war materiel. Chaliand deals repeatedly with the liberation struggle of women in North Vietnam. The emergence of women de rives in part from the partys attention to the matter and its attempts to educate the masses. But to an even greater de gree it stems from the strong convictions of the women themselves: They woke up to the fact that they were capable of doing the same jobs as men and began demanding that they be placed on an equal footing with men. Some of the formal steps taken toward achieving such equality have a mechanical and artitlcial flavor. For instance, new regulations enacted since 1967 provide that an industrial unit or cooperative in which women make up 40 per cent of the labor force must have a woman on its management committee; if the figure

is 50 per ceht, the assistant manager must be a woman; 70 per cent or more and the manager must be a woman. A married woman with three or more children can receive an abortion on de mand, but if she has less than three children, her husband must consent. Marriage laws have been changed to protect women from being forced into marriages arranged by their families. Women in Vietnam have a long way yet to go, but they are moving forward with the rest of their society. Chaliands book is valuable for its demonstration of the positive effect a socialized and collectivized economy has had on the formerly colonized and oppressed peasants of North Vietnam.
JUDY BAUMANN

same speech he said, we will start immediately a voter registration drive to make every unregistered voter in the Afro-American community an independent voter. We wont organize any Black man to be a Democrat or a Republican because both of them have sold us out; both parties have sold us out. Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party.
LEE SMITH

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY by Malcolm X, ed. GeorgeBreitman.Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970.184 pp. $1.95. This collection of speeches, interviews and a letter from Malcolms last year makes a valuable companion volume to Malcolm X Speaks. George Breitman, the editor of both books and author of The Last Year of Malcolm X The Evolution of a lkwolutionary, explains in the foreword to the present volume that most of the material it contains was not available when the first collection was prepared. Among the first eleven chapters of the book are the question and answer session from Malcolms appearance at the Militant Labor Forum in New York on April 8, 1964, and the two speeches he gave at the first public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity on ~une 28, 1964. In these two selections, as well as elsewhere in the book, he discusses the need for a break with the two capitalist parties and for independent political struggle by Black people to gain control of their own communities. Any Negro who registers as a Democrat or a Republican is a traitor to his own people; Malcolm said at the New York forum. At the OAAU rally, he said, So we have formed an organization . . . to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African de scent . . . in the United States and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. Later in the

MARXISM IN OUR TIME by Leon Trotsky. PathfinderPress, New York, 1970.47 pp. 65 cents. LIFE IN AN AUTO PLANT by Tom Cagle. Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970.23 pp. 25 cents. LA RAZA by Roger Alvarado et al. PathfinderPress, New York, 1970. 15 pp. 30 cents. The new Merit pamphletby Trotsky ,s an essay written in 1939 as an introduction to The Living Thoughts ofKarl Marx, a book published that year by Longmans, Green and Company. The ?amphlet contains Trotskys entireoriginal text, including sections deleted by the publishers of the book in which it appeared as an introduction. The pamphlet is an excellent introduction to the theory of Marxism and its revolutionary application to political practice. The fact that it serves as a good introductory pamphlet, however, in no way makes it less valuable reading for more seasoned revolutionists who will benefit from its clarity and conciseness in their own daily encounters with young rebels new to Marxism. Tom Cagles pamphlet originally appeared as a series of articles in the Militant. A UAW veteran, Cagle explained in a letter to the March 27 Militant how the articles grew out of a lunch-break gripe session at the GM assembly plant in Fremont, California where he works. The symposium and the speech which make up La Rurat also originally appeared in the Militant. The issues of an independent Chicano party and Chicano studies are key in the rapidly deepening struggle of the Chicano people for self-determination. Every serious revolutionary will want to get and read this pamphlet. LS

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- Leon Trotsk~ 1

MYLFE
by Leon Trotsky Trotskys outobiogrophy yet encompasses introduction has all of the dramatic youth in Czarist some of the most stirring historical in the revolutionary soldier and statesman, by Joseph Hansen novel a conas a in the life af quality of a great events man. A rebel from his early scious Iifetime participant writer, oratar, orgonizer, Russia, Trotsky became struggle for socialism and tells of his role in the introducpp.

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Trotskys final years in Mexico.

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OL AGAkST
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