To Frank Pestana
Who for Many Decades Has Held High the Banner
Of Human Progress in North America
Especially in Those Dark Moments When the Summer Soldiers Disappeared.
__CUT_FROM_HERE_OUT_OF_WEB__Table of Contents
Author's Preface to the 8th edition 4
Part I --- The Era of Necessity
Chapter Title Page
Before we begin: The Language of Historical Science 32
1 The Hardware 74
2 Sex and Speech 79
3 The First Band Stage 81
4 Living with the Enemy 84
5 The Second Band Stage 89
6 The Third Band Stage 90
7 The Stage of Tribal Agriculture 93
8 The Simple Chiefdom Stage 102
9 The Stage of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms 109
10 The Stage of Slavery 112
11 The Stage of Feudalism 118
12 The Stage of Capitalism 121
Part II
Socialist Transition to the
Era of Freedom
13 The Stage of Stalinist Socialism 147
14 Bolshevism Spreads to China 265
15 The USSR: From NEP through the Five Year Plans 298
16 World War II 348
17 US Hegemony Over the Capitalist World 417
18 The Collapse of Revisionism, (c. 1990) US Hegemony
(c. 2004) and Global Capitalism (2008) 426
19 Comparative Analysis: The Simple Chiefdom Stage
vs. the Stage of Stalinist Socialism 480
20 The Stage of Advanced Socialism 490
Part III
North American Labor History
21 From Puritanism to the Revolutionary War 497
22 Capitalism Unchained: 1781 --- 1860 505
23 Capitalism Unfettered: 1861 --- 1877 515
24 Capitalism Unleashed: 1878 --- 1920 519
25 The United States in the Imperialist Phase 540
Of the Capitalist Stage
26 See Saw: The Cold War I: 1945-1972 573
27 See Saw II: The Cold War II: 1973-1989 591
28 2008: The Collapse of Global Capitalism 618
29 Toward a Fifth International 630
Index 642
__CUT_TO_HERE_OUT_OF_WEB__ __ALPHA_LVL1__ Preface to the 8th Edition of ABC's of Communism, Bolshevism 2012The year 2011 witnessed very positive developments right across the board for international communism. At home in the USA we formed a real Communist Party, USA (Foundation) and witnessed the appearance of its online daily newspaper the Daily Worker USA. Abroad in the Western Hemisphere the enemies of communism suffered defeat after defeat with South America in a new and permanent anti-imperialist alliance for its own development along several different paths, but for the first time in two centuries almost completely independent of US imperialism. The Chinese solution, to the problem of the emerging capitalist second economy conspiracies to restore capitalism in the remaining socialist countries (as it had in the USSR its East European People's Democracies and Mongolia), expanded to Cuba from the PRC, Vietnam and Laos, and appears to be about to do so in the DPRK as well.
This latter development flows from the analysis that now takes up the first thirty odd pages of Chapter 18 as a detailed theoretical explanation of how capitalism came to be restored in the initial homeland of the World Stalinist Socialist Stage. This proves that we now know how to avoid similar developments in countries embarking upon the socialist road. Reconstructing the origin of the New Class in Czarist Russia and the New Class in the Soviet Union is therefore complete and a central feature of the presentation throughout this Handbook.
In 2011 Gringo capitalism found itself absolutely stuck in the muck of its own creation beginning first and foremost in its homeland with massive unemployment and thirty million workers on the dole of some kind. Another hundred million underemployed and/or underpaid living in poverty. The general crisis of capitalism (see chapter 12 --- The Capitalist Stage) is an iron law and the gringo capitalists no more immune than any other group of capitalist social parasites. Meanwhile the gringo imperialists suffered defeat after defeat in three wars against the Muslim world and in the massive social upheaval of petty bourgeois revolts against the establishments of bourgeois comprador regimes in Arab countries ranging from Egypt to Libya, Syria and Yemen. Not to mention being expelled permanently from Iraq and soon from Afghanistan. While Chinese socialism continued to demonstrate success at home and abroad, wherever it counted, the gringo
2imperialist hegemony over capitalism not only showed it could not reassert itself, but Gringolandia itself appeared increasingly to the entire world as a paper tiger about to be set on fire and permanently removed as a threat to the people of the world. It was a good year indeed.
Scientists define the stage of Modern Communism as something no one has yet seen and the stages of Primitive Communism as something we left behind prehistorically. However, ``Communism'' in the capitalist press means what we Bolsheviks are doing, or have done, where we have or had state power.
The reality is the man in the street, knowing no better, accepts this constant repetition of the latter definition of communism, and thus our cadre must deal right off the bat with questions such as why was Communism overthrown in the Soviet Union, why does Communism do this, why that? In current affairs then to most North Americans ``communism'' means what we Marxist-Leninists have done and are doing, where we do have state power, and where we do not. The answers to all these questions are in this Handbook, thus the name change to ``The ABC's of Communism'' from the earlier editions published as the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism.
Nor is this a new and unusual propaganda direction for the capitalist press. In fact, this is the normal way the bourgeoisie uses everywhere to lie to the mass of producing people. In this regard the US is exactly like everywhere else.-And has been since day One. Lenin said it best in his address to the 1st Congress of the Communist International in 1919: ``The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument (counterpoising democracy and dictatorship) repeated in a thousand strains by the capitalist press are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.''
This is a Handbook for revolutionary cadre regardless of Party affiliation. You may think of it as the citizen's equivalent of a soldier's Field Manual. In this sense this handbook serves the same purpose as Nicolai Bukharin's book (1918) of the same name. (Co-authored by Bolshevik theoretician Yevgeny Preobrazhensky). The Bolsheviks and their Red Army of that time (1918 --- 1920)) had the task of securing the national home base for socialism in the Soviet Republic and then the Soviet Union. ---And, they had the additional task of triggering the world socialist revolution.
Your task is to speed up the law governed process of sociocultural evolution so as to get us through the stage of Capitalism as quickly as possible. Especially now, when the positive contributions of capitalism to sociocultural evolution have been completed and only the bad remains. Bad is too mild a term. The lethal component of capitalism now threatens our species very existence. This means you additionally are to lead the struggle for armed insurrection against the capitalist regime in Washington DC and establish working class state power over the entire North American nation. Thereby finishing the task of global socialist revolution.
Without us communists, it will take millennia to make the transition. With us communists, we can do the job in a few generations or decades.
Gulf of Mexico
What the never ending environmental crisis in the US Gulf of Mexico has proven, as if any more historical evidence was needed than history has already provided, is that without us communists, the capitalists will destroy the world in their insatiable greed to produce profits at any cost. The capitalist disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is just the tip of the coming iceberg! With us, working people will destroy the cap threat and propel our species into the Era of Freedom.
BP
The last several chapters of this book (Ch. 24 to 27) deal coincidentally with BP from its inception as Anglo-Persian at the turn of the last century. You will find this historical insight into BP useful in your day to day conversations with others.
Bungler's Paradise
The Implosion of Gringo ``Intelligence''
Perhaps the most interesting non-economic development of 2010 in Gringolandia was the Washington Post July expose, where it becomes evident that the Gringo ``intelligence and subversion'' establishment has imploded. In fact, many different systemic failures came to head at the same time in the gringo ``intelligence'' establishment, just as they had in the overall imperialist economic structure.
There is nothing surprising about this to us. US intelligence has always been considered to be a joke in the major spy centers of the globe. The reason being the (1) general historical ignorance of those employed and (2) the inability to build ties to anyone in the colonial and semi-colonial, Third World comprador classes. (3) To the degree that gringo agents have had success it is because of the suitcases full of money they carry and that is it pure and simple. Now they have run out of real money and have to rely on printing increasingly questionable money. The recipients know it and are desperately looking around for an alternative to these funny money paymasters. (4) No significant tradecraft knowledge exists among gringo agencies including their so-called agents on the spot.
In the last decade the imperialist bosses in Washington simply did what they always do and that is to try and buy their way out of every mess they have created with borrowed money. So, what was already a pathetic intelligence establishment (measured by what you get for what you pay) became an out and out travesty as thousands upon thousands of con men were hired as analysts (one stop on the two ladders upward in Washington --- government jobs being one and private contractor jobs being the other. A gringo equivalent to Middle American peasant life where one ladder up is civil and the other the church). No one in gringo ``intelligence'' has the slightest idea what they are doing and furthermore they never will. Take my word for it --- they have always been lost and now they are lost in space and will never find their way back.
3This does not mean they are not dangerous. Even a hog will root out a pearl now and then. But it does mean they can be handled by normal means.
Wikileaks
Shortly after I wrote the foregoing section on the Washington Post expose of the total incompetence of gringo intelligence after its 9/11/2001 so-called ``long awaited reform'' we discovered that a US Army Private soldier from Oklahoma (see the new Left
magazine Red State about Oklahoma's past and present socialist history) had managed easily to get his hands on all the secret cables of the US State Department, to and from its embassies around the world, and furthermore had had no difficulty in copying them and sending them to the website Wikileaks. Is this level of Gringo intelligence incompetence even possible? Doesn't this make the Brit capitalist error in permitting Soviet penetration of MI5 and MI6 look strictly ``small potatoes'' in comparison. The entire episode simply reinforces the truth of what I said foregoing. The gringo's don't have the slightest idea what they are doing on the ground, with each agent and agency running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Furthermore there is no reason to believe we will be up against anything better than this sorry joke of an enemy in the foreseeable future.
4The first stage of this new Era, where humans are no longer confronted first, foremost and forever with the problem of satisfying their most fundamental wants before they are FREE to do anything else, will begin with the Stage of Communism. The transitional modes in the organization of modern society with revolutionary proletarian governments, we establish to accelerate the process, we have to come to call ``socialist.''
I have tried to provide you with the information you will need to answer the many questions people have about sociocultural evolution, ranging from primitive days, through the rise of monumental architecture (e.g., pyramids), to the present day. Accordingly this Handbook now has an index. When working people understand what Modern Communism will really be, once accomplished, then they will set out enthusiastically on this road into the Era of Freedom (as Engels termed the period which will begin with the stage of Modern Communism.)
I want you to remember and never forget that there are only a few of us Communists among those fighting for liberation from wage slavery and the establishment of working class power, in our country. Most people on our side are simply fighting for justice in order to survive and hopefully prosper. They know very little about the facts of history and even less, usually nothing, about the laws of history. This is not an accident. The ruling class and especially its new trillionaire oligarchy have seen to it that working people get only lies as news and history. It's been that way acutely for some 65 years. On the other hand, a few people are knowledgeable. Specifically, us communists. It is our historical obligation to lead the working masses and in so doing complete the task at hand.
5Some of us have always been communists. We will always be communists. In practice this means that we take command of every situation in which we intervene as a combat organization of professional revolutionaries and provide the leadership the masses must have to win their battles. That's what Leninism means in the phrase Marxism-Leninism.
In North America we have had to create a new Party for reasons you will come to understand herein. The first job of our Party is to train the next generation of communists to take our place. For, as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying, ``the Earth belongs to the living.'' The rectified North American vanguard party, the Communist Party USA (Foundation), is tasked with taking command of the revolution of the working masses of our country. What is coming will not be an easy fight. It will not end well for our enemies or it will not end well for us. However, this is a price we are willing
to pay, for as Mr. Jefferson was also fond of saying ``better that there be no more than one man and one woman left in every country on the face of the Earth than that things should continue as they have.''
In this 8th edition I have done more than deepen and expand certain sections. I have changed the name of the book from Fundamentals of Historical Materialism to The ABC's of Communism retaining the subtitle Bolshevism and the year of the edition (in this case 2012), mainly for the reason above. You should note this name change also reflects the fact a real Communist Party has now been created in the USA
In short, since the day to day practice of our politics is what most North Americans think of when the term communism is utilized in the cap press we now rise to the occasion, defining in this limited sense, what communism is all about in contemporary life. Accordingly, even though we are still in the last days of the pre-Modern Communist period (the last days of the Era of Necessity as Engels termed it,) we should always answer the questions being asked by workers about what they consider to be ``communism'' and in the process of doing so, convert the situation into an opportunity to present the facts about how our day to day political policies have developed since 1917. In such a way dialectically convert the sabotage and obfuscatory tactics of our class enemies into weapons to open the vaults of historical truth
6For the moment let's tackle the number one capitalist propaganda tenet; namely, that capitalism is coming back in the Socialist Camp (China, Vietnam-Laos, Cuba.) In short this is just nonsense. Just another capitalist lie.
In the Soviet Union and East Europe the New Class (originating as socialist bureaucrats and emerging after Stalin's death as a new bourgeoisie) did overthrow socialism. In chapter 18 you will come to understand the mechanics of how they accomplished this, doing in four short final years what every previous capitalist plot from 1917 through the Hitlerite attack had failed to do. The Soviet New Class has established a kind of half-assed capitalism benefiting no one but them. Currently Putin et al are facing a crisis where they must decide which way to turn --- return to a socialist path toward communism or try and make permanent some kind of fascist capitalism. Putin having led Russia into BRICS is a good omen for the future but of course not nearly enough.
7On the other hand, where the New Class was weaker, and working class control of the Communist Party stronger, socialism was also accordingly stronger. Thus, in China, Vietnam-Laos and Cuba, the Communist Party did not lose power but adjusted to changing circumstances. In chapter 18 you will see how.
In these latter countries we are implementing what we have learned from our own experimentation in the 20th century, and continuing now in the 21st, in the technologically developing countries of our Socialist Camp. In short, in today's Socialist Camp we are still completing the task of building the infrastructure we should have inherited from a fully developed capitalist stage.
Experience in the USSR has shown us it is often necessary to use in this process the bourgeois and especially small bourgeois, elements of society to get this done (chapters 13 and 14). Under our direction, of course. As part of our general plan. What we cannot allow is a secret second economy growing unchecked and in fact denied. This led to the collapse of the Soviet experiment and cannot be allowed to happen again. In all
the contemporary countries where communist parties have command, the socialist component of these economies is by far the overwhelming dynamic portion, and our Party is openly controlling the completely exposed capitalist portion of the national economies in question. This is why China handled the global capitalist collapse so successfully (Chapter 28 below).
ALBA
ALBA has been given several meanings (Bolivarian Alternative Latin America; Bolivarian Alliance Latin America; etc.) but what it is, is a Left alliance led by Cuba and Venezuela, which includes Marxist-Leninist governments in Nicaragua and Bolivia and a Left bourgeois government in Ecuador. It's expanded form is economic and takes in a whole variety of Caribbean and Latin American bourgeois republics with a vested interest in securing their energy and trade relations independent of US imperialism. It has become a constituent part of the New World Socialist Camp the core of which is China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba.
BRICS
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)
Our party is also in power in a few coalition situations as in the ANC government in South Africa. In Brazil our Party is in coalition with several other worker's parties and Brazil's new President is one of ours who fought with Marxist-Leninist Guerillas in her youth and spent many years in exile in Cuba. Now South Africa has joined with Brazil, Russia, India, and China to form a bloc of the biggest of the developing countries (BRICS) whose very nature is antithetical to US and all other capitalist imperialisms (Europe and Japan). So both Brazil and South Africa are part of a newly forming phenomenon where Communist Parties share power with other Left and Progressive forces in pursuing national development and anti-imperialist policies internationally. Keep an eye on BRICS for these parties in power in coalition play a sometimes decisive role.
8The New World Socialist Camp of the 21st Century
---And, the emergence of ALBA and BRICS means de facto that the nature of the 21st century World Socialist Camp has changed from the simple cookie-cutter version of Joseph Stalin (see Chapter 13 below) to something much more sophisticated. What we have in this new Socialist world camp is tripartite:
(1) A core with hard-line orthodox party ruled nations in direct alliance with
(2) Left governments of a broad-spectrum of varieties ranging from ALBA to
(3) BRICS.
A new socialist camp is emerging in other words and we should not mince theoretical words about this. This is the future of the Socialist Camp for the foreseeable years impending. You must internalize this and act accordingly. Our enemies are too stupid to have figured this out yet and continue with their Cold War style plotting against communism. Which is just as well for us. But the enemy will not stay stupid for long and
will adapt its tactics in the foreseeable future and that is perhaps the real significance and danger of the Obama regime on the Potomac.
Social Justice and Communism are two separate categories entirely
Why mixed economies before full socialism, not to mention communism? Because social justice is one thing and communist stage egalitarianism quite another. You cannot artificially impose permanently the latter. It can only be permanent when the mode of production is fully developed to the level necessary to make practical the slogan ``from each according to her ability to each according to her need''. Let us next take a quick forward peek to see why. The remainder of the text in this book explains this insight into the future in scientific terms. This time warp view of the future is Marxism perfected --- what the term Marxism is all about in the phrase Marxism-Leninism.
A few comments on how we got to our current correct understanding of human social and cultural evolution (sociocultural evolution) and the shining path it has opened for us.
When Karl Marx and Frederick Engels met each other for the first time in Paris, in November 1842, they quickly recognized they had each, independently, come to the same general conclusions about how society evolved to its present stage (what we now call Historical Materialism, and its constituent sciences of evolutionary anthropology, history, psychology and sociology). They also recognized that Marx had begun unlocking the secrets of production of the Capitalist Stage itself. In so doing Marx was answering the question as to why the more science and technology contributed to the ability of humans to make more things, more effectively, and cheaply, the less the people making these things actually kept for themselves. As Hegel had remarked, to paraphrase, ``never did a labor-saving invention do anything other than worsen the conditions of the laborers themselves.'' Marx's theory of capitalist production was presented to the international working class movement in various forms through the 1850's and 1860's and culminated with the publication of Capital Volume One in 1867.
9(A) The last seven years of Karl Marx's life (1877-1883) were spent trying to extend the historical materialist theory of sociocultural evolution back into the detailed history and prehistory of mankind. Marx, in other words, had already unlocked the secrets of the Capitalist Stage and was attempting to do the same thing for the preceding stages in the social and cultural (sociocultural) evolution of humanity. Thanks especially to a century's work, on the part of innumerable anthropologists (especially archaeologists), that task has now been completed, as this book will prove
(B) What We Did Not Foresee: Why Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez are Correct. As far as I can tell neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels ever anticipated that the working class would take power anywhere other than in an advanced capitalist country. Even in their later years when conversing with Russian Social Democrats about the possibility of revolution in Russia, did either seem to have anticipated the strange unfolding of events which was about to occur. Marx did see the possibility that Russia could be the trigger of world socialist revolution but that is all. The idea that Russian workers could go it alone never occurred to him.
What is the significance of this? What am I talking about? About the fact that workers first took power in the least advanced of the capitalist countries --- namely Russia and its Empire. Nor, then, could the founders have foreseen that the next great addition to the global workers government stage would come in China which was only capitalist in the most technical sense of the word and then largely under the influence of imperialism and Chinese compradors (the Green Gang based in Shanghai --- Chapter 14.)
On the contrary, Marx and Engels had seen capitalism being moved rather swiftly out of the way, as its own advanced working class replaced it, with a new system which put them and the masses at the top of the priority list rather than on the bottom of it (See Chapter Two paragraph 22 of The Communist Manifesto). In the highly schematized way we have of looking at social and cultural evolution that was natural and it is quite understandable, especially to anthropologists; particularly to archaeologists. (Archaeology is one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology: the other three being cultural anthropology, physical anthropology and linguistics) Why? Because we in archaeology, especially, are always drawing sequences from older to younger, in archaeological sites, in regional and area synthesis, in overall evolution. One layer gives way to the next. Let me show you:
10In an archaeological region or subarea, in the USA Southwest, we might have the following reconstruction:
Modern human remains
Pueblo VI remains
Pueblo V remains
Pueblo IV remains
Pueblo III remains
Pueblo II remains
Pueblo I remains
Anasazi III remains
Anasazi II remains
Anasazi I remains
Proto-Anasazi remains
Archaic Desert Cultural remains
Proto-archaic remains
Palaeo-indian remains
This reconstruction would be based on several different sites. Each site would have enough of the sequence within it so that, in a like fashion to tree-ring matching and tree-ring sequence building, we can put together a sequence of occupation for the entire region or cultural subarea, or area.
However, this is highly schematized, not that there is anything wrong with schematics --- far from it. Schematizing archaeological sequences and broader sociocultural evolutionary sequences is one of the principal tasks of archaeology. What can be wrong with this approach is not the approach but the assumptions that could go with it. For example, this particular schematic shows little about the processes occurring (quietly unassertive) in each level. These we have to figure out for ourselves based upon both
theory and detailed analysis of the remains of each level, sublevel by sublevel, in each of the sites in question. When we do this we begin to see an entirely new picture.
For example, how and why did the Anasazi people move from the pithouse domestic structures of Anasazi I --- III into the above ground house and room buildings of the Pueblo levels? Or, for that matter, how and why did the archaic nomads of the Great Basin Desert Culture move into a sedentary (or at least semi-sedentary) residence pattern? These details are in the ground and with detailed research in enough sites over a sufficiently broad area the mechanics can be laid bare for all interested observers to see.
Now, in the preparation of summaries for our colleagues, for students, for readers of prehistory in general, we usually produce the kind of schematic you see above. When we look at the even larger picture, say all of North and Middle America, we often draw a schematic that looks like this:
High Cultural Civilization of Mesoamerica
(the Aztecs and the Mayas for example)
Primitive States
(Teoitihuacan, Oaxaca, Palenque for example)
Tehuacan Chiefdoms
(the Archaic levels)
The Tehuacan Simple Chiefdoms
(the proto-archaic and archaic levels)
Broad-spectrum Hunting and Gathering
(Palaeo-indian sequences at Tehuacan: Lerma, Clovis, Folsom levels)
-And, we may even generalize further as:
White Contact
Post-Classic
Classic
Formative
Archaic
Proto-archaic
Lithic
In this latter schematic we have a sequence equivalent to the historical sequence of
Modern Communism
Capitalism
Feudalism*
Slavery
Primitive Communism
*Feudalism: as I explain in the text, the term feudalism is loaded with the idea of small fiefdom society in Western historical literature. That is fine. However, that definition has little in common with the use of the term here, where a broad global sociocultural evolutionary stage, is the object to be defined. Here, therefore, we use the
term Feudalism to represent the global, universal, transitional stage between chattel and wage slavery, which occurred everywhere in the world where there was autochthonous (indigenous) sociocultural evolution and, therefore, feudalism, as a global stage, may be fiefdom in polity (e.g., Europe) or imperial (e.g., China).
Now the point is, to look at how much we miss if all we have is the latter sequences. We miss almost all of the transitional evidence. We don't quite miss it all as Feudalism is a transitional stage between chattel and wage slavery, but even that may be hard to see without a more thorough sequence of stages and phases to show us the transitional period (and its, at least, two Chiefdom Stages) which had occurred already between primitive communism and slavery.
It is for this reason, as I say; I went into archaeology to begin with. To try and find what Marx was looking for in the last seven years of his life. Namely, the transitional proofs for the movement out of primitive communism into chattel slavery. I thought if we had that part of the sequence than perhaps we could gain insight into characteristics of the current transition from wage slavery to modern communism. I believe I was correct in that regard as the first ten chapters of this book will prove.
Practical Application: the Source of Ultra-Left and Trotskyist Errors
You can use our now accurately reconstructed, model of prehistoric with historic sociocultural evolution and see where the Trotskyists and the Ultra-Left took the completely wrong fork in the theoretical road; namely, by confusing in 1917 where we were with where they wanted to be, to wit:
Communist Stage
Second Egalitarian Epoch Begins Here
_^_ Where the Ultra-left want to be and think we were in 1917
Advanced Socialist Stage(s)
_^_ Where we are now
Stalinist Socialist Stage
_%_ Where we really were in 1917 in Russia but without the completed capitalist stage technological accomplishments
Second Transitional Period Begins Here
Capitalist Stage
Feudal Stage
Slave Stage
Servitude Epoch Begins Here
Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms Stage
Simple Chiefdoms Stage
First Transitional Period Begins Here
Tribal Agriculture Stage
Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 3 (Homo sapiens)
Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 2 (Homo erectus)
Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 1 (Homo Australopithecus)
Ape-like Humans
Primitive Communism (1st Egalitarian Epoch) Begins Here
Human-like Apes
Primate Origins
Because the Trotskyists and ultra-leftists of all stripes (e.g., RCP and Bob Avakian) had no accurate prehistoric-historic knowledge about sociocultural process --- reflected above in our archaeological chart of sociocultural stage evolution, or fundamentally about the more profound implications of our theory, these Trots, and later the followers of Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao's wife (Madame Maoists), took the wrong road. This is their objective, scientifically derived, commonality. Those who followed Stalin and what became the Party's General Line had no such knowledge either but they had common sense and knew their way was in fact the only way. The latter persevered and the former have not. History speaking for itself i.e., unfolding as it did is the proof.
By correcting this profound error --- going back to the fork and taking the correct road --- those in error (Trotskyists and ultra-leftists) can become effective fighters for rapid transformation to Communism, once again. These people are our comrades, and many if not all have suffered greatly for their beliefs, and we should at least try to help them, despite their problems, if we can. We want them to rejoin the international revolutionary movement via the correct Communist Party and correct international working class revolutionary line. After all, everyone was confused for a while. Those who were right by accident will now know why they were right. (The revisionists old or modern were always wrong and anti-Marxist-Leninist then and now but that is another matter altogether.) Problem resolved.
11Let's not get off on the Wrong Foot right at the Start
The brief explanation of the history of the internationals in a blurb at Venezuelanalysis is completely misleading, wrong and unacceptable.
The First International did not collapse. It was threatened by anarchist takeover in Europe so General Secretary Karl Marx sent it to Philadelphia. There the 19 sections of US communists dissolved it at Marx's bidding. In its stead they created the Workingmen's Party of the United States and other Marxists in Europe created their own
social democratic parties. I discuss this in detail in Part III on the history of the Labor Movement in the USA.
The Second International was taken over from the beginning by revisionists. By revisionism we mean those who try to justify capitalist rule by preaching ``the reform of capitalism.'' They did what we have come to expect from revisionism. (Both this original archetype kind which is still with us and in power in many capitalist countries, and modern revisionism of the USSR-East Europe type, which is now gone thank goodness, except for the leftover puppet parties --- e.g., the USA Party).
The Third International created by Lenin set things straight. It is a lie to say that the Comintern was perverted by Stalin and/or Stalinism. If we are going to start a new international it cannot be just an excuse to bring Trotskyist mythology back to the fore. In this book you can read the truth about the history of the 3rd International in the160 pages of chapters 13 through 16.
The Fourth International of the Trotskyists never got off the ground. They have never been able to secure state power anywhere. Originally because, at least in my opinion, the only programmatic difference between Stalin and Trotsky was on the question of pace of the five year plans. The only other real difference being the personality struggle between the bourgoisiefied would-be aristocrat Trotsky and the long term Old Bolshevik Stalin.
Trotsky was an enemy of Bolshevism most of his life and with us only a short time. Stalin gave Lenin the first permanent labor union in the Czarist Empire in the oilfields of Baku and Batum and robbed banks and stage coaches and ships to get Lenin money. It was Stalin and associated Old Bolsheviks (never including Trotsky) who triggered the national general strike that led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the Russian Revolution of 1905. All of this and the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well, is discussed in this book.
A fifth international is exactly what is needed but not one based on silly Trotskyist lies, distortions and mythology. If those assembled should decide to create the 5th International they should consider setting up a Historical Commission to study and resolve differences of opinion on all these matters. Any attempt to foist Trotskyist mythology on the international working class movement's most important central body will doom such a body to defeat right from the start. We need to get off on the right foot.
The Four Curses of the Modern World
If Ancient Egypt suffered from eight curses the modern world and especially the international working class movement suffers from four. These are in order of importance (or descending order of danger) (1) naïve ultra-leftism (2) Trotskyism (3) modern revisionism and (4) anarchism.
The order of danger is important here because as recently as last year I would have listed revisionism first and Trotskyism second. However, there are no revisionist regimes left and their parties nothing but shadows in most countries. Trotskyism is dangerous but not as dangerous as the more wide-spread naïve ultra-leftism as RCP still exhibits in the USA (Bob Avakian needs to get with it and learn what is in this book. I mention this party specifically
because they could have a lot to offer if Avakian would just read a little) and its associates internationally not yet fully exposed for their fundamental Madam Mao errors.
Trotskyists (and camouflaged Trotskyists in such groups as Workers World and PSL) are always a danger because of the way they pander to the petty bourgeoisie student movement (There are good communists --- Us - and those guys in PL or CPUSA(F) are the bad communists --- or in other words not just these mentioned but virtually everyone else considering themselves Marxist-Leninists.)
Anarchists we parted ways with 150 years ago but like a bad case of syphilis they just keep coming back whenever the working class movement is under stress. So they take up last place. All of these (perhaps 95% of the US Left) are unfit for duty in any revolutionary sense and will be swept away like a skirmish line when the revolution gets underway in North America (by which I mean the USA and Canada). However, in the meantime their members are well meaning and could be helpful if the chains that bind them to these foolish parties are broken.
This is just the first course in Marxism-Leninism
Finally, in 2010, I wrote a synthesis for my colleagues in anthropology, concerning the completion of Marx's theoretical research into the origin and evolution of human modes of production. This monograph also serves as an introduction to graduate level coursework (e.g., Anth 501 Advanced Historical Materialism, for those of you teaching ABC's courses.) That monograph entitled Karl Marx's Second Magnum Opus: Archaeology and Primitive Communism.
We have Great Opportunities
The Enemy is finished --- The Gringo Imperialist Empire is collapsing
Asimov's ``Foundation'' Analog
As 2011 opened the USA and its Empire was at a defining point in history: namely, the end of the Gringo Empire, the demise of the so-called North American Century. No matter what the US ruling tiny group of oligarchs does now in 2012, it is too late. The US Empire is doomed and nothing its rulers do now can save it. The trillionaire Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, DuPont, etc. super-capitalists can and will save themselves by changing nationalities and/or national business locations. In fact, they already are. Meanwhile, the American people have been well and truly fucked, all their assets disappearing in a great historical robbery. The Britainization of gringo ambitions combined with the looting of the working people's assets in every form is leaving behind the burnt out shell of a national clunker. This is not hyperbole but science as you will learn as you read and internalize this book.
12In this sense we are where Hari Seldon was when his mathematics of psychohistory predicted the inevitable end of that Empire. It was this fictional analog I just referred to in the subheading foregoing about the Isaac Asimov story. As a matter of interest Asimov's story propelled both (Nobel Prize winning economist) Paul Krugman and me into our search for the foundations of human sociocultural evolution. ---And, it is
this story which is on-target today (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation.)
Another analog is the situation for humans in the quandary of contemporary global warming in that no matter what the US now does it is too late. In other words, even if today we stopped all further CO2 pollution (which of course we won't) it would be far too late to stop what is now environmentally inevitable.
Fortunately, the road forward for you young revolutionary communist cadre is far more easily seen perhaps than it was before the global capitalist system collapse of 2008. Your task is to speed up this transition from the Servitude Epoch (and its capitalist stage we are now in) to communism via the most rapid possible transitional stages (we are also in now.) This handbook has been produced to assist you. You must fight for a constitutional convention to rewrite our fundamental document in favor of Socialism and against Capitalism. To secure our victories in this arena we must have a working class army and police force and that should grow from our armed seizure in combination with the military not against it. ---And, we must have a model.
To you students let me say the most important part of this book in my opinion are the first ten chapters which explain how class divided and state (army/police) organized society came into existence after 99.99% of human history having been spent in a period of egalitarian and altruistic social relations (what we call primitive communism.) I mention this because many of you are in political Parties where there are contentious matters having to do with 20th century issues in our movement (Trotskyism for example.) I recognize many of you are anxious to get to those chapters. Fine, get to them first if you need to, but don't forget the most important lesson herein lies in how and why we left the epoch of primitive communism and entered the Servitude epoch (the slave stage, feudal stage and capitalist stage) and these facts you will learn in the first ten chapters.
13Why is this, the most important topic? Isn't it essentially academic?
No, it is not a purely academic endeavor for if we know how we traversed the period between primitive communism and Slavery (1st stage of the Servitude Epoch) than we may well get insights as to how we will get out of Capitalism (the last stage of the Servitude Epoch) and into modern communism! Two transitional periods, each composed of at least two sociocultural evolutionary stages, we know existed and exist. In any science it is pro forma to investigate for possible transitional commonalities in such situations and so we conduct such an investigation in social science.
At any rate, in these remarks, and in additional chapters at the end of this book, I will also comment on what happened in the USA during 2009, 2010 and 2011, when there were dramatic developments in this heartland of world imperialism leading to:
(1) The brink of collapse of the entire Empire! The Capitalist Stage (Imperialist phase) USA Empire is fatally flawed and can be taken down soon! However, even with the dismissal of Gringolandia from its role as sole global superpower our problems will remain. Specifically, the problem that construction of Communism via the intermediary steps of Socialist stages will take longer than we had originally thought, with or without US imperialism as the leader of the global capitalist stage.
(2) Furthermore, as you will see in this Handbook the international situation with regard to working class revolutionary seizure of power has improved radically.
This Handbook also reflects
(3) A perfection of the Specific Theory of Primitive Communism as a distinct main point and part of the structure of our science. A distinct contribution if you will to the General Theory of Historical Materialism.
(4) As usual I will summarize the developments that were most important to you (as a revolutionary cadre) in 2009 - 2011 from a scientific perspective. Never forget we have the science of culture, society and their history as our virtual sole property and we should rely heavily upon it. Not just to be right. But to be more effective than our enemies.
Our enemies live in a dream and fantasy-like world of religious superstition and ad hoc radical screw ball slogans of the far right (fascist) wing US leaders. This ridiculous ideology which arose to delude the sheep is now leading the Rockefeller-Mellon-Morgan et. al. oligarchy into one fatal trap after another. We have seen this happening to them over many decades and now their ignorance is coming home to roost for them. Ignorance, silly political prejudices, and religious fairy-tales, as the main stay of your educational and information system are one thing when you are running the show --- when you are in fact the Empire. But when you are just another failing capitalist country, history proves fairy-tale religion combined with general ignorance of history and sociocultural evolutionary anthropology, will fuck you in the ass every time.
14For the gringo capitalist oligarchy there is no going back to being number one top dog. They will be fortunate just to hold onto a leading place in the wolf-pack of advanced capitalist countries. ---And, if they are allowed by their bourgeois brethren to hold onto a respected place in the alpha group of capitalist countries it will be a gift. One they have not earned, and do not deserve except, for their inertia. (Meaning their huge in-place capitalist institutions in manufacture and finance. Although by dismantling much of this and sending it to cheap labor centers abroad, they have screwed themselves in this regard too.) The hope of the world has been that the election of President Obama will mean a retreat to the otherwise rather clear course toward World War we have been watching unfold. Obama may lead the US into the not altogether despicable position of being ``the guy in the room who fucked everything up, but couldn't help it because he is the village idiot.'' In the end that is the best he will be able to do for the oligarchy.
15Murdoch (FOX --- balanced and fair neo-Nazi propaganda --- fascist oxymoron news and commentary) may jump ship and go back to Australia and you can expect many other similar centi-billionaire and trillionaire families to ditch the US for better homelands elsewhere in the world. After all the educated US petty bourgeoisie has been jumping ship for decades and now at least 250,000 USA originating families emigrate every year to new permanent homelands. Murdoch circumvented our laws against foreign ownership of the media by becoming a US citizen first so he could legally bring his poison into the US for his partners in the Rockefeller oligarchy. (See Chapter 27 for my fight with the Azcarragas over their ownership of all the Spanish language newspapers, TV and radio stations in the US. They had too much self-respect to do the same as Murdoch.)
16(5) This is excellent news for us Communists because now with a proper ideological rearming (as herein for example) we can make up for lost time quickly. More importantly we can bring about the end of capitalism even more quickly than we might
have imagined even a year ago. If we do we will definitely be starting out in some kind of advanced Stalinist socialism so we want to be sure we shape this thing the way we want it. Along those lines the Communist Party USA (Foundation) was formed to earn a vanguard position among North American working people.
17Going to Completion
(6) Harry Bridges used to point out to his colleagues in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) a most critical fact. Namely, this is a capitalist country, and as long as it is, there is only so far the Union can go. In other words being a worker in a capitalist country is something like being a ten year old boy on a first date.
In my own case I thought I was in love with a ten year old girl (Judy Syms) in my elementary school class and I went as far as to arrange a date. My father took us to see Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return. The problem was, at the end of the date there was nothing to do! My father drove us to our respective homes and that was it. I didn't know about sex and had no idea what to do next and the whole thing just died a natural death. A ten year old boy can only rarely go to completion.
Industrial workers are in the same boat until they destroy the capitalist thuggery (the Army-Police) holding them in wage-slavery, creating our own state (Army-Police) and go over to seizing and taking total ownership over the means of production. Turning their own labor and the resulting income stream to their own benefit.
Seizing the Means of Production
Class conscious workers in a Union are also stuck in a nowhere-to-go situation. As long as this is a capitalist country there is only so much value and surplus value to be directed toward the needs of the men and women who actually do the work. That amount of Value is finite and limited. Winning a strike is great but it leaves you right where you were to begin with as long as capitalism is retained. The capitalists still have the legal right to own the factory and make all the decisions (except for the issue you just won because of the strike.) The worst part is that the capitalists get to keep coming back to screw workers again and again no matter how many limited worker actions we might win. Unless we liquidate them and their system, and replace it with us and our system,
workers will always be in the quandary of a ten year old boy on a first date. Unable to close the deal.
Only moving toward a fully conscious demand for Communism and Now can US workers get beyond this conundrum by seizing ownership of the factories and other means of production by armed force and establishing our own police power over enemies of the people --- e.g., the capitalists --- preventing them by law from ever coming back to an ownership position. Then workers can use the profits of their endeavors for themselves, their families, and society overall.
The Private Property Trap
Classes are defined on the basis of the ownership relations of a group of people to the means of production and the subsequent right to oversee distribution. People consider themselves part of one class or another when they assume a commonality of interest.
This is the Achilles Heel of the petty bourgeoisie for example because they assume a commonality of interest in the private ownership of the means of production with the big bourgeoisie because they think they must. The capitalists convince them that ownership of private property is a universal right, the same for giant factories as it is for your bathroom toothbrush, and if you want what goes along with being bourgeois, (that is, some special privileged position with regard to ownership, then they have to agree that all of the means of production and distribution must be held privately too). These rather pathetic small bourgeois elements are thereby coerced into thinking they have little choice but to accept this, thus defined, Doctrine of the Sanctity of Private Property. That is the capitalist pitch.
18The truth is private ownership of the giant factory type and the individual householder type should be two totally separate categories in law and can be easily made so in practice. In fact, they already are, often in capitalist countries as well. At any rate, in the current capitalist crisis the media (which is always under oligarchic dictatorship) consistently talks as if the one unquestioned assumption is that there always has been and there always will be private ownership of the means of production and distribution. We, of course, counter with ``No. Private ownership of the means of production and distribution is a new phenomenon of perhaps 6,000 years duration and in the previous millions of years property was held in common. It was the division into society of classes and the expropriation of public property by the ruling class which put the means of production into private hands. Theft, in other words. There will be no permanence now to private ownership of the means of production and distribution. In fact we intend on seizing all the means of production and distribution above a certain level immediately upon seizing power.''
19Protecting Your Personal Property
What is that ``level?''
Another capitalist trick is to give people the idea that we communists are going to seize their cars and Ipods. This is just bullshit but some people will believe anything. We have no interest in the personal property of people being publicly owned. That would make no sense at all. In fact, just the opposite! We are trying to get as much personal property as possible into the hands of individuals. That is what ``from each according to her ability to each according to her needs'' means for goodness sakes!
Private ownership of the principal means of production (steel, autos, aluminum, electricity, etc.) is a totally separate category from personal private property (cars, houses, the stuff in them, etc.) That is the point, and you need to internalize this. We will seize in totality the commanding heights of all finance and industry and simultaneously protect the interest of working people in their ownership of their private personal property. WE will seize the corporate farms and assist small and middle and even big farmers who want to stay private and work along a co-op road (especially important here are some religious groups who practice cooperation and collectivity such as the Mormons, Mennonites and Amish.) Right now the capitalists own the principal means of production and fuck around at will with the people's personal property (mortgages, credit cards, crop price supports, etc.) Our revolutionary armed seizure of power will reverse that situation and double-quick!
20(1) Political economy: The two central global financial developments of the preceding year have been (1) the ruling class response (a) in the US and (b) internationally, to the US instigated financial collapse and (2) the rapid recovery of the People's Republic of China from the global catastrophe. Let's take China first.
Since China has a Capitalist sector we must review that aspect of Chinese development within the context of the overall growth of the Socialist sector of the economy (incomparably larger.) When we do we see one thing crystal clearly --- it was the Socialist sector and its strength which allowed the Party to move in and take the necessary steps to do an equivalent injection of capital to what is called ``stimulus'' in the new US ruling class lingo. In fact, it was easy for the Chinese Party to do this because of half a century of state power dealing with much more difficult investment problems, not to mention prior decades of learning how to make do in the insurrectional environment of Civil War.
The Chinese Communist Party has now proven it can handle Two Systems One Country and its ability to do so is primarily due to its leaders honesty combined with the strength of the socialist sector of the PRC economy. But, from our standpoint, the critical point is the Deng solution of a NEP-like program for Chinese revolutionary construction does work! We have our Party in command of China, implementing an industrialization of industry and mechanization of agriculture with both capitalist and socialist answers. Despite the collapse of the world capitalist system the Chinese Party was able to handle the consequences within China while stepping up their program for increasing GDP.
Workers will see, if you explain it to them that what worked in China could work even better here! Namely, by putting people back to work as they have in China but have failed to do in Gringolandia, with its thirty million workers now on the dole.
In fact the same methodology in government will work better here because we do not suffer from technological backwardness which is still the central feature of the PRC economy. The US ``rust belt'' could be resuscitated overnight, and we communists would do that. With cash infusion comparable to the way we converted Detroit from automobiles to tanks and planes (a la World War II) these factories could be up and running in months. Our communist government would put everyone to work immediately! But this will require a revolutionary armed seizure of power by working people and how that is to be done needs to be worked out.
---And, most importantly, as good as the Chinese example is it is inadequate because China is so much more backward than would be required for true Advanced Socialism (let alone Communism.) We have to build our own model. In the US we can move directly to Communism, because the industrial infrastructure required by Marx and Engels is in place and we can take advantage. It is our (a) great technological sophistication, as well as (b) the experience we international Bolsheviks have gained in building Socialism since 1917, which allows this to happen.
(2) Class analysis: Meanwhile class shock continues unabated among working people of the advanced capitalist countries. We will deal extensively with the situation in Gringolandia and elsewhere in the capitalist world in the last chapter of this book.
An Old Gringo Bolshevik Lives to See the Great Day
Some of you may remember the Carlos Fuentes book and movie Old Gringo (Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, now streaming on Netflix) as I do and which I can identify with as I am about the same age I suppose as the Gregory Peck character. When I was in Cuba eight years ago preparing to help the Cuban's resist another assault from the gringo monster from the North even I could not imagine that in eight short years the entire gringo colossus in Latin America would have collapsed and it its place a new unified continent and adjacent islands would have found their way into a permanent alliance with Socialist Cuba and an anti-imperialist economic-political-military alliance which cannot be reversed. This Old Bolshevik Gringo lived to see it happen.
Developing socialist economies in Latin America have featured continuing redistribution of wealth and power more democratically as in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Now these four are in political and military alliance with Cuba. What a dramatic shift in global relationships in the eight years since I visited Cuba, when this homeland of Socialism was relatively isolated and on a near-war footing, awaiting gringo invasion.
-And, in all four of these nations, major potentially progressive strata of the Latin American nation, are stronger and more empowered and emboldened than ever before. The gringo regime lost control of both Colombia and Peru in 2011 and this is of monumental significance for our side. For our most deadly enemy it was an unexpected fatal blow for the gringo imperialists who did not imagine eight years ago, in their wildest nightmares, that the future they hoped for in Latin America was about to be dumped into the sewer of fantasia forever. It was a shocking turn of events for such as gusana Ros-Lehtinen and assorted fascist thugs who assemble in Washington just in time to see Honduras, Colombia and Peru permanently depart from the US orbit. Only the Miami mafia dream-world remains for them. Overall on a broad front in Latin American (i) national (patriotic) bourgeoisie, (ii) petty bourgeoisie (include farmers here), (iii) working class and (iv) indigenous peoples, a progressive New Horizon emerged from the US instigated global capitalist financial collapse, and emerged far stronger than almost anyone thought possible a short eight years ago.
21What the gringo oligarchy had been thinking about, and all they had been thinking about in their greed, was getting out from under the collapsing burden of too much cash going out and too little coming in to the USA, and buying time by borrowing money which was what the sale of US paper is all about. China is dumping this soon to be
worthless paper as fast as it can, but according to Saturday Night Live June 4th 2011, Hu Jintao is still taking it up the ass to the tune of 800 billion! To get out from under this fatal imbalance they had to wreck the other capitalist classes and they proceeded to do so. All in all the US capitalists made out very well as successful bandits in this regard, for as a class oligarchy anyway, the top of the top one percent did win out, at least compared to what happened to their class brethren internationally (although this betrayal will come at an as yet unknown political price).
The US imperialists were forced into ``stall and retreat'' actions against the progressive Governments and movements in Latin America. The gringo imperialists don't have the money or the troops to send anything more to South America than the small-unit trouble-making forces composed of US Navy Seals, US Army Green Berets, and US CIA agents. So far all these guys have succeeded in doing is causing trouble in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, in mounting offensive probes against Venezuela, and in seizing momentary opportunities such as that in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where small forces under their command can seize a few buildings affecting a temporary overturn of a popular ``banana republic'' Government. In 2011 the Latin American's following Hugo Chavez managed to reverse even that. An amazing defeat of US imperialism which has always had Honduras as an outright client puppet.
22All in all ALBA is not only still in place and stronger than ever, it is having a very positive effect in creating a unified political and military stance for the South American continent minus the US puppets like former Colombian President Uribe. Santos as his successor is taking Colombia into the South American united front and away from its alliance with US imperialism. Meanwhile Ollanta Humala took Peru away from gringo comprador Alan Garcia in an epoch making historical election. Regardless of many silly gringo interventions ALBA has made it possible for the ABC powerhouse to move irreversibly toward full independence within the capitalist stage. (ABC = Argentina, Brazil, Chile.)
This loss of gringo imperialism's last South American client regimes (Colombia and Peru) means that continent has been permanently removed from the gringo orbit. This freedom for South America is another fruit of US imperialist aggression against Arabia and the Muslim World and nothing the gringo oligarchy does can make up for this historic reversal in their loss of South America. Now that the gringo rulers are helplessly lost in the quicksand of South Asia and Arabia we have a few more years in which to consolidate our gains before the next US imperialist invasion of South America, which is inevitable, if the Gringo Regime survives intact.
(3) The Next and Immediate coming crisis: Importantly, the US rulers at least have begun preparing people for the inevitable monetary crisis. Specifically, the crisis created by the rapidly devaluing US dollar. This devaluation was inevitable even without the collapse. Now the degree to which this devaluation has been accelerated by the trillions of printed dollars created for the gringo oligarchy to get out of its current crisis is the only remaining question.
One way or another a second international currency will be brought into existence. Either the existing dollar removed from control by Washington and turned over to a new governing body (EU-BRICS for example) and a new domestic currency created for the gringo politicians to fuck around with, without affecting the rest of the
world. Or some combination of international currencies to form a basket of convertible notes to replace the US dollar, already underway, will be regularized, the gringos left to handle their mess anyway they can.
The first hint of this new capitalist propaganda mass-line I heard on NBR (PBS show National Business Review) September 16, 2009, when Paul Kangas' guest told viewers, even though we have gotten used to the idea of US Treasury notes being as good as cash, the truth is they are not cash and their value is in question, if over a ten year perspective, and investors should be aware that low risk does not mean no risk! Furthermore, he says you should consider your US instrument buying to be short term to avoid the longer term risk.
Then on October 7th yellow (anti-immigrant) ``know nothing'' journalist Lou Dobbs invited several so-called economists to discuss a second international currency (These CNN talking heads are just idiots like Dobbs but in this case we have a classic example of ``it's not important what they say but that they are admitting the issue.'') In short, the sheep are getting the message: ``The US dollar is not sacrosanct and subject to the same objective laws of economics as everyone else.'' With that Dobbs kicked off his new Financial News section and one suspects one central ideological feature is going to be an ongoing dilution of the truth about the inevitable collapse of the Post-World War II financial world order, featuring the US dollar and several shock-absorbing sub-currencies (originally the Mark and the Yen but now including the Yuan) in command. (Dobbs resignation at CNN coming shortly thereafter is simply a concession to the rapidly burgeoning Mexican and Hispanic population. His Hispanic wife heading for the door.)
23October brought official admissions that even Brazilian currency, until recently one of the Pariah currencies of Latin America, appreciated 40% in the first nine months of 2009 over the US dollar!
On October 8, BBC World News reported that the major Asian central banks had intervened in the currency market to stop the headlong crash of the US dollar.
Not to be outdone CNN reported October 9 the Dollar is in severe doldrums. Whatever that means. Actually it means nothing except one more step in admitting the truth to the North American people about what has been done to their money.
On October 10, CNN Your $$$$$ which is another regular ``business'' show reflecting the policy of the US oligarchy, dedicated much of its program to the ``collapsing US dollar''. One of the guests was humorously if unusually honest saying ``I thought I knew a lot about economics but I don't understand anything happening right now.'' Unfortunately, for the North American people, this is going to be the general line; namely, somehow things got out of whack but eventually we will get out of this ``recession'' and everyone will go back to living happily thereafter. In fact, on October 16th the Los Angeles Times ran a front page headline implying that the decline in value of the US dollar was actually a good thing since US exports would be cheaper.
On the day before Thanksgiving I heard for the first time the phrase ``the US is a declining power and India is a rising power'' on a BBC report on the visit of the Indian President to Washington. The same day PBS News Hour conducted an examination of the monetary crisis: India's central bank bought 200 tons of gold from the IMF. This is a desperation move to turn devaluing US dollars into something solid before it is too late --- but - it also puts such important central banks as that of India (especially China, but also the central banks in Venezuela, Brazil and soon Cuba) in the position of becoming major
international currency brokers and price setters. This is the beginning of the final move away from US currency as the international currency. The same report pointed out Canadian dollars were now about equal to US dollar; the Euro at $1.50 heading for $1.60. Everyone knows the value of the US dollar will continue to collapse as the Gringo Regime prints more and more money with nothing whatsoever to back it up except the ``good faith and credit of the US Government?'' A phrase that has lost a great deal of credibility in recent days. On Thanksgiving Day the bosses of Dubai announced they were defaulting on loan payments and set them over unilaterally for six months. The money in Dubai's real estate development does not come from oil but from investment and much of that was of the gringo variety --- meaning highly shaky. A Dubai bankruptcy could bring down capitalist banks all over the world including Gringolandia. ---And, on that same day the US dollar collapsed to a fourteen year low against the old shock absorbing standby currency of the Japanese Yen.
24On June 9th 2010, Jack Cafferty admitted on CNN that the 19.5 trillion dollar US debt (by 2015) can never be paid! He concluded the Obama Administration is destroying the country by continuing the massive spending programs of stimulus, war, and interest payments not to mention other long overdue corrections as in health care.
US workers are not living happily ever after now, and now they never will be --- under capitalism. Thus, your task is a lot easier. As that year closed NBR reviewed (1208-2009) US productivity and found ``significant gains'' for capitalists surviving the latest round in the gladiator contests as workers were forced to work longer hours for less money. More temporary workers were being hired as capitalists shed all health care benefits. What should have been technological advances at the service of mankind became instead death traps for workers forced to the street, unemployed, health uninsured, their children long since forgetting about college, and if they are in a minority preparing instead for a life in prison.
Of course, that happily living forever I mentioned above, happened only in the daily propaganda of television and radio as far as US working people are concerned. It's been fifty years since Leave it to Beaver might have had even the remotest reflection of daily life for any substantial number of US families. As if to prove it, the 26th of November issue of the comic book Time (magazine) had a cover beginning to hint at the truth in its ``decade of hell'' theme.
We will review relevant data about North American Labor History leading up to the current capitalist depression in Part III. The most relevant fact concerning ``recovery'' as far as working people are concerned is that it took from 1929 to 1945 to get out of the last capitalist major depression and that happened only because of the massive government World War II spending that put everyone back to work and drafted huge new feminine reserves into the industrial work force. That spending was the greatest in US history and amounted in the end to many trillions of contemporary dollars spent over a period of three and one half years. The point here is the US oligarchy has men and women at its command now who know this and who wish lead the US to recovery by doing the same kind of spending (regardless of the excuse; it doesn't matter as long as it gets money into the hands of hundreds of millions of people on a regular basis.)
25Yet this matter is severely complicated by the fact that the value of the dollar itself cannot be maintained. That is not a condition existing in the great depression of 1929-1945. No one knows therefore exactly how this policy of continuing trillion dollar
spending injections will play out. If the stability of the US dollar cannot (and is not) to be counted upon, and is to be replaced by a stable alternative of some kind, then the dominant leading role of the US in the international capitalist class can no longer be expected to be what it was. In fact, it is only a matter of time until the gringo oligarchy is pushed into the background, as far as the other ruling classes of the rest of the capitalist world are concerned. Capitalists as classes all over the world are getting bigger and more powerful than the gringo oligarchy --- China now has nearly as many billionaires as gringolandia; the Britainization of the Gringo Empire is underway and irreversible.
On June 30, 2010, Jack Cafferty again led the way on CNN when he devoted his show to the replacement of the US Dollar with an international new currency beginning with a ``basket of currencies'' as advocated that day by UN financial analysts. So, finally, the US population will begin to hear the truth about what has happened (irreversibly) to their currency.
In other words, as we began this Preface, the truth is no matter what the US oligarchs do now they cannot save their Empire. As in Hari Seldon's Galactic Empire, US Imperial collapse is inevitable and analogously this is identical to the model predicted by Seldon's science of psychohistory.
But this is not a novel. History has led the US Empire to its inevitable dissolution and this collapse is underway, law governed, and most importantly irreversible, no matter what steps the US ruling families take now. ---And the science is not Asimov's fictional psychohistory but the dialectical and historical materialism of Marxism-Leninism.
As 2012 unfolds we will hear more discussion of the fringe effects of monetary devaluation (of the US dollar) on various aspects of the domestic US and international economy. This is no accident but part of the overall propaganda theatre being choreographed by the masters of media control. This phase of the current capitalist depression is far more severe than it was previously and much more unstable in terms of international fiscal policy of various capitalist governments. What I mean is we have to watch closely to see how they handle this phase as I said we would have to do as far back as the 2007 edition, when I predicted this collapse, to see how the capitalists would handle their crisis. This ``watching'' being about all us communists can do at the moment in the USA.
Why? Because (1) we communists are spread out among a broad-spectrum of parties considering themselves communist (plus a Party [CPUSA]), and (2) as usual, as some kind of haunting syphilitic specter always at our heels, international anarchism. To escape the current crisis permanently the US people have to (3) reject capitalism. To do that they now have a (4) real vanguard revolutionary working class (Communist) Party: the Communist Party USA (Foundation).
(4) Information Control: Why is this as important as the first three factors?
Because the key thing I learned about the way the gringo capitalist oligarchy (Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon and other trillionaire families) got out of their 2008 catastrophe and leveled out into the current depression in 2009 - 2011 is, they got away with it because they have absolute control of the media and we need to understand how that was and is being achieved. In short, it has been a masterful use of television and radio to maintain an atmosphere of calm, ``normality if severe'', ``we will inevitably rebound and soon'', and it worked, even while millions lost their homes and jobs. I doubt working people in any other capitalist country would have stood still for this, nor for an
occasional check from the Regime on the Potomac as a sop to keep them from starving on the streets. In the first nine months of 2009, of the nine million scheduled and already processed foreclosures, only 500,000 have been helped by the Federal Regime of Barack Obama. In short even the progressive government of Obama has really just done a social justice deed for a few people while they have given an absolute blow job to the capitalists.
At any rate absolute and masterful media choreography is how the US oligarchy held on while their emergency room actions to save their economy were underway. Learn all of the lessons inherent in this fact. Break this control of the airwaves by a half dozen trillionaire families somehow and their days will be numbered.
(5) The Gringo Conundrum: Fatally Flawed World-view Models of the dying USA ruling class is the other side of the ``information control coin.'' We have generations of journalism and political science students (among others in related fields) who have internalized the fantastic stories and models of the US rulers. They actually believe the official (e.g., Time, Newsweek magazines) version of the world. Since this model has literally no accurate reflection within it of the real world, and the causality and process inherent therein, believers are doomed to a Wizard of Oz kind of understanding of the world in which we live.
As I have mentioned, it is one thing to have a fantastic view of the world we live in when it doesn't matter. It no longer matters, for example, whether one is protestant or catholic (excluding the crackpot evangelist far right wing nutballs where every fairy tale nuance of their Biblical interpretation is important) as it did at the time our Republic was founded. But it is important if the fantastic world-view means to completely misunderstand or totally non-understand the history of the United States and of the international working class movement. Since the ``official'' models are silly and non-reflective of reality it leaves US trained journalists and political scientists, who are would-be willing agents of gringo imperialism, lost in space! Real space cadets.
As the gringo Regime on the Potomac stumbles into one catastrophe after another because their view of the world is not only unscientific it is actually anti-scientific, the fantasy world models of these poorly educated and trained ``wannabe'' journalists and political scientists are of no real world use in advising the USA trillionaire oligarchy. Instead of intelligence being gathered, a silly world-view is being propagated, and as useful as that is in fooling the sheep back home it is counter-productive when what you need is the incisive insight afforded by a scientific (academic) understanding of the issues at hand.
The real world is a mine field and only those with an accurate understanding of it will have a chance to traverse it successfully. The gringo ideologists at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and PBS are not just the purveyors of calm in a chaotic capitalist crisis but sponsors of silliness in the understanding of the real world and its history. Therefore, they are also the grave diggers of the gringo capitalist system because you can't negotiate a mine field at all if you are truly blind and alone. The gringo capitalists and their flunkeys are truly blind and very alone. Helping, if unwittingly, to delude the US people, the pathetic US journalists and political science graduates are now also helping to fuck up gringo imperialism simultaneously with their silly op-eds and hypothesis based on nothing but fairy-tale models of reality. Their current dilemma over Cuba a case in point. Their dilemma over Afghanistan another (not to mention, Iraq, Venezuela, and virtually
26everywhere gringo planners have substituted fairy tales and religious superstition for the realistic scientific descriptions of nations and events which real world politics requires.)
This conundrum, which is irresolvable by the gringo capitalists, is an excellent example of dialectics in practice. A social and cultural mechanism created and shaped over many decades to delude the masses has within it the assurance that imperialism's brain trust will be made up of retards! Dialectical method allows us to see this and is an obvious example of how our superb scientific understanding of social and cultural causality and process gives us a superior position from which to fight the class war.
The Problem with Models - It's Time We Advanced Once Again
Searching for the Model; Building the Model
This is the Stalinist Road of Expanding Global Socialism
The problem with Models for us has been that the only one we had --- the Soviet Union --- was not really adequate for us. The Russians being in a far more primitive mode of capitalist production at the time of the October Revolution than we are now. We shall see where we are now in the overall reconstruction of US capitalist history in Part III below.
This doesn't mean it is methodologically bad to use a model. Quite the contrary. Model building is the first step in scientific higher education at places like Cal Tech, and it should be for us too. The problem with a model lies in the degree to which this new cultural ``software'' fits the old social ``hardware''. In other words, the better the model the better the outcome. The more poorly a model approximates reality the poorer the outcome.
As Professor Antonio Gilman has pointed out for many decades, Stalin's theory of socialist expansion had one Soviet Republic after another, probably bordering the USSR, being created cookie-cutter style. This Russian model however kept changing. Changing from the idealized War Communism model, to the NEP model, and finally to the Five Year Plan model of socialized agriculture in collective farms alongside a supporting industrial power plant greater than the world had ever seen. All good models for Russia in their time. But perhaps only the latter applicable to the USA. However, it had taken fifteen years for the Stalinist model to really take shape. In the meantime the US communists had had their own battles to fight and their own future models to think about.
The Chinese after 1975 expanded their search for the right model(s) in a way quite similar to the way the gringo bourgeoisie did. The division of that capitalist nation (USA) into ``states'' effectively allowed the local bourgeoisie to be the bosses of their own areas. It allowed for a multitude of social experiments to be conducted simultaneously. Some states had advanced working class legislation while others had outright chattel slavery. This social structure became an extremely effective way of letting off steam from many sources. For example, Utah is nearly worldwide known as the ``Mormon State''. (Never mind the fact Utah guarantees the civil rights of all religionists.) ---And, in the course of our history we have had States dominated by Catholics, right wing nutball Evangelists, Protestants of the respectable Presbyterian
27variety, even left wing ``socialist'' state governments under a variety of populist leaders have existed from time to time. One thing they all share in common is their acceptance of capitalism. The other thing they have in common is that each constitutes an experiment which if and when successful might be duplicated by other States.
China has been doing exactly this kind of experimentation, at the provincial, county and municipal level for decades now and it's paying off for them just as well as the gringo bourgeois experiment we call the USA worked out for them. Except here in China all these experiments share in common their acceptance of socialism and CPC direction.
We have a choice which is to build our own model now while the enemy has state power and then try to impose it during armed revolutionary struggle. Another choice would be to utilize a loose governing structure such as the US federal system while the Party proceeds to impose its program. We could wait for some other advanced capitalist country to set the pace. Wait until we can model ourselves after them.
Frankly, I think we will in practice witness all three of these options coming to the fore in the coming decades.
The Cover
The cover of this book presents a picture of the Stalinist model of Socialism on the road to Communism as pictured for the masses of Russia and the world c. 1936. At its center the idealized picture of the USSR in the 1930's with its mechanized collectivized agriculture on the ``American scale'' so admired by Lenin and Stalin. The industrialized base for mechanization (e.g., tractors and the factories creating them) is shown in one overall grand scheme of things. ---And, hovering above it all is the image of Joseph Stalin symbolizing the fatherly, wise, protective, leading role in all this of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As Professor Antonio Gilman has pointed out, it is this model the Comintern presented to the world to be duplicated in country after country. It was this model we had to sell in the 1930's and 40's and indeed into the 50's and beyond. The model was highly attractive for decades around the world and still is especially in developing countries.
28However, it is our task to improve and perfect this model to the standards now attainable in the advanced capitalist countries and the advanced socialist countries. You should be giving our perfected model a lot of thought because this is what you have to sell. It is this emerging model we will have to sell to the newly forming Fifth International.
Using Our Sociocultural Evolutionary Chart: The most important immediate conclusion to the completion of the general schematic of human sociocultural evolution has been to see the answers to our questions about where we are, and why, in the overall course of history. When we do this we can see the real at-bottom theoretical source of confusion for the last century has had to do with one or another misreading of where we are on the ladder of sociocultural evolution. For example, we were not on the verge of being able to create Communism in October 1917, not even what we have
come to call Socialism. In fact, in the Soviet Union we were in the most primitive beginning phase of industrial capitalism (as we had come to know it in North America and Western Europe). It was a pattern to be continued for many decades in our Socialist Camp. Since that phase has lasted so many decades and featured its duplication in many countries we conclude, following the rule history is always unfolding as it should, what we have seen is a special subphase of the second transition or what in fact is what we have come to call a distinct stage in sociocultural evolution --- i.e., Stalinist Socialism. It too we see will evolve into an advanced form of Socialism and there may well be more as yet unseen transitional Stages yet to come for these parts of the world before we enter the Stage of Communism. Make a copy of our chart of sociocultural evolution and put it on your wall. Your tasks as revolutionaries in the future will be to work out the steps and phases relevant to your own situation and act accordingly in terms of developing a strategy and tactics to propel your Party into power. Much of that will depend upon where you are. What is relevant in Nepal is unlikely to have any relevance to what needs to be done in Singapore or the USA. Here it is.
29(7)
Chart of Sociocultural Evolutionary Stages
(Read this chart from bottom to top which is to say from the oldest to the most recent category.)
Second Egalitarian Epoch
(Era of Freedom begins)
Star Trek Stage
Communist Stage
Second Transitional Period
(Era of Necessity ends)
Advanced Socialism Stage
Stalinist Socialism Stage
Servitude Epoch
(Epoch of Chattel and Wage Slavery)
Capitalist Stage
Feudal Stage
Slave Stage
First Transitional Period
Stage of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms
Stage of Simple Chiefdoms
First Egalitarian Epoch
(Epoch of Primitive Communism)
Stage of Tribal Agriculture
Stage of Advanced Homo sapiens Hunting and Gathering
Stage of Homo erectus Hunting and Gathering
Stage of Home australopithecus Hunting and Gathering
Practical Application: the Source of Ultra-Left and Trotskyist Errors
You can use our now accurately reconstructed, model of prehistoric with historic sociocultural evolution and see where the Trotskyists and the Ultra-Left took the completely wrong fork in the theoretical road; namely, by confusing in 1917 where we were with where they wanted to be, to wit:
Communist Stage
ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂç Where they want to be and where they think we were in 1917
Second Egalitarian Epoch Begins Here
Advanced Socialist Stage(s)
ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂç Where we are now (China, Cuba, Vietnam)
Stalinist Socialist Stage
ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ Where we really were in 1917
Second Transitional Period Begins Here
Capitalist Stage
Feudal Stage
Slave Stage
Servitude Epoch Begins Here
Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms Stage
Simple Chiefdoms Stage
First Transitional Period Begins Here
Tribal Agriculture Stage
Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 3 (Homo sapiens)
Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 2 (Homo erectus)
Hunting Gathering Bands Stage 1 (Homo Australopithecus)
Ape-like Humans
Primitive Communism (1st Egalitarian Epoch) Begins Here
Human-like Apes
Because the Trotskyists and ultra-leftists of all stripes (e.g., RCP, Bob Avakian) had no accurate prehistoric-historic knowledge about sociocultural process --- reflected in our archaeological chart of sociocultural stage evolution, or fundamentally about the more profound implications of our theory, the Trotskyists and the Madame Maoists took the wrong road. This is their objective, scientifically derived, commonality. Those who followed Stalin and what became the Party's General Line had no such knowledge either
but they had common sense and knew their way was in fact the only way. The latter persevered and the former have not. History speaking for itself i.e., unfolding as it did is the proof.
By correcting this profound error --- going back to the fork and taking the correct road --- those in error (Trotskyists and ultra-leftists) can become effective fighters for rapid transformation to Communism, once again.
These people are our comrades, and many if not all have suffered greatly for their beliefs, and we should at least try to help them, despite their problems, if we can. We want them to rejoin the international revolutionary movement via the correct Communist Party and correct international working class revolutionary line. After all, everyone was confused for a while. Those who were right by accident will now know why they were right. (The revisionists old or modern were always wrong and anti-Marxist-Leninist then and now but that is another matter altogether.) Problem resolved.
Contents
Defining Our Terms
Historical Perspective
A Vision of the Future
Erroneous Visions
The Evil Imprinting of the Servitude Epoch
In Science we build on the Past
The Method: Original Documents
History is Always Unfolding as it Should
Modern Science Born
Theory and Practice in the Science of
Society, Culture and their History
Marxist Philosophy of Science
Cross-cultural Comparative Analysis by Formula:
The mathematics of sociocultural evolution
The evolution of culture: the dialectics of contradiction
The evolution of culture: Crises dialectics
Do not get confused
The Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit
Laws
The First Presentation of Stage Sequential Laws
Of sociocultural evolution
The Problem of Trotsky and Trotskyism
The New Class is the General Crisis of
The stage of Stalinist Socialism
Stalin and Stalinism
Taking on the Rothschilds, 1901
The Empire Atremble
The Revolution of 1905
Trotskyist Mythology
The New Class is not a deformation but Part of a New and Necessary
Transitional Stage --- of which there will be several more before we arrive at Communism
The New Class is Our # 2 Problem
Backwardness in technology is not what Marx and Engels Proposed
Prehistoric Origins of the New Class
In the Slave and Feudal Stages
Capitalism and the Technocrats
Socialism and its New Class
To Review
Two Ugly Facts You Must Face
Back to Our Story in Russia
Construction of Russian Socialism is both fast and slow
Lessons of the Cultural Revolution
Wanting Communism is not enough to have Communism
Epilogue as Prologue
If this country had a real educational system, which is to say a system of telling the truth about political science, then what follows in this preliminary section would more properly be termed ``remedial terms, definitions and concepts.'' Since we do not and most North Americans are in a state of total political ignorance with all of its ramifications (ignorance of history for example other than the fairy tale history of US lower grade textbooks) we will not use the term remedial with its pejorative content. It would be unfair to so penalize those who were the victims rather than the perpetrators of these educational crimes.
Furthermore, many who consider themselves communists from virtually all of the Left (self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist parties) have been writing pamphlets, brochures, leaflets and even books for the last several years in which their discussion of world capitalism, globalization, the role of labor, the role of revolutionaries, etc., managed to never even mention the imminent global capitalist collapse now in process. (Chief offender here is Sam Webb's ongoing propaganda in favor of disarming the working class and substituting the U.S. Government's version of what is going on for a scientific Marxist view.) The other offenders didn't mention it because they didn't see it coming. They didn't see it coming because they don't understand Marxist economics. They don't understand Marxist economics because they don't understand Marxism. We, on the other hand, do understand Marxism and you can see the proof in the last several years of articles I have written for my old website and now reproduced in our Recent Archives section, as well as in this text The ABC's of Communism, Bolshevism 2012.
30What is happening now is just the dress rehearsal for the total and final collapse, (obvious to any serious Marxist-Leninist political scientist as I have proven over the last five years in this book and in the innumerable columns I have written for my old website http://groups.msn.com/JasonSmithcom soon to be found at the Daily Worker. This next collapse is coming and soon. Thank goodness what we are currently experiencing is just
the dress rehearsal because we US Bolsheviks are far from prepared at the moment to being able to lead working people in a final revolutionary struggle against the fascist regime in Washington. As for the North American Left's self-declared ``communists'' enough is enough from these writers. Now let us move on.
Let me begin by pointing out that the definition of terms is critical in every scientific and academic endeavor. -And so it is in revolutionary politics as well. In this book you will learn, many of you for the first time, the scientific definitions of important terms in the science of society, culture and their history. You will learn these correct definitions and how enemy propagandists, and their so-called ``educators,'' try and trick you by giving these same words an entirely false and unscientific meaning. This confusion is spread as a principal tactic of our enemies. For example, when neo-Nazi fascist thugs, like George Bush and Rush Limbaugh, mouth words like ``freedom'' and ``democracy'', these words end up meaning exactly the opposite of their real definition. For ``freedom'', Bush et. al., mean the ``freedom'' to rob, pillage and kill, the working people of this world. By ``democracy'' they mean that among themselves (the billionaires and trillionaires who own this country and its sorry ``government'' in Washington) they will be ``democratic'' in determining how to rob, pillage and kill the working people of North America. A far cry from their real meaning and like the Nazi's before them this ``populist'' language is aimed at confusing the ill-prepared, ignorant, and uneducated.
31Historical Perspective
For the first time in many years the situation in the USA with regard to the possibility of working class political power is extremely good. The Orwellian nightmare of modern revisionism in the USSR and Eastern Europe has been lifted from our backs and now the US imperialist flagship has crashed itself onto the Iraqi shoals of an emerging new continent in world history; in the aftermath there is great confusion on the part of our enemies. For our side, we have gone through a period of confusion, but this book among others, is a signal that long-view clarity is being imposed. It remains only to put our now correct understanding of contemporary historical process to work in appropriate organizational ways. I, for one, have never seen us in a better position than the one we Bolsheviks now occupy, both at home and abroad; more importantly I believe there has never been a more propitious situation in the history of North America, for real progress toward real Communism, than the one we now confront.
32A Vision of the Future
Is there a painting, or an illustration, or say a movie, which can give us a view of the future which is consistent with what Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin would have pictured for us as an ideal future? Yes I think so --- probably quite a few books, illustrations and movies or TV shows, show us a future with at least some aspects we can admire and with which we can identify. My favorite happens to be the vision of Gene Roddenberry (not that there are not many others.) For in Star Trek we see a near future with technology so advanced that people can live without money and without pay, and yet everything they desire in the way of material things is instantly available. In this future the ``necessities'' of everyday life are made available to everyone as a matter of birthright. This is a near future with technology so advanced that when a person wants a cup of coffee or a meal she simply asks the ``replicator'' machine for said item and the food and the cup or plate
33containing it instantly appears. Private ownership of such things as food and cutlery is an anachronism; i.e., irrelevant; immaterial. This is Communism. In this version the Starship Enterprise crew are the communists of the future.
For me, this Star Trek future is the vision I think is most consistent with the scientifically predicted future of Karl Marx and most subsequent Marxists. Therefore, you will see occasional references in this book to future human society and future communist society as societies having Star Trek characteristics. We will be thinking in broad sociocultural evolutionary themes with a sweeping overview of humanity from its primate origins to its near and predictable future forms, so such ``vision'' is important for all of you to consider.
Whether, such advanced technology as pictured by the Roddenberry tradition is at hand, or even possible in the coming century, is really not the point. The point is that someday, in the not too distant future, meaning in the next few centuries, we will have an adequate industrial base to support the slogan ``from each according to her ability to each according to her need.'' ---And, when that day arrives we will have the technological basis needed to support the Stage of Communism.
I happen to think that what Roddenberry pictures for us with regard to faster-than-light travel is possible and will be achieved in the 21st century (virtually everything else from The Original Series has been invented and is very much with us, with this exception, and the exception of teleportation). As far as space travel in general is concerned, there is just one remaining problem and that is the cost. But from a several centuries perspective, that problem will go away once science and engineering create an anti-gravity engine. For these reasons, I have spent considerable time over the last four decades in the area of subatomic physics --- a kind of hobby, if you will, where the problems of light speed and gravitation are the very essence of the subject matter. For those of you interested in where I am going with this I recommend that you read my book New Perspectives in Physics, 1999, Jason W. Smith, Premier Books, Boise, 160 pp. or, the four papers at http://www/communistfoundationpartyusa.org - click on the button to on the home page of that site, also labeled ``New Perspectives in Physics.'' (See the website WorldCat for university libraries closest to you.)
34Erroneous Visions
One final comment about futuristic visions and their importance. I alluded to the fact that not every Marxist leader saw the future as Marx, Engels and Lenin did. Most notorious was Cambodia's Pol Pot, who as a young man wrote a doctoral dissertation in France, and then carried out much of the thinking expressed therein, many decades later as chief of the Khmer Rouge. In his way of thinking, it was sufficient to have an ideologically pure and advanced cadre lead people into an egalitarian communal way of life before any great technological advance occurred. We know how that turned out in practice. ---And, I think it proves that Pol Pot was not really a Marxist at all. In China when the Cultural Revolution took an ultra-left turn it was Madame Mao (Chiang Ching) who took the equivalent position to Pol Pot and we know how that disaster turned out.
35There is the historically related movement called Anarchism. Their view of the future may best be seen in the way they organized their areas of Republican Spain in the 1930's. However, their failure to accept Marx and Engels' discovery of the nature of the state, left them irrelevant to us, and enemies in fact. (e.g., Marx sent the First
International away from Europe to the USA, allowing it to ``die'' there, in order to avoid allowing the pernicious influence of anarchism to contaminate labor. See Part III of this book for the details.)
In the same sense I think Pol Pot and Madame Mao left the common fold when they failed to accept what Marx and Engels had proven; namely, that one cannot advance into a truly communist society, let alone into a society where human power is its own end, until one has the technological wherewithal to make the foregoing slogan of communism a reality.
Roddenberry's vision has our advanced technological base as a ``given'' for the altruistic and egalitarian lifestyle he preaches. So, in that sense, it is fully in accord with the vision of Marx and Lenin. Don't get bogged down in whether this or that facet of Star Trek is possible or not possible, or feasible or not feasible --- give a little artistic freedom to the writers, because, our tasks at the moment, are much more down-to-Earth, as you are about to see. The point is that we Marxist-Leninists have a vision of technologically assured plenty, scarcity eliminated, egalitarian social relations extant, in the absence of class coercion (i.e., the state) as the future of humanity.
The Evil Imprinting of the Servitude Epoch: Herbert Aptheker
Herbert Aptheker, an outstanding North American Marxist historian, and theoretician of the CPUSA, recognized the evil nature of mental imprinting in the world as currently constructed, and in the last years of his life he said so to his Communist Party USA colleagues. The autobiography of his daughter tells us that Aptheker had his own peculiar, culturally imposed, demons which presumably helped him come to this correct conclusion. His experience teaches us that erroneous visions, such as his terrible life curse, have their foundation in, the at-bottom evil nature of contemporary mental imprinting that affects ALL classes not just the oppressing classes. People are not born with a blank slate for long. Imprinting begins with birth and proceeds rapidly apace so that by the time a child is a few years old it is well set in. Communists are just as susceptible to evil basal mental imprinting as anyone else. It is for this reason that attempts to jump into the social organization of communism, without adequate mode of production preparation, have failed. That is, first or simultaneously with socialist reorganization of society, we need to have the fully accomplished technological gains of the Capitalist Stage firmly in hand, so the material foundations for modern altruism exist. ---And, then enough time must pass for the new way of doing things to be reflected in the ideology of said societies. This means that the old and evilly infected must be allowed to pass away so that the new generation of properly imprinted persons can take their place. Because the Earth always belongs to the living, as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying.
36Let's say it again: the material conditions of great plenty, the founders required for communism to be successful, must be laid first! Or, at the very least, must be very well advanced and underway before modern altruism can replace modern selfishness-sadism, among the masses, as the primary underlying mental template being imprinted. The founders were right, as usual. Modern communism requires the fully modernized industrial base of the capitalist stage. You either inherit it or you build it. There is no short cut. We know. We have tried. We found out the hard way.
It certainly is not our intention to return to primitive communism. From our theoretical standpoint we would be far better off sticking with capitalism which is more
advanced in sociocultural evolution, as you will see in this book, and as Marxists have always maintained.
In Science we build on the Past
In science we are always building on the past. For example, in the case of biology we are always building on Darwin's discovery of variation and natural selection. We work out the details as we go along; explaining how these two pillars of our general theory work mechanically and systematically, and we have gone through several distinct periods with their unique contributions. Such as the discovery that inheritance is particulate (Mendelian genetic specific theory) and now the rise of molecular specific theory (DNA). We don't throw Darwin's discoveries overboard as we progress, but rather deepen our understanding of the way in which variation occurs and the ways in which selection acts upon it. In the case of physics we don't throw out Newtonian mechanics or Faraday's electricity discoveries but rather more fully explicate their mechanical function, always seeking to deepen our understanding of the underlying systems, as in Maxwell's field mathematics, Einstein's relativity theory and contemporary subatomic research, e.g., http://www.communistfoundationpartyusa.org ---And, the same should be the case with social science. Our task is to deepen our understanding of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels original discoveries and to do so by learning the real lessons of history from our own historical practice.
37The Method:
Original Documents;
History is always Unfolding as it Should
In fairness we need to point out that social science is neither biology nor physics. Because it is ``social science'' everyone recognizes that contemporary ``political programs'' are affected by our reconstruction of historical events. This means there is a very definite bias favored by contending persons inherent in such reconstructions and this in and of itself leads to partisanship in scholarship. This accounts for the radically different qualities of journalism to be found in the newspapers of the far Left. Some articles have valuable data and are ``right on,'' others are simply ludicrous and sometimes have not a true historical statement in them, being simply umpteenth-hand regurgitations of historical mythology (as for example in continuing misrepresentations of what happened in the first go-around in China with the capitalist classes. See Chapter 14 Bolshevism Spreads to China for an accurate summary).
38But, there are ways for everyone to ``check'' the tendency toward petty partisanship. A scientific ``method'' in other words peculiarly well suited to our subject matter.
What are these checks? What is this method?
The first is to go to the original documents. The second is to follow the guideline that history is always unfolding as it should!
Thus, our task is not to pick a side (as for example Stalin vs. Trotsky) but rather to determine accurately what in fact did happen and why. In the end we may appear to be taking a side but there is a very big difference in the way we go about doing it. Contemporary Marxist schismatics pick their side first and then try to justify it by a partisan, inaccurate, interpretation of historical events --- scientists on the other hand make
an objective historical assessment first and then if they wish may pick a side, although what possible service side-picking might afford many decades or more after the fact is beyond me. Recognizing that history has provided us with this analytical tool cum rule (i.e., history is always unfolding as it should,) I have tried to follow it in my work, as for example in this book. This means finding out what really did happen and then finding out why. ---And, to do this I always go to the original documents --- not nearly as difficult a task in this day and age, with so much information instantly available on the internet, as it used to be when hours, days, weeks, months and even years in various research libraries were required. This is a method you can use to check the tendency toward petty partisanship in your understanding of history. Once you do this adequately you can proceed to the next --- organizational --- step.
39Modern Science Born
As Charles Darwin founded modern biology so Karl Marx and Frederick Engels founded modern social science. As Darwinian evolutionary theory is the foundation of all of modern biology, so Marxist sociocultural evolutionary theory is the foundation of all of social science.
The word ``theory'' in science is used to describe our highest explanatory construct in that science. Theory does not mean in science what it means in everyday talk, which is to say someone's idea about something. This latter definition more appropriately fits the scientific term ``hypothesis.'' Scientific general theory flows from materialist epistemology (that branch of philosophy known as ``theory of knowledge.'') For us Bolsheviks, this materialist epistemology is always dialectical. That is, we search for the interconnections between all phenomena and try to discover the moving causes which create the evolutionary process. Often these causes appear as ``opposites'' and feature one transforming into the other.
Generally speaking there are three areas of ``philosophical matter.'' That is, three types of real world existence in the universe. These are the non-living physical area, the living or biological area, and the sociocultural realm. Our concern as professional revolutionaries is primarily with the latter.
When Marx and Engels met for the first time in Paris in November 1842, they quickly realized that, independently, they had come to the same conclusions as to the motive forces involved in sociocultural phenomena. We often refer to these discoveries as the ``laws of history.'' To wit, people articulate with their environment via a buffer we call ``culture.'' Culture has three components: the forces of production (technology), the relations of production (social organization) that people enter into in order to utilize that technology and a mental superstructure (ideology) that arises on the foregoing, Mode of Production.
The terms technology, social organization and ideology were inventions of Leslie A. White who brought Marxism back to the forefront in the English-speaking World, as the General Theory of Anthropology. White felt he had no choice but to camouflage anthropological theory's Marxist origins, if he were to successfully populate the post-Second World War US (GI Bill) public universities with graduates of his own "neo-Evolutionary" school of Anthropology. Thus, the terms, technology, social organization and ideology, so widely used in anthropology today. Another story for another book.
Theory advances with practice.
In biology that practice took nearly a century of intense work, after Darwin published Origin of Species, before the underlying mechanism of variation was laid bare for all to see in the 1953 announcement of Watkins and Crick that they had uncovered the nature of hereditary chemistry. DNA showed us the structure of heredity and also told us how natural selection works mechanically.
At about the same time as Darwin and Marx those who would found the modern Earth geological sciences were publishing their own breathtaking vision of the real forces at work shaping the planet. ---And, building on Newton's discovery that light is particulate, practical experimenters were building the foundations of contemporary subatomic physics. This latter work would take much longer as the subject matter, being invisible, required more sophisticated means of getting to its at-bottom causality.
Theory and Practice in the Science of Society, Culture and their History
In social science, we have had 91 years of practice since workers first seized power in October, 1917, by overthrowing the Magnate-Ducal Czarist regime in Russia; creating the first working class state and government in the world. Since then the tide of global class struggle has ebbed and flowed, and in this book you will see how and why. As importantly you will see what stages humanity passed through on its way to this contemporary situation. We are in the second transitional period (between two Epochs, and this time two Eras) where the last of the Servitude Stages (Capitalism) is giving way to the first stage of the Era of Freedom (Communism) via at least two intermediary ``socialist'' stages.
Sociobiology
There is a field of ongoing neo-Nazi ideology called sociobiology. The first principle of this so-called school of scientific thinking is (1) the science of Anthropology never existed. (2) There is no such thing as culture as we Marxists and all anthropologists define it. (3) Rather in this new Hitlerian vision all human behavior is determined by genes and the earlier Hitler caveat of Aryan racial superiority in a chart of superior to inferior humans based on skin color, hair form, skull shape, stature, weight and so forth, was wrong and the real chart should be based on who has what superior genes which again are said to determine all behavior including such things as altruism. Then they set about blissfully to find these genes. Of course this is all nonsense.
The truth of Marx's and Engels' understanding of culture (forces and relations of production upon which arises an ideological superstructure) is as firmly set in social scientific stone as natural selection and variation are in biology. Which is not to say there are no critically important genetic components to human evolution as of course there are and I have mentioned them throughout this text. Most importantly, recently, has been the successful ongoing research linking changes in the chimpanzee brain to cultural activity as I point out herein.
The only important thing for you to note about this nutball ``science'' is that it is in the wings and waiting. Waiting for what? For the inevitable final struggle between fascism and socialism and the open dictatorship the oligarchy will establish by military coup or at least attempt to establish soon here in the USA. This will be reflected in an imposition of this kind of neo-Nazi ideology on the university and High School textbooks and teachers. That is, if we allow that to happen, which we shall certainly try and prevent.
Marxist Philosophy of Science
Frederick Engels spent the better part of his life studying the then contemporary advance of philosophy as the highest guiding body of knowledge of any science. His central conclusion was that science and philosophy had become the same thing; at least as far as we are concerned. (Bourgeois ideologists of course get paid for penning ongoing bullshit but that is their problem.) There are no better works on dialectical materialist epistemology than the originals of this great historical genius. ---And, from his work we have constructed the modern materialist philosophy of science and I urge all serious Marxist philosophy students to go back and start at the beginning with the work of Frederick Engels.
The method flows from a Marxist philosophy of science and the theoretical explanations thereby constructed. Science always has an explanatory and investigative ``structure'' beginning with epistemology (that branch of philosophy known as ``theory of knowledge'') which in our case is the epistemology of dialectical materialism, another topic for another book. Schematically, we can picture the following from top to bottom: the first level on top is epistemology. Below epistemology is General Theory which means a series of statements and concepts expressed in words or numbers or both, explaining ``everything'' within that science. At the next level, below general theory, each science has many, seemingly innumerable, specific theories which are more specific statements that explain everything within a rather tightly subsumed category within that science. So, for example, we have the ``General Theory'' of Historical Materialism and the ``Specific Theory'' of Primitive Communism.
40In our case our general theory is historical materialism --- what this book is all about --- and that also means our general theory is the general (highest) theory of the sciences of anthropology, psychology, history and sociology. When we set our immediate task to develop a specific explanation (theory) that covers all examples of the New Class in all circumstances where it exists, we turn to the three major ways to construct an explanatory specific scientific theory and these are: 1) the deductive way where the premises make the conclusion necessary; (2) the probabilistic form of theoretical explanation where the premises make the conclusion probable; and (3) the historical or ``genetic'' form where any given event is explained in terms of its evolutionary antecedent forms. Because genetic has so many other connotations in science we will use the term ''historical'' which at any rate has its own place in the history of our science.
41Cross-cultural Comparative Analysis by Formula
The Mathematics of Social Evolution
Using the third form of scientific investigation/explanation we extract a formula for production as the ``theoretical'' way of expressing the relationship within the Mode of Production. (The mode of production is called the ``base'' of culture; ideology arises on the base and is called the superstructure)
{Technology ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ Social Organization} mode of production or base
The formula can be expressed in terms of four elements in an equation, and using the formula for the capitalist stage as an example (see Chapter 12), these are:
Human working activity (l = concrete individual working activity; lp = homogenized collective labor, temporally measured, called labor-power.)
Technology (in the case of capitalism this is always some kind of machinofacture.)
Value --- the cost of labor and in the Servitude Epoch (especially in the capitalist stage) the cost of labor-power
Surplus value --- the additional amount produced above value in capitalist systems and in pre-capitalist systems of the Servitude Epoch; and surplus social product in pre-Servitude Epoch society.
Expressed as follows:
l (or lp) + technology ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ V1, V2 + SV
These are the four essential elements of human productive activity and they can be cross-culturally compared through time and across the entire space of the globe. This is the way we build a theory in science and the way we make it useable. (You may think of them analogously as the four nucleotides of sociocultural DNA; not that there is such a thing, of course.) The General theoretical structure is the cultural concept of the Mode of Production; the specific theoretical constructs are as numerous as the sociocultural evolutionary stages they represent. Which is to say (i) we define the essential elements at the core of something (in this case human productive activity) and (ii) arrange them in such a way that they appropriately describe every instance of the subject in question (which in this case is the evolution of human productive activity through distinct ``stages'') ---And (iii) we do this at two levels: (a) a high general level and (b) a secondary tier of specific levels. As you can see ``theory'' has two magnitudes.
42This time, in this edition, as we use our third form of scientific investigation and explanation, we will spend more time on the origin and development of our contemporary New Class, tracing the New Class back into its previous forms. We can see that it has several ``occupational'' or ``professional'' components. Accounting is one. Enforcement is another. Religion (and certain associated scientific endeavors such as astronomy) is another; professionally specialized crafts are another. You will see who the predecessors of today's new class were, how they functioned and transformed.
Thus, we have what we meant to have, when we used the phrase ``a ``Marxist'' ``theoretical'' explanation'' (or as commonly, an ``historical materialist theoretical'' explanation.) It has been the failure to produce a Marxist theoretical explanation for what happened in the USSR, Eastern Europe, and in a totally different way, the People's Republic of China, in the last several decades, which left the ``Left'' in the capitalist countries totally confused and often demoralized --- subject to ideological subversion by the non-stop assault of the capitalist media. Hopefully, that deficiency is remedied herein.
The Evolution of Culture: The Dialectics of Contradiction
Mechanical materialists (e.g., Leslie A. White; Marvin Harris) approach the evolution of culture as a linear process whereby one step leads to the next. Dialectical materialists approach the evolution of culture by deciphering how one type of core causal
phenomena transforms into its opposite step by step, from the earliest to the most recent, and then we try to project into the future the likely next dialectical resolution. Rather than continue to speak in the abstract let us turn to the text to see how this method works in practice.
The general contradiction can be reduced to a prime directive for our purposes. There are two general contradictions with which we are preoccupied in our studies and each of these will have its own prime directive. The general contradiction describes the two polar opposite keys to understanding the social organization of an epoch. The prime directive is the resulting cultural commandment for all citizens of the group in question in the epoch being studied.
In our case we begin by describing two General Contradictions that occupy two ``epochs'' in human history. The first of these is the general contradiction of the first egalitarian epoch (the epoch of primitive communism) consisting of the bands and tribes of the hunting-gathering and early agricultural modes of production which simply put is that ``every step taken to prevent surplus social product, and the social dissolution, inevitably created by it, becomes in addition a step in making the creation of surplus social product a certainty. ---And, as importantly, this fact makes it certain that even though a given step may gain a temporary respite in the burgeoning of surplus social product, the process is even more certain to end in social dissolution.'' The prime directive of this general contradiction is to avoid the production of surplus social product at virtually any cost.
43The second general contradiction is that of the servitude epoch (the stages of slavery, feudalism and capitalism) where ``every step taken is aimed at maximizing production but despite this the results are less and less of a share for those doing the work; a worse living condition for the producers themselves and these facts make it certain that the dissolution of this epoch will also occur as slaves, serfs and workers revolt, sharpening the class struggle and requiring armed force (the ``state'') in the hands of the domesticating classes to pacify the masses who are resisting the process of being domesticated. The prime directive of this general contradiction is to maximize production regardless of all other factors.
The task confronting us is to explain how the first contradiction transformed into the second ``opposite'' contradiction.
The Evolution of Culture: Crises Dialectics
A General Crisis on the other hand is the engine that drives a particular ``stage'' (within the epochs) through growth, maturation and eventual dissolution. For example, in the Slave Stage (as part of the second or Servitude Epoch with its specific general contradiction) the general crisis arises as a result of the need to have a larger and larger ever growing army and police (i.e., the ``state'' itself in other words) to keep the slaves in servitude. The cost of the state (army/police) is a drawdown, or cost, charged against the surplus value column as you will see, and the generals (or sergeants) will eventually realize they can replace their employers, a more intangible cost. Both (a) the drawdown on surplus value and (b) the rise of ``the state'' (army and police) over society, lead to the end of Slavery as a stage, and the necessity of the half-way house of Feudalism to replace it, and can be expressed in the form of an equation or formula, which I will teach you herein. This resolution should also be viewed dialectically in that the origin of the ``state''
44occurs to insure the status quo yet its very success dooms the status quo.
In Capitalism the general crisis is caused by the financial cost to the capitalist of the constantly increasing investment required of him to stay competitive. He must buy into more and more, increasingly expensive, next generations of machinery, which is a drawdown on the surplus value column. Eventually, as you will see, one capitalist eats the other and capital is concentrated. This also can be expressed in the form of an equation. In short, we say that it is the Law of the Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit which results from this inherent need of each capitalist to stay competitive by buying into more and more new machinery which is the engine both causing and driving the General Crisis of Capitalism, for reasons which will be explained to you in detail in this text.
45This resolution should be viewed dialectically in that investment in the next generation of machinery (NGM in the equations you will learn) occurs to increase production, and to increase its efficiency, yet the ultimate outcome is great poverty for the mass of producers, so that workers must revolt to put an end to the steady deterioration of their lives, as they are getting less and less value for themselves, even though they produce more and more value overall (expropriated by the capitalist.) You will learn this equation, among many others.
-And, in so doing, you will see that all of human culture and societal affairs can be reduced to the few simple elements mentioned above, and in detail below, in the same way that all of life on Earth can be reduced to a few simple nucleotides. This is what science is all about --- getting to the core of causality and process and laying bare the key driving elements, stripping away all the non-essential factors, adornments, and related manifestations.
Do Not Get Confused
Violence, Armed force, Government, Class and State
I want you to notice that we Marxists do not confuse ``the state'' with violence. Violence existed before class-and-state society and will continue after class-and-state society. Neither do we confuse ``the state'' with ``armed force'', for ``armed force'' of the people as a whole existed before the emergence of class-and-state societies and will exist after the disappearance of class-and-state society. We do not confuse ``the state'' with ``government'' for people governed themselves before class-and-state society and their governments, and they shall govern themselves after the disappearance of the class-and-state society of the Servitude Epoch (Slavery, Capitalism and Feudalism.) The state refers to thuggery (a private monopoly of armed force) in the hands of an already separated, or in the process of separating, ruling class. Class refers to a group of people with a distinct relationship to the means of production: the most important relationship being that between those who own, and those who do not own, said means of production. In class divided society (existing for only some 6000 years) other classes exist as well, particularly those who find employment serving ruling classes (soldiers, cops, and priests for example; also, small proprietors and occasional entrepreneurial workers, and in time a ``New Class'' of technocrats.)
46The Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit
There is continuing confusion over the Law of the Absolute Decline in the Rate of
Profit. Marx found confusion abundant on this subject during his lifetime and he had a great deal to say about this misunderstanding in the post-1867 period (and the publication of Capital Volume One). Yet, because macro-theoretical economics is such a rarely understood, let alone taught, science in the USA, and most readers, therefore, have no previous experience with the subject matter, it is worth reframing the question here.
The crux of confusion lies in understanding the difference between the absolute decline in the rate of surplus value production and the absolute decline in the rate of profit. These are two separate categories. Two separate things. Yet, intimately related all the same.
You will become familiar with many equations, which are short-hand ways of describing relations between key elements of human productive activity. Let us jump ahead for just a moment, using the formula for the capitalist stage as the example:
labor power (lp) + technology (t) ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ Value 1 + Value 2 + Surplus Value (SV)
Profit / NGM
In the case of Capitalism we are always discussing the application of human labor-power (homogenized collective output of factory workers, for example, measured by the factory clock) applied to machinery (``t'' technology: which is machinery in the capitalist stage.) What is thereby produced repays the workers for their labor-power (only in part) (Value 1 --- i.e., wages and benefits) and pays for the factory installation and upkeep of the machinery (Value 2). We call both value 1 and value 2 ``value.'' What is left over is what we call ``surplus value.`` From the surplus value column there are many possible deductions the capitalist can make but the ones of greatest concern to us are those that account for (as sub-columns in our equation) the capitalist's ``profit'' and those that account for his investment in the Next Generation of Machinery (NGM).
47When new machinery is installed (under ``t'' or technology in our equation) it is done precisely to lower the amount of labor-power (lp) that is required to produce a given commodity. This allows the capitalist to hire fewer workers. Or, another way of putting it is that workers previously hired will be sent to the street unemployed.
The rate of surplus value production must decline because to buy the new machinery, install and maintain it, the capitalist must shift more overall output from surplus value to value 2 (the cost of installing and maintaining the newly purchased machinery) and also (and most importantly) take more of this overall output and shift it to cover the cost of this newly purchased (next generation of) machinery (NGM).
In order to avoid this, the capitalist would have had to hire more workers, and/or work the same workers longer hours, so that labor-power input increases at a one-to-one ratio with that of the increased productive power of the new machinery, thereby maintaining the same rate of surplus value creation. In this way he would stay competitive (it is for this reason that Capitalism as a Stage hates competition because) this he cannot do; his idea was to reduce the amount of labor-power going in, not to increase it (and thus his costs.) Therefore, right off the bat, while the introduction of new machinery means a reduction in the cost of his labor force (in hours and/or numbers of workers) it also means an increase in the cost of installing new machinery and maintaining newly equipped factories and therefore results in less surplus value being created; and because simultaneously the capitalist must invest more and more of his
48remaining overall output in the purchase of the new machinery. This means, all other things being equal, that this absolute decline in the rate of surplus value creation is exacerbated and indeed brought to ``crisis'' by these new costs of each successive generation of machinery (NGM). This latter fact results always in an absolute decline in the rate of profit. This is why as Karl Marx discovered it is the antagonistic articulation of profit with the costs of the Next Generation of Machinery under Surplus value which is the major loci of the General Crisis of Capitalism (what causes it --- the cause of the so-called ``business cycle'' of boom and bust.)
Yes, of course, there are short-term things a capitalist can do to offset the absolute decline, at least temporarily, by choosing new ways (eliminating previous ways) of using his surplus value that had hitherto been choices he found desirable. The best long-term way for him is (i) monopoly and/or fixed corrupt contracting, and (ii) slave labor, but these generate massive social resistance. No matter what he does short of these two things, in the end, he is still confronted with the necessity of investing in new machinery or losing competitive advantage; thus in the end he will have less surplus value available for profit. This is the Iron Law of Capitalist Relations.
In short, the decline in the rate of surplus value creation (as the cost of value 2 must increase even when labor costs (V1) decrease as he sends workers to the street) sets the stage for a general crisis because what surplus value is available must be shifted on an increasing scale to cover the cost of the next generation of machinery (NGM). Thus, in the end there is less surplus value available for whatever other expenditures he may have in mind --- especially profit - and this means that the rate of profit must also decline. That is why I said that while these two absolute declines in rate are totally separate categories they are at the same time intimately related.
I want you to read the chapter on Capitalism (12) carefully for the detailed exposition, but this summary may assist you in understanding what is going on. It may be especially helpful to re-read this short essay after reading Chapter 12.
All of these technical data on the operation of the capitalist system are not just for economists. These internal operations of all capitalist systems always end up in terrible social and thus political crises that close factories, sending masses of workers to the street, leaving higher priced commodities for consumers, and undercutting all the social programs that workers have fought for (and which can no longer be paid for in ``the black'') You are witnessing the truth of all I have written above today in your everyday lives.
Laws
Before proceeding to the text let me make one final comment on the definition of terms. In the initial version of this book I discussed certain terms and their definition around which confusion often exists. Since then I have found some confusion also over the use of the terms ``law of value,'' ``laws of history,'' ``laws of sociocultural evolution,'' and so forth. When we use the phrase ``laws of history'' we should be referring to Marx's and Engels' discovery of the concept that history is determined by people using ``culture'' (anthropological definition) as a buffer between the environment and society. This is the broadest stroke of the use of the term ``law'' and refers to the fact that ALL of human social and cultural evolution must be understood in terms of the evolution of culture's three components, technology, social organization and ideology. (The ``Mode of Production'' being the forces and relations of production; ideology is the Superstructure.)
49These laws apply to all human sociocultural formations. This is, as Engels said in his funeral eulogy to Karl Marx, one of the two greatest discoveries of Marx. The other greatest accomplishment was Marx having unlocked the secrets of operation of the Capitalist Stage.
---And, if I may say so, I think a third great accomplishment of Marx at this level was his formulation of the Marxist theory of psychology where the relationships exhibited in production are known to appear in new and different forms (to paraphrase Marx in Volume One of Capital, ``the material relations among people appear as social relations between things.'')
On the other hand the phrase ``law of value'' refers specifically to the law by which capitalism operates, and not pre-capitalist formations, except, of course, where capitalist germinal elements are present in pre-capitalist stages of the Servitude Epoch, and then the law of value operates only within the germinal capitalist sector. The law of value in this sense always refers to the ``socially necessary labor-time'' required in the production of a commodity. The relative value of a commodity produced by different factories is the socially necessary labor-time involved in the production of a commodity in factory X as compared to factory Y, and so forth. This is usually a function of the amount of new advanced machinery installed in a given factory --- the newer that machinery, the less socially necessary labor-time is required in the production of a given commodity.
50Laws of sociocultural evolution will be explained as we proceed but again these refer to all stages in some cases and only specific stages in others. Laws of history refer in general to all of the above.
These are important considerations and not simply matters of technical definition. They are important because Marxists believe in history being determined by cause and processual interaction of these causes in a ``lawful'' manner as in any other case of natural phenomena. Marx dealt primarily with the laws of operation of the capitalist stage and was spending the latter years of his life deciphering the laws by which pre-capitalist formations operate (a task he left uncompleted). Marx never made the mistake of projecting into the past, capitalist formation laws onto pre-capitalist society. Even Soviet textbooks, originally at least supervised by Stalin, tended to blur these distinctions and it is important that we do not duplicate that error (Mao pointed this out in his A Critique of Soviet Economics, see the 1977, Monthly Review Press edition of this work of Mao Zedong).
51The First Presentation of Stage Sequential Laws of Operation
It is fine to assert that such universal laws exist because on the one hand we know epistemologically and in our general theory that such laws must exist. It is quite another to assert that the laws of operation of pre-capitalist systems are known when in fact they are not. To the best of my knowledge this book is the first one to project a series of laws of specific operation of each stage of pre-capitalist society which conform in every way to the model established by Marx in his analysis of capitalism.
For some informal discussion of Marx's work in the last seven years of his life and his struggle to understand pre-capitalist society especially primitive communist society, listen to the audio portions of my website at http://www.communistfoundationpartyusa/org .
One Final Word on the Future
For Marxists, there has always been one clear vision of the future. It was laid out for us by the ``founders of our science'' themselves: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Their vision was, and is, part and parcel of the science of society and culture and their history; that is to say, it is a product of, and mandated by, our scientific understanding of sociocultural evolution. Virtually every subsequent great thinker in our tradition has identified with that vision, including V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi-Minh, and Deng Xiaoping. So what precisely is this vision.
The Future Mode of Production
For Marxists and Leninists, the future features highly advanced industrial technology alongside social relations of absolute egalitarianism, and the full freedom of each individual to the fullest expression of their inner-most desires in daily productive activity, sexual orientation, and family life.
Technology, in the future we shall build, is so advanced as to assure the production of unlimited quantities of heavy and light industrial goods, and consumer articles, and the distribution of all such produce to every industry and every person. The future, in other words, features society where unlimited access to the articles of production for every person, is a simple fact of everyday life. Since we did not inherit the most advanced technological preparation in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, or Cuba, we have had to build the industrial base from scratch. But, all observers can see that we have done so.
Bidding ``the State'' Good Bye
For Marxists and Leninists our goal is also a future society in which ``the state'' (army and police) has ceased to exist and withered away. How can this instrument of class oppression be made to disappear? The answer is, only by doing away with social classes first. Once we have done away with social classes we have also done away with the role of the state, in all societies. The role of ``the state'' is a role for a social institution which is nothing more than an institution of repressive violence in the hands of an exploiting or ruling class. Once class society ceases to exist --- and class society did not exist for 99.99% of human history (nor did the state) --- then the need for the state will be gone too.
When the state is no longer needed as an instrument of class rule, then and only then, can we finally do away with it altogether. Until that time, one class or another will rule. ---And, the way one class or the other rules is through the use of police, intelligence services, military force, judicial systems, torture chambers, prisons and execution. There are no exceptions now nor have there ever been any exceptions, anywhere, to this form of class rule --- nor shall there ever be. In contemporary times, when the capitalists have state power in their hands, they use it against us. When we seize power we establish our own state and we use that power (in new, loyal, hands) against them. Who will persevere? Science tells us that we will. But, science cannot tell us how long it will take us to win; for better or for worse in the meantime, before the final solution, we are free agents with free will; we are free to win and we are free to lose.
52
The Problem of Trotsky and Trotskyism
Beginning in 1965, when I took my first SWP course on Trotsky and Bolshevism I found myself quietly at odds with the conclusions and general tenor of the instructor and the majority of already convinced students. To me Trotsky's book Permanent Revolution seemed extraordinarily shallow. There was nothing in this book that was not already established doctrine among Leninists as far as the idea of continuing the bourgeois revolution into the proletarian phase was concerned. As the course proceeded it became obvious to me that the then popular idea that Trotsky had the right ``take'' on art and literature was in fact ludicrous. It should have gone without saying that whatever art and literary forms exist at any point in time are reflective of the class interests of the ruling classes of that time, period. ---And as the decades passed, and I learned more about Trotsky as a person, the more disgusting I found him to be. How could a Marxist of whatever stripe act so haughtily and arrogantly toward working class cadre of the social democratic movement unless he was fundamentally flawed as a person --- carrying over the worst rather than the best of what had gone before, in terms of individual cognizance of his own importance.
53Gradually, I came to the conclusion that Trotsky was the author of a mythology as deadly to our side as the fantasy world in which the capitalists live is to their side. I mention this up front, so as to make it clear what side I would have been on in the Trotsky-Stalin split. My prejudices allowed to precede me, for your benefit. Take them as you will.
For our purposes, the most important thing we need to make clear about Trotskyism is, in my opinion, the at-bottom fundamental difference between world Trotskyism and the world international Communist movement is the idea that the New Class is a temporary deformation of a working class-ruled world Sociocultural Evolutionary Stage, when in fact it is no such thing. What we have in Stalinist Socialism is a distinct worldwide Stage (in its own right) of Sociocultural Evolution characterized by backwardness that has necessitated a New Class, potentially dominating and ruling. This is, in fact, the General Crisis of this new Stage in social and cultural evolution --- not a deformation. In other words, what we have seen is a new transitional stage; a Stage which features a necessary technocrat class with certain privileges, because there has been no choice, given the technological (almost pre-capitalist) backwardness in which we first seized power.
54Had we seized power in the most advanced capitalist countries the role of this technocracy would have been quite different; many workers, sufficiently educated, would have been in place to quickly ascend into these technocratic roles. That was not the case as history has proven. Rather we seized power where we could --- meaning in countries where the ruling capitalist classes were relatively weak and thus more easily defeated. But, the consequences of victory first in these countries, led to the necessity of the vanguard Party having to create the conditions that Marx and Engels had assumed we would inherit.
We did not inherit them. We inherited the presumptive wind of a global hurricane. From nearly empty air we had to build the technological foundations without which Socialism is not possible.
Two New Sociocultural Stages
This type of ``Soviet'' socialism occurs again and again in many countries in the period after 1917. Furthermore despite all odds it continues and despite all odds it continues to evolve. Thus, we are seeing for the first time a distinct sociocultural Stage emerge and evolve on the Planet Earth. To get from here to the Stage of Communism as we conceive it implies at least one more sociocultural Stage will emerge along the way. Probably two or more, I suspect. China marching into the Stage of Advanced Socialism shows us what that Stage looks like and it also is a New Sociocultural Stage. In about 200 years at this rate the entire globe may well have entered the Communist Stage although political liberation will occur long before that period of time passes. ---And advanced capitalist countries like the USA could literally skip over these two Stages (or at least shorten them to one or two decades) and go directly to the stage of Communism.
55Back at the Ranch
Preparing to Understand Trotsky's role in Chapter 13
The Stage of Stalinist Socialism
An administrative caste, if you will, was clearly necessary for the Bolsheviks in power and in uniform. In the latter part of his life Leon Trotsky made this de facto New Class the principal bugaboo of his theoretical position. Yet even perfunctory historical analysis shows us that when he was on top, Trotsky was all in favor of a bureaucratization of everything, including the working class itself, he would have placed under military discipline in their factories! (As he proposed at the 9th Party Congress in the Spring of 1920.) It was Trotsky, not Stalin, that Lenin found guilty (in his Testament) of too much attention to the bureaucratic aspect of things.
Alternatively, Trotsky later proposed a variety of solutions, but finally, and most often, he spoke of "internationalism" - meaning the support of workers from other successful revolutions in advanced capitalist countries - coming to the assistance of the Soviet Union. -And, he blamed the Stalin "gang" for staging what he called a "coup" against the legitimate representatives of proletarian power in the Party and the State and of course with filling the Government with their own. This is another of those historical problems that requires surgically precise logic and very accurate historical knowledge to get to the bottom of the contention. I find it useful to separate Trotsky the man from Trotskyism the strategy, and indeed the Trotskyist "theory".
56Beginning with the former, I think Trotsky in the last analysis had no one to blame but himself for the alienating of the Bolshevik "Old Guard." With his very wealthy family background and privileged upbringing, his arrogance and air of superiority, his tendency to lord it over the less verbal Bolshevik Old Guard, he was everything that the Bolshevik working class originating old cadre hated. He had opposed Lenin and Bolshevism virtually his entire life. He came over to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party very late --- in late June and early July of 1917 - only after rigorous argument with Lenin, where he made demands so infuriating to the rest of the Bolshevik Party (such as demanding they change their name, if Lenin wanted to gain his membership and indeed leadership mantle) he made many enemies - for life. Among the Bolsheviks only Lenin wanted him. Because Lenin wanted him the rest went along.
57Lenin wanted Trotsky in the summer of 1917 because Trotsky had a big mouth, and he could put the Bolshevik position forward consistently and clearly in the all-important Petrograd Soviet. ---And, eventually in the national Congress of Soviets.
Trotsky's Bolshevik candidacy was feasible because he was a Marxist, and he had one critical point upon which he agreed with Lenin and that was in turning the bourgeois February Revolution into a Proletarian Revolution as quickly as possible. Trotsky had a small group of followers he could throw into the mix and they were people of competence and ability, so Lenin would pick them up along the way as part of the deal with Trotsky. Lenin knew Trotsky would be a spoiler in the Petrograd City Council upon his return if he was not brought under control and the only realistic way he could bring him under control was to bring him into the Party.
As the years have progressed I have often found myself thinking that bringing Trotsky into the Party was Lenin's greatest single mistake. Yet, on the other hand, the most important thing in May and June of 1917 was seizing state power. Lenin knew Trotsky could be invaluable in this respect because he knew Trotsky would have a tremendous influence in the Petrograd City Council (Soviet) which was the most important political body in the Empire at that point in time. Without Trotsky the Bolsheviks would probably win. With Trotsky the Bolsheviks would definitely be successful in the seizure. Nothing was more important than the seizure. With it everything became possible. Without seizure, nothing would have been possible. History is unfortunately, often messy, and this is just one of those unavoidable examples. So, in the end bringing Trotsky in was the right thing to do. Frankly, I suspect that everything would have gone much smoother if Stalin had disposed of him in 1919 rather than 1940 but that is just speculation.
58Trotsky would later claim to have been the originator of the idea of going over quickly to an armed struggle for proletarian dictatorship once the bourgeois revolution began, and attached the label "permanent revolution" to it, but this is simply not true. It had been the policy of Bolshevism since it became Bolshevism in 1903 to argue for going over to working class seizure of power from the bourgeoisie as quickly as possible once the bourgeois revolutionary process might begin. In a somewhat different form the idea goes back to Karl Marx and the revolutionary period 1848-1850. ---And, as a matter to note, for still different reasons, it was Mao Zedong who pressed the idea of permanent revolution on the Chinese Party throughout the period after 1952.
59Now in the summer of 1917, Lenin needed Trotsky's ability in the Petrograd (earlier St. Petersburg, later Leningrad) Soviet, where debating and oratory were a daily necessity for Party leaders of every persuasion - and the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies in Petrograd was a de facto proletarian parliament, which the capitalist parties dominated at the beginning of the six month period from February to October 1917. Lenin had seen from the very first that it would be the Petrograd Soviet and others like it that would be the organizational form around which the Bolsheviks would move for power and he had the experience of the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet to learn from.
In the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet, Trotsky had played the leading role, and thus, was admired by the relatively sophisticated workers of 1917 Petrograd. In their mind he was a man who could hold his own with the best of the Cadet, SR (Socialist Revolutionary Party, Left and Right) and Menshevik orators with the debating skills of his upper bourgeois class background - and he was on their side! He made them proud and they would listen to him. At least that is what Lenin thought and hoped, and was the reason he put up with Trotsky's stifling arrogance in their negotiations. Lenin certainly had more important things to do than bullshit, day-in and day-out, in the Petrograd
Soviet.
Trotsky's followers later maintained that it was he who had led the actual seizure of 24-26 October, 1917, and that is merely true. He was one member of the committee formed for the purpose of seizure three weeks prior to 24 October, 1917 (the origin of the first Politburo). He played an assigned role as did everyone else on the committee except for Kamenev and Zinoviev who betrayed the revolution on the eve of the Revolution. But that's it. (Lenin forgave these two their treason and they were readmitted into the Party. Stalin did not. They were shot in 1936.) In fact, the seizure took place in many other cities simultaneously and was hard fought and took several weeks. What is true is that in Petrograd, which was the capital of the Empire, ``the practical work of organizing the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviets and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.'' (Joseph Stalin writing on Trotsky's role in a Pravda article of November 6, 1918, the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and quoted by Stalin in his 1934 book The October Revolution.) Furthermore, the Bolshevik revolution was not confined to Petrograd. Bolsheviks under other leaders seized power simultaneously in Moscow, Kiev, Samara, Minsk and many other cities, beginning 24 October and continuing over the next several weeks.
60In the military struggle it is often thought that Trotsky was the sole brain behind the eventual success of the Red Army and that certainly is not true. As I explain in Chapter 13, there was from the beginning and throughout the Civil War a sub-rosa conflict between Trotsky and Stalin with regard to military strategy and tactics, and in April of 1919 the Stalinists finally won control of the Red High Command (Party Military Committee) and kept it, despite the fact that Trotsky was allowed to remain as War Commissar (because Lenin wanted it that way.) From that date forward Trotsky's policies would be closely watched by the worker-general Mikhail Frunze, the candidate of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. Frunze, the new Chief of Staff, now would have three of the five seats, in addition to himself (for 4 out of 5) in the Red High Command. So, if there was a ``gang'' of Stalinists they emerged immediately, and the ``coup'' against Trotsky began in the first months and years of the October Revolution, not years later after Lenin's death.
61In other words there was no coup by any gang. Accurate historical reconstruction shows us that the Stalin-Trotsky Party and Army split existed from the beginning and deepened through the entire Bolshevik experience, until one or the other had to prevail. The divisions between these two and other Party leaders were so bitter by 1921 that Lenin feared factionalism could destroy the Party. At any rate, so much for the myth of a Stalin gang and coup. Logically, this tell us, in my mind, along with other aspects of the way Trotsky conducted himself, that he had a tendency to exaggerate and distort history, to suit his purposes as he saw fit, with the passage of time.
-And, when it was all said and done it was Trotsky's disastrous leadership of the 1920 Polish-German-West European campaign, that left the Soviet Republic high and dry without the hope of any immediate international linkage to the essential advanced industrial bases of the West except for what could be gained by the more normal type of bourgeois statecraft to which Lenin was now reduced.
In fact, even Trotsky spoke by 1922 of the new situation internationally where the Soviet Republic could expect to participate on an equal basis in the international grouping of capitalist states. Hardly a call for a ``revolutionary internationalist'' solution to the problems confronting Bolshevism.
The second bugaboo of the Trotsky theory has to do with the idea that what was needed was more workers participatory democracy. But Trotsky was rather slovenly in coming to this position also. It was Trotsky who in 1919 started the program of labor armies to replace the soldier armies that were being disbanded, the soldiers discharged. It was Trotsky who in early 1920 called for the total militarization of the Russian proletariat and to hell with the trade unions. This proposal being justified by the idea that since the workers now owned the state and government and were led by a worker's party that they were well enough represented and could be reduced to what amounted to automatons. Lenin had to step in at the 9th Party Congress in the spring of 1920 saying someone would have to defend the workers from their own state if Trotsky's ideas were to be given serious consideration. That's how precarious the situation was at that time.
62-And Party democracy is the other side of this second theoretical coin Trotsky tosses out in the 1920's. However, it was Lenin who kicked off the campaign in 1921 to tighten inner Party discipline because he saw the need for ending factionalism in the Party (and with it the endless debates) and demanded it. Lenin saw that the time had come "to go to work." It was time to face the facts: namely, that the proletariat had failed to seize power in any other capitalist country. That situation was not going to change in the foreseeable future. Certainly it wasn't going to change right away, after the failure of Trotsky to complete his mission to seize Warsaw and Berlin in 1920 (for details see Chapter 13 below.) In fact, the situation in Russia had grown so intolerable that the better part of 1921 had to do with crushing the massive Tambov, and other, peasant rebellions (not to mention the Kronstadt sailors mutiny) and was only successfully concluded because of the re-introduction of capitalism by Lenin's fiat in the spring of 1921 (the New Economic Policy or NEP).There was no possibility of an internationalist solution, to use a popular Trotskyist phrase, to the problem of Russia's technological backwardness at that time. It would have to be done by the Bolsheviks themselves at home where they did have state power. -And, Trotsky agreed at the time with the demand that debate and discussion end and that a policy of carrying out orders be adopted. Except during a ``campaign period'' if you will of a few weeks before a Conference or a Congress.
63Lenin saw the grave danger confronting the Soviet Republic because of its technological backwardness and improvised accordingly. To make up for the fact that Russia's initial technological backwardness had been exacerbated by the loss, in the civil war, of up to 90% of the politically conscious proletariat by 1921. The Government would have to lick its wounds and start to educate and train the necessary cadre at home - as slow and painful as that might be - and, in the meantime, gain as much time as possible, before the next inevitable imperialist onslaught, with a new foreign policy.
Finally, the bureaucracy bugaboo in the Trotsky theory claims that the power to appoint secretaries and functionaries from the center --- which had replaced the earlier, inefficient (for military purposes), electoral forms of democratic centralism within the Party during the Civil War --- was carried to an extreme by Stalin and used in essentially undemocratic ways to win his political fights. In other words, Trotsky claimed Stalin won his fights in the Party by rigging the elections, since the delegates were often his hand-
picked secretaries and other functionaries. All of which may well be true. But that is just organizational politics. What is important is what lies behind or below the surface in such matters.
The role of the Party was dramatically and in fact drastically different in power than it had been out of power. Out of power a great deal of input from below on every issue had been the norm. Then, after a decision had been reached, it was the responsibility of the Party leadership to carry out the decisions and the membership to do as they were told, to implement the decisions. Now, in power, without the necessities demanded by Marx and Engels (fully modernized capitalist industry) the Party had to get to work and build virtually everything from scratch. Its role demanded that it transform itself into an enabling organization --- an organization charged with building the foundations of Socialism however it could. A Party of ``builders'' as opposed to a Party of ``destroyers.'' A Party without such rigid internal control would not have been able to carry out the gigantic historical tasks it would soon confront. Not the least of which would be the collectivization of agriculture (which would not begin until 1928 so they had seven years to get their act together.) Not to mention winning the inevitable imperialist second world war.
64We shall mention all of these consequences again in this book but the point here is that the ideas which form the mainstay of what would eventually be called Trotskyism are historically ill-founded. I think the Trotskyist analysis makes no sense when reviewed within the context of the reality of those times.
Does this mean that the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was not a new class? Does it mean that they would not separate themselves as a New Class with title deed to property if they got the chance and in the meantime act as if they did? No, of course, it doesn't. It does mean that the Trotskyist analysis is flawed fatally in both theory and practice and in the real test of the facts of history.
Trotsky as a person (and, thus, Trotskyism as a strategy/theory) became irrelevant except as a straw-man whipping-boy for Joseph Stalin who found it convenient to use him, and it, that way until he disposed of him in Mexico City in 1940. When Trotsky was reduced to nothing more than whining about the pace of the very programs he had advocated - i.e., massive industrialization and agricultural mechanization/collectivization - he became irrelevant to Communists almost everywhere. ---And carping still more about Stalin's management methods left him even more outside the fold of ``legitimate critic'' in the minds of most communists.
Except for the perceptive few who saw the problem created by the New Class and were honestly trying to do something about it - the Trotskyists. It is because of their sincerity that we should welcome them into the New Bolshevik movement, as I have done for many decades. I remember my friend Arne Swabeck, one of the leaders of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, (see the movie Reds for Arne's last public appearance) and many other Trotskyists in the 1960's for their support of Chairman Mao's attempts to reign in the New Class, and among the Trotskyist youth also in Los Angeles for their willingness to pursue common objectives with us (Progressive Labor Party), as in the Los Angeles Anti-Vietnam War Committee they created. The fact that Mao's attempt was tortured along the way by reality is another matter altogether, which we shall be discussing at several points below. I like to think that it has all worked out in the end for China. But, what about for us?
65
At the end of this handbook you will see that a New Class of managers and bureaucrats has been necessary for the construction of Socialism in backward countries. Inherent in that recognition is also the insistence that we see to it that they play only this role and are not allowed the role of a new ruling class.
We shall also see that backward countries may well have to witness capitalism developing alongside socialist institutions, as in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, for example. Given the backwardness of those economies a Chavez-Morales-Ortega triumvirate in alliance with Socialist Cuba is not just the ``best'' we could expect but by far good enough! With our Marxist theoretical understanding as outlined above, and explained herein, you will see that it has been Bolshevik policy to support exactly this, as circumstances require, since 1921.
However it may end up in the future, for the moment, the Chinese Communist Party is doing exactly this, because as in the case of Lenin's Russia, China has had no choice. The Russians tried jumping straight away from capitalism to communism; failed; restored capitalism and then tried again, this time with limited (i.e., ``socialist'' as opposed to ``communist'') goals, by ``building'' into the planned economies of the Stalinist Socialist Stage. In China's case its first ten years (1949-1959) under Bolshevism were all about getting to communism as quickly as possible (ending capitalism and feudalism in agriculture; collectivization; peoples communes) requiring in the succeeding twenty years, two new revolutionary struggles; all the while trying to stay on the right road (1966-1975; 1976-78). Not an easy task, without historical precedent, and when one is uncertain as to which road is the right one. In both the Russian and Chinese cases these initial attempts at jumping into communism failed, and new forms of social organization had to be invented. In both cases Bolshevism has had to step back and deal with the reality of backwardness.
66Can we do our part --- meaning fight for and seize state power, build the socialist transition and move rapidly into communism all the time struggling to prevent New Class separation? We should be able to do so now. We have the technological foundations the founders required; we should be able to invent the democratic proletarian forms to prevent the negative aspects of the initial experiments in Russia and China from happening once again, as we replace oligarchic ownership of our factories and land with ownership of the working people in those factories and on that land.
Stalin and Stalinism
One might wonder why the question of Stalin and Stalinism has been so terribly distorted in the English-speaking world. The answer should be obvious. The ruling capitalist classes, and their academic toadies, desperately needed to attack Stalin and they found the most convenient way of attacking him to utilize the mythology spread by Trotsky about him.
An excellent example is now playing; in May of this year PBS broadcast the most recent attack of Gringolandia academics against Stalin. It starts out with a great lie of omission (ignoring the twenty two year history of Britain and France against the USSR including their every attempt at sending Hitler against the USSR during the years 1933---1941) and the PBS lies continue, one compounded on the other, throughout this miserable series --- hopefully no one of you will ever give a penny to the scumbag PBS (they are worse than FOX because everyone knows what FOX is.) Far worse yet is the attack
ongoing in the USA by Left traitors and paid FBI agents. In fact, this PBS pack of lies was rushed out to counter the truth as now is being published herein and in other books. Especially since the earlier excellent movie World War II: When There Were Giants with major actors (Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, John Lithgow) playing the roles of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt has had such an impact on contemporary thinking in Gringo academia of a positive (which is to say truthful) way; meaning a truthful exposition of World War II and its conduct. PBS is after all, just another capitalist outlet for lies and misstatements of history, albeit unlike FOX (Fascist Oxymoron) it is aimed at ``educated'' North Americans as opposed to the ignorant and unwashed targeted by the latter.
As the years since 1965 progressed and I read more and more of the original documents I came to see an entirely different Stalin than the one Trotsky propagandized. So different that it is truly shocking. Furthermore, because of my own involvement in the intelligence service I began to see how Stalin organized and led the most important combat part of the international communist movement --- the Red Secret Service --- and, accordingly, have been writing a book about it (Red Sword, Red Shield). Let me give you an accurate assessment of Stalin's originating role in the Bolshevik Party.
Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili on December 9, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. Nicknamed Soso by others, he chose the name ``Koba'' for himself by the time of his adolescence. In time he would take on a new name. His official new name would be Stalin, the man of steel. But that was some time into the future. For now Stalin would be Joseph, Soso, or Koba.
Koba was the hero of a Robin Hood novel about a Georgian who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Joseph continued to use Koba as his first name in the underground world of the RSDLP. The main book that Koba read was The Patricide, its author Alexander Kazbegi --- perhaps the wealthiest landowner in Georgia - had released his serfs from their serf obligations, given away his own wealth, and gone to living as a simple herder of sheep in the mountains of Georgia. Writing his Koba stories occupied Kazbegi's plentiful spare time as a shepherd during the years 1880 to 1886. The first six years of Joseph's childhood.
At the age of 8 Joseph's mother enrolled him in elementary school. Here he was forced to learn Russian, as instruction was done only in Russian, and he completed elementary and middle schooling therefore in the Russian language. He graduated with honors from this church school in 1894 and at the age of 14 was admitted to the seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, for high schooling, which was the only way toward a higher education for a poor boy. The following year at the age of 15 he joined the Russian Social Democratic circle (called Mesame Dasi) in Tiflis. There he caught the attention of the man who would become his mentor, Leonid Krassin. Krassin was a well-educated capitalist, working for Russian wildcatters and foreign oil concerns as a manager, company man and sometimes as an entrepreneur for himself, wildcatting in the rough-and-tumble oilfield culture of Georgia, especially around Batum and Baku. ---And, Krassin was a secret Social Democrat of the Lenin variety.
67Now, note two things: (1) at the turn of the century three families dominated the Russian oil industry: the Nobels, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, and (2) in these days the seminaries were producing revolutionaries like hot house plants. Not only in Trans-Caucasian Russia, but also in Georgia and Armenia.
In Tiflis (renamed Tbilisi in 1936 by Koba, now Georgia's favorite son, known as Stalin) as a member of the Social Democratic organization, Joseph and other seminarians met revolutionary factory and oilfield workers, studying in secret, and immersed themselves in these workers activities. They were studying Russian translations of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels principal works including Marx's Capital Volume One. Caught reading these materials at the seminary Joseph was expelled in 1899. However, in the five years from this initial meeting, which is to say when Koba grew from 15 to 20 years of age, Krassin taught him how to organize workers, and as importantly, how to rob banks, stage-coaches and steamships. Krassin was such an obvious and enthusiastic capitalist, the Czarist secret police missed him altogether, and thus, for some time they also missed his most promising student. Krassin would work his way up the Czarist bureaucracy, in time, to become what Lenin would eventually call (during the First World War) the ``Finance Minister of the Bolshevik Revolution'' for reasons you will come to understand in the text.
68In 1900, Joseph met his first face-to-face intermediary to Lenin. Arriving in Tiflis from internal exile in that year was Victor Kurnatovsky who had met their future leader while in exile (Lenin was exiled to the Siberian town of Minusinsk at the time) and come under his sway. Kurnatovsky told Koba about Lenin whom he described as a genius who would lead them all to victory. By this time Lenin had been released, having served his prison sentence and had made his way to London. Unlike other ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂémigrÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂés Lenin arrived in London with a plan of action. Sewing circle reading and discussion groups would give way under the new leader to a secret professional organization of militarily organized combat revolutionaries. The central instrument Lenin proposed to implement the policy of the General Staff of the Revolution was a newspaper. The following year, 1901, The Spark (Iskra) began to arrive in Tiflis via sailors on shore leave at the Black Sea ports. Joseph became a follower of Lenin among the Social Democrats; following the split of the RSDLP into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, Joseph, now known in the Party almost always as Koba, joined unhesitatingly with the Bolsheviks.
69In 1901, following instructions received via Iskra, Koba threw himself into organizing the oilfield workers and organizing armed strikes at Baku and Batum and then into organizing bank hold-ups stage-coach and steamship robberies, and other armed ``expropriations'' (known as ``exes'' by the Bolsheviks.) Shortly after the 1903 formation of the Bolshevik Party, Koba and Krassin became the number one in-country ``provider Team'' of cash to Lenin's cause; organizing for example, the Great Tiflis Stage-coach and State Bank Robbery that netted Lenin some 300,000 gold rubles! In other words, at just the right time Koba provided Lenin with the two things he needed most: (1) a real organized labor movement which had won armed strikes and put their union into the oilfield on a permanent basis and (2) money. This was the first successful organized labor movement in the Russian Empire and it was Leninist thanks to Koba and his fellow Bolshevik-to-be organizers. The soon-to-come Bolshevik Party had also become the first financially independent working class vanguard Party in the world; again thanks to Koba and associates. Lenin recognized all of this and began to put Koba on the top of his list of people to be pushed ahead.
70Among these principal organizers in the Caucuses were not only Koba but his closest friends including Kliment Voroshilov, future head of the entire Red Army, and
Michael Kalinin, future President of the Soviet Union. Of course, Leonid Krassin continued as the senior advisor of this Young Communist cadre.
Taking on the Rothschild's: 1901
As we have seen there were three major international oil concerns operating in Russia at the turn of the century; those owned by the Nobel's, the Rothschild's and the Rockefeller's. All three were well represented on the Caspian, especially in the oil cities of Baku and Black Sea Batum where Koba had risen to be the de facto chief of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party strike organizing operations by 1901. Having built a union in the oilfields, the following year Koba took on what he considered to be the weakest of the foreign oil combines. Namely, that of the Rothschild's. However, as the unfolding began, the strike once again brought out the Czarist troops and gendarmerie. Koba and his associates jumped into the fight with guns and every other weapon they could get their hands on and the fighting was underway. Troops burned the workers quarters and shot down men, women and children daring to engage in open protest and refusing to work. Koba's teams of armed workers fought back and forced the cops and troops to retreat or face hundreds of burning wells. The capitalists decided this was a higher price than they were willing to pay and called off their troops. The workers won the strike and went back to work with a union! It was the first Social Democratic victory in an armed strike and it electrified the Empire.
71Meanwhile in London, Lenin was thrilled to learn that his brand new newspaper was considered by the Czar's secret police, and by his own Party, as responsible for the Caucuses being in flames. Lenin had believed from the moment of his arrival in the United Kingdom the previous year that the Czarist regime was very weak and open to direct attack by workers. Workers could and would engage in massive work stoppages regardless of the sacrifice in wages required to do so. Furthermore, he had proven that workers would take up arms and fight for socialism whether or not Russia was considered by bourgeois intellectuals to be too primitive for Socialism. All the workers needed was encouragement and that came from the underground newspaper Spark (Iskra). The text or ``copy'' to be printed was smuggled to the Caspian on ships with friendly sailors and then printed in one of the underground print shops Koba and associates maintained. All the intellectuals needed were some balls. Then they could understand that it didn't matter whether the revolution started in Russia or in England. What mattered was that it started, and then got international, as quickly as possible. Workers with advanced industry would come to the aid of workers with backward industry, and would be more than happy to do so, since the latter would have started the conflagration that had led to their own liberation. ---And, that was Lenin's program in short. Action now for proletarian revolution. The Russian Workers Revolution would come to power in a period of transition with ``the state'' (Army and secret police) in its hands, and full scale industrialization would occur as workers in the advanced capitalist countries got their act together and joined in.
72First in Batum, and now in Baku, Koba and his fellow organizers had implanted the Party printing presses. Code named ``Nina'' the Russian printing press operation by 1902, was hidden in a dugout cellar eventually expanding under several homes and city streets in the mainly Mongol working class quarter of Baku. From here, bundles of the paper were printed and smuggled as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg in the North and
then to every working class quarter in the country, as opportunity provided. The distribution network for petroleum products that flowed northward and eastward from the Black Sea functioned for many years as the backbone of secret Bolshevik newspaper distribution, another gift to Lenin from his devoted Baku-Batum followers led by Koba. Accordingly this network became the vertebral chord of secret Bolshevik Party cell organizing as well.
The working class action committees of Baku and Batum had set the pace and provided the model for what workers could do in other cities. ---And, Lenin knew from his growing network of informers and couriers that workers in every other city of the Empire, aware of what was happening in the Caucuses, were seeing in those committees, the model for their own organizations. Inside the newly created Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, those who had seen Lenin as just another intellectual in exile now saw him in a quite different way. Unfortunately, some such as the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, were simply jealous of this young upstart's success. Plekhanov chose to see Lenin thrusting ahead of himself and felt his long suffering service in presenting Marxism to Russia to begin with, was being forgotten. Others, like the newcomer Leon Bronstein (Trotsky), initially sided with Lenin but then went over to the other side within the exile RSDLP leadership. Perhaps because they too were being sidelined by Lenin's ability to get things done. However, their varying motivations may have been, the fact was that what would be, in the Russian revolutionary workers movement, was being decided on the ground, and Lenin had all the troops.
73The Empire Atremble
Even Lenin was surprised when his as yet unmet leaders in the Caucuses, principal among them being Koba, succeeded in 1903, in organizing the most eventful workers action in the history of Europe since the Paris Commune of 1876. A general strike that not only shut down the oilfields of the Caspian Sea and everywhere else but also shut down every industrial city in the Russian Empire. For a moment the Empire wobbled. Could it all be over that fast?
In theory yes. Marx had said in the Communist Manifesto it was just a matter of workers changing ownership of the means of production, putting themselves and those in need among the people, at the top of the national priority list, instead of at its bottom, as the capitalists had done, and you would have socialism. Eventually, with the abolition of private property you would have a paradise on Earth where all the advantages of industrial production would be at the service of the working people rather than the other way around as the capitalists had arranged it. -And with publicly owned means of scientifically advanced industrial production, making the slogan ``from each according to his ability to each according to his need,'' a reality, you would have communism. But, what about the resistance of the exploiters? Surely, they would mount powerful counter attacks. The capitalists were already sending the Czarist secret police (Okhrana) in huge numbers; the Army and the Cossacks could not be far behind.
74The Revolution of 1905
The General Strike of 1903 left the Czar's top advisors unanimous in wanting to start a war to refocus national thinking off of the internal problems confronting them. Rather than seeking social reform with the liberal capitalists and the new class of petty
bourgeois intellectual and educated bureaucrats, the Czarists preferred to start a war. This time they planned for a successful war.
The problem came when they failed in their elective war. They had chosen the wrong victim. Japan. In this case the Japanese nation was prepared, although ruled by a small tight-knit coterie of formerly feudal aristocratic and noble families. Families that had kept the discipline of their rule over slaves and serfs while voluntarily transforming themselves into capitalist ruling families. As they applied this feudal discipline to their rule over workers they were able to catapult themselves into the modern industrial world of international capitalism. The Okhrana, focused as it was on internal dissent, had missed all of this. Russia acted as if it had not known of Japan's industrialization and its immediate application to the construction of steel war ships with fully modern big guns.
75The setting chosen by the Russians for their conflict was Korea. But, in the event, the Czar's Army and Navy proceeded to disgrace themselves in a series of embarrassing military debacles. The war climaxed with virtually the entire Czarist fleet being buried at sea!
In response the Russian nation rose up. Many in the capitalist class, hitherto allied seemingly inextricably with the feudal Lords, intermarried and interbred, wanted west European style parliamentary democracy, as did the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie - especially the New Class of technocrats upon which the Czarist Regime depended increasingly. The farmers rose up under their Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders demanding redistribution of land along the lines they imagined it had existed before Peter the Great. The workers rose up under their political parties: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. As the year progressed the Bolsheviks began to get the upper hand among them. ---And, along the way a variety of individualists such as Leon Bronstein (Trotsky) arose to espouse their own doctrines and acquire in the milieu of revolution their own following.
76Trotsky cut out his following from the masses gathering around the St. Petersburg City Council (Soviet is the Russian word for Council.) The Bolsheviks gained a mass following in the workers quarters which was also reflected in the City Council. In the end the Czar outfoxed the revolutionaries and crushed the Petrograd City Council and along with it the rest of the revolutionary councils that had arisen throughout the nation.
Koba's first importance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks was precisely his clarity on the nature of the enemy and what was to be done about them.---And, this clarity was achieved first of all in the real school of life. Furthermore, he was willing and able to get done, what needed to be done, for his Party and his Chief. Lenin recognized these qualities in Koba, calling him ``that wonderful Georgian.''
During the 1905 Russian Revolution Lenin came to depend on Koba. Koba could get things done. He had a wide range of working-class political contacts and was developing an even wider range of bourgeois contacts including those of the underworld as a result of his prison experiences which had only begun. Lenin would, in the years up to the October Revolution in 1917, rely on Koba to carry out the most dangerous and sensitive and the most important secret tasks confronting the Party.
For example, all the bourgeois socialists including Leon Trotsky, were opposed to Lenin's program of bank hold-ups, and other armed robberies to finance Party activities, organs, and the press --- strong-arm work of which he had placed Koba (Stalin) in charge, and which policy Lenin defended in open debate against the Mensheviks and Trotsky at
the 5th (1907) RSDLP Congress in London. After all, Lenin argued, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie had stolen all this money from the people to begin with and it was only right that the people's champions should expropriate it on their behalf. Lenin dismissed his opponents politically, considering them bourgeois sissies, and went on with the business of building his own (Bolshevik) Party. A Party which of course did not include Trotsky or any of the other bourgeois socialists (Mensheviks.) For Lenin it was politics not personal.
Stalin, however, as we have seen, pictured himself as a kind of ``Robin Hood'' of the Revolution. So much so that even before he became a Social Democrat, as we have also seen, he had taken the name of the legendary Georgian Robin Hood, ``Koba''; a name his friends would use for him all of his life. The anger he felt toward the haughty Trotsky was not so easily assuaged.
Lenin also handed Stalin much of the responsibility for organizing the secret financial investments of the Party in a variety of Russian banks; arranging transfers of cash and securities to Party safe-drops in West European banking centers, and so forth. --- And these are just a few examples of the important secret work that Lenin entrusted to Stalin.
As a matter of historical note, Stalin's first face-to-face conflict with Trotsky occurred as a product of this 1907 RSDLP (5th) Congress (Joint Congress with both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks attending) debate in London, and went far to shape his dislike for the man he considered to be an ``aristocrat-bourgeois'' socialist. In a short time a mutual hatred emerged between these two. Hatred destined to shape so much of the Party's future experience. If Trotsky had been less aristocratic in his bearing and less presumptuous toward those doing all the work, and taking all the risks, perhaps even showing appreciation for those such as Stalin, the latter might have been less likely to politicize his personal feelings. I suspect Stalin's feelings were hurt and he did politicize them.
77I imagine that the more Stalin thought about Trotsky, the exact kind of privileged person he hated the most, and his absolute failure to understand the dedication and importance of his (Stalin's) work, the more he internalized his hatred of Trotsky, until it was part of the marrow of his bones. Stalin ``went off'' on Trotsky within weeks of the beginning of the armed struggle in 1918 and I don't think it was just because of their principled military disagreements. However that may have been, before this was all over Stalin would bury an axe in Trotsky's head. Albeit via a surrogate and far from home.
Trotskyist Mythology
We will return to Stalin and his role in the creation of the world's first worker's Government and State in Chapter 13. For now, let me say again that the Trotskyist mythology which has cursed a certain portion of our movement for many decades has necessitated this factual review of early Bolshevik history. Also, it sets to rest, permanently I believe, the slander Trotsky spread far and wide about Stalin being some kind of late-coming usurper of the throne that should have been his. This mythology has two main threads. The first that spun by Trotsky himself. The second the impression left by history on foreign communists about the relative importance of the Russian Bolshevik leaders. The former speaks for itself and is seen in all of Trotsky's writings. The latter is something I witnessed myself and, thus, had to come to understand.
78
In 1965 when I was helping Phil Taylor organize Los Angeles for the Progressive Labor Party I met long time Trotskyist Arne Swabeck and his wife. (See the movie Reds for Arne's last public appearance.) I spent a number of hours throughout that year listening to Arne talk about meeting Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders in 1919 and many times thereafter. He told me that at the Comintern Congresses he attended he never heard of Stalin. I believed him and it is something that has stuck with me and which I had to confront and answer for myself.
Now, after decades of research, I think I can see how Trotsky's shameless proselytizing on his own behalf utilized certain historical features of 1917 and the subsequent six or seven years, to spread and reinforce the idea that Stalin was an outsider and a usurper. This as we have just seen is the furthest possible thing from the truth one could imagine. I think what Lenin is purported to have said to Michael Borodin upon his return to Russia from Chicago, about Trotsky having been brought into the Bolshevik Party by Lenin to handle the Petrograd City Council where otherwise he would have been a spoiler, is probably exactly what happened. Things worked out and according to Lenin when Trotsky turned his attention to military affairs that worked out also. I will leave this military question to the text and return to the second issue at hand.
79Namely, that foreign communists and indeed foreign capitalist leaders of Germany, England, Italy, France, the UK and so forth, got the impression that Trotsky was one of the principal Bolshevik leaders on the same level as Lenin because Trotsky had a big mouth, had been in charge of peace negotiations that eventually took Russia out of the world war, and was the public face for a long time of the Red Army. Combine this with the fact that most of these foreigners had no command of the Russian language whatsoever and no familiarity with Bolshevik history or even its most basic publications left the field wide open for assuming that whoever was standing up front and talking the most must be the boss. Well that certainly put Trotsky right up there as public face number two --- right next to that of Lenin --- and Trotsky was always shooting his mouth off to the press, foreign as well as domestic, so he got even more Press than Lenin! This led to people such as Arne Swabeck getting the wrong impression about the relative importance of Trotsky (who was the real late-comer) and the relatively quiet Stalin. It also explains why Stalin found it so easy to isolate Trotsky from the rest of the Russian Party rather quickly as we shall see in the text.
80Finally, most foreign communists knew the Russian Bolsheviks almost exclusively through the prism of the Comintern. Here there were many such leading mouths: e.g., Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev not to mention Trotsky, etc. Stalin was there, but very quietly, as the boss of the Comintern's secret department. This decision to make Stalin the real Comintern boss as far as real world operations were concerned had been made by Lenin in an almost offhand way when Lenin was single handedly organizing the Call and Structure of the Comintern and its First Congress during January and February of 1919. It was rather natural that Lenin would have continued to show complete confidence in Stalin in this matter in that he had long since placed Stalin as the head of the Russian Communist Party's (Bolsheviks) secret department. (Stalin, from the beginning, and always thereafter, for the rest of his life, had been and would be head of Bolshevik secret operations at home and abroad no matter what organizational, bureaucratic, structure and name had been or would be involved.) The other Bolshevik leaders were intellectuals well suited to the development of the intellectual side of
81Bolshevism. Now they were the public face of the Comintern and contributed all the talk and stuff of the Comintern press. Stalin on the other hand rarely spoke in Comintern meetings or publications. His secret role was the most important job in the Comintern but only those members with a ``need to know'' would have had any indication of this.
The Trotskyists are for the most part quite sincere people. At least that is my experience. But they have been badly misled and in our country they suffer the gringo curse of failing to read. However, education is the cure for both deficiencies and perhaps we have laid a good foundation for imposing clarity here in this foreword. Now let us move on to the central theoretical false premise of Trotskyism.
The New Class is Not a Deformation but Part of a New Necessary
Transitional Stage --- of which there will be several
Before we arrive at Communism
The most important theoretical difference between international Trotskyism and the international Communist movement in 2011 is on the question of the nature and role of the Soviet New Class. (-And, by extension that of the New Class in the Socialist Stage in China, East Europe, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. as the Trotskyists maintain today.) Is the New Class, just as Trotsky maintained, an aberration?
Trotsky's thinking made the New Class into a historically accidental, peculiar, social structural deformation. According to him this was due to idiosyncratic developments in Russia (namely his main bugaboo, Koba or Joseph Stalin.) If, for example, he and associates had been on top, the bureaucracy would have been controlled in an otherwise well put together working class sociocultural evolutionary stage. A single transitional Stage of Socialism. Or, rather conversely, is the New Class a part of a new and specific transitional Stage of Socialism, which features working class, farmer, and petty bourgeois technocrats in alliance? (By extension this implies that there will be one or more additional transitional Stages of Socialism yet to come.) Trotsky claimed the former. In fact, the historical evidence --- combined with the archaeological evidence --- tells us the latter is the case. Let us see why.
82As I said in the Preface to the 2006 edition of this book, we are indebted to Professor Antonio Gilman for identifying a deficiency in my writing the first edition of this book (Fundamentals of Historical Materialism, Bolshevism 2005.) Namely, that I had failed to be sufficiently explicit about the origin and evolution of the New Class in Socialist Societies, the central problem in the construction of Socialism since 1917. I accepted this criticism as correct and so, we shall now outline this origin and evolution.
The New Class is our #2 Problem
In fact, the number two problem, after survival (which to date has been our number one problem), so far encountered in countries undergoing socialist construction, has been how to live with, meaning how to properly reward, the bureaucratic infrastructure essential to the construction of the scientific and technically advanced industry and agriculture in societies which were only pubescent with the high levels of development initially proposed by the founders (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.) Because the consequences of this central fact of having inherited technological backwardness in the homelands of proletarian revolution, have been, and are being, used by the propagandists for capitalism, to discredit the Marxist-Leninist strategy, and indeed
our entire historical analysis, an evolutionary trajectory for the New Class, as it should be understood (nothing emerges unique and pristine without antecedents in sociocultural evolution), is now a centerpiece of this handbook.
To begin with then, as you will see in this Bolshevism 2011 version of Fundamentals of Historical Materialism now The ABC's of Communism, the problem of the New Class has to be understood in theoretical terms --- Marxist theoretical terms.
What does this mean?
In practical terms it means we continue to use the methodology of historical materialism's analysis of pre-capitalist formations as explained in this handbook. ---And, in so doing we lay out the origin and transformation of this New Class over the past 6000 years. As you will see, when we precede in this way it becomes clear that the administrative bureaucracy of Socialism is actually a very old class, with its origins in the Simple and Advanced Theocratic Chiefdom Stages.
Why is it true we must proceed in this way, besides the fact that this method works?
Backwardness in Technology
Is Not What Marx and Engels Proposed
So far, with regard to technology, it has been ``national backwardness'' we have encountered in the homelands of socialist construction. This is not what Marx and Engels had proposed --- exactly the opposite, as a matter of fact, is what they required before one could realistically hope to construct socialist, let alone communist, society. They had proposed a completed capitalist stage with all its ``modernizations'' in place. What we got was the extreme backwardness of Russia and China, with only the post-World War II German and Czechoslovak exceptions, too little and too late to make any real difference.
The problem of the Soviet Union and China with the New Class is not the same problem we should expect to have, at least to the same degree and intensity, when working class revolution comes to the advanced capitalist countries. However, having said this let me also assert that a New Class of administrators will still be needed through the transitional Stages of Socialism in the USA, and the other advanced capitalist countries, as we enter the transitional period. ---And, while the transition in our advanced countries will be fast (the productive forces fully developed --- i.e., as fully as possible anyway under Capitalism) there will still be a transition and it may last a decade or even two. Although, hopefully, it will be this time a truly "classless intelligentsia" as Stalin named it in the 1930's, and not a would-be new class of wolves parading in sheep's clothing. It is up to you to be sure that this time the Nomenklatura (Soviet term for the New Class) meaning persons named to the different bureaucratic positions determined by the leadership, is held directly responsible and immediately recallable by democratic proletarian organs. Given the proven dangers, experience has taught us of not doing this; you should make it a priority when the time comes. ---And, this time, the New Class of Party and Government administrators should be a class that will be consciously building itself out of existence, over a period of time, as it works alongside the other working classes, toward the day when all working people share the responsibility of managing the affairs of the economy and government democratically, as the founders planned in 1848 (with the January appearance of The Communist Manifesto.) It certainly seems possible
83to me that a person starting on Day One, after the revolution in the USA, could be a bureaucrat for a decade and then have phased herself into a role she may more truly appreciate (perhaps being a scientific researcher, or a High School coach.)
Today a management of the whole economic and political life of society by the people as a whole is more than ever possible and absolutely essential. It is possible because of the cybernetic revolution that makes every person into a potential manager and monitor of the economy as a whole with worksites at home and in their professional capacities. It is essential because we did not overthrow the class system of the Servitude Epoch simply to create an Orwellian nightmare, nor to ``share the poverty,'' but instead to create limitless goods and services of the most advanced (indeed STAR TREK like) nature. ---And, with it the only real world possibility to create a society world-wide where it can be realistically and common-sense wise, true, that each person contributes what she can and is rewarded as she wishes. It is possible and essential, but only can happen if we create an altruistic mental template in society that can only be made permanent by the vast increase in productive capability which makes selfishness anachronistic; an increase the advanced capitalist countries have achieved. (-And, in the case of China, the vast increase which we project to be extant there by 2050).
84So now as to the New Class (i.e., the bureaucracy in the Party, State and Government apparatus' of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.) What was it? What were its sociocultural evolutionary predecessors? What were the specifics of its development? What about the New Class in China; what forms does it occupy; where did they come from and where can they be directed, as a class, while accomplishing the objectives of the proletarian Party in power as it is in China?
Prehistoric Origins of the New Class
In the mid 1990's, I noticed an article in a popular magazine from an archaeologist in one of the USA Southwest's National Parks about evidence for compartmentalization of the holdings of a Chiefdom storehouse - a Simple Chiefdom at that. It set me thinking. Perhaps, as we archaeologists look for evidence of state origins by finding the material remains of barracks (army garrisons) and cop-shops, we could also find evidence of the origins of professional specialization as "administrators" by finding evidence of the things that reflect administrative tasks (such as differential storing and accounting for different agricultural contributions). For that matter, as we find evidence for professional specialization in the production of pottery by searching for evolving uniformity and standardization, in the early chiefdom levels of archaeological sites. (As opposed to the idiosyncratic features of individual household pottery manufacture of the tribal domestic mode of farming production.) My analysis of such remains has been discussed elsewhere. The point is, there is in fact clear evidence in the remnant material culture of such early administrative tasks and eventually they become truly specialized. A "new class" can emerge from this "new specialty." -And it often does. Always, as a matter of fact, in the five known centers of the origin of civilization (by ``civilization'' be sure to note that historians are always referring to the emergence of the Slave Stage) and we can see the beginnings even in the outlying independent centers (e.g. the USA Southwest) that never got quite as far as class division and state emergence for a variety of reasons. This is a "handbook" so I won't pursue the subject except to say that our contemporary Socialist society ``New Class'' has its distant origins along the banks of the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile,
85Huang-ho and Yangtze Rivers in the Old World, and in the highlands of the Central Andes, as well as the lowlands and highlands of Mesoamerica in the New World. This is the beginning of our specific theory of the contemporary New Class in socialist societies.
In the Slave and Feudal Stages
As you will see the ruling families that constituted the ruling classes of the Ancient World (the term Ancient World means the Slave and Feudal Stages of the Old World and the Slave Stage of the New World) had a deadly problem of their own with regard to their boss-hierarchy (which will become the technocrat bureaucracy of modern times in Capitalist and Socialist society) and they attempted to resolve it in a variety of ways. Sometimes they were successful but just as often they were not. Among the successful techniques they used we shall see two that were continuous and especially important: (a) the construction of monumental architecture (to keep labor-power in servitude out of the hands of the boss-hierarchy) as one way they dealt with the problem (e.g. the pyramids of Egypt and China's Great Wall.) Another (b) was to keep the boss-hierarchy deeply in debt by encouraging all sorts of expenditures on high living and luxury items. Without labor power and without cash they could not very effectively challenge the ruling and richest families.
86Yet, keeping labor-power in servitude (whether it be slave, feudal or capitalist; i.e. chattel or wage slavery) requires a military-police establishment. Increasing the number of slaves requires a large constantly growing military and police establishment. Under these circumstances it's only a matter of time until some of generals realize they can replace their employers. Thus, slave stage forms always result in military dictatorship and usually begin that way as well.
(This tendency is ever present, even in capitalist societies such as the USA with a parliamentary tradition, as we can see at present, where some the richest families want to do away with much of the democracy that exists among themselves, and move toward a more efficient dictatorship of the police-military sort. Fortunately, for some of them, the moron Bush has failed - but next time there may be someone of a more than Forest Gump capability - a Clinton, a McCain, or a Kerry --- a smarter fascist leader - who will succeed in replacing the quaint notions of constitutional safeguards the US ruling class has enjoyed for so long. Either way it's their problem not ours. Our task is to destroy all of them.)
-And don't panic over the Patriot Act - they have been doing all this for many decades anyway and they will keep doing it, with or without legal authorization, until the day they are overthrown and liquidated root and branch. They have been tapping my phones, following me to school and to work, conducting surveillance of my mail, etc. since I was ten years old and this is not unique. For the details see the first volume of my autobiography entitled The Buccaneer. So, this is a ruling class problem --- not ours. That is to say the bourgeoisie must fight out their own battles with the billionaire-trillionaire oligarchy to protect their own turf. We know the US ruling class state apparatus will try to do whatever they like with regard to us as they always have. (We will fight back, overcome them, and liquidate them. But, on our terms, as we see fit.)
87Capitalism and the Technocrats
Feudalism was the half-way house stage between the chattel slavery and the wage
slavery of the preceding (Slave) and succeeding (Capitalist) stages, where the role of the administrative bureaucracy, as part of the overall boss-hierarchy, assumed its special ``Eastern'' and ``Western'' characteristics. Specifically, for example, the highly sophisticated 250,000 strong corps of eunuch scholar-bureaucrats, administering China for the Chinese ruling classes, in the east, and the rather puny castle-bound individuals in the pay of European fiefdom princes (still, however, with their testicles), responsible for financial affairs in the west (the vast territories around the Mediterranean Sea). But as I have pointed out in the text, Feudalism was doomed, not because it was an historic compromise that gave more freedom to farming families in exchange for labor-peace, but because its system of productive forces was primitive --- just as primitive as it had been in the Slave Stage.
88Capitalism, on the other hand, introduced machinery (in part at least of iron and steel made by machine tools) with its own independent power sources (e.g., steam engines) to which unskilled, untrained labor-power could be put to work in the factory installed machine manufacture (machinofacture) of commodities and this changed the entire nature of wealth acquisition. ---And with it the jobs spectrum of the boss-hierarchy; especially for persons involved in things other than enforcement. ---And these technocratic sectors expanded quickly and became during the 1700's in Europe and the Americas by far the biggest part of the boss-hierarchy, with enforcement relegated strictly to a specialized state (military, intelligence, police) establishment. For capitalist machinery obviously takes brains to make, maintain, and most importantly improve --- generation of machinery, after generation of machinery.
89The myriad of productive tasks and professional activities involved in machinery produced commodities, would require a new and far superior method of technical education for the boss-hierarchy. Thus, arose the technocrats.
In economies as advanced in the capitalist way as those of the major eight capitalist countries, this New Class is not as obvious as it is in the newly emerging economies of places like Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela (for that matter essentially all of South America, and many developing countries in Africa and Asia as well) where the technocrats stand out clearly, and are often a political force as well. However, we don't want to forget that the most advanced eight capitalist countries had an emergent class of technical people that looked in the 1700's and 1800's much like these contemporary ``technocratic New Class'' elements in the developing capitalist countries.
Furthermore, where the Marxist parties did take power beginning in 1917, it was often from this ``new'' Technocrat Class the leadership first arose (e.g., V.I. Lenin, Mao Zedong) --- petty bourgeois and bourgeois in class outlook --- and continues to arise (e.g. Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara). Our leaders often come from this special part of that class ``in service'' to the ruling families and ruling classes, where their intellectual preoccupation and commitment to science and scientific method led, and leads, some of them to accept Marx's scientific discoveries of the laws of history, and as importantly the laws of operation of the capitalist system. Among these individuals were those who decided, and who continue to decide, to side with the working class --- the proletariat --- and its farmer allies.
90Socialism and its New Class
The very first problem confronting Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Petrograd on the
night of 24 October, 1917, was how to build a new Government. The second was how to build a new State (military/police). Surprisingly, little thought had been given to these tasks when everyone's eyes were fixed on the seizure. It was chaos at the Smolny Institute where Lenin's leadership established their first ministries (commissariats) by tacking pieces of paper on doorways announcing that this room was for Education and Enlightenment, this for Nationalities, this room for this, and that room for that. Within hours they had to confront the old bureaucracy of the bourgeoisie which either walked away altogether or refused to obey orders or in a few cases tried to help. The same was true in the military. The crude use of power was all that the Bolsheviks could do in those first days to open the financial system (blow the vaults open) and make the military command submit (by shooting officers refusing to carry out Lenin's commands by telephone, or in person).
91It soon became apparent (for their Government) the Bolsheviks would have to use those who were willing, among the old technocratic petty bourgeoisie, and as soon as possible to add to their ranks or supplant them altogether with persons coming from the ranks of the proletariat or poor peasantry, who could read or write, or soon would learn how, and who could be educated quickly to assume minimal responsibilities. The Bolsheviks had no choice.
Even for their State (the Army, Navy and special police) it would be necessary to use officers of the Czar, when they were willing. -And, it was safe to do so, or at least as safe as such a policy could be, if there was a Red political officer counterpart next to every command officer with the ability and willingness to shoot said command officer if the slightest perfidy was suspected.
Russia and the soon-to-be constituent Republics of the Soviet Union featured nearly universal female illiteracy among the peasantry and most of the males too, in a country that was 90% peasant. Needless to say it would be hard to make technical administrators out of these people quickly. It would take time. It did take time. In the meantime the Bolsheviks improvised as best they could, always believing that international assistance from working class revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries was inevitable, and most importantly, hoping and believing it would arrive soon!
You will learn how such illusions, among the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, dissipated by 1921. You will also learn about the consequences of Trotsky's failure to successfully conclude the Polish-German campaign in 1920. With that campaign however, the Civil War proper had come to an end (meaning the period of White Russian Armies against Red Russian Armies, with the former supported by all the imperialist countries [yes, including the USA, but also the UK, France, Italy, Serbia, and Japan; the Soviets supported by working classes in those countries and by peoples of the colonial world].) Yet, 1921 began for the Bolsheviks with the necessity of having to stifle another Civil War in the bud. ---And this time, given the failure of the 1920 Polish-German offensive, meaning no assistance from the advanced workers of the West, and confronting the 1921 Tambov peasant uprising, and the Kronstadt sailors mutiny of 1921, Lenin was forced to restore capitalism at home, and to embark upon a new kind of international statecraft abroad.
92The Party didn't like the New Economic Policy (NEP) and went along with it only because Lenin insisted --- they trusted Lenin. After all, without Lenin they never would
have gotten this far and they all knew it. Even so, the Party wanted to move on with the abolition of private property and everything that went with it, with or without advanced technical assistance from Europe or North America. But that was not possible in the foreseeable (day to day planning) future as far as could be seen at the beginning of 1921. Nor did Lenin think that it was a matter of critical importance. There was no Marxist prescription on how long the revolution against private property would take --- nor, more importantly, any prescription left by the founders (other than some broad social notions --- see Chapter 2 paragraph 22 of The Communist Manifesto) as to what form(s) and phases the transition to public from private property would encompass.
Lenin knew that the key thing was that the Party had state power. Its key first task was to preserve itself and its hold on state power. Always, and first and foremost, is and was the question of `could the Bolsheviks retain state power' --- everything else that was and is to be accomplished depends on this. This was Lenin --- always --- first --- foremost --- preaching and demanding that the Bolsheviks retain state power no matter what; no matter what the cost!
If that meant the temporary restoration of Capitalism so be it. ---And, it did mean this. To fail to restore capitalism in 1921 as Lenin insisted, would have led to the overthrow of the Bolshevik Party and the loss of state power. Lenin realized by now that it was War Communism which had led to the defeat of Bela Kun and his Communist Government in Hungary, and worse, that Rosa Luxembourg's radicalism in proposing permanency to the abolition of private farming had led to the defeat of the insurrection in Berlin. He realized he had tried to go too far too fast. It would take time to educate the farmers and to prepare a transition to US-style large-scale mechanized and indeed industrialized agriculture, although this time publicly owned.
93The whole point behind my decision to go into archaeology to begin with was to uncover prehistoric sociocultural stage evolutionary indicators which by comparative analysis might help us determine where we are today and why. This is what Marx spent the last seven years of his life trying to find. What I have discovered is that the Stage of Stalinist Socialism is structurally, comparable to the Sociocultural Stage of Simple Chiefdoms, especially in the latter's initial few centuries. This archaeological comparative evidence tells us that what we have been witnessing since 1917, is the emergence of a distinct sociocultural stage (comparable to that of Simple Chiefdoms, structurally) with its own class characteristics. It also, implies, what must come next. The next Stage in Sociocultural Evolution being that of Advanced Socialism. ---And there may yet be another Stage after that, before we can make the transition to communism.
94In each of these twentieth century examples, what we have is not a workers Government alone; nor even a workers and farmers Government; but Government whose support requires a technocratic New Class and a police-military force of modern type. These classes being somewhat differentially rewarded. This will continue until we seize power in an advanced capitalist country and get to the point Marx and Engels thought we would have reached by the time a working class revolution took power. Then, and only then, will we be able to march, inevitably, to Communism. In other words, at least one more transitional Sociocultural Evolutionary Stage will be required to finish up Advanced Socialism. Unless and until an advanced capitalist country has a working class
revolution there will be no other route to a truly Communist Sociocultural Evolutionary Stage. All of this will take one or two centuries more. This means a lot more fighting and dying and perhaps annihilation. Freedom or death! There is nothing to be gained by a denial of historical inevitability; knowing where we are and how we got here, should help us avoid the latter.
Two Ugly Facts You Must Face
Lenin's Party membership had an emotional commitment to end private property. They had often interpreted their emotions as being the same thing as objective realistic assessment. Meaning, the Party membership wanted the transition to total public property to happen overnight. As we were about to see, given the peculiar conditions of working class dictatorship in the 20th century (happening first in the least advanced capitalist countries of Russia and China) it was not going to happen overnight. It was going to take a long time. In 1921 Russia, no one knew how long. The Russian Bolsheviks had to face up to the ugly fact that there is a big difference between wanting Communism and being able to have Communism. Something the Chinese would have to face up to by 1975-78. ---And, that the Communist International Movement must face up to today!
95Nor would people suddenly become altruistic and give their ``all'' for their fellow humans in the construction of a new and just society. In time, we would learn that people carry with them the psychological template of the ``Epoch'' (in this case the template of selfishness-sadism that characterizes the Servitude epoch and is imprinted in nearly everyone to greater or lesser degrees regardless of class) into which they were born and that would not change overnight either. In fact, even under the best of circumstances (fully developed near-Star Trek levels of technology) it will take generations.
This means that backward countries must build the capitalist mode of production first (at least the technological component) before they can even begin to consider building the communist one. We tried jumping into communism time and time again, only to fall back time and time again, for lack of mode of production preparation first and superstructural (ideological) preparation second. It also means that it is high time revolutionaries in the advanced capitalist countries bring about revolution in those countries if they want to get to communism more quickly. We know this is true not only because we have tried to jump and failed, but because the proof lies in the fact that this is the way history played out and history is always unfolding as it should.
In short, (1) wanting communism and having communism are two different things --- communism cannot exist in its modern form without the most advanced, indeed Star Trek-like, technology. (2) People are not inherently good. Even working people. People are not inherently bad either. They are just people and the way they think is conditioned first and foremost by their environment. The principal component of their environment is culture. The ideology arising is either altruistic (the primitive communism of the bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers and early farmers) or it is sadistic (as we see all so clearly in the history of slavery, feudalism and capitalism.) These are ugly facts but they are nevertheless facts and Bolsheviks must face them and accept them. It will take generations of inculcating modern altruism, after we have state power, before we will see the final disappearance of the selfish-sadistic ideology of the servitude epoch.
96
Back to Our Story in Russia
Meanwhile the Soviet New Class began to emerge as the bureaucracy the Leninists had to have to run the Party, the Government, the State and the public sectors of the economy (and, after the Spring of 1921, to regulate the private sectors.) Initially it was composed of Party people, old Czarist era bureaucrats of the willing variety, and a new kind of opportunist. No longer did we have just the romantic idealists of the pre-Revolutionary period or even the self-sacrificing Bolshevik and trade unionist shock troopers of the Civil War. Now, joining up were all those looking for advantage. For there was only one way forward and you had to talk a good show to get a job with these guys. How to tell the real revolutionaries from the opportunists? Well, there is no sure way. The secret police can only do so much (i.e. the Cheka.) Or the Party Control Commission or the Commissariat of Workers and Peasants Inspectors, etc. Periodic reform campaigns and purging of Party ranks helped but didn't ever fully succeed.
97As we shall see, the bureaucracy was also an open road for the honest and forthright and just as often manned and staffed by them. Bureaucracy, as a class, had and has, a legitimate role and it has lasted 6000 years in its evolution. In this volume you will see that origin and watch the evolution of the bureaucracy of the Chiefdoms, through the Stages of the Servitude Epoch, where it functions as one or another kind of ``boss-hierarchy'' for the ruling family or families or indeed class. The question is (1) how is it to be rewarded in the transitional stages of Socialism and (2) can differential reward be established without threatening the internal foundations of proletarian power (i.e., without corrupting the Party.) -And, in this historical explanation, we have that specific Marxist theory which explains (a) both the rise of modern revisionism and its collapse in the USSR and East Europe and (b) the totally different way in which the New Class is being handled in China.
98Construction of Russian Socialism is both fast and slow
The first and most important part of the bureaucracy the Bolsheviks had to replace was in the state apparatus, that is to say the military, and by the end of the Civil War they had pretty much succeeded in weeding out the Czarist officers and replacing them with officers of proletarian origins. War is an exceptionally fast way of naturally selecting the best (among the new people of proper origins) and for elevating them to higher positions of command.
Things were not nearly so smooth in Government as far as industry is concerned. It took years - the years from 1917 to 1934 - to fully train the first generation of technocrat managers. -And, although politics was emphasized in the new schools and technical training institutes as much as performance in the subject matter, the truth is that the extreme poverty of Russia would see that much was left to be desired in terms of being able to create a communist consciousness in these students. The new system of restored and controlled capitalism was extant to the degree that it could be explained by Bukharin one year after Lenin initiated NEP in his Economic Organization in Soviet Russia. An argument essentially the same as that of Deng in China in 1975-1978.
Lessons of the Cultural Revolution
In the end, as you will see in this book, the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1975) failed because it failed to deal with the New Class in any kind of final
definitive ''theoretical'' way. On the contrary, China's ultra-left demonstrated the futility of its ideological campaigns to get production moving in China, and in the end they were shown to have no real program to offer the Chinese people except to ``share the poverty.'' To the degree that the Cultural Revolution may be said to have succeeded, it is to the degree that everyone in China and much of the rest of the world, now knows that New Class separation is our number two enemy after US imperialism. The biggest problem we have coming up, after we liquidate the Gringo trillionaires and their sorry government, will be to establish our own rapidly transforming socialist stage and to do so without creating a permanent New Bureaucrat Class cum New Ruling Class.
99 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/2011/ABCC999/20110726/199.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ from .docx from author (see ABCs.el) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nilAt any rate, in 1975 --- 1978 the Chinese Party examined its heritage and especially the results of its first thirty years and there was a turn to a course very similar to the one Lenin launched in Russia in 1921 (the NEP, which we have reviewed and will do so in more depth in the text ---especially in Chapters 13 and 15) and about which Politburo spokesman Nicolai Bukharin wrote in detail in 1922. Of course now thirty four years later (i.e., after 1975) in China, what has emerged is a far more complex mixed economy than the Russians had ever had an opportunity to achieve in their seven years of NEP. After seven years of restored capitalism opposed at every turn by the imperialist encirclement Stalin had no choice but to go to a war footing as the necessity of getting serious about the coming war with capitalism in technological preparation. To do that he also had to complete the social revolution at home. This necessity for the survival of Socialism led to the Five Year Plans beginning in August 1928. In other words if the pressure had been off and the Soviet Union could have had access to capitalist bank credits and financing the Soviet Union could have industrialized under NEP. Only the agricultural pace toward collectivization and coops would have had to have been stepped up and that was already part of the NEP program. However the global capitalist class of this historic period could emerge with no policy other than the total destruction of Socialism and especially Bolshevism by aggression and eventual cataclysmic world war. The die was cast and we know how it played out in the form of World War II as it eventually came down.
100At least this time, as the 21st century unfolds, everyone is aware of the potential danger of the New Class becoming a ruling class by transforming the Communist Party itself. It took several years for the Chinese Party to complete this turn. Over the next three decades (1976 - 2006) the Chinese leadership would come up with a ``theoretical'' solution, which is consistent with what I have presented herein.
Wanting Communism is not enough to have Communism
However, having a solution and explaining it internationally are often two different things. Especially since the rank-and-file Left in the West is not well read, nor well educated, and does not have the discipline to sit down and study the progress of the NEP-like program of the CPC over the last 30 years. Furthermore, as the Left in the West has always had an ultra-left component that wants communism NOW, Euro-American leftists have been especially resistant to the idea of a mixed economy in China. But, as you will also see in this book, and as Lenin was forced to admit in 1921, wanting communism and being able to have communism are two distinctly different categories. Emotion is not enough. One has to accept what Marx and Engels discovered, and that is that the mode of production for modern Communism requires an extremely
101modern technological component. There is no short cut.
We have tried relying principally on the ideological and social organizational components of culture, in lieu of technological advance, and in all instances these attempts have ultimately failed. Without an extremely advanced industry and agriculture, communism is not possible in the post-Servitude Epoch way, anyway. ---And, it is not our intention to return to the primitive living conditions of ``primitive communism'' (the Stages of Hunting and Gathering and primitive agriculture) in order ``to share the poverty.'' Those who wish to follow that road now, after the experiments of the 20th century, are free to do so, but they are not communists nor Marxists nor Leninists, nor Maoists --- rather, they are a modern form of the old utopian socialists that Marx and Engels first confronted, exposed and defeated. Living in a ``commune'' in the forests of Oregon or the slums of Chicago is fine for those who wish to do so, but it is no more representative of what we communists have in mind for society overall, than the Kibbutz is representative of capitalist Israel. After reading this book you will know exactly what it is we have in mind --- in a phrase, modern communism, with Star Trek levels of advanced technology; that is, with the highest living standards and conditions possible, for everyone, to go along with it.
102Epilogue as Prologue
You revolutionary cadre (from a variety of political parties and tendencies) need this textbook summary in handbook form, so that you can better use our scientific grasp of causality and process in history to successfully defeat the tiny US ruling oligarchy, for it is the intention of this tiny group of super-billionaires and trillionaires that rule the USA to kill you and yours. Their ruling ancestors consciously set about killing tens of millions of US and European workers when they started the First World War. As I say, it is the intention of their descendants, now in power, to kill you! ---And, they have new means at their disposal, such as intercontinental disease, and environmental catastrophe of geologic epoch proportions, in addition to war, to use against you, and they will use them against you. These are examples of what they have in store for working people around the globe, but they do not include all of the evil plans of the billionaire and trillionaire elite in the USA and abroad. These are the families Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, DuPont, Bush, and their foreign allies such as the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (to name only a few.) You see, this gang of killers no longer need you. They see you as the enemy within. Ironically you are an enemy they have created, as a consequence of the laws of capitalist production. I am going to teach you about these laws of capitalist production, herein. ---And, along the way I will teach you about how capitalism as a ``stage'' in social and cultural evolution came about.
103You will learn, for example, in this book, why the capitalist ruling classes undertook the mass murder of tens of millions of European and North American workers in what they called The Great War of 1914. By the time you finish this book you will know why mass murder by war was the conscious policy of the capitalist ruling elite of North America and Europe; why it was one of the two main reasons the capitalists started their First World War. To stop them from doing the same thing again, this time against you and your families and friends, you must act first, now, before they succeed.
For the moment, US imperialist policies are primarily aimed at global domination of raw material inputs (e.g., oil and gas) to the factories they own on all the continents of
the globe. Also, for the moment, US imperialist policies are primarily aimed at controlling the globes cheapest labor-power resources. In part, this is because the tiny group of US ruling billionaire and trillionaire families is in desperate straits; they are far weaker today, than at any time since they established their hegemony over the Capitalist World in 1945. (Hegemony means asserting a predominate influence over others --- in this case, the US ruling families exerting dominance over the ruling families and classes of the other advanced capitalist countries.) In fact, the US ruling oligarchy of billionaire families and their (U.S.) Government have lost that hegemony in the past eight short years, as you will see, and they, and it, are now desperately striving to stave off total financial collapse. Thus, your first acts must encompass the concept of stopping their drive for global domination.
104We are in the last days of the imperialist phase of the Capitalist Stage. (Imperialism means shipping constant capital [machinery and factories] to colonial [now Third World] countries to take advantage of their cheap labor.) Imperialism is a phase of the Capitalist Stage which began soon after Capitalism was fully extant in Great Britain c. 1850, and reached a zenith in global terms, in the First World War period (1914-1918). Since then, imperialism has been the only form of large scale Capitalism, and it has become increasingly centralized. -And, in the aftermath of the Second World War, was (until very recently) hegemonized under the leadership of the US ruling financial families. The fact that US hegemony has collapsed during the last few years is a new development - very positive for our side - with special ramifications, not all of which we can yet foresee. Some of which we shall discuss at the close of this Handbook.
105As you read you will see why I say that the strategy of liquidating billionaire-trillionaire control over the North American People is a feasible and correct strategy to follow as the 21st Century unfolds. (This billionaire control exists as an unholy alliance of US comprador billionaires and foreign trillionaire families - as for example the Bush family and the Saudi so-called Royal Family, as demonstrated so well by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11). Along the way, you will figure out which tactical approaches may best be honed to your long term goals.
However, fighting the US ruling billionaire-trillionaire elite (and their foreign allies) over their policy of global domination of raw resource and cheap labor inputs, does not mean that you should spend all your time and energy in the Anti-Iraq-War Movement or for that matter in the anti-Afghanistan War movement. After all the more troops imperialism sends against the religious crackpots in these countries the fewer gringo troops we have to confront in this hemisphere! ---And if they don't destroy the nutballs we would have to do it anyway. At the same time if anti-Islamic war activity corresponds to ``base building'' fine. Otherwise, it is far more important to devote as much time as possible to organizing working people to (1) fight for popular power, and; (2) organize workers, union and non-union, organized and unorganized, (especially, the lowest ranks, the most oppressed) for the seizure of political power at the opportune moment, somewhere down the road. -And, (3) remember that in the end, it is the ``conscious'' working class mass base which will provide the ultimate block to the ruling oligarchy, by destroying imperialism (the final stage of capitalism) root and branch, once and for all. The final solution to the problem of those who would kill us, in their drive for super profits, is to seize power!
106Make no mistake, the final solution in the US will involve an armed struggle to
defend democracy from the fascist regime in Washington, and to go over, all the way, to the fight for Socialism! This is not going to end well for the enemies of the people; or, it will not end well for us. Unless I miss my bet altogether what is coming will make the French Revolution look like a Sunday School Picnic! You must either stop the elite or they will liquidate you. The armed struggle for a final solution is not going to be a pretty picture.
History is with Us
Remember this: We Bolsheviks have never admitted the word ``defeat'' into our vocabulary. We fight to the bitter end or until there is no one left to carry the guns. We do know the word Victory! Victory belongs to those who believe in it the most and who believe it the longest --- who sacrifice everything for it.
Remember what we are fighting for: the future we Bolsheviks have in mind is Star Trek like; a United Federation of Peoples. Our objective is to establish a Communist social order with such massive production that the slogan ``from each according to her ability to each according to her needs'' is the obvious way to live. The future our capitalist enemies of the people have in mind for you would have you made into Borgs!
For the purpose of this summary presentation I have left out the story, as it is understood today, of the origin of our universe, our solar system, the Earth, life upon it and the subsequent evolution of life - as fascinating as these topics are - to begin with the origin and emergence of Homo. Those of you who understand the importance of these former topics, as the framework for understanding cultural evolution, are referred to the many textbooks in astronomy and subatomic physics. Among them my own monograph ``New Perspectives in Physics, 1999, Jason W. Smith, Premier Books, Boise, 160 pp.'' for a new account of the Big Bang, and the creation of the fundamental particles that constitute force and matter and their antimode.-And, of course, there are many excellent textbooks in palaeontology and geology which will bring you up to date on modern conceptions of the origin and evolution of life on Earth and the plate tectonic history of the Earth itself.
107Because of space and time limitations I have to skip over these now fairly well understood stages in the origin and evolution of life on Earth, before and after the advent of hard-part fossils, even though the entire matter is directly germane to the way in which the biological foundation for ``culture'' came about. Suffice it to say that this evolution created the parameters upon which a, new, ``third'' form of matter came into existence. What anthropologists call ``culture.'' Serious students must always keep in mind that to understand how cultural ``software'' functions, one must also understand first, the biological ``hardware'' upon which culture is based. So, the evolution of invertebrate and vertebrate life is not a peripheral subject. Is is simply beyond the scope of this summary. The requirements of compact presentation are best served when we begin by coming directly to the evolution of the Order of Primates. For practical purposes this begins with
108the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the creation of vast new ecological niche opportunities, following the asteroid impact some 65 million years ago.
The dialectics of human sociocultural evolution require an understanding of the dialectics of human biological evolution so I want to begin with some commentary on our earliest relatives and how the biological where-with-all came into existence to support culture. Then we shall proceed directly to the key questions of causality and process in the evolution of cultural matter - i.e., people and their humanity.
Preparation for the Human Era of Necessity
We know there have been extraterrestrial contacts of the asteroid impact category, and these have created a series of sudden wrenching changes in the course of the evolution of life on Earth. Also, at the end of the pre-Cambrian there was a mass extinction of still uncertain cause (perhaps the global snowballing of Earth). Another event of geologic proportions occurred at the end of the Palaeozoic when Siberia was literally split apart as a dome some 1200 miles across began to build in its center. Out of that dome came perhaps the greatest outpouring of mantle rock (as lava) in the Earth's history occurring over many tens of thousands of years, leaving behind 60 mile wide and 1000 mile long seismic fissures in the surface. After the collapse of oxygen levels and the emergence of a new fauna (dinosaurs, birds, mammals) we have the Mesozoic and its Age of Dinosaurs (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous).
109The most famous of all the catastrophic changes is the one defining the end of the Mesozoic, caused by the asteroid impact centered near contemporary Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. -And, with it came the extinction of the dinosaurs and all forms of animal life weighing more than about 60 pounds in adulthood on land, and huge numbers of species of plant and animal life in the oceans. ---And a dramatic renovation of the botanical landscape of the entire world.
What is most important to us is the fact that the insectivore/prosimian complex of tiny animals radiated throughout the world in the Palaeocene. The palaeocene is the first geologic period in the Cenozoic (or most recent geologic epoch.) These small animals, of the size of prairie dogs, filled the ecological niches left after the sudden massive extinction of so many life forms 66 million years ago. If not for that the carriers of culture might have been the dinosaurian ``raptors.''
-And, it is time to memorize the geological periods below. Also, to put some landmark sociocultural features firmly in your memory bank. I suggest these, from most recent to the most ancient:
The Cenozoic Era
Years Ago Geological Period
~10,500 Holocene <-Agricultural Revolution (Bands & Tribes)
Chiefdoms emerge and give rise to the Servitude
Epoch (c.4500 BC Old World 1000 BC New World)
~1,000,000 Pleistocene <---archaic and modern humans {H. erectus ;
H. sapiens} Living in Band and Tribal Societies.
Pliocene <---the first (ape-like) humans {Homo australopithecus)
Living in Band Societies.
Miocene <---Old World Apes {Dryopithecus; Ramapithecus}
Oligocene <---Old World Monkeys {Aegyptopithecus}
Eocene <-Prosimians become monkeys {Northarctus}
Palaeocene <-Prosimian primates radiate worldwide {Plesiadapis}
The Mesozoic Era
~66 million Cretaceous <-----------ends with asteroid impact at
Merida, Yucatan.
Jurassic
Triassic
The Palaeozoic Era
_%_-----------Siberia split in half by mantle eruption
Permian
Pennsylvanian
Mississippian
Devonian
Silurian
Ordovician
Cambrian
Pre-Cambrian
Origin of the Earth ~4.6 billion years ago.
The dialectics of primate biological evolution feature contemporary natural selection producing biological alternatives, as usual, for eventual adaptation to future changing environmental conditions. This time, however, emerging in the primate line is the potential for the ability to use an entirely new way of adaptation which, in form, is the dialectical opposite of traditional natural selection. (Those primates that make the entire trip outlined below become human. Those who do not make the trip will not get further than where they are, more or less, in the evolutionary schema of primate speciation.) Now adaptation takes the form of ``controlling'' environmental change. This new way of adaptation is what we call the ``cultural'' way in anthropology. Thus you can see why we can say cultural matter is the ``third form'' of matter (the physical and biological forms preceding). -And, its precursor requirement is an expanded (human) brain capacity of the right type that is, organized in a special way. Currently substantial progress has been made in isolating those human brain genes that are accelerated in their evolutionary change rate over those of the chimpanzee. But, however this biological factual foundation is laid, so to speak, human evolution of the biological type will be seen to be decisively changing course because of the evolution of a complex of behavioral proto-traits. The behavioral traits include collective tool use and defense, and thinking and symbol-use. The complex is acting as the prime director for natural selection; not natural selection operating directly for genetic features of fleetness of foot, keenness
110of eyesight, etc. But natural selection for bigger and better brains, in the sense of abstract thought capability. Brains that allow cultural evolution to take over the direction to be taken in the future evolution of Homo sapiens as a species because this thinking, collective, tool using proto-activity, is what is giving them the ability to survive and reproduce consistently effectively. This is the first key for you to understand, and this is a rather well agreed upon anthropological principle (if not always well explicated.)
During the Palaeocene, and Eocene, the consequences of a life in the bushes and trees brought about a new kind of prosimian. You want to remember that the Palaeocene begins immediately with the wreckage of this planet created by the asteroid impact. The foliage that survived, mutated, and spread throughout the world, was quite different than that preceding it. Now there were a great many small bushes and trees of all sizes and grass (there were antecedent grass forms before the asteroid impact but they were few and far between). In this environment are our earliest ancestors among the primates, and they flourished.
This is the phase called the arboreal adaptation period in physical anthropology. Our basic body plan emerges at this time. Hands and feet that are prehensile, arms and legs, binocular vision and a rotating neck, expanded cerebral cortex, ability to assume upright posture, and so forth.
Recently discovered early Palaeocene fossils from China show a chipmunk sized mammal coexisting with giant 7 foot tall Carnivorous birds extant over most of the Earth by 9 million years after the asteroid impact. These tiny mammals had clearly developed primate prehensile hands.
One of the early fossil prosimian primates is an early Lemur called plesiadapis. These arose after Tree Shrews, which still had claws instead of flat nails. Other than a few of these prosimians, all other primates lost claws in favor of flat nails.
We see the change of the location of the eye orbits beginning to occur, so that binocular stereoscopic vision replaces the lateral orbit monocular eyesight of the insectivores and the lower prosimians. But flat nails, precision grip, and binocular vision, are simply associated features of arboreal adaptive anatomy. What is really important is that there is an enlarged cerebellum associated with this increase in the visual and motor cortex. These traits were obviously caused by the rigorous natural selection that accompanied life in the trees and high bushes.
Why is this important? Because abstract thought appears initially among primates as a product of the same part of the brain as that responsible for motor control in precision manipulation and with vision.
The Family Adapidae is the second level of fossil Lemur and is important to us because it shows the eyes truly in a forward position, meaning that the transition to binocular vision was complete. -And the fossil family Northartidae shows excellent prosimian to monkey characteristics by middle Eocene times.
So, the brain was expanding and in the area most important to our analysis - that associated with abstract thought.
Of course, not all individuals in a species continue to evolve. For as long as there is no challenge to their genetic make-up they are perfectly free to continue as they are; they will survive until some great environmental change comes along that they cannot
tolerate.
However, since erroneous DNA duplication keeps throwing up variation in the form of abnormal individuals, each species will generate aberrant forms; some of these will prove adept at living within some particular environment. Some will not. When environmental change does come there is a broader spectrum of responses proposed by biology to the dispositional effect of nature. Thus, the increasing reliance upon the new and improved primate brain led onward and upward among some individuals to monkeyhood.
Fully developed fossil monkeys have been excavated in Egypt and are now known from many localities. These are called Aegyptopithecus. They have the best organized brains of any animal then extant, and are by far larger than the lower prosimian primates from which they evolved. We find them in Oligocene times. These are the fossil Old World Monkeys.
The Old World Monkeys gave rise to the early Apes. Fossil specimens include the Dryopithecines and the Ramapithecines.
From these kinds of apes emerged the first human-like primates.
Human-like apes gave rise to ape-like humans. We call these the Australopithecines!
Brain Changes in Favor of Abstract Thought
The important ball to keep your eye on is brain reorganization in favor of abstract thought. This is the really important change going on in the line leading to humanity. Once humans are extant on the face of the Earth it will be the continuing expansion of the brain to handle culture which is the most important thing changing.
The split of the hominoid elements out of the anthropoid ape stock probably occurred between 10 and 7 million years ago. The term hominoid I use to include the still largely missing fossil data that links the anthropoid apes to the hominids. There is a lot of sloppy terminology in both professional and popular literature, but for your purposes think of hominid as the line beginning with Homo as a genus. So, we have:
Modern Humans H. sapiens
Gorillas, Orang-utans, Chimpanzees
Gibbons Archaic Humans Homo erectus
Early Humans {Hominids} Homo australopithecus
Human-like Apes {Hominoids}
Anthropoid Apes
Monkeys
The hominoid transitional step is not yet very well known in the fossil record; we have not yet been able to identify stone tools for them. Although, logically, we must assume they at least used rocks to throw, cut and crush (in their natural form,) so that we may be able to find some stones of this sort in sealed and well dated stratigraphic components.
A chart of the overall stages of sociocultural evolution can be seen on page 316 of this book.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 2. Sex and SpeechAfter the expanded brain and abstract thought capacity what broke the hominoids out of the anthropoid ape stock? The answer lies in two more critical new components of a biologically enabling nature - for a total of three balls to juggle, if you will. One of these is sex; the other is speech.
Primate sex and speech are the only things of significance to be added to the genetic pie on top of the arboreal adaptive anatomy and the concomitant expanded abstract thought capability. Let's talk about sex first.
Human sexuality required the revolutionizing of the biology of the sexual system. 365 day a year female receptivity to male advances is what separates hominoids from the great apes. It provided assured group life for the obvious reason that you can't have non-masturbatory sex if you don't have access to a partner. However, constant female receptivity is not the only feature of primate sexuality that assures group life. Male constancy in pursuing sexual pleasure is just as important.
Homosexuality and Heterosexuality
This is true because for the advantages of group life, it is irrelevant whether sexuality is heterosexual or homosexual. The mechanics of sexual object identification among higher primates allow for both to occur as children are socialized. Thus, homosexuality is a permanent part of the human condition, as well as that of our nearest relatives. Which explains, for example, why we have lesbian chimps in the Congo, within the chimpanzee bands. Human sexuality (and that of our nearest relatives) is primarily for the purpose of social organization not for the purpose of reproducing the species. There will always be someone to impregnate the female. Then as well as now. The structure of sexual relationships acts as the skeleton for the musculature of social organization.
111The key to understanding human sexuality is group life. It gave the hominoids and the chimps safety from predators. Once hominoids emerged as social animals they had conquered the Earth, as far as fearing predators is concerned. That is, as long as they stayed ``social.'' In other words as long as they stayed together. A wandering lone hominoid could be caught and eaten then as well as now.
Finally, there is one more physical change in the hominoid line which we want to point out. One which is intimately related to the efficiency of group life. Can you guess what that is.
Talking
Speech is rudimentary in many animals including the chimps and the gorillas in
the sense that they make noises that communicate ideas. Higher primates have the abstract thought capability to make words and sentences but they don't have the physiological ability to enunciate the phonemes (the fundamental repeatable units of sound) to make the morphemes (fundamental units of meaning) which constitute words. This required an anatomical change in the throat and voice box. Such anatomical change requires genetic selection over a long period of time. That genetic selection had to occur no later than about seven to five million years ago among the hominoids.
But it is not speech that separates the hominoids from the other great apes. Speech is a result of the group life that was shaping them; it accelerates the process of strengthening the group efficiency by making the coordination of hunting and gathering, offense and defense, invincibly efficient. It makes cooperative collectivity permanent.
Was speech ``just'' a matter of improving the efficiency of group life in the defensive posture? Was it ``just'' the matter of making the collective production of tools and using them to produce the fundamental needs of life more efficient? What about accelerating the rate of brain alteration because of the warp-speed advance in the use of intellectual symbols? (Spoken words.)
Yes. Talking was a revolutionary gigantic leap forward in facilitating the way the earliest people could intellectualize about the world around them. Talking, made the passing of learned behavior to successive generations certain. Initiating a true material cumulative process of ``cultural memory'' being passed on from parents to children. It made the use of complex kinship reckoning feasible. Thus, the complex organization of society became possible. The selective advantage is obvious; we can see why, therefore, talking did accelerate the rate of genetic expansion of the brain itself. As the molecular biology of brain genetics develops perhaps a test can be designed to relate these genetic changes to changes in vocal anatomy and other aspects of cultural evolution.
112The Pattern of Avoiding Surplus Social Product is Set
-And, complex kinship reckoning and complex social organization became principal ways of using social time; simultaneously diverting some of that social time from becoming ``labor time.'' In effect the result was a true dialectical opposite: in other words, the first mechanism, by which human surplus social product accumulation was negated in favor of only producing what was needed day to day, is the mechanism of spending time thinking and symboling rather than engaging in productive activity. -And, this is critical, for the avoidance of surplus product creation is the basis upon which primitive society avoids envy, jealousy, coveting and the like anti-social centrifugal tendencies that are the only tendencies that can tear Band society apart! The pattern of doing non-productive things to evade surplus social product accumulation has been set! It will be with us for millions of years. In fact until the last six thousand years it was the only way people had to handle the danger of too much produce inequitably distributed among a Band (or Tribe).
113At any rate, the first true hominids (humans) we do have in fossil form, as well as their stone tools. They walked the Earth five million years ago! They are known best - almost exclusively - from Africa. But there are reasons to consider the possibility that these Homo australopithecines have extended across the entire tropical and subtropical Old World from Africa to China's Pacific coast.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 3: The First Band StageThe Last Human-like Apes Become the First Ape-like
Humans by Virtue of Their Struggle to Create Value.
By ``value'' we mean that which is created in modern society (say, capitalist and socialist) in the process of putting ``labor-power'' (a special economic category; distinct from simple ``labor'') to work on machinery (the system of machinofacture we shall discuss more extensively below: Chapter 12 ``The Capitalist Stage'') which is used to reimburse the possessor of said labor-power her subsistence, and that which is created to maintain the machinery itself. However, all things have origins. Labor-power is a commodity having its origins in the collective labor of primitive society - also, collective labor has itself an origin, and that can be found in the evolution of Homo. We can arbitrarily define the period when the first ape-like humans emerge, as the period in which collective production of necessities of life and the tools obtaining them co-exist together, and as a complex of traits constitute the dividing line between Hominid and the earlier Hominoid stock.
114From the dim mists of antiquity, some seven to five million years ago, there did emerge this entirely new phenomenon among living, breathing, animal life - and that was the complex of anatomical features we have just reviewed - which in their totality brought about the capability of cultural creativity. At first and for many millions of years it would center around the creation of tools and necessities, and in the maintenance or re-creation of said tools - that is, the creation of ``primitive value.'' Which is to say the process of manufacturing things of everyday life (consumables) via the use of other things that had also been created - i.e., tools. -And, in using these tools, the first hominids entered into ``social'' relations.
115Along the way people began to become creative in another way also. They began to experience the feeling of freedom that comes with cognition of self and the belief one understands something of the world around one's self. Thinking, cognizant, self-aware, conscious, self-actualization vis a vis the ``material'' world (real world environment) in which this awareness emerged created along the way simple real life reflections. Necessarily, where real life reflection was not self-evident in its operation, we have the creation of hypothesis (we call superstition) about those non-tangible or non-understandable phenomena; in this way people created the ``spiritual'' world.
These mental or psychological categories constitute what we call the superstructure or ideological essence that arises on the mode of creative production of the fundamental needs of daily life (food, shelter, clothing, warmth, defense.) That production mode, and the ideological superstructure that arises on it, constitutes an entirely new and separate form of matter. What anthropologists call culture. This Mode of Production has two internal categories: technology and social organization.
Ideology
Technology ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂà_%_ Social Organization
This Above is What Anthropologists Call Culture
Culture is both tangible, as you can see above; and, somewhat intangible, at the same time. It arises on biology, as biology arose upon physics and chemistry. Yet it is entirely new. As biology was once entirely new. Culture is subject to its own laws of cause and process. Intimately related to its biological carrier yet fundamentally separated. As biology was subject to its own laws of cause and process. Intimately related to the non-living physical world yet fundamentally separated.
When the human-like apes could walk, talk, and engage in social life and cooperation in pursuing the reproduction of their daily needs, as the key to the reproduction of themselves from generation to generation, they had become the first ape-like humans. We call them the australopithecines. The hominids had arisen from the hominoids.
Both the tools and the things that these early people made with them are what we call primitive value. These creatures had a type of social organization that has been called a horde; in its initial stages it was probably not much different from a chimpanzee band. A group of males sharing the sexual favors of a group of females. The females bearing and raising their children. Bonds of affection and reliance develop among the children for their mothers and quite often between certain males and certain females. Among some chimps between females also; so it must have been between females among the australopithecines. Then as now. {-And, presumably, the same for some males.}Thus, the work of contemporary field primatologists is of critical importance for us to understand the social and sexual lives of our earliest ancestors. A molecular biological search is underway and currently is providing promising results in the evolution and development of human vs. chimpanzee RNA genes where human-specific changes occurred in a much accelerated fashion. Thus, as time proceeds we should be able to nail down the natural selecting factors and correlate them with specific steps in hominid emergence. Until then we are stuck with our rather old-fashioned stones and bones approach to these earliest humans.
116The australopithecines used sticks and stones and built crude shelters. They fought against predators, as well as capturing animals as food, in a collective fashion. Gathering what they could from the environment in which they lived they found solace and security in collectivity and talking. Having along with this an omnivorous food consumption pattern the world was theirs.
Physically, the australopithecines were not much different from the norm of stature and weight of the World's Homo sapiens populations today. They were a little shorter and weighed a little less but not that much. {Never compare fossil specimens to North American averages for stature and weight, because these are skewed far to the extreme even on today's modern population spectrum for stature and weight.}
What is different about the australopithecine populations anatomically, is the size of the cranium. They had about 1/3 the cubic centimeter capacity of modern people. The key question is why?
Better put, we might say why did the Homo cranial capacity double and then grow by half once again in the three grades of humanity?
From one million years ago:
Homo sapiens --<----- ~1500 cc
Between two and one million years ago:
Homo erectus <------------- ~1000 cc
From five million to two million years ago:
Homo australopithecus <-- ~500 cc
It is not a question with a simple answer. It looks simple. One says to oneself that the reason must be because they made better tools and thus benefited by increased rates of survival, as they got smarter. It's such a seemingly obvious answer that the question has not been seriously considered very often.
A closer examination, however, shows us that it took millions of years for people to produce tools more sophisticated than hand axes. Yet their brains doubled in size in that period of time! -And, they spread into the most northerly climatic regimes of the Old World.
Yes, as they moved northward they needed more clothes; they had to have an associated tool kit of hide-cutting and sewing tools; but, these are not such a great technological advances over what they had in tropical and subtropical zones of Africa and Asia. There had to be some other factor at work which put a heavy premium on abstract thought. What could put so heavy a demand on Homo that people would pay such a high price for the ability to think in increasingly sophisticated ways that this brain structure trait became the only DNA segment of substance that did change in their biology? (Mitochondrial DNA markers are not matters of ``substance'' in this presentation regardless of their utility in tracing population relationships.)
117What Other Genetic Alterations Occurred?
Yes, skin color changed. As people moved northward they acquired the genetic prohibition on the production of melanin (from the melanocytes in their skin) giving them whiter skin. This allowed the vitamin D production which would have been lethal in the hot tropical zone to reach proper levels in the effected skin in the cold sunlight depleted northern temperate and alpine zones. If you were in Scandinavia or Britain you would have only your hands, face and feet exposed to the sun for much of the year; what vitamin D was produced was going to have to be produced on those tiny skin areas so you can't have a lot of melanin screening out the sun's rays. {All races have the same amount of cells that produce melanin. But different races have different genetic prohibitions on the amount produced by these cells. Among negroids the melanocytes make lots of melanin. Among caucasoids very little. This regulation of Vitamin D production is the principal reason.}
118But, skin color doesn't mean anything fundamental! It has nothing to do with what really counts. Brain power.
Nor, does hair form, nor stature, nor weight, etc. etc. These things vary according to local need, when populations are resident in said areas for ten thousand years - or more. That's all.
So, what was driving the doubling of cranial capacity among humans?
So, Why Did People Expand Into Northerly More Hostile Regions?
Yes, they needed to make better tools to deal with the more hostile environments into which they were moving - but, why move there to begin with?
Population pressure?
Not really. These human bands were tiny. These people had short life spans. Most died not long after reproductive age (menarche in women starts the clock); at any rate in their twenties they were on their way to the grim reaper. They lived in groups of 20 to 60 individuals and had no inherent need to move very far for reasons of population pressure. There were very few of them and as individuals they weren't around long
We are not sure how many people lived on the Earth at the end of the last ice-age; the beginning of the agricultural revolution proper, in other words. But, estimates based on various criteria put the number no higher than ten million, globally. -And, many experts think that it was only 1/10th of that - or one million on the entire planet. Africa alone could easily have handled a million to ten million hunting and gathering humans. So what propelled them all over the globe. {By this time no one disagrees that the entire Western Hemisphere was populated by hunting and gathering bands, as well as the Old World.}
The answer is that migration into increasingly difficult areas had inherently within it the fact that more social product would be necessary day to day, than the day to day amount of social product required in the original Eden. In other words, migration indirectly assures compliance with the prime directive not to produce surplus social product by making expanded production necessary rather than surplus.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 4: Living with the EnemyAfter security was institutionalized through group life the principal enemy ceased being the outside world. The only thing that could destroy these groups were their own failures to maintain unity. The enemy was not the lion, the tiger or the elephant. The enemy was envy, jealousy and coveting. These things would blow a group up.
Competition for sexual mates among all concerned was not a sufficient force to dissolve a group. The hominoids had already dealt with this concomitant of intensive sexual activity, in their biological evolution, each step of the way. It had to be something more powerful than that.
Let's say it again: the answer is that surplus social product was dangerous to the health of all concerned hominoids and hominids. In fact, it still is the most explosive thing in human society. It's like a powerful drug and it takes a lot of control to use it. For five million years people thought the best thing was just to say no!
It took me forty years to figure out that what was driving the expansion of the human cranial capacity was the critically important need not to produce surplus social product. It is this need that (1) underlies migration and it is this need which underlies the drive to spend more social time (2) doing non-productive things. Because we live in the Servitude Epoch this was hard to see. The one thing that characterizes all Stages of that Epoch {Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism} is the drive to produce surplus value regardless of all other factors. The one thing that is so difficult for people today to get a handle on, is that maximizing production was an idea that never existed until the Chiefdom Stages (when it was in its incipient form) and until Slavery {Civilization} emerged some 6000
119years ago.
Prior to the emergence of first Chiefdoms and then Slavery, the prime directive of the primitive communistic way of life of the hunting and gathering Bands and the Tribal Agriculturalists was to produce only primitive value!
What does that mean? What's the difference between primitive value and primitive surplus social product?
The Primitive Form of Value and Surplus
Let us review again what I discussed above with regard to the definition of primitive value. By primitive value in these studies I mean two things. The cost of maintaining the lives of these early people in the very rudimentary form of food, shelter, clothing, defense, etc. From day to day. -And, of course, in this way they could survive to reproduce sexually from generation to generation. I call that Value 1 in the formula we shall be using. The second kind of value is that which is invested in the production of the tools people use to make the first kind of value. I call this Value 2. The Law of Fundamental Needs (reproducing life from day to day and generation to generation) among humans is satisfied in this new ``cultural'' way --- i.e., the cultural production of value.) The cultural buffer (technology, social organization and ideology) between our species and nature is an entirely new phenomenon on the Earth.
120Primitive surplus social product (which in strictly economic terms is also ``proto-surplus value'' - we shall see below what is meant by ``surplus value'' in modern economics) is simply that amount of product of hunting and gathering beyond what can be instantly shared and consumed. It is a category peculiar to the Band Stages.
As society becomes more complex - especially, in the Chiefdoms period and the succeeding Servitude Epoch - these terms and the formulae in which we insert them will evolve and transform, continuing as they do so to be critically important to understanding every aspect of modern production. But, in the beginning it is a childishly simple relationship.
To resolve the potential crisis of inequality, created when surplus social product is on hand, people needed bigger and better brains than those available to the australopithecines; these earliest people found migration into more hostile climates an effective way of dumping labor-time in the day to day production of Value 1 and Value 2. Thus, avoiding (putting off) the day of reckoning when surplus social product would be on hand no matter what! {The agricultural revolution when it finally occurs will feature the irreversible release of surplus social product, but that is long into the future.} In other words the australopithecines needed to take the enemy from within and put it outside of them once again, and one easy way of doing this was to move into more environmentally challenging regions, where increased amounts of social product are necessary rather than surplus.
121People managed in this way, and in directing potential labor-time into other social activities, to avoid the irreversible release of surplus social product for about four million years. What was so dangerous about surplus social product?
Envy, jealousy, coveting. Especially for people with a brain too small to grasp the details of their behavior in any scientific way. What they knew was that the sharing cooperation they exhibited in food collecting and collective defense made them strong. Intraband strife over surplus undermined this cooperation because it negated sharing. It
undermined collective defense too.
Sharing what you have instantly is the answer to avoiding the socially dissolutional tendencies of envy, jealousy and coveting. Sharing binds people together, therefore, and secures the production of Value 1 and Value 2. It is a centripetal process. It is the foundation of primitive social unity. But, it would be even better if excess social product didn't even come into the picture of daily life at all, so that you didn't have to face the question of how to share it.
The foundation of social dissolution on the other hand is the centrifugal process created by envy, jealousy and coveting.
People Achieve Unity and Affluence
As I indicated above, in addition to finding more challenging environments, people began to pour more effort into their social organizational component of culture. I alluded to this emphasis on social organization, and the idea system necessarily inherent in primitive kinship reckoning and increasingly complex sodality social structure, (as opposed to an emphasis on technology) because it shows us how ``time'' (that is to say, ``social time'') was dumped (so to speak) in non-technological activities. In seeing this we can explain how something other than technological progress succeeded in diverting social time from becoming productive labor time and why therefore technological innovation was so slow for millions of years. That is thinking about and talking about social organization and creating ideas and categories of thought and indeed specialized kinship words are all things keeping people busy and not constantly scavenging (hunting and gathering) for food like most animals do. This attitude (lack of attention) toward tools is the exact opposite of the way contemporary capitalist modes of production accelerate innovation at an exponentially increasing rate --- which you will come to understand in the section on ``innovation'' in Chapter 12 below.
122After all, the technology available to Homo australopithecus was quite sufficient to produce the ``fundamental needs'' of group life. Any further creation of value has within it the potential of becoming ``private'' (individual or subgroup) ownership unequal between persons and/or proto-families and that would be a hidden invitation to violence and social dissolution. Remember, the underlying prime directive to produce what is needed and no more, has itself the underlying desire for unity rather than disunity. This is the hidden explanation for what drove selection for the doubling of the brain power of Homo. Increased brain power made increasing concentration on categories other than technology certain. Thus did Homo australopithecus give rise to Homo erectus.
123Let's say it again this way. It takes brains to 1) figure out how to organize society on the basis of kinship and to assign rights and responsibilities accordingly. It takes brains to (2) invent sodality structures (non-kinship categories that cut across kin lines such as men's clubs and women's clubs). It takes brains to come up with (3) a supernatural idea system of cognizing the real world. But, if you had (a) the brains to do these things and (b) spent much of your daily life thinking about and talking about these things rather than creating potential surplus, then this kind of primitive affluence would allow, and indeed promote, unity and the group would survive as disunity would disappear from the face of the Earth. (Note: we will define ``affluence'' scientifically and extensively below.) At least until long after you and yours were buried in the ground. Millions of years thereafter, in the case of the Homo australopithecus populations!
124
-And, Homo erectus populations, with their much bigger brains, found a continuation of these patterns of diverting social time much to their advantage as well. The proof lies in the fact that the human brain continued to expand by vastly increasing in size. You will recall this further brain increase is on the order of ~500 cc (from ~1000 cc for H. erectus to ~1500 cc for H. sapiens.) The pattern of continuing to move into more challenging environments where social time spent as labor-time was necessary simply to provide the ``fundamental needs'' of group life (rather than the creation of what would have been surplus in the more bountiful environments from which they came - those needs more quickly and easily provided earlier in the tropical and subtropical zones of the original Eden.)
125As these better socially organized - via kinship reckoning and sodalities - peoples, and their more sophisticated supernaturalism confronted the world, they found that by ``moving-on'' into new and more challenging environments that they were all busy; every day producing limited value, sharing it and just living the simple life. In this way they had the necessary but minimal amount of surplus social product on hand. In their minds they were affluent. No objective social basis existed for stealing. People covet what they see; not what they have never seen, don't have and can't have. The resulting permanent intra-society peace achieved becomes part of the reward one has for this simple way of life and a pillar of being affluent as defined here. In other words, these people are happy because they have the necessary things of daily life and that's that.
126However, dialectically there was in this surplus avoidance patterning an opposite beginning to emerge.
Note: Culture Contact
It is this simple fact that affluence is defined among primitive peoples as having that needed for daily life and nothing more based on what they know, which is another proof in its converse of the entire thesis presented herein. When a ``superior'' culture (invariably defined as a technologically more advanced culture) meets an ``inferior ``culture the latter often collapses altogether as we see time and time again with the impacting of Native American societies by incoming White society. The Russians had a similar history with the Eskimo and Herding peoples of their Far North and Siberia.
What we have here is the new fact that there ``are'' new things to covet. In this case the ``inferior'' culture people had no previous knowledge that these things existed and were obtainable. Overnight their way of thinking about things was changed in a de facto revolutionary way simply via culture contact.
Still another Way of Spending Social Time
Along their palaeolithic way people also found that a good way to dump social time before it became labor time was in handicrafts. Making things. Making things again and again also means making some of them better and different; for new previously unthought-of of uses. Thus, handicrafts are inherently a kind of social time dumping that leads inexorably, if invisibly, to increasing technological sophistication. (A dialectical conundrum.)
Resistance is Futile.
Resistance to technological improvement becomes futile. -And, technological
sophistication also becomes increasingly desirable as the challenge of new environments increases. As we have also seen this migration into new and harsher environments is also another way of saying social time dumping is transformed into productive social time without increasing surplus social product! Thus, you can see technological sophistication not only does not threaten constant social surplus product on hand but does so by transforming that ``surplus'' social product into ``necessary'' social product. So, technological sophistication is a concomitant of the territorial expansion of the human race. But, not its cause.
Again, these two ``opposites'' (to social time expenditure in ways calculated to avoid the production of surplus social product) were inherent in the very process of avoidance.
I am not illustrating this book so I will leave it to you to get pictures of Oldowan, Chellean, Acheulean, Levalloisian, Clactonian tools and techniques. I shall simply note that stone tools become increasingly sophisticated between five million and one million years ago. However, it didn't require four million years to learn how to take all the surface off of a cobble or a flake of stone rather than just a few flake removals to get a cutting edge.
When it is all said and done, what is crystal clear is that people doubled their cubic centimeter cranial capacity in that four million years because of the importance of making culture work for them. That meant organizing their social relations to minimize friction internal to these primitive hunting and gathering Bands. To produce only what they needed (which is Value 1 and Value 2) and to do anything and everything to avoid the production of surplus. All the things I have mentioned above including and especially their ``intellectualizing'' about the ``supernatural'' world, then associating these ``ideas'' with the kinship organization of society honed their abstract thought skills. The better their ability to think abstractly, (combined with their sexually motivated group life and their ability to express their thoughts with precision due to speech), the better their selective advantage in the environments they confronted.
127Every Sociocultural evolutionary stage has its own General Crisis driving it and in this case the general crisis is that created by the need to create daily needs collectively versus producing too much.
We can illustrate this australopithecine cultural mode of production in a formula:
The Australopithecines
l + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2
Produce enough
But no more
l = human labor (which much later will become the category of labor-power)
t = technology (Oldowan stone tools)
V1 = cost of life (food, shelter, clothing, etc.)
V2 = cost of maintaining Oldowan technology.
__ = General Crisis
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 5: The Second Band StagePeople Make Themselves by Struggling to Create
Fundamental Needs (Value) but not Surplus Social Product
The actual course of human evolution is not dividable into incompatible species so that one day people can mate and produce fertile offspring and the next day some are so advanced that they can no longer do the same with more ``primitive'' neighbors. That is never the case in biological evolution anyway.
At any given point in time all humans were capable of mating and producing fertile offspring (assuming that all other things are normal.) What we should be thinking about, anyway, is that there are three rather distinct grades of humanity based on cubic centimeter cranial capacity of the fossil skull data, we can group in time. These three grades of humanity can be associated with general levels of subsistence and modes of production; all of which we can detect in the remnant material culture we archaeologists dig up.
The at-bottom reason for the doubling of the cranial capacity that leads to the archaic form of modern human - that is Homo erectus - was as we have seen surplus avoidance. But, the formula for production stays the same. (H. Australopithecus had ~500cc of cranial capacity and H. erectus roughly ~1000cc of cranial capacity.)
The General Crisis here is the same as it was in the first Stage. We create a second sociocultural evolutionary stage in our sequence because these people are twice as smart as their predecessors (or at least have brains twice the cubic centimeter cranial capacity of their preceding ancestors) but the General Crisis continues as it was.
l + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2
Produce enough
But no more
l = human concrete laboring activity; i.e., human labor (Homo erectus)
t = hand ax technology
V1 = cost of life
V2 = cost of maintaining hand ax technology
__ = The locus of the General Crisis which continues in the exact same form
New challenging environments, social time dumping into non-labor time activities of intellectualizing the supernatural world and the kinship organization of society, alongside the application of real world knowledge and discovery to the handicraft industries of the band - all in the course of collecting animal and plant food - assisted in the sharing cooperation essential to keep the enemy outside; keeping the inside world a place of comfort and safety for the two or three decades that constituted a human lifetime.
Brain size doubled.
Ideology Emerges
Although superstition is the enemy of modern science and intelligence, it was also
its mother. (An archetype dialectical paradox.) Primitive people lived in a world of superstition. But the important thing about superstition is that it established a complex abstract world that was the intellectual framework for their cognition of the ``real'' world. All that remains is to make that ``unreal,'' real world construct, into an increasingly ``real,'' real world model. -And, eventually, we shall have modern science!
We know about primitive unreal (superstitious) world views from the study of animism and animatism among living primitives. From what is called the ethnographic record. {Ethnologists (Cultural Anthropologists) write ethnography - thus the term.}We know about contemporary unreal (superstitious) world views from the study of religion.
The world of the hunting and gathering band person is a world of so-called animistic and animitistic spirits. Meaning that everything from the lowly pebble to the great spectaculars of nature has a supernatural component in the minds of primitive people. -And, to all of this, is hooked the aura and mysticism that surrounds the ceremonial life of the band woman and man and child, with regard to their rights and responsibilities to one another, on the kinship organized chart of their little group.
This is why Lewis Henry Morgan's discovery of kinship terminology as a key to the kinship system, which in turn is the sole basis upon which primitive society is organized, was such a tremendous discovery. It is why we consider Morgan to be the father of modern anthropology. (Kinship terminology, and the social organizational system it reflected, constituted the subject matter of two of Morgan's greatest works including Ancient Society which also changed Karl Marx's perception of human history. These discoveries of Morgan's propelled Marx into his study of primitive society in the last years of his life, 1877-1883.) (See The Ethnological Notebooks, Karl Marx, unpublished manuscript until translated and edited, with an extensive introductory commentary, by Lawrence Krader 1972. Also, the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1888, Frederick Engels, in many editions. ---And for some further oral comment on my part there are the audio sections at our new website.
128At any rate, these archaic humans had evolved in the period between two and one million years ago, and occupied virtually all of the Old World; possibly the New World too. This latter hypothesis will be tested in the 21st century and resolved on the basis of fact rather than fancy.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 6: The Third Band StageThe archaic human populations we call Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens or modern people with roughly 1500 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity by one million years ago. All of the erectus populations made this journey. There was no fantasy-land separation of the grades of humanity with some pockets left behind. Culture was always the factor being selected for. Technical competence and social organizational and ideological sophistication were the universals responsible for nature acting in favor of the increasing cranial capacity. That's the end of that story.
Broad-spectrum Wild Resource Exploitation is a Revolution
Triggering a new General Crisis
What is new and revolutionary to understand is that these Homo sapiens populations faced the crisis of broad-spectrum wild resource exploitation for the first time. The ability to exploit virtually every living animal and plant resource was at hand.
Why was this a crisis?
Because such exploitative ability has within it the assurance that surplus social product is increasingly likely as an outcome - exactly the opposite of what all this social time expenditure of millions of years was about. By dumping social time in the ways we have just discussed, primitive people managed to stave off the terminal deepening of the crisis of increased competence in production (too much on hand) until now - now the ``potential'' of nearly unlimited surplus social product on hand could no longer be deferred. In other words, the broad-spectrum wild resource revolution which had been inherent abstractly, was now at the door. It was the enemy at the gate and the ways of a million years or more would no longer suffice to ameliorate the outcome. Every step they would now take to delay the inevitability of surplus social product on hand instead made having it on hand the immediate and irreversible result. A true dialectical irony.
129The archaeological evidence is universally in line with this interpretation and compellingly conclusive in this regard. We see all over the Old World from seaside camp villages on the French Riviera {c. 400,000 BP} to grassland burning South African bands {c. 100,000 BP;} to the Chinese of Choukoutien {500,000 to 100,000 BP} that people had learned a very great deal about their environments and had started controlling them in a variety of ways. Not the least of the results of that control was the ability to spend long periods of time in one place. -And, to produce quite sufficient social product with a relative minimum of labor input. Social affluence now achieved with an absolute minimum of labor input.
The classical work on this ``Original Affluent Society'' is published as the first paper in the book Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Sahlins.(the original edition, was published in 1974 by Tavistock, London, and is available in all libraries of tertiary institutions; a new 2004 edition is available from Routledge, London, 348pp.) Those of you seriously interested in Anthropological Economics in the cross-cultural comparative sense, are urged to study that text.
These Hunter/Gatherers could work less hours and do other more creative things. But, although the reduced labor-time input into production could keep the output to just Value --- creative activity also led to more knowledge about the world - which implied the ability to produce even more social product. An excellent example of an emerging dialectical opposite.
The First proto-Commoditized Labor-Power
Occurs Among Homo sapiens Advanced Hunter-Gatherer Tribes
Often these larger kin units engaged in group production, where the concrete laboring activities of the individual were de facto abstracted, through joint communal effort. The cliff-jumping of herds; netting of migrating fish; the planned burning of grasslands to encourage the growing of certain nut trees, are examples of ``pooling'' labor-power. Even though these pooled labor-power categories were not governed by the modern ``homogenizer'' of labor power - the factory clock - we can see that labor-power has been placed in a clearly ``proto'' position with regard to this kind of homogenized labor-power production for there is a certain amount of time regulation --- even if it is only ``we work from dawn to dusk'' - and thus, we can say in strictly economic terms, that the next step for this primitive (proto-) homogenization of labor-power is the actual
130commoditization of labor-power, in that this proto-labor power could be allocated to community or inter-community tasks and/or otherwise put up for exchange. A more precise term, given our temporal perspective, would be that this pooling of labor-power in primitive hunting and gathering Tribes is a form of ``proto-commoditized'' labor-power.
With the advent of animal and plant domestication, the tribal form of life was already very much on the horizon in the Old World. MacNeish's studies show that in the New World without the domesticated animal component, Bands were often the basic social organizational form by which the arts of subsistence were practiced prior to serious reliance on plant domesticates made semi-sedentary agricultural village (Tribal) life possible. -And, this kept Band society around several millennia longer in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the rate of change in the Old World centers of agricultural revolution (with their numerous potential animal and plant domesticates); where Bands quickly transformed into the larger Tribal unit; but the process is and was identical.
131This is the general crisis of all hunting and gathering bands and tribes.
By 110,000 BP we see tool kits of intricate content all over the Old World in archaeological sites. These specialized tools reflect deep knowledge about environments and ways to exploit and control them. Most importantly from our perspective these specialized tools reflect the great amount of labor-time devoted to experimentation with and perfection of said tool kits. -And, increasing emphasis on time consuming ``beauty'' in the manufacture of utilitarian items.
By 20,000 years ago people were making the final steps toward irreversible release of surplus social product. Or, another way of putting it is that they were making their first tentative steps into the agricultural revolution. Over the next five to ten thousand years (say 20,000 BP to 10,000 BP), in center after center of the origin of animal and plant domestication, people would become irreversibly committed to this new (agricultural) way of life. Producing food rather than collecting it. -And, in this process they would come face-to-face, finally, with the enemy within.
At the core of this transition is the reality that social time consumed in experimentation, perfection and beautification of tools (rather than engaging social time in direct production [i.e., hunting and gathering]) had back-lashed into making people even more capable of creating social surpluses than they were before.
The General Crisis continues (produce enough, but no more) in a more sophisticated form of extraordinarily complex social time usage. Nevertheless this increased concentration on thinking abstractly in order to engage in such extraordinary social time dumping is simply exacerbating the rate of development of this tendency to potentially being able to really significantly increase production by making it certain people know more and more about plants and animals and every other aspect of their objective daily lives. In other words, the more they know about nature because of this extraordinary amount of thought and time devoted to de facto learning, the more they could if they wished increase their production. The proof lies in the fairly rapid emergence of broad-spectrum exploitation in the latter part of the Lower Palaeolithic and then in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and its in turn transformation into the agricultural revolution! Finally, we consider this a distinct sociocultural evolutionary change because of the extremely acute nature of the General Crisis and the biological evolution of the carriers to having 1/3 more cubic cranial capacity (and presumably
132smarter too.)
The new formula looks like this:
l + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + Surplus Social Product
Non-productive time creates more
Productive potential
l = human concrete laboring activity
t = Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic tools
V1 = cost of life
V2 = cost of maintaining technology
Surplus Social Product = proto-surplus value about to be irreversibly released productive potential.
__ = This is the locus of the general crisis of hunting and gathering, as it has been, but it is now acute.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 7: The Stage of Tribal AgriculturePreventing social time from becoming labor time was the multimillion year tested, tried, and true method of avoiding surplus social product. As I mentioned above surplus social product is more than just surplus - it is, in modern economic terms proto-surplus value. Surplus social product will become surplus value, and like all value (both 1 and 2) comes ultimately from human labor. Eventually human individual and group labor will become the economic category we call human labor-power.
As we have seen, in some parts of the world tribal life began to replace band life many tens of thousands of years ago, while people were still in the hunting and gathering mode of production, precisely because more mouths to feed made having social surplus on hand less probable. At least at first. That is to say, that ``tribes'' as simply larger ``bands'' tied together by more complex kinship reckoning systems and cross-kin line cutting sodalities, would with their larger population numbers, naturally require larger amounts of Value 1 (and even Value 2,) thus momentary increases in production were absorbed quickly by more mouths. A corollary proof we can see in the ethnographic record when populations are small much of the year so that people arrange themselves in territorial Bands until such time as seasonal bounty provides the objective basis for a get-together of all the Bands in a Tribal setting where the extra social product can be quickly absorbed by the greater number of mouths. ---And, still underlying this way of life is the commandment not to produce more surplus social product than absolutely necessary and when it is necessary to make the larger settlement pattern the option of choice to facilitate the certain consumption of said seasonal bounty.
133Why are the categories ``tribal society'' and ``proto-commoditized'' labor-
time so important?
The Great Divide in the mode of production base of society lies at the boundary between individual concrete labor-time and the value it produces and collective abstracted socially necessary labor-time and the surplus social product (later surplus value) it produces. That Great Divide occurs in the sociocultural evolutionary Stages of Chiefdoms. (This would be a good time to read Papers 2 through 6 on the ``Domestic Mode of Production'' and related topics in Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Sahlins.) But, its origins lie as far back as the beginning of proto-commoditized labor-time among Tribal hunters and gatherers - especially in the Old World. After the Chiefdom Stages, in the three stages of the Servitude Epoch, abstracted socially necessary labor-time is the entire basis of what is now the academic field of political economy (``economics'' in the USA). {As in Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.}
134This is the technical definition of value: i.e., abstracted socially necessary labor-time.
The Agricultural Revolution
Tribes, at-bottom, are just bigger groups of people. Yes, they have a more complex kinship system of organization by far than do the bands. Kinship is the only means they have after all, to organize society, and the larger the group the greater the demands on the kinship way of doing things from day to day and generation to generation. -And, tribes have sodality organization also, which simply means that there are institutions that cut across kin lines such as men's clubs and women's clubs devoted to different tasks. But, fundamentally Tribes are still just elaborated Bands. In the Old World ``tribal'' social organization is the basis upon which the agricultural revolution evolves and as such is the first key diagnostic.
135With or without tribal organization people in the New World also got to semi-sedentary village life (because of the efficiency of the broad-spectrum wild resource exploitation pattern now so well developed, if at Band levels of population size.) Thus, when we uncover semi-sedentary hunting-gathering Band camp sites in the New World we also know these people would certainly have developed tribal stage social organization, with its agriculture and animal husbandry, as they domesticate the wild precursor plant and animal stocks, during their advanced broad-spectrum wild resource exploitation, day to day. It would tell archaeologists that the next phase they will be looking for, in the ground, would be exactly this new Tribal Agricultural phase. At any rate, the second key diagnostic we want to understand is the revolution that agriculture, as technology, brought to humanity.
136Archaeologically, we often speak of a set of artifactual diagnostics that accompany the Neolithic (Old World) and Formative (New World) Revolutions. Ground and polished stone tools, milling and grinding tools to turn high protein seeds into flour, village life, pottery, and so forth. However, what is critically different is that people are producing food rather than collecting it; within the food production arts, it is now inherent, that surplus will be produced.
The General Crisis driving this stage is now the need for ongoing continuing on hand ``surplus'' (considered a ``necessity'' by farmers) versus the danger of a system which could, unregulated, open the door to issuing an economic invitation to violence, because of inequality in possession of articles of agricultural production.
Our production formula now looks like this:
(l +lp) + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + SV
Surplus in the Family Farms
Surplus Needed vs. Dangerous
Surplus
l = concrete individual laboring activity
lp = human labor-power
t = Neolithic/Formative Agricultural Revolution technology
V1 = cost of life
V2 = cost of maintaining technology
SV = irreversibly released surplus social product (proto-surplus value) in large quantities.
__ = Surplus in the Family Farms: both needed and dialectically dangerous (inequality between the farms.) This is the locus of the general crisis of Tribal Agriculture.
One reason for the irreversible release of surplus was and is that farming people need surplus for the rainy day. A myriad of events can bring catastrophe to crops in the field, then as well as today. Floods, droughts, insect pestilence, fire, disease, hurricanes and tornados. In these predicaments the farming families have to have reserves to see them through until a new crop can be planted and harvested.
For another reason it simply isn't possible to tell either the plants or the animals not to reproduce to capacity. You can thin herds and let fields lie fallow but you wouldn't have to do this if ever-present extra surplus would not otherwise be on hand.
The fact is that surplus social product has been irreversibly released with the coming of the agricultural revolution. But, this kind of agricultural surplus has a tendency to be irregular due to outside forces such as those above.
As has commoditized labor-time also become a new if irregular feature of Tribal life. For these primitive farmers must pool their collective labor-power at least occasionally for clearing fields, planting and harvesting, and the construction of irrigation works and perhaps the village chapel.
Within this new setting the larger families will produce more than the smaller families, if for no other reason than that they have more ``hands;'' population will expand simultaneously, because more hands make self-sufficiency of the domestic unit far more certain and also simultaneously, because the more mouths there are to feed the less surplus will be accumulating in individual farms at any given moment. (These sociocultural dynamics are well established in the ethnological literature and the subject of Marshall Sahlins Domestic Mode of Production in his book Stone Age Economics and I strongly urge those of you with a serious theoretical interest to move on to that study as soon as possible.)
More hands and more mouths constitute a vicious circle, running inside and in the same direction as another circle of need for surplus for hard times. -And in both cases these two circles are encouraging increased production (meaning more labor hours and/or labor-time hours devoted to productive activity). We can think of these two circles of causation, as encompassing another counter-rotating inner circle consisting of societal
mechanisms for controlling the magnitude of surplus. This is the key nexus for as we have also seen it is the existence of surplus, and the real or potential inequality between the farming families it creates merely by existing, that is now the at-bottom source of envy, jealousy and coveting --- the ultimate danger confronting primitive communism.
We can say it again this way: in primitive farming villages of whatever size it is the ``more hands and mouths and inevitable hard times means we need surplus'' idea, which functions as the central ideological feature driving production. That is, driving production beyond the old hunting-gathering Band level of minimal subsistence requirements.
It is the acceptance of the new reality of constant surplus on hand that sets this new farming village way of life fundamentally apart from the subsistence pattern hitherto lasting millions of years. In other words, this drive for surplus, regardless of magnitude, runs diametrically counter to the millions of year's old tradition of handling potential and real surplus with (a) minimal labor input and (b) sharing.
This is the General Crisis of Tribal Agriculture. Let's say it again. The engine at the core of Tribal (or Band) Agriculture, as a distinct sociocultural evolutionary stage, as the principal mode of production is the Tribe's need for permanent surplus for as-needed redistribution in the event of environmental stresses and for regular redistribution to support community efforts and perhaps one or two professional specialists. Surplus potential increases with the steady growth of population which provides the domestic farming unit with more hands and is sustainable in the new economy. Note that a growing population level, in and of itself, reduces the amount of surplus on hand, at any given moment and simultaneously, makes it necessary that new levels of production be regularly achieved to support the rising population numbers. These central features constitute the driving force to increase production and become antagonistic to the counter-running tradition of discouraging surplus social product from ever coming into existence.
137In satisfying the need for more production by assigning more persons to agriculture and sedentary life (as one example), leading to bigger families living in each individual farm, society had created a self-triggering mechanism leading to an inevitable increase in the amount of surplus social product being created in the farms and thus in society as a whole. On the other hand, this irreversible release of surplus social product, was certain to generate social dissolutional effects of envy, coveting, jealousy and so forth unless it was immediately and promptly ameliorated, shared, in some effective way (which initially will be Tribal Council collection of surpluses and then the storage of said surpluses until the time comes for redistribution, or some kind of socially approved consumption.)
138The General Contradiction on the other hand continues as it has for the previous many millions of years. The drive not to produce surplus social product, but only produce needed, in the face of the ever-present reality that people in such societies could produce much more than they do.
Both the General Crisis and the General Contradiction find resolution when the Tribal Council collects surplus above and beyond what is agreed upon to be necessary for the annual upkeep of one given person. In this way the larger families are assured of having what they need as are the smaller families; yet the inequality that otherwise would exist between different-sized farms is leveled out by the collection of everything above
this level of subsistence as surplus, and its transport and storage at some central point (the Tribe's ``warehouse.'') It's administration being part of the job of the democratically elected Tribal Council. {The ethnographic record tells us that immediate recall is an accepted feature of such representative processes. (The primitive communist mode of ``term limits'' for elected representatives, in other words.)}By the way we should note that the first professional administrators emerge at this time. Why? Because someone has to keep track of all of these contributions --- family credit, clan credit, sodality credit, moiety credit, and phratery credit --- these are examples of how credit for contributions would have been made --- and we haven't yet considered the role of these Central Consigliore of the Chiefdom in astronomy and religion. These administrators are the embryonic form of what will become a New Class (once classes exist.)
139We know from the ethnographic record that another common way of avoiding the production of too much surplus in Tribal agriculture is for these peoples to rely on the old fashioned dumping of labor-time in non-productive chores. Although, in its new form of ``moving-on'' slash-and-burn agriculture, the dumping of social time comes in the form of the non-essential repetitive dumping of labor-time.
But ``inequality'' is a real and ever present specter now. Infants and children are exposed to the fact that for some reason (it doesn't matter what) there is a difference between being well off and not so well off. In other words all I have mentioned above, that is inherent in the economy and social organization of tribal agriculture, makes the fact of inequality inescapable. Even when ameliorated or leveled it was still there; otherwise it wouldn't have to be handled in these ways. Yet what could these societies do except what they had always done? ---And, one feature of what they had always done is that the more hands there are in the family farm the less each of them works. This fact has been expressed in the form of Chayanov's Rule. Details here are discussed by Sahlins in his book Stone Age Economics.
140It was not necessary in many cases that people pick up and move every few years for strictly technical (soil depletion) reasons. This could have been handled with fertilizer, crop rotation and irrigation. The reason they move is because they found the tremendous effort involved in ``starting over'' all over again, to be good for the spirit of collectivity. In strictly economic terms it dumped labor-time before it could become surplus social product.
Why didn't this go on forever?
Because, something just as critical as the mode of production was changing. That was the way some people began to view the egalitarian ideas of times past. The superstructure of ideology was changing from being altruistic to something less so much less so.
Understanding the Primitive Communist Mentality
Now we come to a most important part of this presentation which is, how should we view the primitive communist mentality? How should we understand the way in which primitive communist peoples of the hunting and gathering and/or early agricultural way of life looked at the ideas (mental categories) we call ``needs'' ``desires'' and ``wants''? In answering this question we are indebted to Professor Marshall Sahlins who proved in 1974 in his book Stone Age Economics (most recently published in 2004 by Routledge) the key lies in the understanding that peoples of the Palaeolithic (Lithic in
the New World) considered their society to be ``affluent'' when it satisfied all of a their material wants --- and --- when we do this we have to determine exactly what the wants of hunting/gathering and early agricultural peoples were. The absolutely incorrect way to assess this category is to assume bourgeois priorities with regard to needs, wants and desires.
Bourgeois dominated societies (capitalist societies in other words) such as our own, feature the possession of large quantities of ``commodities'' as the key to affluence. This is because machinofacture production of ``commodities'' via the application of human labor-power (see Chapter 12 below) is the center of everything the ruling classes consider worth having. It's all they fundamentally really believe in. It is the barrenness of this world-view which accounts for the continuing appeal of religion to many who should know better and of course to the masses that remain uneducated. However, what Sahlins proved beyond doubt was this is only one way of assessing affluence. For 99% of human history ``affluence'' was defined first and foremost in an entirely different way. Namely, by the desire to possess very few articles of production. So, if one has those things one considers essential then one is affluent.
141``If you desire little than little will make you affluent''
Slogan of the Primitive Communist
Primitive peoples desired little and therefore found it rather easy to be affluent. This sums up the entire attitude of humanity for millions of years with regard to the possession of articles of production.
Note: In everyday talk we always call articles of production commodities, but commodity has a special meaning and definition in capitalist economics --- commodities are created by applying labor-power to machinery to get said articles which contain value and surplus value. In bourgeois dominated capitalist society almost everything we obtain is produced in this machinofacture way. Almost everything we in the U.S. obtain are commodities because they are produced in this way. In other words in modern society --- capitalism - the articles of production equal commodities. In short, commodities in the technical definition sense (in capitalism) are always produced by labor-power. Before capitalism (and before the Servitude Epoch and its stages of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism) for the most part articles of production were not commodities and were created not by labor-power (defined in modern economics as the homogenized labor of a group of factory workers --- i.e., the average production of a group of workers organized in a factory at their various workplaces, with the average being regulated by the factory clock) but by individual human concrete labor. Thus, individual artist produced pottery, glasswork, metal ware and so forth are not commodities but something else --- in these cases objects of art. (Note that such products could be converted into commodity-like articles for sale at some later stage by a mercantile capitalist of some sort. But no matter what happens to them they will never be capitalist commodities in this strictly technical definition of the term because they were not in origin created by labor-power.) Labor of this sort and labor-power are two distinct things. This fact was Karl Marx first and original contribution to Classical economics.
142The Affluence of Primitive Communism
Sahlins proved affluence can be achieved in two ways: (Case 1) by desiring little (and sharing everything as in primitive communism) or (Case 2) by producing much (as in capitalist societies but with distinct dramatic differences in individual sharing in this production). Sahlins amassed considerable ethnographic data to prove this point and a wealth of ethnographic proof has subsequently been assembled which makes this point ``written in stone'' as far as science (anthropology in this case) is concerned. (Go to Murdoch's World Ethnographic Sample for the proof assembled from ethnographic data of over 1000 primitive societies.)
Why do primitive people desire little? There are numerous reasons and all of them reflect factors inherent in the rather primitive hunting and gathering mode of production or the nearly as primitive early agricultural mode of production. To take just one factor, let's look at mobility. If one is mobile on a daily basis, as are hunter/gatherers (99 percent of human history lies in this mode of production) there is only so much one can carry. If one becomes semi-sedentary or truly sedentary such as in the early farming daily lifestyle there are only so many things one can use in the farming household. When you have these things then that is that. It would be hard to desire something one has never seen, can never see, and will never even know about (until such time as contact occurs with a technologically superior culture.)
143As importantly, the ethnographic record proves there are a multitude of ideological ways to discourage production beyond what is socially recognized as needed from an individual regardless of his/her hunting/gathering or agricultural status; regardless of Band or Tribal status. Having ``x'' is desirable and everyone should have that much but having more (``y'') is not desirable and no one should allow surplus to accumulate in their hands any longer than necessary to consume it in a timely way.
In short, both natural factors and social factors mitigate in favor of an ideology where there is a distinct and recognized limit to what should be accumulated, and the corollary a certain amount of possessions (regardless of how held) must be considered ``desired affluence.'' Primitive peoples always live in a world of superstition as Elman Service has so pointedly proven many times (Profiles in Ethnology) so their ideology will be one of animism and animatism.
An Economic Invitation to Violence
Furthermore Sahlins proved primitive societies do not horde articles of production and would always rather use them up immediately. They do this not simply because they probably constitute too much to carry or store on the walk or on the family farm but because if they were to accumulate things, besides being impractical, it would create social differences in relative wealth. As we have seen it is this difference in ``wealth'' between individuals and/or families which is the true enemy within: the source of coveting, envy and jealousy. It is for this reason the more individuals there are in a given social group the less each of them works. This fact was presented by A.V. Chayanov in 1966, (The Theory of Peasant Economy). It's one proof of our theory that says surplus of any kind is highly dangerous to social health and the main focus of primitive communist's day-to-day battle for egalitarianism, not production, of even more trouble-making surplus. This fact is as I have said the basis for what we now call Chayanov's Rule. (The fewer hands in a given family the more each must work or conversely the more hands in a given farming family the less each will be expected to work.)
144
The essence is that if one allowed surplus social product to be created to the limit of each household's productive capacity and then held within that household, there would be farms with far more ``wealth'' than others, if for no other reason than the different position of each farm in the cycle of births and ``hands'' on hand. This is as Sahlins says a ``economic invitation to violence.'' (Sahlins 2004:88). I think you can see this concern with differences in ``wealth'' has been at the bottom of primitive communism's concern with surplus social product for millions of years prior to the agricultural revolution.
Chayanov's Rule functions to insure ``that the three elements of the DMP (Domestic Mode of Production) so far identified --- (1) small labor force differentiated essentially by sex, (2) simple technology, and (3) finite production objectives --- are systematically interrelated. Not only is each in reciprocal bond with the others, but each by its own modesty of scale is adapted to the nature of the others. Let any one of these elements show an unusual inclination to develop, it meets from the others the increasing resistance of incompatibility.'' (Sahlins 2004:87)
Missing the Boat: White and Harris
None of the conceptuality of the bourgeois mentality is present in primitive society for these reasons. ---And, as a historical note let me add a few comments. This is where the mechanical materialists such as Leslie A. White, and Marvin Harris, stumbled, faltered, and forever failed, in their attempts to rationalize sociocultural evolution as systems of increasing energy efficiency.
Unfortunately White did not live long enough to internalize the significance of Sahlins discovery. In 1976, shortly after the publication of my book Foundations of Archaeology, (where the Foreword was written by world famous archaeologist Richard S. MacNeish) I had asked him to write the Foreword to my book Principles of Anthropology and he had agreed. It had been my intention to take up these questions with him prior to his writing that Foreword but he called me before 6:00 am on the day of our meeting to tell me he was quite sick and I should not travel to Santa Barbara that day; before I knew it he had passed away.
In Harris case he simply was always too bent in his ways to consider other opinions (as I learned at the Mexico City, Society for American Archaeology May 1970 meeting at the National Museum, in the Seminar on Marxism and Archaeology organized by Professor Antonio Gilman, where I participated as did Harris.) -And Harris continued to go down the wrong road of trying to prove that sociocultural evolution was a function of increasing energy efficiency among primitive peoples. A completely wrong way of looking at things (because of its non-dialectical and in fact anti-dialectical nature) and now he is gone; the ideas he espoused have lost the champion that kept them around a lot longer than they might have otherwise (or if people like me had not switched our daily endeavors to matters more mundane and down-to-Earth such as the civil war in Peru.) Harris had never had the slightest grasp of dialectical materialism and proved it in a chapter by that name in his otherwise outstanding book The Rise of Anthropological Theory.
145His epistemological bankruptcy was at-bottom the reason he ultimately failed in his anthropological theoretical career. His example should be a warning to any of you who may mistakenly think that philosophy (dialectical materialism) is of no importance
in the understanding of human sociocultural evolution, primitive or modern. (Harris had grasped the truth of Marx and Engels discovery of the evolution of society from one stage to the next --- i.e., the practical side of historical materialism --- but that is as far as he got.) Chapters 1 through 10 of this book answer that question missed by White and Harris --- which is to say now you understand how and why society continued to evolve through this series of stages. Or, if you don't yet you will once you read and re-read these chapters (1 through 10) a few times --- take notes --- and study. I have done my best to popularize this for you but you have to do the learning.
Increasing energy utilization efficiency ratio's discussed by White (Evolution of Culture) and later made the totality of Harris' model (Culture People and Nature) may all well be true but are merely true --- i.e., irrelevant. What is relevant is the struggle between the need for social (collective) labor to survive, reproduce and live day to day and the need on the other hand to avoid too much surplus on hand which would be the economic invitation to violence in the Hunting and Gathering Stages as well as the Tribal Agricultural Stage. The prime directive to produce only as much as needed and avoid surplus on hand at any cost is the mode of production base for the superstructural manifestation of desiring little to be affluent. The ideological axiom of primitive communism is thus explained. ---And the trained scientific mind should be able to imagine what must be coming
146``The Slogan of the Modern Communist''
To each according to her needs from each according to her ability.
Desire as much as you like for our productive capacity can provide
All your needs and desires
Having made a point of ``the slogan of the primitive communist'' foregoing I will jump to the conclusion of much of this, for just one moment, so you can see that what we envisage as modern communism is technologically exactly the opposite of primitive communism. Thus, the resolution of the general contradictions of the Epoch of Primitive Communism and the Servitude Epoch is resolved in the Second Egalitarian Epoch with the emergence of the Communist Stage. Our technology will then be so advanced that there are no practical limits to our being able to produce everything everyone wants and needs. This proper application of technological advance to society's betterment rather than the betterment of an exploiting, ruling, domesticating class, frees people from the day to day struggle to live. The new technological revolutionary advance offers all people the freedom for the first time in human history to pursue their interests in life as they will. ---And, for society as a whole to pursue greater social objectives such as exploring the universe. That is why Frederick Engels called the period beginning with the Communist Stage, the Era of Freedom; he referred to that period of our existence prior to the emergence of the Communist Stage as the Era of Necessity.
147Now back to the ranch and the beginning of the first period of sociocultural transition: the Stage of Simple Chiefdoms.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 8: The Simple Chiefdom Stage
There is another way to handle the newly emergent General Crisis within the Stage of Tribal Agriculture, and in doing so simultaneously to stay within the constraints of the General Contradiction of the First Egalitarian Epoch; without moving-on, slashing-and-burning, starting all over again, as a life style strategy.
What is this other way?
That other way was to stay in place, build an irrigation system, fertilize fields, and intensify in situ production via both animal husbandry and field agriculture. This other way allowed each family to intensify its farm's reliance upon gardens and pens. This other way is what we in archaeology call the Simple Chiefdom way. The details can be understood if one studies Marshall Sahlins classic treatise Stone Age Economics (in its first or subsequent editions.)
Karl Marx Identifies the Chiefdom Stage as the Loci of Class Division
And State Emergence
Karl Marx explains in the Ethnological Notebooks that his view on Chiefdoms was based on the newly available ethnographic data, namely, that they were living remnants of the point in sociocultural evolution where society began to abandon primitive communism for the historical stages of Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. Again, he says this clearly in his now published Ethnological Notebooks. Archaeology as we can see has proven him exactly correct in this regard and furthermore archaeology has provided us the details of the transition. We have to understand the meaning of the archaeological data of course. ---And, that is now what I will explain.
The proto-Commoditization of Labor-time Proceeds Apace
The Simple Chiefdom way required the professional specialization of some individual producers, and part of this division of labor along professional specialist lines, is the marking of commodity production with an abstracted sense of the amount of socially necessary labor-time required to create each unit ``commodity'' (article of production in this case) in the productive process. Thus, the Simple Chiefdom way is also the point in history where we have regular proto-commoditization of labor-time, evolving naturally from what had gone before in the advanced hunting-gathering bands and tribes. Concrete labor-time has become abstracted into socially necessary labor-time, in at least some small component (or large) of the new way of doing things. Some people contribute their part of the de facto social contract by farming (tilling, planting, harvesting, caring for the fields of whatever grass domesticate - wheat, oats, barley, rye, millet, rice, corn, etc.) while others work full time producing pottery, textiles, stone tools, etc. The center (the chief and her consigliore) arrange for the collection and redistribution of the goods produced. This has become a constant or regular feature of social production. Professional specialization is creating ``ranks'' within society and among them the maturing if still embryonic form of what will become the New Class (after classes exist) can be seen plainly enough.
148Professional specialization ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàsocial ranks ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàsocial classes
Now, even though we cannot homogenize and thus categorize the labor-time input
of all of these contributors along the lines allowed by a factory clock{that regulates production per unit time in a capitalist (or socialist) factory} where the creation of ``X'' amount of goods per unit time is the basis for the economic efficiency analysis of said factory, it does mean that we observers of prehistoric sociocultural evolution can see the ``proto-`` emergence of abstracted socially necessary labor-time as an economic category.
Brave New Selfish World
Underlying this shift in the hub of centralized, reciprocal movement of goods and services (from the Tribal Council to the sole Chief) is the new motivation. Namely, in the perception that there is a non-altruistic way of doing things. A selfish way. A new kind of basal psychological imprinting has emerged for the first time in all of human history. Why is this so?
Because the time has come when infants and children recognize that no matter what mom and dad and the parental generation said about sharing, in reality some families were better off than others, and the concomitant logical conclusion must have been that some professions might also be better situated in life than others! Something less than altruism is on the ideological horizon! It will become the new ideological template of the new Epoch (i.e., Servitude Epoch) when the latter is fully extant. It is the parallel developing superstructural tendency accompanying the move from professional specialization ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàsocial ranks ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàsocial classes:
149Less than altruism ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàselfishness ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàsadism
It is inherent within a system where some people are supported by the social surplus of the Tribal Council (in order that they may clear fields, dig ditches, build dams, make pottery and textiles, for those who do not have the time,) that the differential in reward becomes part of what is imprinted as the nature of the real world. Even if, in an ideal situation, the labor-power input of all of the contributors were exactly equal it may not appear so, for individuals may and do have different values with regard to work and reward. Thus, the perception that one individual's path in life may be superior to another person's, for said person's very personal benefit, has taken hold for the first time in five or so million years. In reality it could never have been more than a matter of time until perception truly did reflect the objective fact that some professions offered more reward than others for the same amount of input.
150It only takes one person so imprinted, with the desire to be on the better end of the stick, to begin to agitate for a solution to the General Crisis of Tribal Agriculture that is not of the egalitarian moving-on, start over, slash-and-burn, tradition. Such persons might pose the question ``why not stay in our homeland, and make our production more efficient?''
Commitment to efficiency in production does have a lot of advantages. All that unnecessary, and sometimes dangerous, moving is eliminated. People get to stay where they feel at home and comfortable. -And, for a while the actual results will be better for everyone. Efficient field agriculture and stockyard husbandry will produce more surplus at a lower labor-time input per person. Note how complex the SURPLUS VALUE column has now become:
The General Crisis emerging features surplus constant and on-hand as a fundamental reality and necessity. Yet, its division will be a source of great social friction when there is too much or too little social product.
(l +lp) + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + Surplus
Storage/Support
Neither too much or too little
l = concrete individual laboring activity
lp = labor-power as a proto-type is emergent
t = Protoarchic/Archaic, Neolithic/Chalcolithic technology
V1 = cost of individual labor and collective labor-power
V2 = cost of maintaining technology
SV = Surplus Value
Storage = that surplus value in storage (for redistribution as needed or as planned)
Support = that surplus value used to pay the professional specialists, and the center (the chief and her consigliore, retainers, families)
__ = This is the locus of the general crisis of the Simple Chiefdom Stage. One must have enough surplus to supply demand (necessity) but not too much. That extra (above agreed minimum personal maintenance needs) is collected by the Chief and stored in the central (society's) warehouse (not in the family farms.) Potential inequality is eliminated and needed surplus obtained simultaneously.
Changing are the General Contradiction and the Prime Directive
Instead of avoiding the enemy within (envy, jealousy, coveting) by evading surplus production, one is now saying maximize surplus production, because with honest central collection and efficient one-woman administration we will all still be equal! However, on this course, and in a few more steps (and centuries), the maximizing of surplus production will occur far beyond ``necessary'' amounts.
Why?
Because (A) society has been (1) dividing into special interest groups (via professional specialization) which constitute de facto ``ranks'' of differing access to both the articles of production and the means of production! These ranks are the necessary result of the simple fact that with the professional specialization of individual concrete labor, some professions are economically and ``politically'' ``better off'' than others. ---And, (2) simultaneously non-egalitarian ideology has firmly taken root!
(B) The effect has been that the higher ``ranks'' of society, now selfishly motivated, want to maximize production to take more as ``profit'' for themselves. The General Contradiction of the Servitude Epoch is on the horizon.
This new and coming General Contradiction would have been camouflaged by all the talk about how, what we call the General Crisis can be more efficiently handled. The archaeological record is universally in line with this interpretation. Everywhere, without exception, where we have a continuous sequence of sociocultural evolution in the ground, we see the transition from Tribal Agriculture to Simple Chiefdoms happened exactly this way. Which is to say in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and Peru.
Efficiency in a tribal agricultural setting is further enhanced, some would have said, by getting rid of the Tribal Council and all that ``democratic rot'', in favor of military discipline and organization of the various productive tasks that come with the professional specialization of labor. So one Chief is elected - and, although she may have consigliore from the clans - it is a revolution in social organization tending toward centralization and concentration of social authority as well as surplus.
The small group at the center will have within it that ``one'' who advocated (or will advocate) this change for the ulterior motives of greed and self-advancement regardless of the effect on the community as a whole. Not that the immediate effect will have been bad. It probably will have been excellent. But to the person with the hidden agenda this is altogether a matter of fortune, he or she can turn to their advantage in selling the ``new way.'' Her concern is with herself - not ``them.''-And being in the center of the reciprocal movement of goods and services means you can pull some of it out of the ``cash flow'' as you will, to do as you wish!
The farther one goes down the road of efficiency, via professional specialization of labor, the further one has traveled along the road of social revolution. The Chief collects the surpluses and assigns different persons to new tasks such as full time irrigation and dam building; full time pottery and textile production for the new rank of irrigation and dam builders. Etc. The more labor-time that is actually specialized - truly commoditized now as numbers of people are assigned to specific tasks where their labor-time is socially necessary and abstracted - the better the results in the production of both value and surplus social product (including proto-surplus value.) The Chief and her family, helpers and cohorts from the clans, the religious specialist who convinces all the rubes that all this is divinely inspired, now constitute special ``ranks'' themselves. As do the farming families; the professional specialist families.
151These ranks have special interests. It is inevitable that they will become antagonistic, if for no other reason than that the vagaries of primitive agriculture and animal husbandry. The exigencies of Tribal Agricultural Stone Age Economics may create a severe shortage of surplus leaving the central granaries depleted. {Hail, rain, flooding, drought, locusts, disease, war or raiding, etc., etc.} Who is going to get the shit-end of the stick when the Chief's warehouse is approaching bankruptcy? When the granaries are full which groups if any stand to benefit more?
The General Crisis of the Simple Chiefdom Stage is the growing need for professional specialization of labor on the one hand and on the other the concomitant need to offset the tendency toward social dissolution. A society split between different special interest groups with inherently different interests, implies potential antagonism between them, and thus impending social crises. One must either stop fragmenting society and return to the simpler Tribal Agricultural way of life or find some way to offset the dissolutional effects arising from the fractioning of society into groups of relatively discontented people.
The First ``First Stage Chiefdoms'' in the Near East and Egypt
When these primitive Chiefdoms migrated where did they go?
In the Near East and North Africa, some of them went to what appear to be the worst rather than the best locations. Going deeper and deeper into the deserts of Arabia is one example. That is leaving the lush environs of the Mediterranean, or the hilly flanks of
Southwest Asia, for the blazing hot desert sands along the Tigris and Euphrates as far as Sumeria is an example. Up the Nile into the incredible ovens of Egypt and the Sudan is another.
So, why did they do it?
Because, it was an ``excuse.''
Whose excuse?
An excuse of the ``privileged'' rank to further professionalize labor, which is the source of their power and the riches. Wealth is being accumulated by the Chiefly rank, as a function of their ``New Rank'' position in society. This is also the origin of the New Class (when ranks become classes.)
Not every Simple Chiefdom went this route. Where mass democratic impulses were stronger than the selfishness of the few, who wanted to further intensify social ranking and the concomitant privilege of the central administrators and bullshit artists (shamans are becoming priests and priestesses,) the chiefdoms moved into environmentally friendly areas. Which is to say, Tribes and Simple Chiefdoms, where democratic inclinations were more powerful, moved into areas where they could ``stay with the old ways.'' Where the rubes could slash-and-burn to their hearts content, and live happily ever after. Such as the vast steppe lands of the Soviet West and Central Asia and Eastern Europe and so on and on...
The Oldest Profession
Shamans had become full time specialists (priests and priestesses) supported in totality by the center of the Simple Chiefdom. This was the first time in human history that a religious specialist was anything more than a spare time practitioner of the arts of supernatural communication and manipulation. The job of the religious bosses was to support the increasing reliance upon professionally specialized efficiency in the use of abstracted labor-time, for those tribes and Simple Chiefdoms moving into the New Way. For those simple chiefdoms that were dominated by the newly selfish few, beyond the point of sticking to the ``old way;'' and that did move into the deserts where the most intense professional specialization of abstracted labor-time was the only way to survive... well, there were more surprises in store for these people. At least for the ones doing all the work.
152Challenge
Do not think that only deserts (such as those of Iraq and Egypt) provide the necessary challenge. The key word is challenge. That could be the challenge of living in intensely populated regions such as nuclear China along the Huang ho and the Yangtze Rivers; it could be the arctic and alpine environments of the highland valleys of the Peruvian-Bolivian Central Andes; it could be the humid swampy lowlands of Yucatan and southeast Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. It could be many things but the challenge is always so great as to encourage or indeed necessitate the extreme organization (perhaps quasi-militarization) of the labor force along professionally specialized lines.
Nuclear China
In the great regions bordering the Huang-ho River in the north and the Yangtze
River in the south, nature provided China and humanity with some of the finest and greatest tracts of agricultural land with the most perfect climate she provided any Neolithic farmers anywhere in the world. Conditions over these millions upon millions of acres were exactly the opposite, one thinks, to the regions of environmental extremes posed to farmers in the other principle areas of the origin of civilization. Elsewhere, the challenge confronting the early Simple Chiefdoms were deserts, or low and humid lowlands, or alpine and subarctic highlands, as in Egypt, Iraq, Mexico-Guatemala, and the Central Andes of Peru. Areas which we have seen required the professional specialization of labor and the application of true labor-power. So what happened in nuclear China? If challenge is always the key, and it is, why do we see identical sociocultural evolutionary trajectories in environmentally near perfect China? What was the challenge?
153The answer: a very rapid population explosion of Neolithic (Tribal Agricultural) farmers over an area so vast as to dwarf any of the other foregoing centers of origin --- and to do so by orders of magnitude. Excavations carried out in the 1990's, along the Yangtze drainage, by Chinese and foreign archaeologists (especially Richard S. MacNeish) show us that the agricultural revolution was well along by 14,000 years ago and that by 10,000 years ago rice paddy agriculture was being invented. This irreversible release of huge quantities of agricultural surplus laid the basis for rapid population expansion. With this rapid rise in population numbers came the early and absolute concomitant necessity of immediate, thorough-going and dramatic transition to increasingly effective Simple Chiefdom society featuring intensive professional specialization of virtually every productive task and the early application of true labor-power to agriculture and other handicraft industries. The challenge was the sheer numbers of people --- far greater in numbers than in any of the other centers of origin. To overcome the challenge the Simple Chiefdom had to remain in place and intensify its internal processes. As there was nowhere to migrate, those persons in the center with the new ideology of selfish acquisition motivating them had only to advocate doing what was clearly essential and doing it, in place.
154Getting it Right is Important
For once Karl Wittfogel's idea of the requirements of hydraulic civilization was almost right. I say almost, because, at-bottom, Wittfogel's hypothesis of irrigation agriculture necessitating ``state'' (army and police in the hands of a ruling class) origins is essentially incorrect. It was not the requirements of irrigation agriculture which necessitated ``the state.'' ``The state'' arose once classes came into existence, as the simple and straight-forward product of their irreconcilability. Irrigation is a technological improvement emerging nearly everywhere in the Stage of Simple Chiefdoms (and even among some earlier Tribal agriculturalists). Irrigation undergoes massive expansion with the emergence of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms, and of course, is even more massively expanded with the rise of the Stage of Slavery. It is the process of reorganizing society along rank and then class lines which is underway, and the state (army and police) arises, in the midst of this process, in the hands of the privileged ranks cum classes, that have the money to pay the thugs (i.e., to finance the state.) Because Wittfogel did not understand dialectics he was unable to get the horse in front of the cart and this is an area where there is no substitute for getting it right in theory.
155
First, those that would form the ruling classes (beginning with the privileged center of Chief and Consigliore and their retainers and families; later the higher ranks composed of these same persons and other strategically and advantageously placed persons) had to get into position. It was this position which provided a mechanism to professionally specialize labor and a reason to justify the application of the new economic category of labor-power, (always because of some underlying environmental challenge). Thus, in Egypt and Iraq, in the Mayan lowlands, in the Central Andes, the Simple Chiefdoms walked into, asked for, solicited, these environmental extremes. In China, it was the in situ fact of vast human numbers which provided the ``environmental'' challenge key to enabling the underlying interest of the new selfishly motivated persons to intensify their advantage via special position in the center of the new mode of collection and redistribution. In other words, the interests of those in the center were advanced, when the need to professionally specialize labor and apply labor-power in place, occurred anywhere, regardless of the reason. Once the ranks formed, and privilege existed, the conditions were ripe for class separation and the emergence of armed force in their very private hands.
156It requires surgically precise logic to see the difference between this and what Wittfogel superficially and mechanically projected; it requires the dialectical understanding of cause and process in prehistoric sociocultural evolution. That is what science is all about. If everything were self-evident about these processes there would be no need for science. Wittfogel's errors led him into pathological anti-communism and into acting as a willing agent for US imperialism in later years.
Origin of the Concept of Profit
Side by side with the sincere converts to the ``cause'' of efficiency via professional specialization and tight central administration, were those of ulterior motivation whose basal imprinting of selfishness (and soon, if not already, true sadism) was invisible. Cloaked as it were from public view.
One can imagine a variety of ``reasons'' offered for moving into the hot and hellish deserts of Mesopotamia and Upper Egypt/Sudan. Free land ready to exploit. Relative security as people would be protected from raiders by the very deserts themselves. But, at-bottom, the real reason was that survival in these extreme climates could only be certain if these societies went whole hog down the road of professional specialization of labor. -And, in that process, of course, those at the center of the reciprocal movement of goods and services stood to benefit - indeed, to profit. Thus, emerges for the first time in human history the concept of ``profit'' as a primary motive for the action of certain persons. Hidden for sure, but none the less, just as real. ---And, the category of ``profit'' in our equations as an economic category. It is a distinct new category because, for the first time, we see that a new disposition for surplus value exists. One in which surplus value can be extracted by the administrating clique for its own upkeep, and lifestyle; perhaps even for ``reinvestment.''
157__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 9: The Stage of Advanced and Theocratic Chiefdoms
An advancing Simple Chiefdom is a society about to be torn apart by antagonistic special interest groups. For Chiefdom society to survive it is essential that the specialist groups and the ``ranks'' be unified behind the leadership.
The Origin of Religion
For supernaturally steeped people it is religion that can do the job. For there is nothing else. No ``state apparatus'' (army and police) yet exists so it is impossible to compel obedience of one rank to another or even of one special craft guild to the center. In other words, before there was coercion there was persuasion, because there had to be persuasion, in the absence of the ``state'' (armed thuggery). It was the only way to insure social unity and cohesion.
The archaeological evidence is clear in this regard. Religions emerged which persuaded people to give over more authority to allocate their abstracted labor-time (labor drafts; annual labor-time voluntarism), and to adjust the amount of produce to be kept in the individual family farming household, per ``head,'' as the leadership wished. In this way the privileged ranks could take more of the surplus social product being created at the family farm or village commune to the center (themselves). -And, more of the abstracted socially necessary labor-time to the center too, even before it had become surplus social product (which you will recall can also be thought of as ``proto-surplus value.''). This was the function of what we call the first ``religions'' and of their specialist practitioners --- the priests and priestesses --- the job(s) of which was (were) to support the center and its new selfish extraction (of surplus) policies.
158In Mexico we see this religion emerge and spread like wildfire and we call it the Olmec. In Peru it is the Chavin and Paracas. In China, Lungshan. In the Near East the An-En cult. -And, in Egypt the Solar Cult. Structurally they are all the same thing. A unifying religion that persuades people to obey the dictates of the center. Thus reinforced, we see in the archaeological record, in each and every case, that these societies often last a millennia or more. In ``short hand'' terms, for convenience of rapid calculation when reading archaeological sequences, you can think of this ``religious'' Stage as lasting in each and every case roughly 1000 years. The ranking becomes acute in these Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms; the separation of the specialist crafts and guilds the basic feature of their social organization. The selfish and sadistic imprinting of infants and children proceeds apace, as it must, since it is sadistic relations which for the first time are everywhere at hand (as we know archaeologically and even historically) and thus, what all infants and children must see as they mature.
159-And, everywhere, abstracted homogenized socially necessary labor-time is emerging (which is to say the new economic category of labor-power.) From now on it will be this proto-labor-power which is the principal form of human labor setting the standard for our formula. Not that concrete human individual laboring activity ceases. Far from it. But, it is the new category of labor-power as applied to technology which sets the pace; acting as the common denominator for the payment of Value 1, even to those who are not part of the category of collectively applied, temporally measured, group labor. From this point forward in history, what is obtainable, by the individual, will be measured by what the collective labor of ``corvees'' or forced labor (slaves, convicts, captured peoples) has to be paid (in food and shelter --- the cost of their minimal
160subsistence.)
However, the seeds of the destruction of this order are also very much in place. Religion has temporarily solved the problem of ``labor discipline'' (obtaining voluntary compliance with the theocrats production plan) in the production of surplus (now a definite necessity) but in so doing the practitioners of religion have set themselves up as a factor (new social rank) exacerbating the increasingly complex division of social production. No matter how this increasingly acute struggle over social produce is resolved it is likely the poorest people will get the shit-end of this stick.
Let us look at how our formula says that the SURPLUS VALUE column is subdividing:
lp + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + SV
Storage/Support
Profit/Theocrats
lp = labor-power
t = Chalcolithic and Bronze Age technology in the Old World; Classic and some post-Classic technology in the New World.
V1 = cost of labor-power
V2 = cost of maintaining technology
SV = surplus value: its distribution is the locus of the general crisis in this Stage.
Support = cost of supporting the professional specialists
Storage = that surplus value held in storage
Profit = that appropriated by the high ranks for themselves for the first time
Theocrats = that appropriated by the theocracy for itself; a substantial continuing
appropriation, derived from what the Chiefs and Consigliore took during Simple Chiefdom times (a form of profit.) To the degree that the theocrats are also part of the high ranks, this is a ``double dipping'' for them.
__ = Religion temporarily solves the problem of labor discipline in the production of surplus (now a definite necessity) but sets itself up as a factor exacerbating the increasingly complex division of social production.
Comment on Process: Monumental architecture (pyramids, Nazca lines, etc.) is an archaeological hallmark of ATC stage society. Such construction is the real world manifestation of religious tenets holding the masses of ignorant farming families in line.
However, eventually, all the explanation and persuasion of the theocrats in justifying the social order, the division and distribution of surplus social product, (the bullshit in other words) from the priests and priestesses will be insufficient to assuage the anger and insight of the mass of farmers and other lower ranked laborer specialists.
This is the locus of the general crisis of the Stage of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms --- which is to say on the one hand society must have the theocrats to stay together, and on the other hand, the priests are also simultaneously exacerbating the inherent unjust nature of a society (in the process of dividing against itself, between the haves and have nots) and are contributing to the splitting of society by helping themselves to the maximum as well.
When a crisis arises that puts too many people between a rock and a hard place,
and the resolution attempted by the center is blatantly unfair, Ma and Pa Kettle will gather round with their fellow rubes and revolt. Then they will either tear society apart in a rank war; or some will flee to begin life again in a simpler way, in lands far from the home region; or, a new solution will appear to the civil conflict. What can that be?
Origin of the State
The state! The state is the Army and Police in the pay of the richest families. It exists to compel obedience from the poor families. That is what the ``state'' means in scientific terms and should not be confused with ``government'' which existed before the state and which will exist after the state withers away.
The archaeological record is replete with proof of this eventual end to Advanced Theocratic Society in Mesoamerica, the Central Andes, along the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Huang ho and Yangtse rivers, and many many other places including East Africa, the Indus, the USA Southwest, the USA Eastern Woodlands, etc. Everywhere it is always the same.
Is there no way forward?
Yes there is, but it involves the emergence of armed force in the very private pay of a few financially powerful families and/or ranks of the old Theocratic Chiefdoms. Where that happens, which is to say, where ``the state'' emerges, then true class society has also emerged. Ranks have been transmuted into Classes and the ruling classes will domesticate the rest of society.
Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto is as perfect a recreation of an Advanced Theocratic Chiefdom (ATC) as I could imagine, and I have no hesitation in recommending this movie to you as an excellent historical example of the stage. It was precisely this kind of society Hernan Cortes and associated investors and adventurers first encountered at the mouth of the Grijalva River in the contemporary state of Tabasco, Mexico, along the Gulf of Mexico coast, as the movie brilliantly illustrates. (The Spanish Monarchy was unaware of Cortes' existence let alone his adventure against Mexico. In 1518 Cortes put together an investor group of wealthy men and women in Cuba and Hispaniola and a bunch of buccaneers and went after a rumored City of Gold on the newly discovered Mexican Yucatan peninsula.)
161As an aside, it is a matter of continuing interest to me that a religious person such as Mr. Gibson should again and again recreate a perfect Marxist example of historical events as in Braveheart, the Patriot, and Apocalypto (the struggle within English feudalism, the North American Revolutionary War and finally the Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms of the Yucatan peninsula, respectively.)
Stonehenge
Not All Chiefdoms on the Road to Statehood
In Neolithic Europe and thereafter through the early Bronze Age we find a tradition of building large stone structures called Megaliths. Most of these are tombs but some are of the rather spectacular impress-the-sheep variety such as Stonehenge. The latter architecture is clearly a major undertaking of many Tribes, Simple Chiefdoms and at least one Advanced Theocratic Chiefdom in southern England bringing the main construction elements (blue stone) from some 240 miles away. In both cases these projects serve as excellent dumps of communal surplus proto-labor-power (regulated let
us say by dawn to dusk collaboration) reinforcing simultaneously the main tenets of the religion of these builders. At Stonehenge we see the equivalent to ATC pyramid construction (or Nazca lines) we have just discussed elsewhere in the world. ---And, for exactly the same reasons. But, unlike the Chinese, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Mesoamericans and Central Andeans, the Stonehenge builders did not move on to statehood immediately. Why? Mainly, because there were inherent economic limitations in the far northerly climate which put a real world cap on surplus social product creation.
What is now Great Britain and Ireland would have to wait the coming of Julius Caesar to learn the glories of true class division, slavery and rule by the Army. With the collapse of the Roman Empire West (c. AD 400) the descendants of Stonehenge would prove they had learned the lessons of Roman class/state society well and permanently.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 10: The Stage of SlaveryThe best artistic representation I have yet seen of the way of life existing in the Slave Stage is shown in the HBO series Rome. Rent it and watch it and internalize the very nature of slavery as a sociocultural system.
The two Chiefdom Stages foregoing constitute what we may call the First Transitional Period. They took humanity out of the primitive communism of the First Egalitarian Epoch {and its three Stages of Hunting and Gathering Bands and its Stage of Tribal Agriculture} into the Servitude Epoch {and its three Stages that we know from the historical record: Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.}These two Chiefdom Stages were the First Transitional Period. In the Old World they begin in Egypt, Iraq and China about 7000 years ago and come to a climax around 5500 years ago.
In these three centers of the origin of class and state society (the first Stage of which we call Slavery) the beginning appears around 5500 years ago and within half a millennia say about 5000 years ago (roughly 3000 BC) we have Imperial Slavery in Egypt and Iraq that continues until about AD 400; frequently, under new management (e.g., Greece and Rome.) The collapse of the Roman Empire West into Feudal Kingdoms and Fiefdoms is the special and peculiar political/polity form of Feudalism in Europe and much of Arabia.
The Old World Slave Stage
In China, on the other hand, we see an early rise of the ATC's and true class division soon thereafter. In fact, this is the earliest yet known class division in the world. From at least 3500 BC slavery lasted in China until 221 BC. China experienced in that period the most advanced technology and ``state'' social organization of any Slave Stage anywhere on the globe. So advanced in fact, that we know of two early experiments during this three and a half millennia period, in Feudalism. Although in neither case was the experimentation successful in becoming permanent. Rather, we have the Slave Stage lasting as I have said, until 221 BC. The last part of said Slave Stage is called the Warring States Period (481 --- 221 BC). In the end Slave Kingdoms were replaced by Imperial Feudalism.
162The Imperial Feudal regimes of China and elsewhere in Asia, invariably feature the replacement of nobles and aristocrats which earlier had constituted the boss hierarchy in these areas, as they did in Feudal Europe and Feudal Japan for much longer
periods of time, with a New Class of professional specialists similar to ``Nome Bosses'' in Egypt.
In China this New Class was huge; they were called ``Eunuch Scholar Bureaucrats''. Castration of these scholar-bureaucrat officials was ruling family policy in China. Under the Imperial Feudal Regime that begins in 221 BC castration was mandatory for the 250,000 scholar bureaucrats the ruling family and its retainers employed to rule over the vast empire. The theory of the thing was that castration would prevent ill-gotten gains of the bureaucrats from being passed down (in such societies it is a ``given'' that all bureaucrats steal) although in practice many of the Scholar-bureaucrat eunuchs succeeding in passing down great wealth and in building dynasties via nephews and nieces.
The Asiatic Mode of Production
Similar great New Class run societies existed at one point or another in the Ancient World on the Indian subcontinent, Indochina and Indonesia (what Europeans thought of in their ``dark ages'' as the fabled ``Spice Islands.''). It is, by the way, the existence of these concentrated populations ruled over by professional bureaucrats that gives Chinese Feudalism and these other imperial systems their special ``Asiatic'' character with regard to the Feudal Mode of Production.
This is a reference to Marx's interest in the East and what he called the Asiatic Mode of Production. As you can see this ``Asiatic mode of production'' is in reality just the imperial bureaucrat run slave and feudal stages of South Asia, the Far East and Indonesia.
Old World West and East are then mirror image opposites in terms of polity, but exactly the same thing in terms of sociocultural Stage evolution. In each and every case, East and West, Slavery is replaced eventually with a half-way house between chattel and wage slavery that we have come to know and call ``Feudalism.''
(Note 1: in the use of the term ``feudalism'' in discussions of this sort --- i.e., sociocultural stages --- we do not imply anything about the political form it might take. In traditional uses of the term ``feudalism'' in western historical literature the term was heavily loaded with the idea of small ``fiefdom'' organized society. This is an entirely different use of the term and irrelevant here.
Note 2: Some many years ago a conference was held on Marx's ``Asiatic Mode of Production'' where the ``intellectuals'' attending spent their time analyzing the psyche of Karl Marx and a variety of equally irrelevant things rather than focusing on the obvious course which would have been to study the historic and prehistoric record for the origin and evolution of these Asiatic systems. That would have produced the accurate and useful result herein. Instead as usual from these types we got wasted trees and garbage.
The New World Slave Stage
Secret of the Spanish Ronin's Conquest of the New World
We have seen why in the New World, which is to say in Mesoamerica and the Central Andes, the Stage of Tribal Agriculture lasted several millennia longer than in the Old World. Namely, to reiterate, because there were virtually no potential animal domesticate stocks in the New World and far fewer domesticateable grasses. Thus, the experimentation with domesticated grasses (corn, and a variety of other wild grasses that
didn't really pan out) in a sedentary, or even semi-sedentary village setting, took longer in the Americas to get to the point of substantial reliance on cereal, as a basic foodstuff, than it did in the Old World with its penned sheep, pigs, goats, horses, cattle (not to mention fowl and pondable fish). Fortuitous natural differences that brought sedentary and semi-sedentary agricultural village life to the fore in the eastern Hemisphere, several thousand years earlier than in the western Hemisphere.
In other words, the simultaneous Old World domestication of the wild grass species we call oats, rye, barley, wheat, rice and millet, whose progenitor forms were spread far and wide in the Old World, and which therefore underwent domestication very early, alongside the villages with penned animals of all types, could not happen ``mirror image'' in the Americas. Therefore the sociocultural evolution from Tribal Agriculture to each successive stage, took longer in the New World, without these wild stocks.
Interestingly, in South America, people proved they could duplicate the surplus potential of domesticated grass seeds by the creation of a stable agricultural equivalent to a cereal staple, in the domestication of tubers to produce manioc and, of course, potatoes. Yet despite the difference in grain or other carbohydrate-protein staples the processes underlying the reorganization of society are (were) identical.
At any rate, this is why the Stage of Slavery does not emerge in the New World until about the time of Christ. A full three thousand five hundred years later, than in the Old World. It had earlier taken that much longer for Tribal sedentary agriculture to emerge in the Americas, with so few plants and animal domesticates on hand, and upon which to experiment. In other words, once the Tribal Agricultural Stage was delayed in the New World, in reaching its fullest modernization, by at least three and a half millennia, then each successive New World sociocultural evolutionary Stage was likewise offset in temporal sequence, by comparison with the Old World.
In the overall evolution of Homo three thousand five hundred years is an insignificant amount of time. However, when contact did occur in 1519 and 1534 (Mexico and Peru, respectively) the difference was enough to make the destruction of one sociocultural stage and its replacement by another inevitable. Indigenous Slavery gave way virtually overnight to foreign Feudalism. In this case thirty five hundred years was more than enough difference in technical development, and most importantly social organizational development, to give the Spanish ronin the decisive edge as the two stages went head to head; the one giving way to the other like anti-particles in collision with the one simply disappearing in a puff of history.
More on the Origin of the State
Society could advance when confronted with civil war and the failure of the persuasive capability of the religious authorities only when there was a new option. Namely, the option of the richest families, to use their newly acquired ability to pacify the mass of farming families, with fire, sword and club. Those with the money had now to use it, to pay thugs to suppress by arrest and brigandage those in opposition. This is the origin of the state everywhere. Which is to say, again, that what we call the ``state'' is at-bottom, just armed force in the pay of the richest families. (``The state'' in scientific terms then is armed force in the private pay of the wealthiest classes. ``The state'' is not ``government'' nor is it the ``armed force of the people as a whole.'' Rather ``the State'' in scientific terms, as used in this text refers to the Army and Police (or in more modern
163times the military-intelligence establishment and the police.)
There were no exceptions then, and there are no exceptions now in the Servitude Epoch. Nor, for that matter, in the Second Transitional Period (which began in 1917) where ``the state'' is in the hands of the working class via its vanguard political Party. -And, ``state'' society must continue until the reasons for the existence of ``the state'' (class struggle, class war, classes) no longer exist.
Note: Neither should you confuse ``the state'' with the use of violence. As Engels pointed out, armed force of the masses existed before the Servitude Epoch and will exist after the Servitude Epoch. In the latter case, for example, in the form pictured for us by Gene Roddenberry, that is Star Fleet. But these ancient Tribal War Parties, and these future forms of armed force, such as a communist Star Fleet (engaged primarily in exploration and only secondarily in defense), are an entirely different matter than armed force in the very private pay of exploiting families. The latter are used to force the mass of producers into submission and obedience.
In other words, armed force of the people as a whole and armed force used by the exploiters against the exploited are two totally separate categories. Armed force of the Tribe and/or Star Fleet has nothing in common with armed force of secret police, spies, regular police and the army. Marx and Engels were clear about the difference between ``the State'', ``Government'', and ``violence'', as all Marxists have been since then. We have become increasingly convinced of the accuracy of this view by the unfolding prehistoric (archaeological) record and the numerically increasingly qualitatively penetrating historical studies of many researchers.
This is the Fatal Error of Anarchist Theory
It was, and is, the inability of anarchists and their offspring [anarcho-syndicalists] to understand this difference which was the at-bottom reason for the split in the First International between Anarchism and Marxism and our subsequent parting of ways, forever. The state is a peculiar instrument of class power and only that. In class war one class or the other must persevere via its use of its own state power. It is not this state which is the source of all evil but the class system from which it comes and in the course of eliminating classes it is only a communist class instrument (the state --- the army and the police) which can make ``the state'' as a social institution wither away by destroying the class and state nature of society first. Then our communist state must hold its own sway over the society in question until the entire Servitude Epoch class and state system is eliminated in favor of communism.
164Anarchist ideology misses all this and denounces all state organization and furthermore makes this ``state absence'' idea the basis of their concept of social revolution. The most concrete expression of this primitive world view is what it amounted to in practice - the ridiculous and hypocritical anarchist organization of Andalusia and Catalonia in Spain during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). For more on this skip to Chapter 16 on World War II.
By getting it wrong, right from the start, the anarchists split from us theoretically. Then they split from us organizationally, when Marx kept them from getting control of the First International by sending it to the USA (pick this up below in US Labor History).
Getting Rich and Believing in It
How the financially most powerful families got rich is not the point. That could have happened in a variety of ways as I have described before, and did happen in a variety of ways, as is well known archaeologically, and for that matter in much of the historical record. (For example, Professor Rathje proved many years ago the origin of wealth in the Mayan Lowlands in the hands of a small group of families came because they controlled long distance trade in essentials and created profit on both ends of these deals. As often military leaders emerge because of their success in some popular campaign. Michener describes the emergence of thuggery in the South Pacific prior to the migration to Hawaii as a function of enforcement by Advanced Theocratic Chiefdom bosses.)
165What is key is that the ideology of people is now committed to selfishness, and indeed sadism, so that the altruism of primitive communism no longer stands in the way. Now the victors ``believe they should be richer than the masses and should domesticate the masses as they have animals and plants.'' -And, accompanying this fundamental change in the superstructure are the armed men and women who will work for food, shelter, pay - and, fun! These are the thugs. Thuggery will be institutionalized in the form of police and soldiers.
This new basally imprinted ideology existed by the time that the Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms approached crisis. This independently supported thuggery existed by the time the ATC's were on the eve of civil war. It remained only for the privileged ranks to throw off their sheep's clothing and appear for what they were --- classes with title deed to property in their individual hands and the willingness and ability to make it so. Thus, Engels could not have been more correct. The ``state'' does, always, arise as the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. ---And, for no other reason. (See Frederick Engels classic synthesis of his and Marx's work with that of Lewis Henry Morgan in one of its many editions: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.)
166Yes, classes now exist. The ranks have become classes.
-And, the financially most powerful classes use their thugs (the first ``state'') to suppress the less powerful classes. In the process many poor farmers and craftspeople are reduced to slavery. One could say that the few have domesticated the many. These are the polar opposites of the first ``civilized'' societies everywhere.
This does not mean that all poor people in Slave Stage societies were slaves. Far from it. But it does mean that the common denominator of the cost of labor-power is now determined by whatever the cost may be of keeping slaves (1) alive and (2) in submission.
The mechanisms institutionalized, by which slavery is introduced and maintained, include debt, capture in war, and punishment for civil and criminal offenses, being born the son or daughter of a slave, self-sale into slavery to satisfy some overriding need.
The new General Contradiction of society now expresses itself in a new prime directive, which is for the master class to maximize profit from the surplus value column at any cost, regardless of the amount of value and surplus value being created. The General Contradiction, in other words, is the opposite of what it was under the conditions of the First Egalitarian Epoch, as is the resulting Prime Directive. Now there is the tendency to maximize production (for the ruling families,) whereas before, there was
the tendency to limit production to that of value needed (by society as a whole.)
The General Crisis of Slavery
The General Crisis of the Slave Stage is that ever deepening crisis created by the cost of maintaining the thuggery (the State) which is essential to keeping the masses in servitude. Our formula helps focus our attention on the new key diagnostic factors of profit for the rulers and the cost of their means of social organization (thuggery; i.e., the state.)
lp + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + SV
State/Profit
lp = labor-power of the slave mediated by the overseer
t = Bronze and Iron Age technology
V1 = cost of keeping slaves alive
V2 = cost of maintaining technology
SV = surplus value resulting from the homogenized collective labor input of gangs of slaves measured by some daily ``clock.''
State = cost of army/police
Profit = that which is appropriated by the slave owners
The more slaves, the bigger the army and the police needed to keep them in that condition must be. The cost of the state is a drawdown on the surplus value column. That drawdown reduces drastically the profit margin. This is the locus of the General Crisis of Slavery.
The Origin of Egypt's Great Pyramids
Furthermore, as capital is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families - until just one family rises above all the others - as, for example, with the emergence of one ruling family over all of Egypt with the beginning of the Old Kingdom c.3000 BC - the boss hierarchy over the slaves becomes a dangerous internal element for the ruling family and its directly dependent ruling classes. For, if that hierarchy of bosses is allowed to use that slave labor power for its own devices, then it shall have the financial wherewithal to challenge the ruling Pharaoh, and associates, for power (and its concomitant license to incredible wealth.) Thus, that labor-power (of the slaves, and those subject to mandatory labor-drafts) must be kept busy in tasks that deny the boss hierarchy access, even when such tasks are non-productive. This is the reason for the sudden undertaking of such labor intensive tasks as the construction of all of the Old Kingdom monumental funerary architecture (e.g., the pyramids.).
167These military dictators {the Pharaohs were always military dictators} had no religious illusions. They knew they couldn't trust their own Nome bosses. (The Nile was divided into administrative units called Nomes.) So, what abstracted labor-time was theirs, that did not need to be gainfully employed by them (the Pharaonic family,) they put to work in a socially justifiable way that denied the Nome boss-hierarchy access to it. End of story.
The motive force for stability was the ruling elite's interest in maintaining and
deepening the enslavement of the masses by whatever means. The prime mover for social change was the resistance and rebellion of the most oppressed segment of society --- i.e., the mass of slaves.
The in-between strata were pushed into institutionalized poverty, because they couldn't compete with slave-labor except at the lowest common denominator. Which was the cost of socially necessary labor-time; in other words, the cost of keeping the slaves alive - i.e., Value 1.
The deepening of Slavery's General Crisis was the same everywhere. In the civilizations of the Mediterranean, slave revolts eventually put paid to the entire process, but it took over 3000 years. In China, the same thing happened. In Mesoamerica and the Central Andes the clay feet of the slavocrats were their Achilles heel, and were cut off by the armed and armored handful of Iberian ronin who found it a simple enough matter to drive a wedge between the slaves, and other subjugated peoples, and their masters; between the subjugated societies and the Imperial Slavocrat New World Regimes.
(Ronin is a special Japanese term for unemployed knights in the Japanese Feudal Era. This is, for example, exactly what Hernan Cortes and his fellow adventurers {and investors} were, from the beginning to the end, in their adventure against Tenochtitlan {the Aztec name for the city also known as Mexico.})
A Marxist archaeological shorthand rule-of-thumb is wherever you have prehistoric monumental architecture you also have rank and/or class division of society. Ruling families control their own boss-hierarchy by controlling their access to labor-power in this way. Keeping the mass of individual providers of labor-power out of the hands of those in the hierarchy who would use it to increase their own wealth and power if they could. For that reason we were never misled about what was happening in the Mayan cultures of Mesoamerica a la foolishness of such writers as Thompson.
Monumental architecture (pyramids, Nazca lines, Great Walls, etc.) now take on much grander size and scope than it had when society was only at the ATC level.
Finally, because we understand sociocultural evolution is the same everywhere and always, and is law-governed, we are never confused about the meaning of surficial similarities among the pyramid building cultures as disparate as Egypt and Peru. Reactionary ruling-class originating writers about archaeology of course have no scientific view such as this and they go off and get lost on the most ridiculous things you can imagine (Von Daniken, Sitchen and others of that ilk are extreme con-man examples, but not that different in their conclusions from barely acceptable diffusionist scholars like Thor Heyerdahl [finally proven by DNA to be wrong about Peru and Easter Island.])
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 11: The Stage of FeudalismScientifically defined, Feudalism as a Stage is a half-way house between chattel and wage slavery. Thus, while the General Contradiction of the Slave Stage continues - which is the General Contradiction of all of the Stages of the Servitude Epoch - the General Crisis of Feudalism is that of both the preceding and succeeding Stages (that is, Feudalism features both the General Crisis of Slavery and that of Capitalism.) For that reason the mathematical expression for the Stage of Slavery takes the form of a simple quadratic equation.
lp + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + SV
State/Profit
lp + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + SV
Profit/NGM
When a calculus is applied to this equation the magnitude of the first equation (slavery) declines relative to the second equation (capitalism), and, of course, the definition of the terms remains the same in both cases.
Eventually the cost of an increasingly disaffected state apparatus, in the face of rising slave rebellion forces a change in the social order. This happened first in China. But what is key to our understanding is that slavery requires armed thuggery instantly available to keep slaves in a condition of submission and obedience. It necessitates a vicious cruelty as a regular and visible means of terrorizing the slave population into submission and obedience before they revolt. Sadism is now the law of the ideological land (and has been since the Stage of Advanced and Theocratic Chiefdoms), so to speak, and will continue this way throughout the Servitude Epoch.
Yet Slavery produces continuous resistance - continuous slave revolts - and, thus, must continuously be suppressed. This means a large and ever growing army - more and more of it garrisoned to police duties guarding the larger and larger slave pens of the Ancient World. In its most extreme form (e.g., Roman Italy) the entire Italian peninsula was turned into what was essentially one gigantic slave pen - ruled over by a group of extraordinarily rich families and their massive state apparatus (the Legions.)
Feudalism is the result of an historic compromise. The ruling families agree to give a certain amount of freedom to the slave families and to take from them only a given amount of produce and/or labor-power. The specifics vary from place to place, country to country, but the effect is always the same. Slaves have become Serfs and their running away and revolting is reduced.
The rapacity of the ruling families knows no end so eventually the crisis of slavery will reappear and more troops will be needed, and walls will have to be built, to keep peasants in submission and obedience and to prevent them from sneaking away in the night. Nevertheless, Feudalism is always a great historic compromise, granting a minimal amount of freedom to those formerly held as chattel, in exchange for labor peace.
China and Imperial Feudalism
One ruling class, in the Chinese Kingdom of Chin (Qin), decided to forge a new way forward. It featured the militarization of the population; its reorganization into a system whereby legal responsibilities to pay what was due the ruling families, were combined with a land redistribution and an adjustment in the system of payments, in kind and cash - which made slaves into small share-cropping farmers and indentured agricultural laborers, able to pay in some cases in cash rather than commodities or time - i.e., slaves became serfs. This new feudal way of life had its own ideology which in
China is called Legalism.
Then Chin attacked the other six Kingdoms of nuclear China; in a lightning campaign of several years Chin brought all of them under its heel in 221 B.C. {Ending the Warring States Period [481 -221 BC] with its six major Kingdoms and four smaller ones (including the Kingdom of Chin where full scale military modernization had occurred --- including the replacement of bronze weapons with weaponry made of iron and the introduction of cavalry and mounted infantry.)}
Chin's success marks the beginning of the period of continuous empire that lasted until the 20th century --- at least in form. From that time forward the new social order of Feudalism existed in imperial form in China, until it gradually began to dissolve under the impact of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1860) and was replaced de facto by capitalism. (Also, this is where the name ``China'' comes from --- i.e., from Chin.)
European Fiefdom Feudalism
In the Mediterranean, the ruling classes were not as far seeing; had no one to bring them feudalism in imperial form. The Roman Empire West collapsed under the persistent impact of massive slave revolts. (``Barbarian'' assaults from Russia and East Europe not withstanding --- these had been handled for centuries by the Romans but became serious threats only when the Empire was weakened by internal slave revolts, which had tied down the Legions in defending [occupying] different regions of said Empire.)
The resulting patchwork of nearly innumerable fiefs was the political form that Feudalism took in Europe after c. AD 400. As a consequence Europe was always a pitiful, rather pathetic, appendage on the body of Eurasia. That is, when compared to the vast wealth, and advanced science and technology developed in China, where capital was concentrated and centralized and produced in amounts, orders of magnitude, greater than in Europe. The Eurocentric view of the world so common in North America and Europe when viewing the globe over the last two centuries (when the slightly earlier emergence of full scale capitalism gave these ``bastions of civilization'' the illusion they were the center of the universe) is actually a rather pathetic reflection of the deep underlying ignorance characterizing our people's understanding of history. This ignorance is the most important product of the ``everything important was made in America'' propaganda kind of history taught in the Gringo mass media if not in their schools.
168China's Great Wall
As a matter to note, the Great Wall of China, like many similar walls throughout both the New and Old Worlds, was first a series of smaller walls built in China's long Slave Stage (~3500BC to 221BC) to block ``underground railroad'' sort of routes to the north thereby keeping runaway slaves within the boundaries of the Kingdoms and later Empire. Only much later, with (1) the emergence of the Mongol threat as an excuse, and (2) the First Emperor's real need to divert corvee and convict labor out of the hands of his emergent class of eunuch scholar-bureaucrats during the formative years, of Imperial Feudalism, did he convert the pen walls of Servitude China into an equally important bastion of defense. That being the joining of the walls and the creation of one continuous Great Wall across the vast reaches of China's northern frontier.
169The General Crisis of Feudalism, to the degree it may be said to have one of its
own, was ``the balancing act'' the feudal lords had to maintain between the disappearing General Crisis of Slavery and the ascending General Crisis of Capitalism. This was true in both the East and the West of the Old World. This can be expressed with our equation in quadratic form.
-And, as I have said, the Slave Stage Empires of Mesoamerica and the Central Andes were simply overwhelmed by the attack of the Feudalist ronin (unemployed knights) from Iberia. These ronin were successful because of the ``clay feet'' of the slavocrats. When the masses are slaves, or little better than slaves, it is hard to rally them around the master and mistress classes. ---And Cortes had found that intra-class war, such as was occurring when he arrived in Mesoamerica, among the ruling classes, could be used to his advantage politically and militarily. These two factors brought down slavery overnight in the New World.
However, the feudal system was doomed not because of its nature as an historic compromise but because it's technological base was essentially the same as the Slave Stage Ancient World - in a word, ``primitive.'' Machinery with independent power to which unskilled, untrained, labor-power could be put to work changed the entire nature of wealth acquisition.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 12: The Stage of CapitalismA commodity produced by machinery to which labor-power has been put (little or no skill required now) has within it both exchange value and value as a utilitarian item. The capitalist is interested in the commodity's exchange value for in that act (of exchange) he can realize (materialize) the surplus value inherent in the system of production wherein the workers are paid at one rate (value) and the actual realized value of what they produced is considerably greater. This is true because within the commodity is also paid and unpaid labor-power, as we are about to see.
The Category of ``Form'' Determines a Commodity's Destination
The form of the surplus value produced determines where commodities must go. In other words, if I am a capitalist producing iron I have to sell it to another capitalist (somewhere in the world) who can use it to make something - for example, steel. In this sense humanity is still in a rather primitive condition where the raw characteristics of the articles created, dictates what must happen thereafter. A useful way to picture this is to think of the ``opposite'' of destination being determined by form, as one sees when we think of a STAR TREK replicating machine. You ask the machine for a cup of coffee and the cup, filled with coffee, materializes. In this futuristic vision the value and surplus value inherent in the system of production are liquid (transmutable) and ``form'' means nothing. If we assume that this future society is a Communist system, where there is no money, no classes, no war, etc. such advanced technological conditions make sense - a la Gene Roddenberry's presentation of the future. Under such hypothetical conditions in the future, value and surplus value are truly free and can be transmuted at will into whatever form.
170That is not the situation now, nor has it ever been, in the history of capitalism (or in the history of the world.) We are still stuck with the fact that whatever the form of a commodity produced may be, so its destination is pre-determined. People don't eat iron -
only certain other industries can absorb it - and, thus the surplus value within it.
The Category of ``Labor-power''
Technically speaking the moment human labor was commoditized as ``labor-power'' we had the emergence of the germinal of capitalism. By ``commoditized as labor-power'' in capitalism we mean that a group of workers in a factory put out so much labor per unit time - that unit of time is measured by the factory clock. Some workers may be more efficient than others but for purposes of the ``commodity'' of labor-power it is whatever the average homogenized output per hour may be. Let's say it again: labor-power as a category and as a commodity is the homogenized (averaged) factory-clock governed, collective output of a group of factory workers.
Prehistorically, and in the Ancient World, before factory clocks and without machines of the typology (diagnostics) listed below labor-power may also have been proto-commoditized as I have discussed above, in a few examples, but these represent only ``proto-commoditization.''
Mathematics of Social Production
Note: In a truly abstract sense, in our equations, we have stripped the entire matter of social production to its essence (four elements). These are (a) labor-power (b) technology (in the case of capitalism it is machinofacture; in our time automated and cybernetized machinofacture) (c) value and (d) surplus value. You may think of labor-power in our equations as having two sub-elements consisting of (i) the three dimensions of work with machinery, collectively undertaken, to which we add (ii) a fourth temporal dimension. Thus, work may (i) be measured and made more-or-less efficient in the mechanical performance sense and (ii) the necessary time it takes said work socially to occur (e.g., the way workers are organized within the factory and at the factory bench), may likewise be treated as a separate sub-element.
171Socially Necessary Labor-Time
The collective labor-power input of a group of factory workers constitutes socially necessary labor-time in capitalist production. However, in pre-capitalist stages socially necessary labor-time is far less of a precise quantitatively determinable category. Nevertheless, it is critically important to cross-cultural analysis. This is true because in the Primitive World, and in the Ancient World (Slavery and early Feudalism) work also had a measured character. Socially necessary labor-time input was understood, if not precisely quantified, by those concerned. As such, socially necessary labor-time is a broader and more flexible category than labor-power (with its rigorous method of factory bench homogenizing, and factory clock measuring, of labor input.) Furthermore, the very inherent nature of the capitalist system of factory production makes paid and unpaid labor-power the basis for extracting profit as we are about to see. It is this very nature of capitalism which makes it a legalized system of theft.
172The Law of Value
The scientific definition of value in its general sense is the amount of socially necessary labor-time involved in production of some given commodity. In Capitalism, value is the amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to reproduce the cost of
labor-power (V1) and to maintain the machinery (V2). Usually we consider surplus value over and above these ``value'' costs although in some instances both V and SV are terms included in discussions of ``value.'' In either case and in any event in our discussions we have always reduced the matter of ``social production'' to its four essential elements (labor-power, technology, value and surplus value.) With the caveat that for cross-cultural comparative purposes we change the content of each term in a controlled way as we progress sequentially from one sociocultural evolutionary stage to another and from one set of equations to the next.
Shorthand in Marxist academic circles for the ``value'' aspect of this productive process, as a core concept, is the phrase ``the Law of Value.'' Remember, the ideal conditions, include (i) the world as the marketplace (ii) outside regulation is absent (i.e., free unfettered competition) and (iii) only the essential elements are included in the equations. (Labor-power and its 4th dimension [i.e., time] is one element; machinery (technology) the second; value the third; and surplus value, the fourth).
Notice that SV (surplus value) is that additional amount of commodity produced per given unit of time which the capitalist appropriates and it corresponds to unpaid labor-power, which is to say also that it corresponds to unpaid socially necessary labor-time. It is from this surplus value column that both profit and investment capital (NGM) must come. -And, it is this fact of commodity production in capitalist systems, which allows the capitalist to appropriate profit ``honestly.'' This is to say, without the stigma of ``swindling'' it via sharp trading practices.
Sometimes we say we have both paid and unpaid socially necessary labor-time in each commodity and that saying refers to the amount of value (V1, V2) and surplus value (SV) represented in each commodity. So in addition to utilitarian value and exchange value, V1, and V2 and Surplus Value, we also have paid and unpaid labor-power involved in each and every commodity. In practical terms this means each worker is working part of her shift for her employer and not for herself.
If one thinks oh well the capitalists are putting forth their factory and its equipment and the raw materials so they deserve something. Perhaps, but remember also, the capitalists are the most recent of a long line of sharks who got their hands on communal property, made it theirs by force, and now confront you with the means of production in their private hands. You say okay but in the real world how much is he taking from me right now? Well when you see how great that is compared to what you are getting paid then you will acquire the beginning of proletarian consciousness.
Finally, note the production of surplus value and its rate of production is one thing. The production of profit and its rate of production is a separate thing. Two categories frequently mixed up together. There are many ways in which surplus value may be expended by the capitalist and profit is just one outcome. This is of critical importance to us because as you are about to see it is the absolute decline in the rate of profit, not in the rate of surplus value production, which is the at-bottom cause of the general crisis of capitalism.
Mercantile Capitalism vs. True Capitalism
The moment long distance trade afforded the opportunity to make a profit at both ends of a deal, since the socially necessary labor-time involved in production is a complete unknown to the partners on both ends, we had mercantile capitalism. That is,
the accumulation of money capital via the process of trade.
However, in economic analysis of sociocultural stages we must always begin with the nature of the productive system. Thus, for true capitalism to be said to exist in the sense of production, we must have machinofacture extant. Then the potential of human labor is made real because it is magnified exponentially via the use of machinery and via the use of the new category of labor-power. At the end of each day you can see we can visualize each hour as having a part of what is produced as value and another portion as surplus value --- or at the end of the day we can say X hours have produced value and Y hours have produced surplus value - furthermore, you see profit can be squeezed directly from said labor-power, out of the surplus value column. Remember our definitions: Value 1 is the wage paid to the worker for his labor; again in strictly economic terms we are purchasing the socially necessary labor-time to use via machinery in the production of a commodity for exchange. Value 2 is the cost of maintaining the machinery and the factory. In this case, capital is accumulated via production when the owner of the machinery and the factory who is also the purchaser of the labor-power appropriates profit from the surplus value column directly, rather than having to swindle it via ``sharp trading practices'' from a seller at one end of some deal, and a buyer at the other.
173What do we mean by machinofacture?
The manufacture of commodities via the input of labor-power applied to machinery is what we call machinofacture. It is the technological heart of true capitalism. There were originally five essential technological elements to machinofacture; these being:
(1) a cheap and plentiful supply of highly carburized (flowing pig) iron; from which a somewhat decarburized wrought iron was obtained (from which steel can also be made.) This meant blast furnaces, for both the pig iron and the decarburized wrought iron. China had blast furnace flowing pig and wrought iron two thousand years, or more, before it was independently invented in Liege c. AD 1500.
(2) Machine tools to cut and work iron and steel and make machinery.
(3) Iron and steel machinery to produce other commodities such as pottery and textiles.
(4) Steam engines. These were the first sources of power to be put to machine tools and machinery independent from those of nature (wind, water, animal, human power.) As a matter of interest the Chinese invented the steam engine many centuries before a French priest brought a toy steam engine back to France. This toy inspired Denis Papin to put the principles to work. The Britisher Thomas Newcomen heard of Papin's experiment and proceeded to build the first steam engine in the West which was later perfected by Mr. James Watt.
(5) Factory installation of machinery to which human unskilled labor-power could be put to work.
In this way we see that the pure category of abstracted socially necessary labor-time, which is to say of, commoditized labor-power, emerges and is henceforth the key to capitalist production. This category (labor-power) was Karl Marx's original and unique contribution to classical political economy. Otherwise Marx accepted most of the categories of economic analysis of Adam Smith, Ricardo, et. al. The ``proto-``steps leading toward this entirely new category in economic analysis are what we should look for in our studies of prehistory. You will recall that we found this category clearly
emergent for the first time, in Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms [ATC's] (labeling it so and assigning it the definition of being the lowest common denominator for determining V1.) In so doing we were linking socioeconomic prehistory to history.
Capitalism in Origin
As for the emergence of capitalism a few comments are in order. Actually, as I have pointed out before, we can see germinal capitalist sectors in the political economy of both the Old World Slave and Feudal Stages (West and East) and in the New World also. -And, as I have also pointed out, this is because whenever labor is pooled and averaged according to some homogenizing, averaging, equalizing equivalent to the factory clock, we have the germinal of capitalist production.
Whenever labor-power is purchased and put to work, whether on the land or in the factory, we have a capitalist germinal element emergent. These germinal elements in the Old World go back to the first city states in Sumeria, along the Nile, and in nuclear China. The later archaeological record in Mesoamerica is replete with examples of purchased labor put to work on the land and in factories from Olmec times forward; in Peru, from Chavin times forward.
In fact, you will recall that we found proto-commoditized labor-power in the Hunting-gathering Tribes and in Agricultural Tribes. In Stone Age Economics, as in modern Economics, one can trace specifically defined attributes back into their previous forms and this search for the origins of commoditized labor-power is an example.
Why didn't the capitalist sector of these Ancient Slave and Feudal Stages become ascendant earlier? Precisely, because machinofacture had not yet been invented. The essential five diagnostic attributes we discussed above simply had not yet come together in one place at one time prior to the second half of the 1700's AD. When they did come together in Europe and New England and in China (and in preliminary form in other parts of the world such as Latin America) Capitalism quickly replaced feudal land holding as the primary source of wealth for the domesticating and ruling classes. Quickly, is of course, a relative term. From the time of Oliver Cromwell, a capitalist farmer himself (who purchased some labor-power each year to use on his lands rather than taking feudal tithes from serfs), in say 1640, until the emergence of the five essential technological elements of original capitalism in Old and New England around 1765, 125 years passed.
174Note the transition from feudalism in Europe to Capitalism in Europe and the America's, was not a peaceful transition. Actually it was never a peaceful transition anywhere. Everywhere the bourgeoisie had to fight for political power. Recent novels and films about the transition to imperial feudalism in Japan (Shogun) where the new class of burghers played a role, and their later transition to full power in a stage of Capitalism they create in their own image in Japan (The Last Samurai) are examples on point. We should be, given the excellent historical record, well aware of the details of this struggle whether in the English Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, the Taiping Rebellion in China, or the Meiji Revolution in Japan. On the other hand academia has often spent more time in obfuscating the process rather than in explaining what was going on - at least as far as textbooks for the lower grades in North America are concerned. So, in reality despite the excellent historical record there is very widespread ignorance of the transition in countries like the USA.
175However, at the time, the underlying cause of the anti-feudal revolt among the
English was not much of a secret. This is not to say that the religious arguments of the English Revolutionaries of 1640 to 1660 might not tend to confuse the realities of those moments today. It is to say that a correct understanding of all of the religious arguments among the Protestant New Model Army men and the various Parliaments of the English Revolution period requires class analysis.
The highest class of the English Revolution in terms of mass numbers was that of the capitalist farmers (e.g., Oliver Cromwell) - and these capitalist farmers did have some aristocratic allies supporting them, rather than the King and his feudal parasitocracy, precisely because they were convinced of the advantages of hiring labor rather than having to hire men to control serfs. The next highest groups of Republicans were the independent petty bourgeois shop holders and guildsmen (artisans, mechanics and proto-proletarians belonging to guilds.) Finally, there were the lowest level of the Parliamentary forces - the serfs and the landless agricultural laborers. Each of these three groups had a name (Congregationalist-Independents, Levelers, and Diggers) and each had a program that became increasingly radical from top to bottom. In fact, at the bottom, we have what Karl Marx would later call a primitive kind of communism being preached. All three classes of the revolutionary forces tried to justify their actions according to a particular interpretation of the Bible which began with the Pre-Ordained Divine Plan beliefs of Oliver Cromwell and ended with the most radical interpretations of the teachings of Jesus Christ at the bottom.
176Eventually capitalism had to win out over feudalism because the productive capacity of machinofacture was of a qualitative order of magnitude greater than any feudal land-holding system, even one in its finest hour. Armed with plenty of cash the bourgeoisie eventually had to succeed.
But, they could not succeed permanently in the years of the English Revolution and the English Republic (wherein both the Monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished) either in Old England or New England. Why not? Because, the five original essential elements of machinofacture were still over a century away when Oliver Cromwell died in 1658.
Origin of Capitalism in Europe
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels saw the emergence of capitalism in Europe as having occurred first in the city-states of Italy, especially, northern Italy. Here the city-state communes of cities like Padua had in the 1300's become concentrations of pooled, averaged, factory clock regulated, thus commoditized, purchased labor-power alongside, or part of, the older guild system.
Marx and Engels also recognized the expansion of European capitalism as being intimately involved with the discovery of gold and silver in the New World. It was this overnight concentration of cash wealth in the hands of the ruling classes of Europe which gave them not just what they needed to trade within the great ports of the Old World, but also the capital they had to have to invest in expensive new technology (such as the Liege blast furnace invented and invested in heavily there beginning in 1500 - only two years after the greatest gold strike in the history of Europe had been made in Hispaniola.)
East African, Arabian and South Asian ports had just become open to Europeans, and for the first time, since the collapse of the Roman Empire West c. AD 400. Columbus was well on his way to opening a new route to China and the Japans even though he
made it initially only as far as the Bahamas in1492. Portuguese sailors rounded the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) a few years later.
The Crusades
Remember that prior to the last decade of the 1400's Europe was an isolated appendage of the Eurasian land mass and all trade had to go through expensive middle persons. The Islamic regimes of Arabia controlled most of Europe's trade with Arabia, East Africa, India, Indonesia (the Spice Islands), China and the Japans. European ruling classes were so unhappy about this that for several centuries they had tried everything to find a way to cut out the middle people. Thus, for example, the Crusades. Yet, to no avail.
It would be the Iberians, on the tip of the European peninsula, pursuing their natural inclinations to explore the neighboring territories, which meant by boat, who would take the successful route down the west coast of Africa, finding thereby the direct route to the Far East, round the Cape of Good Hope.
Europeans on a ``Cash Only'' Basis
All of a sudden, in the decade from 1492 to 1502, the European turn toward naval circumvention of the Muslims paid off. Portuguese sailors found the tip of Africa in the South and quickly turned northward once again from the Cape of Good Hope making their way to Calicut, India (Bombay; Mumbai) by way of East Africa and South Arabia -And, Spanish privateers used the Bahamas and Cuba as their gate way into a truly New World. Shortly they would cross Mexico and build the direct route to East Asia dreamed of by the Great Admiral, Cristobal Colon.
Now, the manufactured goods of the Italian city-states, Benelux, France, Germany, London, and so forth, could find their way to the great markets of the Old World without the intolerable cost of the Muslim interface. They could also be sold to a ``made'' market of European colonials in the New World.
The enslavement of the Native Americans provided the key thing European traders needed however, and that was cash. Gold and silver would pay their way into Asian markets any time. Which was essential. Because European goods were cheap and shoddy. Furthermore, the Europeans had nothing to sell that the Asians didn't have in better quality and larger quantities with the exception of English wool, White slaves, and personal firearms. The Portuguese sailors had almost been hung in Calicutt (not Calcutta which was a British creation later on the other side of India. Calicutt is now Bombay or Mumbai) when they showed up with junk like glass trading beads! (The Chinese had had cannon for at least three centuries by this time, but had never taken it to the level of muskets and pistols for the individual fighting man.)
177Yet this period, beginning in the late 1400's, was nothing more than what Marx and Engels said it was, ``the rosy dawn of Capitalism.'' It was not true capitalism in the sense of production via machinofacture (and its five essential technical elements) with its cheap, unskilled, workers at the factory bench, where their purchased labor-power was pooled and averaged and regulated by the factory clock. In the decade 1492-1502 this was just more mercantile capitalism. -And, so it would remain until the Europeans invented machinery and then also brought said machinery to the masses of sub-humanized people of South Asia, especially India. Chief among these would be the
English capitalists.
Why?
Because the French capitalists lost what Winston Churchill has called ``The First World War'' (what in the USA is often termed ``The French and Indian War'') and was fought out on a global basis. The most important part of that British global victory was not in North America but in India where the French were forced out for good. This ``First World War'' (1758-63) was still a good two and a half centuries away from the days of rounding Good Hope and discovering the Bahamas. Thus, the ``rosy dawn'' of capitalism occurred within the Feudal Stage (albeit it, of course, in the final Phase of said Stage.)
British Capitalism Creates Colonial Financial Crisis
Tea Party in Boston
It's important for you to recognize at this point one critical factor in the emerging post-War (1758-1763) situation in Britain. Yes, the Brit capitalists won the war against France, but they did so at the cost of about 60 million pounds! Parliament took various taxing measures including requiring the North American colonies to pay part of the bill - at least the ongoing part of supporting British troops and other British Government functions in the Atlantic colonies.
This was an abrogation of the long ago won, full civic rights in colonial Assemblies, due to rich White Yankees, in the North American system of rule by White Male Wealthy men. The Stamp Act and other taxing pieces of legislation culminated in the Boston Tea Party and led directly to the North American Revolutionary War (1775-1781.) The ultimate cause having been the greed of the British capitalist's in command of the UK Government which led them to war in order to seize French and other possessions on a global basis. One side effect in the end would be this greed having led directly to the loss of the North American colonies altogether.
Technically this is a colonial war rather than an imperialist war in that the British and French capitalists were not trying to export capital anywhere except India (textile factories). That is, factories and the machinery within them were not being sent here and there and sold to anyone anywhere, which is the technical definition of imperialism. Just the opposite actually as you will see in Chapter 21 on British Colonialism versus North American colonists.
General Contradiction vs. General Crisis
As we have seen the greatest transition, in human history, occurred many millennia before the emergence of Capitalism. That was when the General Contradiction of the primitive communism of the Hunting-gathering Stages and Tribal Agriculture, expressed in the prime directive to avoid surplus production at virtually any cost, had been replaced by the General Contradiction of the Servitude Epoch and its prime directive; namely, to maximize surplus production regardless of the amounts of value and surplus value being produced. This General Contradiction of the Servitude Epoch continues in the third and final (Capitalist) Stage of the Servitude Epoch, and, of course, in the preceding transitional phase out of Feudalism. So, Capitalism emerges long after the Great Divide in Human History. But, it continues with that General Contradiction (of the Servitude Epoch) as its own. What about the General Crisis of
178Capitalism?
The General Crisis of Capitalism
As we have seen each Stage has its own specific General Crisis. Capitalism will have its own General Crisis and we can see it in the germinal forms from which it emerges.
In the Capitalist Stage the General Crisis is a function of the competition between the sub-column of ``profit'' and the sub-column of ``investment in the Next Generation of Machinery (NGM)'' under the category we call Surplus Value.
{In this discussion of the mode of production of the Capitalist Stage you should remember that one given (condition of the problem) is that `what is produced is sold, or otherwise realized, in the marketplace.'}
The Law of the Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit
The General Contradiction of the Capitalist Stage is the same as it was in the preceding Stages of the Servitude Epoch - the drive of the domesticating, exploiting, ruling and owning classes to maximize their profits, regardless of the amounts of value and surplus value being produced. The General Crisis of Capitalism is, however, as Karl Marx discovered, distinct from that of slavery. In fact, it is unique. The General Crisis of Slavery was created when the financial cost of the police and the army needed to keep the slaves in obedience and submission continued to increase (not to mention the more intangible ``social cost'' of the Generals realizing they could replace their employers.) In capitalism the general crisis is caused by the necessity (to stay competitive) to continue to invest more and more money into new and continually successive generations of machinery. In order to stay competitive each capitalist must constantly buy new machinery that produces more commodities per unit of labor-power employed. Even so, and therefore, unless the amount of labor-power going into the productive process is increased on a one to one basis with the introduction of each new unit of machinery the rate of profit per unit of labor-power must decrease. It must decrease because the new machinery costs a lot of money, and without increasing labor-power input, the rate by which surplus value is increased must be relatively less than it had been previously, precisely because of this new cost of new equipment and, most importantly and far more importantly, because this cost is entered into in order to reduce the cost of labor-power --- which means fewer workers working fewer hours. In other words the exact opposite of introducing labor-power at a one to one ratio to the introduction of new machinery enhancement of labor-power produced value. It is this fact which creates the crisis. That is why we say that, at-bottom; the General Crisis of Capitalism is caused specifically by the law of the absolute decline in the rate of profit.
179What precisely does this mean?
When the capitalist buys new equipment to stay competitive, and to reduce the cost of the labor-power going into his productive line, he takes a reduction in the rate of surplus value creation. Why? Because, he reduces his work force, or reduces the hours of labor-power of his original work force, thus reducing the hours applied to the new machinery; simultaneously he increases the cost of ``t'' because of the cost of installation and higher maintenance costs. On top of that, remember that both the cost of the next generation of machinery (NGM) and profit must come from the surplus value column.
There is nowhere else for either to come from. If the new machinery is ten times more productive per unit of labor power applied to it, (more productive than the previous machinery,) the capitalist will make more money, even after factoring-in installation and increased maintenance costs, but there is less overall production for the surplus value column AND HIS RATE OF PROFIT MUST FALL since we must now factor-in the cost of the new equipment. ---And even more critically important is that to maintain the same rate of value production one must increase labor-power input at a one to one ratio to the introduction of more powerful machinery. The capitalist does just the opposite of what he has to do to maintain the same rate (not to mention a possible increase in rate) of value production. This is the inherent iron-law nature of capitalism and there is no getting around it within the capitalist system of social relations. We change all that when we seize power and introduce an entirely new system of social relations and instead of reducing labor-power input we hire more workers and still more workers and face instead of unemployment an increasing labor shortage!
180Again.
His rate of profit must fall for two reasons: (1) there is only one way to maintain the same rate of surplus value production (given the cost of purchasing, installing and maintaining the new equipment and the necessity of hiring more workers to simply maintain the same rate) and this means to introduce labor-power at a one-to-one ratio with the productive power of the new machinery. Under capitalist relations of production this cannot be done. The idea of any capitalist was to reduce the cost of labor and to stay competitive. His idea was not to hire more workers and/or to put all these laborers to work for longer periods of time. Either one or both of these would result in increasing the cost of Value 1 (wages), thereby decreasing the amount of production dedicated to the SV column. (2) Furthermore, by increasing the amount of surplus value devoted to investment in the next generation of machinery (NGM) he further decreases the amount of surplus value available for the profit sub-column; production which at any rate has already witnessed an increased value 2 --- i.e., increased the magnitude of V2 (maintaining newly purchased and installed equipment). Finally and most importantly, the capitalist must pay for the new equipment, and this new cost factored in, reduced absolutely the amount of surplus value available for profit.
181Look at the formula:
lp + t ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàV1, V2 + SV
Profit/NGM
(a) (b) (c) (d)
lp = labor-power (a)
t = machinofacture technology (automated, cyberneticized in modern times) (b)
V1 = wages (c)
V2 = cost of maintaining machinery (c)
SV = surplus value (d)
NGM = Next Generation of Machinery the locus of the general crisis. (d)
Profit = that portion of surplus value appropriated by the capitalist (d)
To maintain the rate of profit one must first maintain the rate of surplus value
production by introducing new labor-power equivalents [a] to the new machinery [b] at a one-to-one ratio. Otherwise the percentage rate of surplus value on the right side of the arrow must decline. Also the new equipment has to be paid for, as does its installation and maintenance. Less surplus value means less available for profit, because second, the complex of new machinery costs must also come from overall value-surplus value production further reducing the amount of surplus value available for the profit sub-column. This is an iron law. There is no way around it.
Except in the future with robotic artificially intelligent STAR TREK labor-power when it would be possible to introduce {a] at the equivalent one-to-one ratio with [b] --- and, where the cost of the new machinery [d] is easily absorbed by the vastly increased productive capability of the robotically manned overall system of production, assuming there are no social restrictions as there are under capitalism to such a policy.
In a capitalist system this introduction of labor-power at a one-to-one ratio isn't done, as we have seen above, so the (i) rate of surplus value production has to decline on the right side of the equation. Also (ii) the heavy investment in purchasing, installing and maintaining the new machinery are factors that combine to leave less surplus value available for the profit sub-column (with V2 increasing alongside t - i.e. with ``c'' increasing along with ``b''.) That is, the totality of costs (i.e., where these costs of ``t'' are accounted for under V2 and NGM) of all of this new equipment further reduces the amount of production available under surplus value for the profit sub-column. Thus, for this reason also the rate of profit must decline. Simple arithmetic. (Or perhaps not so simple --- but, nevertheless just as real.)
182There are things a capitalist can do which will ameliorate the speed by which his rate of profit will decline. Always these have to do with decreasing the cost of (a) by decreasing the amount of (c). Slave labor in Nazi systems, or simple wage control, declining safety procedures (failure to adequately maintain equipment and working safeguards) under fascist systems, are examples, but there are many other less draconian ways such as those pioneered by the North American capitalists (including ``Taylorism'' [i.e., efficiency] or assured US governmental contracting or simple monopoly). But in the end they are all stop-gap band-aids if you will and can only work for limited periods of time. Another topic for another book.
{Note: in Stalinist Socialist systems it has been possible to introduce labor-power at a one-to-one ratio with new machinery and new factories (via reduced wages, forced labor, volunteerism, Stakhanovism [enthusiastic worker dedication and sacrifice in production]). ---And, what would have been profit is shifted instead to other sub-categories, especially NGM. Furthermore, these things were done - especially in the USSR under Stalin and in China under Mao. This is the at-bottom economic reason why both countries witnessed the early ``miracle of overnight development'' that was the centerpiece of attention in the world academic community of economists in the 1930's and 1950's respectively. However, there are reasons why this kind of an increase in applied labor-power cannot last forever (can only be temporary), and without giant leaps in technology which take time, but that is also another story for another book.}
183At any rate, in practice, and most commonly, some capitalists try to maintain their rate of profit by decreasing their investments in NGM. Eventually they lose competitive advantage. One capitalist eats the other. Capital is concentrated and centralized. This was discovered by Karl Marx in the mid-1840's. Marx began his full explication in Capital
Volume One (1867). In practice in the 20th century we have seen the capitalist classes resorting to various extreme measures such as Nazism, a variety of fascist practices insuring low and controlled wages, ignoring deteriorating working conditions, and the US system of assured governmental contracting, and always the tendency to monopoly maximized.
Negating the Law of Value
Free Enterprise vs. Monopoly and Non-Competitive Contracting
Corruption is Inherent in Capitalism
There is a widespread myth in capitalist economics, or at least in the way it is presented to the unknowledgeable beginning student, that ``free enterprise'' is an essential characteristic of the capitalist system. Exactly the opposite is the case, in fact. But, in Marxist theory, freedom to compete without interference at home and/or abroad is an essential given for capitalism to function properly. What is the answer to this conundrum?
The law of the absolute decline in the rate of profit is the at-bottom reason why the primary drive of capitalist enterprise is always toward (1) monopoly and further toward (2) assured (which is to say Government guaranteed) contracts. It has always been the case that capitalists struggled to get contracts without competition (See Marx's Capital Volume III) and to assure that what competition exists, exists at an absolute minimum.
Why?
It should be obvious. If one can obtain an assured purchase price of commodities through a monopoly on their production or at least at a price one dictates via negotiation with a ``friendly'' purchaser it is a world far preferable to one in which the law of value is allowed to dictate price. In this way the capitalists who succeed in achieving a monopoly on producing said commodities or at least arranging friendly (non-competitive) purchases can also assert some control over the otherwise absolutely declining rate of profit precisely because eliminating real competition is in effect a means of negating the law of value. It is a form of corruption, of course. But it is so essential to reversing the otherwise destructive tendency (to maximizing profit) created by competition, where each capitalist must otherwise attempt to turn the law of value to his own interest by doing something to cut costs per commodity produced, that there is no other realistic way to turn. Corruption is as you can see, therefore, inherent in the capitalist system.
184If I can get the US government to pay me according to some assured formula (such as cost-plus ``defense'' [war] contracting --- that is to say, the present system where the US government assures me (the capitalist presenting the commodity) that I will be paid my cost of production plus a guaranteed profit (of say 17%) I need no longer worry about the Law of Value. At least for the moment. No one else will be allowed to compete with me for the commodity being produced (say a warplane) and the more I spend the more profit I will make (17% of one billion is a lot more than 17% of half a billion). In the most egregious contemporary cases such as the war contracting for US imperialism in Iraq, the process is taken to the extreme. Now, in the USA, favored corporations are handed guaranteed cost-plus contracts without ever having to even submit proposals for initial review (as for example competing capitalists have had to do in the past when submitting proposals for weapons systems, where two or three were
185allowed to compete). Now it is up to the contractor to decide if a hammer is worth $1.95 or $101.95, which aside from ethical considerations makes ``price'' an altogether ``arbitrary'' matter. (There may be delayed checks by regulators but the key word is ``delay'', because the capitalist already has the money and has been using his ill-gotten gains for even further profit making in some or another way.)
The desire to have assured government contracts lies at the bottom of Western European capitalist war contracting since the days of old. Whether in Britain or France, for example in the 1600's and 1700's, manufacturers always sought to eliminate the law of value via corrupt practices (buying government and legislative agents under the table) to assure the awarding of such contracts. The same was the case in the USA during the Revolutionary War and everywhere else the bourgeoisie fought for power. (Cheating on quality and quantity of course is a better business practice of all concerned but altogether aside from this inherent corruption --- a different type of corruption.)
In summary, eliminating competition (the absolute tendency of capitalism toward monopoly) is an inherent function of the recognition of capitalists that they could temporarily negate the law of value and for a while offset the absolute decline in the rate of profit. It has its most modern manifestations in fascist systems such as those of Germany and Italy, or for that matter in the USA with its post-World War II cost-plus ``defense'' contracting and current non-competitive bidding.
Now, for a few additional comments on the birth of Capitalism.
Capitalism in the English-speaking World
As we have seen true capitalism, in the sense of capitalist production, required a ruling class with machinofacture (and all five of its essential minimal elements) as its profit center. Once that existed then it was possible for the middle classes (which is what the French word ``bourgeoisie'' means) to mount a serious effort to take political power away from the feudal aristocrats and nobility. Not that these middle classes hadn't already tried.
Britain
The first Western Area attempt to put political power in the hands of the bourgeoisie occurred in the English Revolution {I like to use the dates 1640 -1660 for convenience. In actuality it would be more like 1642 - 1658.} Note that at this time the English-speaking World consisted only of what we call the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the North American Atlantic Coastal Colonies with a few Caribbean colonies thrown in. The entire English-speaking World of that time was affected by the English Parliamentary revolt.
This revolution was eventually headed by Oliver Cromwell who used his New Model Army as the social engineering instrument which shaped the entire experience. The New Model Army could not be defeated. Because of that military fact Cromwell was able to abolish the Monarchy and the House of Lords. He created the English Republic and tried to put political power in the hands of the bourgeoisie. But, without machinofacture as their overwhelming profit center, the bourgeois elements, especially the capitalist farmers, were unable to make their revolution permanent.
Cromwell's New Model Army was based on capitalist farmers such as himself. Why do we call them capitalist farmers if capitalism did not yet exist as a
sociocultural stage? Because these are farmers who ``hire'' labor as they need it. These are farmers who prefer not to incur the expense of hiring thugs to control serfs. Once Cromwell died, and his military genius removed from the class struggle, it was only a matter of time until the wealth of the aristocrats and nobility from their traditional sources (farmers held as serfs; and to the degree they were invested in proto-manufacturing endeavors and world trade, from those too) reversed the political gains of the English Revolution. For a time the traditional Monarchy and House of Lords returned. Cromwell's rotting corpse was exhumed and flogged and it seemed as if everything gained in Old England by the civil wars and revolution had been lost.
186Although, in Britain, machinofacture was on the horizon, ascendant, it was not yet transcendent. It would take another century for the five essential elements to come into play simultaneously, thus, it took the British bourgeoisie another century to fully take command. Although, after the post-Cromwell ``Anti-restoration Revolution of 1688,'' the British burghers were never less than equal partners with the landed aristocracy.
North America
At the same time, almost as if out of sight out of mind, the New Englanders had been left alone for a good two decades - really closer to three decades. -And, during that period of time they had developed their own domestic political institutions.
Furthermore, the drastic labor shortage in New England had created a tremendous demand for every kind of gadget and invention that could save labor-power input and magnify what labor-power input that was available!
These are the two main reasons why the first really successful transition to Capitalism as a sociocultural evolutionary Stage occurred in New England. Left to their own devices the North American middle classes made a successful way in both the area of political life and in the equally important area of rapidly coming to terms with the new technological innovations. Innovations leading to germinal machinofacture! By the time we see the Anti-Restoration Revolution of 1688 in England, the North Americans had plenty of experience, (nearly four decades of practice,) in de facto self-government minus feudal interference. That fact forever marked the further evolution of those English colonies along the Atlantic Coast.
The fighting for a new and bourgeois dominated way of life began in North America in 1775. Almost a century after the Anti-Restoration Revolution of 1688 in London. But, its destiny was laid during the Cromwellian Revolution of 1640-1660 and its consequences would be truly revolutionary. Semi-Capitalist farmers like Washington and Jefferson combined with Capitalist manufacturers and mercantilists in New England to put paid to the extended arms of British Colonialism and the feudal order/cum capitalist order, it represented. Since, in the British North American colonies, the machinofacture elements were in place alongside those of mercantile capitalism, and capitalist farming was the basis of this largely agricultural land, and because there was only a weak native feudal (Loyalist) overstructure to combat, the North Americans were able to pull off a successful military struggle with some critically important help from their enemy's principal enemy - the French capitalists and aristocrats. That war, conducted by George Washington and his Staff, changed history forever.
187Think about it. It's as if Cuba's quiet success in building Socialism may someday (say one hundred years from now) be seen as the real beginning of true Communism,
even with the collapse of the World Socialist Stage's homeland. Certainly, if not Cuba, then China may emerge as the first of the true Socialist and later Communist countries. Not that anyone would have thought this way when everyone's eyes were focused on the USSR! This is one of the advantages of having an Olympian view of prehistory and history. It makes the comparative method of historical analysis fruitful.
However, the Cuban, Chinese or Vietnamese situation may turn out to be as prognosticators of the future of Socialism, there is no doubt but that the USA, tiny and virtually impotent, was the first homeland of the first permanent truly diagnostically Capitalist Stage (minus the Feudal residue of Great Britain) country in the World.
Why? Because all of the trappings of power that spread awe and aura among most observers are really irrelevant to the outcome. What are important are the underlying economic and political diagnostics of class power. The Americans had the unhindered, critically important social and cultural and technological elements for building capitalism, even if the World didn't know it until much later.
Before Industrial Slavery in the USA
Even the existence of slavery did not seriously, adversely, effect the North American bourgeois success, since the slavocrat economy of the South (as we were about to know it) was still in a rudimentary phase; the slave owners were as likely to be neutral or supportive of the Revolution as they were to be loyalist. Witness the slave owners Washington and Jefferson. Some of these slave owners were more attuned to the use of free hired agricultural labor to which slavery was a somewhat antiquated adjunct (thus, the term ``semi-Capitalist.) A true united front could therefore be, and was, forged. Industrial slavery of the sort that followed the introduction of the Cotton Gin and the huge increase in demand created by the textile capitalists of Europe was yet to come at the time of the US Revolutionary War (1775-1781).
188Note that many of the textile capitalists, especially in Great Britain, were unusually intelligent. For example, Frederick Engels was a British textile magnate. Some of them were capable of foreseeing the doom of US cotton slavery and the General Crisis of Capitalism (with it, the concomitant need to move factories to India.)
The French Revolution Brings Capitalism to the Fore in Europe
The Great Revolution in France, in 1789, brought the bourgeoisie to political power there. Let us examine a few of the reasons why capitalist revolution in France was so much more important to the political immediacy of the European continent than anything the North American Revolutionary War portended.
(Bourgeoisie is the French word for middle class; i.e., originally in the ``middle'' between the aristocracy/nobility on the one hand and the mass of dispossessed agricultural workers and urban proletarians on the other hand. What today we call the New Class is the technocratic and bureaucratic strata of the bourgeois class in capitalist and socialist societies --- in alliance, of course with other parts of the capitalist class depending on where and when.)
France had been the heartland of Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire West. It was France that had the overwhelming concentration of Western Europe's population, which was four times as large as the rest of Western Europe combined. -And, the French had inherited the infrastructure of advanced technology of the preceding
Roman Slave Stage
The French Monarchy and its Consigliore would never have consented to help the North Americans (in the US Revolutionary War of 1775-1781) with their radical political program being propagandized here and there and everywhere, if they had really thought the Americans had any chance of spreading such pernicious doctrines in France. The French rulers had millennia of experience in class dictatorship and a very efficient and effective state apparatus. At the center, were the secret police and this police force had concentrated the French noble families (the French boss hierarchy equivalent to Egyptian ``Nome bosses'' or Chinese ``scholar-bureaucrats'') at Versailles (now a Parisian suburb). These bosses numbered some 400,000, individuals (counting men, women and children; all deeply in debt, and under constant surveillance. The French rulers felt confident in their ability to keep the status quo extant.
189What the French Monarchists did not understand was that Capitalism in both manufacturing and agriculture had a new and permanent technological base. The French ``High Command'' did not understand that the amount of capital being created permanently in the hands of the owners of the capitalist farms and the factories was overwhelming vis a vis the traditional sources of feudal capital accumulation. -And, all of this capitalist income was above and beyond, and in addition to, the vast amounts of money capital being acquired globally, in everything from sharp trading to the exploitation of slave labor in the Caribbean.
Furthermore, these new rich elements (bourgeoisie) were not concentrated at Versailles by the secret police --- in fact, they were concentrated nowhere by the police. They found their own favorite locales in the libraries, salons, and clubs of France's great cities.
At any rate, these French ``middle persons'' (bourgeoisie), and the intellectuals who adhered to them could not be set aside and ignored. Yet this was something that the Old Regime could not understand and therefore, could not admit.
Thus, came the uprising of 1789. This time it was the turn of the French ruling classes to experience the civil war that their English brethren had gone through well over a century earlier.
In the event, France's civil war quickly spread throughout the country and ended in the liquidation of the aristocratic and noble classes and indeed of the Monarchy and all of its institutions. In three short years. Along the way the Revolution gave the peasantry the land of the Monarchy, the boss hierarchy, and their Church. In so doing the Revolutionary leaders created a vested interest in making the Revolution permanent among the masses of French farmers. It would be these capitalist farmers that provided the cannon-fodder for the Revolutionary Armies and those of Bonaparte a few years later.
In the two decades following the uprising of 1789, the French capitalist classes in various political forms, destroyed feudalism, not only in France, and the heartland of the old Roman Empire (the entire Riviera from Rome to Barcelona and adjacent territories), but in much of the rest of Europe as well. This was accomplished militarily. At first under the various governments of the Revolution proper and later under the leadership of Bonaparte.
The Congress of Victors
The Restoration of 1815
There is little new under the Sun. With the collapse of the French Revolution/cum Empire the Feudal elements with the foreign (Russian) troops they needed at their disposal, attempted to reverse all the gains of the bourgeoisie. At the Congress of Vienna (the Congress of Victors), in 1815, it may well have seemed to observers that they had succeeded. But, as in England with the death of Cromwell, the success of the Feudal Restorationists was destined to be short lived. For, at-bottom, the nature of technology had changed forever. Thus, while the political form of French government featured the restored Old Monarchical order, the underlying economic and thus inevitably the political power would have to be in the hands of the new, and permanently emergent, agricultural and manufacturing middle classes.
190Continental Capitalist Economic Downturn Leads to Continental Revolution
The General Crisis of Capitalism (which we defined above} began to come to a head in the 1830's and finally provoked the European wide Revolutions of 1848-50 wherein labor found its first independent political role. This real world event triggered the acceptance of Karl Marx's theoretical discoveries by the European labor movement. -And, it encouraged the more far-seeing and richest European capitalists to try sending more machinery to the cheap labor of the colonies. Sharpest, at this hinge of historical fate, were the British textile magnates. They envisioned India's cheap labor applied to their machines. They knew, from experience, about Indian contributions to dyeing and weaving; they saw that the huge numbers of absolutely destitute people on the Indian subcontinent could be placed at the factory bench - burned up - replaced again - ad infinitum.
191Capitalism Prospers in North America
While the attention of Europe was focused on its own deepening economic and political crises in the 1840's what went largely misunderstood, or completely non-understood, was the great success of the North American bourgeoisie. They had spread into the West and South of territories only nominally theirs and often into territories belonging to other nations. -And, in all these cases they were successful.
Furthermore, the technological progress of the North Americans was phenomenal. Every kind of advanced industry existed in at least one of the Northern cities. -And, compared to Europe, North American capitalists had relative labor peace. When the urban proletariat grew too angry with their conditions in factories the American capitalists had the open valve of the West beckoning to these disaffected workers. Workers could take their ambition and give capitalist farming a try in the West (``Go West Young Man''). The heat was off of the pressure cooker the way it could never be off in Europe. Thus, the North American industrial capitalists avoided any duplication of the European Revolutions of 1848-1850 that brought Karl Marx and his analysis of Capital, and what needed to be done about it, to the fore. (Marx's original ``Critique'' of Capitalist production was written and circulated by him and Frederick Engels in the mid-1840's; and its implications were popularized by him during the European revolutions of 1848-1850 (e.g., The Communist Manifesto), and led to the book we know as Capital Volume One in 1867).
192In fact the Gringo Regime was so stable that it profited from the difficulties of the European rulers by completing its seizure by 1848 of the rest of northern Mexico
including New Mexico, Arizona and California. Whatever the French and English may have thought about renewed Yankee aggression there wasn't much they could do about it with their state apparatus's struggling just to stay afloat.
In summary, by 1850, the North American capitalists had not only avoided the proletarian uprisings preoccupying Europe, but they had seized northern Mexico as a result of their victory in the First Mexican War. They brought new territories into the Union and California entered as a ``Free State.''
Yet, the gringo capitalists had a cancer in their system just as deadly as the armies of unemployed workers were to their European counterparts.
What was that cancer?
Slavery.
Free Labor vs. Slave Labor --- Whither the USA?
The US northern Capitalists were forced to pay a high price, to their Slavocrat counterpart rulers in the South, for California and the West coming on board without slavery. That was the United States Federal ``Fugitive Slave Act.'' For the northern fat cats the Slavocrat South was about to become a worse problem, at least temporarily, than the indigenous revolts of proletarians in Europe.
The US federal courts were as corrupt in 1850 as they are today in 2011 and the US Supreme Court was controlled by the worst of the worst of the Southern slavocrats. These evil men had only one interest; that interest lay in maintaining a tight rein on their slaves. The new law created a force of federal commissioners to hunt down fugitive slaves in any state and return them to their owners. Even Africans who had been free for many years, and lived in Free States could be seized and ``returned.'' The commissioners were nothing more than scum-of-the-Earth hoodlums, but they enjoyed a new legal status with the power to kill while in pursuit of Black Men, Women and Children, and under the new US federal law these thugs could compel citizens in Free States to assist in the pursuit and de facto kidnapping of runaway slaves and free Blacks! Hefty fines and prison sentences awaited Whites who refused to cooperate. A captured Black person could not testify on his or her own behalf and was not entitled to a court trial.
193Civil War in the Offing
This Act enraged the North. Some states reacted by passing legislation designed to hamper the federal thug's activities, but such laws were declared unconstitutional by the slavocrat U.S. Supreme Court. When riots occurred in Northern communities and when soldiers were deployed to restore order, the soldiers refused to fire on the protestors. In Kansas and Nebraska the gauntlet was thrown down by Free Soilers, not about to put up with the Fugitive Slave Act or the idea of slavery on their Free Soil! Civil War was in the offing, as the 1852 publication of Harriet Beacher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin prepared the people of the North to see slavery in the South for what it really was.
-And, the Achilles Heel of the Southern Slavocrat Regime was laid bare for all to see. That was the running away to Canada and Mexico of thousands and thousands of
slaves not about to put up with enslavement any more. At least 150,000 slaves escaped to Canada, and perhaps that many more made it to Mexico. When the South's evil leaders realized that their Fugitive Slave Act was going to fail they prepared to leave the Union and form their own tyrannical state! Those of you interested in the history of the Slave Revolts that brought the slave system to its end should read US Communist Herbert Aptheker's doctoral dissertation (published as American Negro Slave Revolts in 1943) and his earlier work on the Nat Turner Rebellion and go from there.
The First Imperialist War
By 1850, the profits returning to the capitalists of the United Kingdom from the factories they had installed in India triggered the Crimean War of 1853 - 1856. The Russian financial capitalists and their Czar hoped to seize India's cheap labor from the English with their massive land armies. The outcome was devastating for the Russians and not so good for the Light Brigade.
(After Cromwell, the British rulers would never allow promotion in the officer's ranks except for reasons of class and privilege. Thus, one of the most incompetent aristocrats ever to wear a British uniform was in charge of the Light Infantry Brigade at Balaklava. He took a private yacht to the war zone and bedded down there with a bevy of beauties and the best of food and service. His tactic in the crunch was to lead his dragoons (mounted infantry), weak and dying of dysentery, straight into the artillery of the waiting Russians, who naturally, wiped them out. Thus, Lord Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade: ``Not for Us to Reason Why; Only to Do and Die!'')
John Brown
As the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act spread throughout the North (and in the South where increasing numbers of slaves were taking to the ankle express as they headed south and north to Florida, Mexico and Canada) armed struggle broke out. Kansas and Nebraska were the scene of the most violent confrontations between free soilers and slavers. Leading the fight were men such as the abolitionist preacher John Brown. (Abolitionist was the popular term for those advocating the abolition of slavery.)
Brown was ready to start the US Civil War right now (1859) and over the issue of slavery. He and his group prepared an attack on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia, US Armory. This military action was to support the political objective of initiating civil war by arousing the slave population to take up the now available arms at Harpers Ferry.
In the event the Army was able to defeat the insurrectionists and killed them. But the fact the civil war did start immediately thereafter (1861) made John Brown a hero in legend and in music (``John Brown's Body lies smoldering in the Grave'' and ``Battle Hymn of the Republic''.) It would be four years after Harper's Ferry before Abraham Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation. But, be there no doubt, John Brown's insurrection against slavery and the USA Government that enforced it was the first shot fired in the US Civil War.
Labor Takes a Giant Step Forward --- September 28, 1864
The (1st) International Working Men's Association
During the course of the US Civil War (1861-1865), Karl Marx joined the {First} International Working Men's Association {1864 - 1876} immediately after its
September 28, 1864, London creation. Marx rapidly became the key person holding the International together and in shaping its composition and policies over the next 12 years.
Marx saw the opportunity to organize massive strikes of British workers as part of his support of the Great Republic, and this made the International something to be reckoned with right away, for the USA. Especially after Washington (DC --- the US State Department) responded warmly to his letter to Abraham Lincoln, on behalf of the International, in which Marx gave Lincoln full support for the Union in the US Civil War.
Civil War (1861-1865) in the USA Changes Marx's Presentation of Capital
The US Civil War triggered the destruction of the slavocrat overburden that the North American burgeoning bourgeoisie had inherited as a product of the way they fought and won the Revolutionary War with Great Britain (1775 - 1781.)
Those who have read
Capital (Volume I) know that it
begins with a citation about the historic significance of the US
Civil War; but you may not know that it was that war which brought
Marx to a new way of presenting his first magnum
opus to the world.
Why?
Because, from a ruling class point of view, the struggle in the US between the Capitalist North and Slavocrat South was fundamentally a struggle between those who advocated that labor-power be purchased and paid at free value (therefore at a higher rate than the slave but without the financial burden of policing the slaves) and those who advocated that labor-power be paid at the value of minimal subsistence (the cost of keeping the slave alive and paying those holding him in subservience).
For free workers the struggle was a reflection of the struggle for paid hours of labor versus unpaid hours of labor. With free workers having to compete with the lowest common denominator (cost of keeping the slave alive) the hours for which they would be paid would be very few indeed --- thus, the status of poor Whites in the South became known to advancing Union armies as the living conditions of ``poor-White Trash.''
---And, the workers of England and the rest of Europe understood this very well. Although the two British working class newspapers had started out in support of the South alongside the capitalist press (because the ``cotton famine'' had shut down a great deal of the British textile industry), Marx had been able to educate and guide them so that by 1864, as Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln, on behalf of the (1st) International Workingmen's Association, to paraphrase, ``European labor has seen the struggle of the Great Republic against Slavery as its own struggle!''
The struggle for paid hours of work, and adequate pay at that, is the very heart of the international working class movement --- the very heart of Marxism. American workers saw that wage slavery was bad enough and suspected what European workers already knew. Namely, any and all capitalists would reduce them to chattel slavery if they could, because they already done that everywhere in Europe they could, as our entire European history and ongoing cultural connection with Europe proved.
Three Organizational/Structural Steps to Emancipation
1 2 3
The International Workingmen's The Paris Commune the Russian Counsel
Association (1864-1876) Model (1871) Model (1905)
From left to right we have the initial three historical stages of organizational awareness in the process of proletarian emancipation.
The First International
September, 1864
Twelve years after reaction crushed the revolutions of 1848-52 a defensive organization led by relatively conservative British trade unionists was created in London.
Its purpose?
To (1) stop by physical force (on the Continent) the importation of scab labor into Britain and (2) raise and share ``strike'' funds to offset the capitalist international organization of labor and finance. It was called the International Workingmen's Association (and it had some definite feminine affiliates but in these days only the most progressive males --- such as Marx himself --- saw this as an absolute necessity.)
Karl Marx joined the First (there would be three by 1919) International within a month and volunteered his services to the cause. Marx had just inherited his share of his parent's estate and was financially independent for the first time in his life. Prior to this time Marx earned money as a writer for many newspapers, especially in other countries, and he received a great deal of financial support from his friend the British capitalist Frederick Engels. By this time Marx had been out of organized politics since 1852 --- for twelve years in other words.
During those years Marx had been doing research at the British Museum library and in three more years this research would come together in the first volume of Capital (1867). Marx quickly became the ideological and organizational leader of the First International.
In his hands ``Marxism'' (the science of historical materialism) would defeat syndicalism, anarchism and revisionism within its own ranks and the International itself would move from being a defensive organization into an offensive one. This development caused the most reactionary governments in Europe to form the first anti-communist Pact.
The Paris Commune
For your purposes you may organize your studies in two parts. The first is understanding the specific historical circumstances surrounding the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 that led to the Civil (class) War in France (1871). The second is the way the Paris proletariat organized this first attempt of the working class to establish its own form of government.
The second of these topics concerns what you need to internalize right now. Namely, the structure of this first proletarian attempt at governing. No one has summarized the governing nature and importance of the Paris Commune better than did Marx himself in 1871 (The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune) in the following five principal points about the structure and indeed nature of the new Government of Paris.
Elimination of the state (professional Army) and its replacement by an armed organization of the people.
Vesting of political power in immediately recallable delegates
No more than workmen's wages be paid any Government employee or leader
Combination of executive, legislative and judicial powers in one ``working'' Government rather than a debating society of different capitalist and bourgeois interests.
The entire nation from the village to the federal level and everything in between to be governed by similar working bodies of immediately recallable men and women paid no more than anyone else.
In the end the capitalists succeeded in destroying the commune and shot over 10,000 men, women and children, by firing squad, and deported to penal colonies (e.g., Devil's Island) or imprisoned 14,000 more.
As importantly, historically, the First International got the credit (or blame) from the aristocrats, nobility and capitalists who began to form anti-communist policies collectively. This early ``anti-Comintern Pact'' (the second would be between Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan in the 1930's) set the stage for the final conflict between workers and capital.
The Psychological Theory of Marxism
Marx dropped the long introductory sections on the ``history of the theory of surplus value'' from Capital Volume I (these would eventually be published by Karl Kautsky in three parts [before he turned renegade] and today are often referred to as Capital Volume IV by Marxist scholars.) Instead, Marx substituted ``The Commodity.'' Why? Because, in and of itself the capitalist produced commodity embodies all of the secrets of capitalist production.
Of equal importance, is that within the commodity lie the secrets of psychological fetishism wherein ``the material relations among people appear as social relations between things.'' -And, this is the basis for the further development of the Marxist theory of psychological imprinting which I have explained in this Handbook. In that imprinting of the underlying template of material relations also lays the secrets of sexual fetishism, where sexual object identification is part of the reflection of these material relations of life. These underlying templates are (1) the altruism of primitive communism and (2) the sadism of the servitude epoch. In the transitional periods, both.
Without Feudalism, Without Slavery, the Future Was Theirs
The end of the US Civil War brought both capital and labor to the fore in North America, as the prime interested parties, and thus the prime movers, respectively, in advancing and defeating the Capitalist Stage. ---And, as Marx's leadership of the First International of Workingmen, and his services in blocking Britain's entry into the War on behalf of the Confederate Regime (also, blocking British construction of Naval Men of War for the Slavocrat Regime in Richmond by organizing a giant British national strike action), was well known to the readers of the New York Daily Herald (for which Marx had been the London correspondent), Marxism began to make rapid headway in the American House of Labor. Not to mention the post-1850 arrival of real Marxists among the refugees from the European working class revolutions of that time (1848-1850).
194The New Englanders had begun their political life in the 1600's essentially
independent of Feudalism, as we saw earlier in this book --- now they would continue it without the anachronism of Slavery. ---And, as the struggle between capitalists for the world's cheap labor and markets intensified, the inherent necessity of revolutionizing the means of production did also. Let us examine this notion of revolutionizing the means of production.
The ``Form'' of Surplus Value Determines its Destination II
Machinofacture increases the productive power of human labor exponentially; it creates huge amounts of commodities. But, the national market is limited to the purchasing power of workers (who are paid at Value - that is, the cost of their wages, keeping them alive [and their families]) and the luxury living requirements of the capitalists. That is not enough. As I pointed out in the beginning of this section, and as Karl Marx discovered, it is the ``form'' of a commodity which determines its destination, thus, also the way in which the surplus value within said commodity can be realized, or made material, so that the capitalist can use it for his advantage. Something besides value (I & II) and Profit must take up the excess surplus value.
195Even though the capitalists have the world as their market (not just the nation in which production occurs), a basic condition in the economic theory of all of Marx's work, this is still not a sufficient answer. No, the answer is that for the massive surplus value being produced, to be consumed, it has to go to more constant capital (the physical means of production) - iron isn't eaten, it has to go to the steel industry - steel has to feed the machine tool, machinery and construction industries. In other words, other capitalists are often the only and best market for all of this excess surplus value. Revolutionizing, or innovating, new means of production, offers the needed market for all this surplus value.
Innovation
This was true then. It is just as true now. This is the reason for the exponential increase in the rate of new generations of equipment (Next Generation of Machinery --- NGM, in our formula) being invented and brought on-line. For example, one no sooner has a computer than it is ``obsolete.'' Contemporary computer manufacturers have a ``law'' which says that microprocessors will be completely reinvented (revolutionized; improved) every 18 months. They rely on this ``law'' for the survival of their industry, by recreating the marketplace continuously.
As we have seen capitalists always strive to eliminate competition via (a) monopoly and (b) assured (friendly; corrupt) contracting. They also use their governments to (c) force further innovation. For example, the US government (by way of Congressional legislation) was recently used by manufacturing capitalists to force TV stations across the nation to go to High Definition (by law!) despite the fact that such technological advance means extraordinarily high costs for the capitalists of the communications industry (not to mention the ``unnecessary'' aspect of such new legally mandated equipment.)
In short, no kind of end-user capital absorber would work unless it was constantly being reinvented (revolutionized.) The means of production, in other words, have to be built all over again. This is quite feasible if the rate of improvement and innovation of the means of production keeps apace with the need of capital to find an
outlet. This is what drives innovation in Capitalism. This is what, as Marx discovered by 1844, is responsible for the exponentially, logarithmically increasing rate of innovation in the means of production in Capitalist systems.
Seeds of Its Own Destruction
As constant capital (e.g., machinery) increases as the end-user of surplus value, and more and more workers (the owners of their own labor-power) are sent to the street (unemployed) with the introduction of the new machinery, generation after generation, workers become increasingly restive. The Iron Law of Capitalist Relations of Production is creating its own grave digger. For workers as a class have no choice but to struggle to seize state power; to put an end to capitalist relations of production in favor of relations that put them at the top of the priority list rather than at the bottom of it. Workers must have a system of social relations that put their needs first, rather than putting the maximization of profit for the domesticating (exploiting) few at the top of that list. (See The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2, Paragraph 22). Working Class power must become their political objective.
196That is why we Bolsheviks are a working class Party. We know scientifically that only the working classes can create humanity's future, because only working people ``have'' to create such an egalitarian future. (Again, the Star Trek model of advanced technology and advanced social relations may be an excellent tool for educational purposes when organizing contemporary working people.)
At any rate, after 1850, more and more capital was sent abroad to utilize the dirt-cheap labor-power of the colonies. The sending of more and more machinery to the colonies was the response of the most sophisticated capitalists within the ruling classes. But most importantly in the half-century from 1848 to 1903, was the growth of the international organization of labor under the banner of Marxism, because the acceptance of Marx's discoveries was the most sophisticated response of the most advanced workers of the capitalist world. (1848 being the European revolutions and the appearance of The Communist Manifesto and 1903 being the formation of Bolshevism.)
More and more unemployment at home triggered revolts. The rising of workers in France in the form of the Paris Commune of 1871; the USA revolt of workers that resulted in the St. Louis Council of 1877, were early related events. Related because all of the capital being sent abroad decreased still further the employment rolls (workers receiving factory wages) in both countries. (Of course, in both cases there were many other specific factors involved in both uprisings but for our purposes we are concerned with the role of exported capital.)
As it had been in the 1840's, the Americans were less affected in the 1870's than the Europeans, by this extra-territorial flight of Capital. This time, because of the rapid industrialization, and expansion of industrial infrastructure, that accompanied the destruction of slavery in half the North American nation, after northern victory in 1865.
Nevertheless, the US situation was exacerbated by the desire of capital to flee to quicker-return profit-center parts of the colonial world (such as Latin America.) In fact, the shortage of capital in the USA was so great (initially as a consequence of Lincoln having begged and borrowed every bit of money he could get his hands on to pay for the cost of the ``industrial'' way the Union fought and won the Civil War) that Capital in Europe was finding New York a far more profitable place to go than to stay at home.
(As a matter of interest, ``James Bond'' creator, one-time MI6 agent, Ian Fleming, owed much to his grandfather, who became one of Britain's richest men by making 40 odd trips back and forth from Scotland to New York with bags of cash he was able to raise overnight in the UK for railroad and other industrial investment in the US and the US Latin American de facto colonies; the senior Fleming starting as a simple clerk who noted upon arrival in New York, with the end of the Civil War, that capital invested brought two to three times as much in the US as in his homeland of Scotland.)
Worker's parties began to appear in the European capitals of Capital. Parties which took Karl Marx and Frederick Engels as their mentors (even though both men were often at odds with these would-be offspring.)
These years were also the years of maturation of the phase of imperialism of the Capitalist Stage. Imperialism is the last phase of the Capitalist Stage. However, this phase has proven to be of over one hundred fifty years in duration, and we can now see that it will continue well into the 21st century, despite the fact that both Stages of Socialism are now extant on the historical stage.
Revisiting the European Working Class Movement
The Twenty Years between Marx and Lenin
During the years of the First International (1864-1876) Marx battled the anarchists and the syndicalists for control of that body. At the same time a group of reforming type (soon to be called ``revisionist'') socialists was emerging in Germany. All of these tendencies were in serious theoretical error. Let us first review the anarchist and syndicalist errors.
Anarchism is a form of Racism
Mikhail Bakunin (1814 --- 1876) (one of the two principal anarchist leaders of that time the other being Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) exposed anarchism's theoretical bankruptcy during that fight by maintaining that humans were innately incapable of behaving in any way other than one in which some would rise above the others, regardless of any other circumstances. The few structured above everyone else, using armed force, (the state) to compel obedience, and would always compel those below to act as they dictated. This is a kind of primitive biological determinism in that it takes its cue from the idea that humans are genetically programmed to behave in this way. As such it is categorically wrong by definition and the other side of the coin of racism.
197In other words, this is part of the fundamental theoretical error in anarchist sociology. Marx and Engels had discovered the science of anthropology (culture) and the growth of that science ever since (and all four of its subdisciplines) tell us that it is not a biologically predetermined structure of society which leads to the evils of class dictatorship but the cultural nature of economy and thought in human society.
That is, the three components of culture (technology, social organization and ideology) act as if they were a system of three component ``governors'' (negative feedback style) so that no one component can get too far out of sync with the other three, and all together comprise the buffer between humans and nature. This buffer we call culture, and it has its own laws of causality and process. Science has proven that there is no genetic predetermination in humans as far as social behavior is concerned. This is scientific law today and written in stone but in those times it had not yet
garnered the massive proof that anthropology would provide in the 20th century.
The Syndicalists like the anarchists came in a variety of schools and movements but they too were defeated in the First International in that they could not come to accept Marx's proof that the state is the instrument of arising classes and not the cause of class division. Thus, the Marxists insisted that the cap state be destroyed first so that the socialist state could be constructed and take its place. Only after the elimination of the causes of the state (classes and class war) could one talk about the abolition of the state altogether.
Defining Revisionism
Arising at the same time was a school of Right-wing social democratic Reformists (who would soon be called evolutionary socialists or ``revisionists'') which advocated in one form or another permanently participating in the bourgeois political formation (parliaments for example) and in settling for a permanent class structure in society with a ruling capitalist class and a constantly struggling working class. A working class doomed to a never ending struggle for their welfare needs such as the eight hour day, social security, medical care, public schooling and so forth, and a capitalist class continually taking back whatever they could as opportunity permits.
This latter group of revisionists claimed Marx and Engels as their theoretical founders but in fact they turned Marx and Engels on their heads and took these great social scientist's work along an entirely new and completely anti-scientific road. Marx and Engels saw participating in all forms of struggle (thus all political forms within capitalist society, including electoral struggle) as essential to building a base for the eventual armed insurrection and violent overthrow of the cap state. After a successful overthrow of capitalist social relations the workers and their vanguard Party would then proceed to build a new social order --- Communism, preceded by a socialist transitional society. The reformists however had an entirely different take. They came up with one excuse or another to substitute the idea that this kind of struggle would lead to peaceful parliamentary evolution out of capitalism into socialism. In other words, to make socialism over in their own image they had to revise all of the principles of Marxism. Thus, the origin of the term revisionist. This completely self-serving fallacious doctrine became the basis of ``revisionism'' then (e.g., German Social Democrats such as Bernstein and Kautsky) and now (e.g., Gorbachev and ilk at home and abroad.)
198As the Syndicalists and the Anarchists went their own way after 1876 so did these reforming revisionists. When Marx died in 1883 the German revisionists had spawned nearly identical reformist-revisionist parties in most of the rest of the countries of Europe. In 1889 these parties came together and formed the Second International Association of Workingmen.
In the twenty years between Marx's death in 1883 and Lenin's founding of the Bolshevik Party in 1903 the principal fight within the European Working Class Movement ceased being between Marxism on the one hand and Syndicalism/Anarchism on the other hand and became a fight between orthodox (real) Marxists and revisionist Marxist traitors on the other hand.
-And, so there we stood.
Why Racists and Fascist Radio Nutballs Sometimes Succeed
As you can see the laws of capitalist production were not easy to discover. Frederick Engels remarked in his 1883 funeral eulogy to Karl Marx in London, that the unlocking of the ``secrets'' of capitalist production was one of Marx's two greatest contributions. (The other being the discovery of the laws of history as we reviewed earlier; in the USA what is more often thought of as the tripartite nature of the (anthropological) concept of ``culture.'')
Workers know they are being exploited but the mechanics of that exploitation are difficult for them to understand in many cases. After all it took the genius of Karl Marx to explain the process to intellectuals. As a consequence workers have often fallen victim to all kinds of persons who would trick them. Fascist radio nutballs like Rush Limbaugh for example and others like Hitler and Mussolini use populist language as the first and foremost trick after racism - Hitler put the words ``socialist'' and ``workers'' in the name of his Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workingmen's Party.)
Our task is to set the record straight and educate those workers we can reach who have been misled. Because, if we don't, and we allow them to become Nazi's, or revisionists, etc., we will end up having to kill them somewhere down the road in the inevitable armed struggle.
Understanding Bolshevik Success at Revolution
In the beginning of any scientific study we need both a ``model'' and some ``keys.'' Therefore, understanding Bolshevik success at revolution requires our understanding of the scientific model being followed by our founders and certain pedagogical keys.
The Model
At the turn of the last century (~1903) the model the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin, was following, was the theoretical model left by Karl Marx (Capital, Volumes 1, 2 and 3; The Civil War in France: the Paris Commune and Critique of the Gotha Programme) with practical emphasis on the latter real world model left by the Parisian proletariat known as The Paris Commune. Most importantly, along these practical lines, Lenin had Marx's initial commentary on what Communists wanted (e.g., Chapter 2 paragraph 22 of The Communist Manifesto) and Marx's analysis of the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France) with his commentary on lessons learned in Paris in 1870-71, for future reference. Also, Lenin had Marx's implied model, that is to say the future model inherent in what Marx had to say against the plans of the evolutionary socialists (a la the classical revisionists Bernstein and Kautsky and the Latter Day ``modern'' Revisionists Nikita Khrushchev and his Gringo stooge Gus Hall) in papers such as Critique of the Gotha Program.
199 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/2011/ABCC999/20110726/299.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ from .docx from author (see ABCs.el) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil
The broader theoretical model was Marx's (and Engels') theory of historical materialism where ``stages'' in the advance in the means and relations of production was the practical side of Marxism. By ``practical'' we mean just about everybody could understand the concept of society evolving from one stage of the way people earn a living, and the social relations they must then enter into, to another stage. Acceptance of this theoretical model by European and New World workers was perhaps the most important achievement in the actual physical, real world, of the Party of Labor --- i.e., the (First) International Workingmen's Association.
For example, ``just about everybody'' included the American lawyer and politician, not to mention millionaire, Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan in several books, most importantly in Ancient Society (1877), had come to these same conclusions independently. Morgan was working from the other end of the prehistoric-historic continuum than Marx and Engels. Morgan had reconstructed prehistoric sociocultural evolution as society evolving from one stage of the food procurement arts to the next and more advanced stage, as a matter of sociocultural evolutionary ``law.'' Thus, Morgan's work was absorbed into the pantheon of Marxist ``classics'' despite his very Anglo conservative protestant gringo Wasp way of thinking. (For example, Morgan's Protestantism and most-importantly anti-Papist views led him to completely misunderstand Aztec Mexico.)
200At any rate, this ``practicality'' was how Marxism came to be understood by social thinkers.
In our time, for example, this has meant the understanding that Band and Tribal hunting and gathering gives way to the Band and Tribal agricultural revolution, which itself gives way to Simple and Advanced Chiefdoms and finally to class and state society (the sequential stages of Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.)
But, in those days, we had only the historical record, for what it was worth, to guide us with regard to how a society might look where the state was owned by the people rather than a select group of social criminals. With only this latter historical record the outlook for people's power might have led some of us to psychological depression.
Then Karl Marx had come along and shown us that the emergence of capitalism and its general crisis, brought along with it, its own grave diggers (industrial workers). Marx proved these workers had a survival interest in a future of science and education, if they were to cease being wage slaves and instead become masters of the universe. Furthermore, one didn't have to wait until some mythical event (e.g., the ``second coming'') because the agents of change were here at hand, already among us! All you had to do was to organize them. This could provide a way out!
However, our ideas about what a worker's government and state should actually, exactly, look like, over a century ago, were rather primitive (in say 1900), because our level of experience was rudimentary. In the meantime, the Russian Marxists confronted both incipient syndicalism and evolutionary socialism in their own ranks, as worker's parties did throughout Europe, but in their own peculiar form.
Russian evolutionary socialists wanted to work toward a system such as the German revisionist Marxists (German Social Democratic Party) had achieved with a role in Government allowing much of the Party's social welfare program to be put into effect. ---And, the ``economic wing'' of the Russian Party wanted to concentrate solely on trade
union issues (a kind of syndicalist pandering to those who wanted to avoid armed confrontation with the capitalist state in any way possible.)
Furthermore, Russian experience at fighting tyrants had centered on armed confrontations between the Czarist state (Army and Okhrana police) and bomb throwing anarchists (the Peoples Will). While Russian Marxists disagreed altogether with the idea of terrorism against the Czar as the winning strategy, many of them including V. I. Lenin were very empathetic with the bomb throwers, because of their personal life experiences. Accordingly Lenin was open to ideas about violent action to secure funding for his Party. All of this taken together constitutes the ``model'' of what real (orthodox) Marxists behind V. I. Lenin were working to achieve, and the path to doing so.
In any scientific study there will be keys a scholar can follow to understand the principle causes and process involved in specific examples of (in this case, sociocultural) evolution. In the case of Bolshevism, I shall save you the time of having to decide which might be the best threads to follow by telling you the result of some five decades of research on my part. This research and my personal experience tells me that the two keys to follow are the two men, Lenin and Stalin.
The Russian Marxists were divided into two broad social class groupings. The intellectual leaders of privileged social backgrounds, most of whom had had to flee into exile, and the at-home on the ground leadership, often of less privileged social backgrounds, that stayed inside the Empire of the Russia's most of their lives and conducted a violent, clandestine, armed struggle against the state and financial apparatus of the capitalists and their noble-aristocrat allies. This latter group made all the difference in the way the Russian Marxists led by V. I. Lenin were able to engineer an armed seizure of power for the intellectual leaders to build upon.
In Western Europe by 1903 (e.g., Italy, France, England and Germany) the evolutionary socialists and the syndicalist types could go to the legal or quasi-legal unions for money and support to run candidates and campaigns for different kinds of workers' rights and welfare programs. This source was unavailable to the equivalent types (evolutionary socialists and syndicalist) among Russia's Social Democratic Labor Party leaders. There were no legal unions in Russia except for those temporarily above-ground because of armed strike victories in Georgia. So, if some Bolshevik intellectuals were inclined to participate in Parliamentary maneuvering (as for example in the Czarist Duma, when and if it was allowed to assemble) they had to get the money from some other source.
The head of the Bolshevik Party was V. I. Lenin. He was the chief (1) of the Bolshevik intellectuals and (2) as importantly of the armed robbery teams. Lenin's principle instrument leading the intellectual fight from abroad would be political Newspapers and Journals. The head of the on-the-ground financial resource identification (robbery) teams was Leonid Krassin whose main pupil, Joseph Stalin, would provide Lenin with all the cash he needed to try and make the Bolshevik action program work.
When Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to be in the Duma, those wishing to participate under the Bolshevik label within the Duma had to go to Lenin to get the money. Lenin always had the money. Why? Because Lenin had his own team (Stalin's Battle Groups) of bank robbers, and stage coach and steamship robbers, at work holding
up banks and conducting a variety of armed robberies to provide the cash for these and many other Party activities (the press, the salaries and support finances of leaders and cadre, participation in electoral campaigns, and so forth.) To get this money Lenin relied on Stalin. Stalin did not hesitate to extort the capitalists for cash either.
Because Lenin always had money we were able to prevail. You can have the 100% right line, as only Lenin did, but without money he would have been another isolated ivory tower intellectual. It was the highest morality to take it from the classes who had stolen it from the working people to begin with. Unless one understands this as the basis of proletarian revolutionary ethics, one is simply a bourgeois sissy and cannot be allowed to mislead workers and farmers.
Violence in pursuit of breaking our chains is no vice. It is exactly the opposite --- it is rather a great humanistic virtue. Anyone preaching against this position is a counter-revolutionary enemy and should be dealt with accordingly. During the first two years of Bolshevik independent existence (1903 and 1904) Lenin needed about 2.5 million rubles per year to build and maintain our party apparatus.
Anyway, following the careers of these two men, Lenin and Stalin, will enable you students just coming on board to quickly weave your way through the morass of violently differing interpretations in the highly politicized academic history of modern Russia and Bolshevism. Accordingly, in this Handbook we shall focus frequently on the activities of these two leaders of our Party.
However, before Lenin there was Karl Marx. He is your key to understanding the history of Labor Movement in the 1800's. (Marx died in 1883; Lenin was thirteen years old and Stalin three). There is, accordingly, a short pedagogical gap which I shall try and fill-in as we proceed.
Marx and Engels Free Working People
I want you to think for a moment of that fictional event when robotic cybernetic organisms become ``self-aware.'' You have read about this for many decades (Asimov's stories for example) and seen it in movies (e.g., Terminator series). Now think of the new class of proletarians becoming self-aware of themselves as people with a distinct relationship to the means of production.
Remember that awareness of oneself as an owner and seller of labor-power is not an inherent aspect of daily work. People have been performing concrete labor since their earliest hunting-gathering ape-like days, but they were not performing factory bench homogenized clock-regulated labor which is what the scientific definition of labor-power requires. These are two distinct and completely separate categories (i.e. concrete labor and labor-power). Even when people became agriculturalists they were not yet selling their labor-power in the capitalist way (the only fundamental definition of proletarian). Nor, even when they were enslaved, as slaves could their first thought have been that their labor-power was a commodity for self-sale (no matter how they were organized in production), for the slave does not own his/her labor-power. For slaves, therefore, their relationship to the means of production being far more primitive than that of free workers, working was not an eye-opening on-ramp onto the freeway to freedom (i.e., chattel slavery itself is only a precursor to wage-slavery which is a completely
201distinct category, because in the latter case the worker does own his portion of what is to be homogenized as labor-power at the clock-regulated factory bench.) For this reason slavery as a stage in both the Old and New Worlds lasts thousands of years. Capitalism provided the objective setting for workers to become self-aware of their new status as the ``free'' owners of the homogenized form of their labor (i.e., labor-power --- which is the average output of a factory bench system where the regulation of the output is by the factory clock; what before came directly from concrete labor now comes in the form of reimbursement --- that is it comes in the form of wages) because it meant in the daily process of working one could begin understanding all of this. Capitalism, in its time, was a critical step along the road to liberation of the human mind. Thus, Marx's theory of society evolving from stage to another stage in a sociocultural evolutionary progression was the first key for workers as a class to understand themselves and their place in the real world. The second key was Marx's discovery of the General Crisis of Capitalism which we discussed above in chapter 12.
202Then, these two discoveries, taken together, meant to build a brave new and free world each person had to utilize their ``free will'' in a ``human'' way and act on that understanding by organizing collective work actions --- industrial action, stoppages, sabotage, sit-ins, education and other cooperative undertakings, in order to put an end to what had been a ``necessary'' wage-slave existence and create this brave new and ``free'' world. This is the objective basis for, and beginning of, self-awareness, of the working class, or in other words, the beginning of modern proletarian consciousness. In still other words, the beginning of the ``political consciousness'' to transform humanity from the ``era of necessity'' into the ``era of freedom'' flows from ``class (self-aware) consciousness''. It takes its most advanced material form in the Communist Parties of all the nations of the Earth.
203Capitalism is an eye-opening on-ramp onto the freeway to freedom and as a stage has lasted a relatively short time for that reason (only two and a half centuries so far compared to 5000 years in the Old World for slavery. In the New World Slavery was cut short after only 1000 years by the arrival of European Feudalism. For reasons we discussed above in chapters 7 to 10.)
It all began in Paris in 1842
Marx met Engels in December of 1842, in Paris France, and the two of them realized they had independently come to the same conclusions about the real world, and how its social evolution had occurred. Specifically, they had discovered (1) the stage to stage ``cultural'' evolution of technology, social organization and ideology, and (2) how capitalism itself functioned.
It became Manifest in Italy in 1848 and spread across Western Europe
Six years later, in January of 1848 they published their ``call'' to change the world we know as the Communist Manifesto. That same month a series of popular revolts led by this new and now increasingly self-aware proletariat swept across Western Europe beginning in southern Italy. In Europe, only the English ruling class was able to ride that
bucking bronco without being thrown for a loop. We usually refer to the period 1848-1850 as the Revolutions of 1848
1864 and the First International
Workers in Europe and the New World realized as part of their self-awareness that the capitalists were shipping some of them from one country to another in order to drive down wages and/or break strikes. Even the most conservative trade unionists felt threatened. Thus from left to right (i.e., Marxists to Trade Union pie-cards) by 1864 all of these workers in advanced countries and their leaders had taken self-awareness to its next logical step --- which, of course, would be the establishment of organizational form(s) to prevent this from happening and to go over to a self-aware ``class'' offensive against Capital by pooling funds to support each other's strike funds.
In 1864 some of them gathered in London and attending was Karl Marx. To make a longer story short, suffice to say Marx became the leader (General Secretary) of this the (first) International Association of Workingmen, and Frederick Engels became the Chief of the General Staff of the ``new proletarian army.'' (I recommend the recent biography of Frederick Engels for those of you interested in him and his critical role as Marx's General in a book by that name (by Tristam Hunt, 2009, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt Co. New York.)
Political Consciousness Emerges from Class Self-Awareness
1876 to 1903
The First International lasted only twelve years (1864 -1876). These were the twelve critical years where General Secretary Karl Marx and his (1) theory of historical materialism and his (2) theory of capitalism, came to dominate the thought of working people in most of Europe. Only in Spain, Russia, and parts of Italy, was there a competing ideology and that was anarchism. By sending the General Council of the First International to New York, Marx managed to derail the anarchist threat to Euro-American Labor. But in its place there were numerous contending schools of thought in Europe.
After Anarchism
There was a great deal of confusion however, even after the dissolution of the anarchist threat, as we have seen and will review again at different points in this Handbook. However, what we see clearly with regard to self-aware labor at this point (c. 1876) is that working classes throughout the capitalist world (mainly Europe and the America's) realized they had distinct class interests which required a distinct political party. The broad-spectrum of opinion as to what that Party of Labor should look like varied from country to country, but pretty much all of the non-anarchist socialist thinkers and leaders accepted some part if not all of Marx's work. Why? For the same reason scientists in any field accept the work of their founders. Because it is proven correct. (e.g., for the same reason all biologists accept Darwin's work because it is the proven foundation of all the biological sciences.)
204
A next step would be Marx's attack on the ``revisionists'' of his time in a monograph that had to wait sixteen years for publication (the actual Congress was held in the German city of Gotha in 1875.) This kick off of the anti-revisionist struggle is known as Critique of the Gotha Program.)
The 1903 Organizational Steps to Leninism
The biggest capitalist countries of the Old World were England, Germany, Italy, France, Russia and Japan. For Europeans it was in Russia that labor was at its weakest. Yet it would be the Russians who first overthrew capitalism! The reason was simple enough and comes in the form of one person --- Vladimir Illych Ulyanov who we know as V.I. Lenin. The first organizational step along the correct Marxist (non-revisionist) road was the formation of the Bolshevik Party which began in the 1903 RSDLP Congress in London. After that point the Bolsheviks were always a de facto separate Party and as such they became the only true Party of Labor in Europe.
The split with Syndicalism and Reformism (Revisionism)
We have seen in the preceding chapter (12) that the emergence of capitalism with its five minimal technological achievements occurred by 1765 in Western Europe. Even though all of these criteria [(i) blast furnace iron and steel, (ii) machine tools, (iii) machinery, (iv) independent power-sources, (v) factory installation of machinery, had been individually invented much earlier in China. However, the relative political-economic strength of the capitalist owners of those Chinese factories was infinitesimally less (by comparison with European capitalist owners) in that same year (1765) than the economic and financial strength of their ruling class competition (Chinese agricultural slave and serf-owners and masters, and their eunuch bureaucracy governing the Chinese Empire.) This was the objective basis for Chinese backwardness in the 1800's compared to the rapid advance of technology in Europe and the Americas. Accordingly, on a global scale, the first successful political steps toward bourgeois emancipation from aristocratic-noble ruling class dictatorship over feudal society occurred in Europe rather than China. In other words the feudalists were weak in Europe and strong in China. Thus, capitalism arose first in Europe rather than China.
205You can't have capitalism without workers so bourgeois success in Europe and the Americas brought along with it the specter of working class emancipation in Europe. Why?
Because in Europe, as opposed to China, the technological and social organizational base for bourgeois exploitative society was far weaker (for the emerging capitalists and, for that matter, for the landed nobility as well), vis a vis the relative strength of the workers. For example, Chinese rulers had total control over massive irrigation agriculture, not to mention complete control of internal transportation via a massive system of canals and interlinked rivers. Whereas European rulers had at best, some poorly maintained roads.
Relatively strong working classes were here to stay in industrializing Europe, and the bourgeoisie had to get used to them and put up with their demands --- at least more than they would have liked too.
In a new industrializing working class situation the very first step one must take is to educate those who have no choice but to fight* for a new world and put an end to the evil old world of capitalism. We had to have an educated body of workers and this meant we had to get educated ourselves. We had to have a science of society and its evolution. We got that science in the initial work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who were accordingly also the first anthropological theoreticians.
*Do not be Naïve
Spying 101
Remember that simply being a worker does not mean a person is on the side of the working class. Orwell makes clear in his Animal Farm that a pretty horse has a distinctly different set of opportunities than the work horses in general. (Something I suspect he learned in his brief stint in the civil war in Spain.) Likewise in the real world a beautiful woman can make her way as an AMW (actress, model, whore) and has a distinctly different set of opportunities than working women in general. ---And, the corollary to this is that many people think they have or might have a different opportunity in life than what they have been handed by their personal history and act accordingly. This latter is the basis upon which all secret police operations work --- that is, the basis for obtaining informants and snitches of all types is to prey upon the wishful thinking of those otherwise condemned to wage slavery. So, don't be naïve about a person's class background. You have to be able to put yourself into the shoes of the person about whom you have questions and think about it from this point of view. More on this in Chapter 16 below.
206To Recap
Intellectual First Step --- 1842 --- Founding our Science
Historical Materialism - i.e., the Laws of History --- the practical side of Marxism
The first step was the discovery by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels that human society evolved from one socioeconomic stage to another via the mechanism anthropologists would come to call culture. Culture in this sense was first defined by Marx and Engels. They saw culture as that learned behavior passed down from one generation to the next, which regardless of extraneous (phenotypic) appearance, always has an identical (genotypic) structure: a mode of production and a superstructure.
The mode of production for any stage (e.g., the stages of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism or communism) has itself two components which Marx and Engels called the forces of production and the relations of production. Many decades later, and to make Marxism acceptable in Gringolandia, Leslie A. White substituted the terms technology and social organization for means of production and relations of production.
Marx and Engels placed human world views (philosophy, religion, superstitious belief systems, ideology, etc.) in a category, schematically drawn to show it above and arising upon the mode of production. Marx called this human consciousness world-view category, the superstructure. It was relabeled ideology by White.
Culture in anthropological science has these basic components first discovered by Marx and Engels:
Ideology = Superstructure
Technology --- Social Organization} = Mode of Production
Marx and Engels met toward the latter part of 1842 in Paris and had gotten this far working independently. They teamed up, and over the next six years they produced the essential outlines of their unlocking of the secrets of capitalist production.
By 1844 they had written Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy which foreshadows the finalized version (Capital Volume One --- 1867) by almost a quarter century. By 1848 they had taken on the principle contenders for leadership of the working class in Western Europe (Prodhounist anarchists in France and Lassalean revisionists in Germany). Next up to bat would be the next generation of European revisionists, but not quite yet.
Intellectual Step Two --- The Communist Manifesto - 1848
From the Revolutions of 1848 to the First International (1864 --- 1876)
Workers rose up everywhere in Europe beginning in southern Italy in January of 1848 and these revolts continued in virtually every European capital and industrial city throughout the next two years. Two years later, that is after 1850, and the defeat of these insurrections, there followed years of serious suppression, and political reaction then set in. The Revolutions of 1848 had been thoroughly crushed, with its leaders and members running for cover to friendlier European climes, but especially to the New World where everything from Gringo industrial expansion, to the theft of Northern Mexico, and finally the California Gold Rush, and Mormonism's continual migration westward, gave emigrating Brit workers, for example, a real alternative.
This is about more than just us
But, for the first time, workers fighting to survive (striking for decent hours, wages and working conditions) were also being told they had an historic obligation to save mankind and get humanity on a direct road to freedom. All of this coming in the Communist Manifesto appearing just as the Revolutions of 1848 began in January.
The reactionaries were able to defeat this labor uprising. Thereafter, and over the following twelve year period, there was relative labor quiescence in Europe. This working class retreat and rearming (after 1852) lasted through the outbreak of the Civil War in North America (1861-1865), until, as I say, twelve years later, in September of 1864; it emerged in the form of the International Association of Working Men under the leadership of General Secretary Karl Marx. Then different ``labor aristocratic'' unions* got together in London to form a defensive organizational bulwark. Defense against what? (1) Against the Brit capitalists use of imported scab labor from the continent and (2) for international strike funds to defend against lockouts.
Labor Aristocracy = the class basis of the first Pie-cards
*Labor aristocrats: About five to ten percent of those then unionized in England were sufficiently well off to be able to pay monthly union dues with some long term prospect of being able to keep this up until a family had been raised. These craft unionists had been the most difficult for radicals to organize. Marx had found in preventing the importation of scab labor, a new ``defensive'' way, of using these labor aristocrats as the ``mass base'' for the new First International. Why these types would be preferable to anyone might be a question today. But, if you saw what he had to deal with in 1864 you could empathize with his desire to begin with this less-than-perfect mass base. It was a mass base that was relatively stable and permanent. ---And, being proletarians they would always be in contention with the capitalist system. They simply had to be educated and given to believe they had a higher purpose in life than simple survival. In the meantime they could and would pay dues to a successful class defense conducted by the International's leaders.
207The First Organizational Step
The Second Intervention of Marx
Reawakening in England and the First International
In England, the reawakening of European Labor came in a new and extremely sophisticated form i.e., the (First) International Workingmen's Association (formed in September 1864 in London). You should note that this is the second intervention of Modern Marxism into the class struggle. (The first being the Communist Manifesto into the Revolutions of 1848). Theoretical Marxism's insertion into the international working class movement, and its subsequent very skillful handling by Karl Marx himself, tells us a world of things about how we should behave organizationally today. So take the time to read the nine pages of Marx's Inaugural Address.
Why We Are Here
Marx became the first of us modern interventionists to prove why we are here. As I have pointed out before, we are here precisely because there are many difficult steps and periods along the way from the Servitude Epoch (and its last ``capitalist'' stage) to the Era of Human Freedom (beginning with the Communist stage.) Since we have the laws of history as our virtual sole property we have a real leg up on the enemy, and in being able to force our program forward step by step.
Furthermore, when you compare and contrast the Communist Manifesto with Marx's Inaugural Address (to the founding of the first International), you can see how much Marx had learned about organizational politics (i.e., the politics of putting together an umbrella organization of truly disparate groups). Compare his language and delicacy in the Inaugural Address to the robust strident revolutionary call to action language of the Communist Manifesto (published 16 years earlier.) By the way, Marx himself comment's on this rhetorical evolution in his work. So, it is important for you to internalize how Marx had become so sophisticated, and try and learn from his example.
In other words, how and why did Marx's ``politically'' careful and correct speech change from one form to another (organizational politics combined with principled politics)? What might this imply for tactical maneuvering in more contemporary settings?
The Second Organizational Step was The Paris Commune (1870 --- 1871) we reviewed in the Chapter preceding. This was followed historically by the Third Organization Step (The Russian Councils of 1905)
The Transitional length between Capitalism and Communism
Neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels tried to predict how long the transitional Stage of proletarian domination of society's government's and state authority would last. What they did agree upon was such a Stage of working class ownership, if you will, of society's political and ``state'' (instrument of class oppression - army and police) apparatus would be necessary while the new proletarian class gained ascendance and the old exploiting classes were defeated.
For example Karl Marx wrote:
``Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.'' (Critique of the Gotha Program).
This Critique was written by Karl Marx in 1875 as the German Social Democratic Party was forming (and going immediately off on the wrong path) --- but not published until 1891, eight years after his 1883 death.)
In short, Marx and Engels could not be persuaded that the subject of the length of the transition from Capitalism to Communism was a subject even worth discussing. Much the same can be said of V.I. Lenin in Russia when he confronted the issue. All of these intellectual giants knew one thing - it was impossible to predict the future that accurately. There were just too many variables.
What they all did know however, was there would be one or several intermediate Stages before humanity reached that stage of fully free and human society where human power was its own end. That is, power of humans as a species. Not some humans at the expense of other humans. Having said this, I should also point out that among the high-minded altruist intellectuals of the labor movement in Europe and America, there was also the unspoken almost secret assumption that working people would quickly put affairs in order, and go about creating a kind of nirvana or paradise here on Earth, they all believed was quite feasible once contemporary society of dog-eat-dog was done away with. In fact, much the same naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé exists among many of today's ``would be'' revolutionaries.
This was an extremely naive and dangerous assumption. In the early 1900's, it almost undid everything.
Building within society, because of the underlying mental template of selfishness and sadism that workers were inculcated with to greater or lesser degrees, was the absolute corruption of the labor movement itself; therefore, of the ``Labor Party'' which sprang from it. In Europe, only the Russians escaped the total perversion of their labor
party; that was due to the historically peculiar and particular fact of Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, who we know as V. I. Lenin.
But this corruption of the working class movement did not begin during Lenin's lifetime. Karl Marx saw the corruption of the labor movement and its Party during his life; he had a plethora of comments to make about it, in letters and in formal papers, as in his 1875 commentary on the wrong path being taken by those calling themselves Marxists in Germany (Critique of the Gotha Program.}
Lenin later took on the bourgeois socialists in the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) and forced them into a split in 1903. After which his majoritists (Bolsheviks) constituted a de facto separate Party from the traitor minoritists (Mensheviks.) From that point forward the Bolsheviks were the true Labor Party in Russia. The others were bourgeois socialists who formed capitalist parties with a ``pitch'' to working people. Such a clear division of those claiming to represent labor happened nowhere else in Europe. Since 1917, true Labor Party leaders have been known world-wide as Bolsheviks. -And, Bolshevism, recognized as the only correct form of scientific Marxism by persons considering themselves communists.
NaivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé
Yet Lenin was also naive. He failed to internalize the complete and total assimilation of the ``Labor Party'' in the European countries, into the boss hierarchy of the Capitalists over the working class. He believed, as apparently did all the other altruistically inclined naive, that the resolution they had forced through the Second International Congress of 1907 (Stuttgart) actually meant that the now thoroughly corrupted Social Democratic parties would really plan for their member workers to turn their guns against their own governments, when the inevitable imperialist world war broke out. One has to be thoroughly separated from the way real people think to have seriously entertained this concept. Passing a resolution does not alter objective reality.
The Pie-Cards
-And, that reality was the European Social Democratic parties had become the willing handmaidens of European capitalist imperialism. They were led by men whose idea of "socialism" was to have a piece of the capitalist "pie." A pie obtained by stealing from the cheap labor reserves of the Third World. For such leaders a "union card" was to be a "share" in said capitalist pie. Thus, the origin of the term "pie-card" for anti-Communist union leaders around the English-speaking World. Again, the consequences of this naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé among Bolsheviks were almost fatal to the birth of the Socialist Stage at that point in time.
Why Did the Capitalists Start the World War in 1914?
Decades of investment overseas - much of which began in the late 1840's - which is to say the shipping of machines and factories (constant capital) to the colonies - produced great profits throughout the decades preceding the world war of 1914. Especially in the twenty years before the outbreak of hostilities. But! The profits that
came back in 1913 were so stupendous that ruling capitalists in all the capitalist countries saw that it was time to go to war.
War could do two things for the capitalists of England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Japan and the USA. It could give the victors even better access to that cheap labor-power in what we call the Third World and those colonial markets they might capture. That was the best case; in the worst case, the losers would lose a few colonies; and the capitalists felt it was a risk they were willing to take; losses could be negotiated to a minimum.
-And, there was no downside! No matter what the military outcome. Each capitalist class would have liquidated millions of its most troublesome male workers.
These European workers were the single greatest threat the capitalists faced. To Capital they were the enemy within. As Karl Marx predicted, massive armies of unemployed existed throughout Europe. -And, the Marxists had radicalized these workers by educating them as to the nature of the Capitalist system. By 1913 these workers, more often than not, were no longer needed as cheap labor-power because the capitalists had seized Africa, Asia and Latin America and had their dirt-cheap labor at their disposal. Even though their leaders were corrupt, and a de facto part of the Capitalist classes ruling hierarchical machines, no one could tell when this boss hierarchy of ``social democrats'' might be pushed aside, by the rising tide of working class militancy - or, that their bosses, the Social Democratic union pie-cards might not decide to take power anyway, as they would be the class administering the factories supposedly under ``public'' ownership.
208No. Take no chances. Kill as many male workers as possible. -And, then if some domestic additional labor-power should be needed you could put their women and children into the factories. They were by far the best workers anyway because they were easier to control. Well over a century of experience had proven that. It was women and children who were first brought into machinofacture production. -And, the history of this tradition goes way back into the Feudal Stage.
Under Feudal conditions, in China and in Europe, women and children producing yarns and pottery pre-forms had made all the difference between starvation and survival from year to year for the serf household. Why? Because the men were worked so hard by and for their masters, there was nothing left for their families.
It now seems inconceivable to me that anyone could have thought that anything other than what did happen on the 4th of August, 1914, would have happened! Yet it caught Lenin totally by surprise when the German Social Democrats voted the war funds for the Kaiser's Capitalist Regime and the war was off and running! -And, then, the other traitor parties of Social Democrats did the same thing in England, France, Italy, etc., ad nauseum.
A brilliant Russian student, Alexander Ulyanov, tried to do something to help his country. Consequently, he was hung by the last of the Russian Czars. This was Czar Nicholas's greatest mistake.
Why?
The Czar would pay with his life! -And the lives of his wife and his children too! Because Alexander's brother, named Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, would see to it that he, and they, died under bullet fire in 1918.
But there was far more to it than just revenge. What was this all about?
Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, later to be known as Vladimir Illych Lenin, led the Party that overthrew the Czar's evil regime and created the first worker's government in the world.
Vladimir turned his attention from the normal pursuits of a bright young boy in High School to revenge, when his brother was murdered. ---And, as the whole world knows, he was more than successful. Lenin did far more than avenge his brother. Lenin avenged the entire working class of the world against their common enemy.
Born in 1870, Lenin, or V. I. Ulyanov, was the son of a relatively prosperous petty bourgeois family (his father an educator and a Czarist bureaucrat; his mother was fully bourgeois and a large landowner.) Perhaps no one could, or should, have expected this young person to be more than his parents. Yet, history has a way of determining what each person might or must be. In this case, history created one of its greatest actors.
Alexander Ulyanov was a budding biologist when arrested by the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) and typically passive politically. At least, until, and because of the Czar's incredibly inhuman oppression of farmers in Simbirsk, where he lived, he tried to help by removing the Czar. Accused of attempting to assassinate the Czar, something discussed amongst Alexander and his ``comrades'', he was informed upon, and arrested. Alexander's family was not without influence in St. Petersburg (later named Petrograd by the Czar and still later named Leningrad by the victors in the coming civil war) but without his father (now deceased) his mother's and his family's influence was insufficient to send the boy into exile. He was hung in the evil Alcatraz of Lake Ladoga.
Changed
Vladimir began studying Karl Marx the summer following his brother's hanging. He spent that summer with an uncle and used the time to read Capital Volume One and that made him decide to pursue the same course as his brother but to do it scientifically. Meaning to organize and utilize the growing mass of proletarians in Russia's major cities. Marx had proven it was only the working class that could do the job because only they had no class choice.
No longer the happy-go-lucky, go-along-to-get-along, slap-on-the-back, fellow-well-met, type of High School student he had been before Alexander's hanging, Lenin now became, according to Nadazhda Krupskaya (his wife to come), somewhat morose and introspective. Vladimir remained very close to his mother and his sisters over the coming years but to all of them he had ``changed.'' Vladimir was now a very ``serious'' young man.
``Serious'' has always seemed a serious understatement to me. I think even a perfunctory review of Lenin's life leads us to conclude that Lenin never had a thought in his mind other than the overthrow of the Czarist regime and equally in importance in his mind the substitution of human control over our own destiny, after his brother's hanging.
Together Forever
The most important thing in life is ``to try'' in my humble opinion. This is as true in revolutionary politics as in any other aspect of life. Lenin saw it that way. He gave up what would have been an extremely lucrative law practice specializing in working class law (contract law for employees; workmen's compensation, etc.) to organize Social Democratic (revolutionary) workers circles and was rewarded accordingly with imprisonment by the Okhrana and exile to Siberia.
Along the way he met a beautiful young intellectual woman, Nadazhda Krupskaya, and after his arrest and exile to Minusinsk, Siberia, she also was arrested. For whatever reason she had the presence of mind to tell the police the total lie that she was Vladimir Ulyanov's wife! However, that may have been in her mind, it is certainly true that Lenin thought of her that way after their coming three years in joint exile, and he became her husband. The proof being that Krupskaya's gambit ended up in making the two of them husband and wife for the rest of their lives.
As an aside, I have only known two people personally, that knew each of them, and in each case I have been told that Nadashda Krupskaya was not only a brilliant person personally, but an extraordinarily sensitive and loving person. For me the idea of her brilliance is obvious. Why else would she and Lenin have been together all of their lives.
-And, the assertion she was especially loving toward the poor and defenseless I believe to be a correct assessment. Not just because of the role she played politically over the coming years but because of the fact, before she met Lenin, she was dedicated to trying to help poor farmers learn how to read and write. In fact it was in this early embryonic period she met Lenin. He convinced her that the problems of the poor and ignorant could not be resolved by bourgeois charity but instead the entire system had to be changed.
Comrade Krupskaya wrote a biography of Lenin and as the years progressed she granted many interviews with the Soviet and foreign press that were specifically directed at learning more about Lenin the Man. The thing that stuck in my mind the most from the very beginning of my reading was how Alexander's hanging changed Lenin's life.
Inside Snapshot
Condensed from multiple Sources
Nadashda Krupskaya
``we spent a long time together alone in Siberia and during those years I came to see how an atrocious act can influence other unrelated persons. Lenin told me `he was responsible for Alexander's death because he was so involved with his athletic endeavors and sports events that he had ignored his brother and therefore knew nothing about his involvement with those who would change Russia by assassinating the Czar.' He said many times that this was because of the nature of our society, being focused as it was on bettering oneself, making money, getting ahead. I told him again and again when this subject came up `Illych (Lenin was called Illych by his family and friends rather than Vladimir) you are not responsible for what your older brother did about which you knew nothing.' He said with absolute certainty, and those of us who knew Illych know when he
209made up his mind that was it, that he was responsible even if by ignorance and inattention. He called it third degree murder. You know his legal training.
``---And, he would not allow me to pursue this too far. His point always was that the whole thing was just stupid. He said `even if they had succeeded what difference would it have made? There would have just been a new Czar! I don't know why Alexander couldn't see that. It was so obvious. If you want to get rid of Czarism you have to overthrow the system, not a man!'
``Then one day he said, `Nadya I don't ever want to discuss this again. I have chosen my side. Either they will kill me or by God I will destroy not only this bastard the Czar but his entire system, and liquidate the entire class of capitalist bloodsuckers behind him'
``That was the last time we ever spoke about Alexander. I was young and in love and somewhat insecure in that we were only recently married and I did not want to presume any more than I already had in telling the Okhrana the lies that got me shipped to Minusinsk originally. The truth is that I don't think Illych even remembered me when I showed up on his doorstep. I immediately confessed to him what I had done and to my everlasting gratitude he acted as if I had done exactly the right thing and invited me in to his home.'' (A more recent biography of Lenin tells the story less romantically, having Nadya and her mother showing up on Lenin's Siberian doorstep expected and with the order from the Okrahana that they be married immediately or she would be moved on.)
I have seen photos of Krupskaya as a young woman at the time she met Lenin and I think she underestimates the impact she would have had on any heterosexual man. She was indeed strikingly beautiful and I doubt very much that Lenin would have forgotten their having met in Social Democratic secret settings. However that may have been the two were together, forever, thereafter.
Jailed
After Alexander's execution Lenin became a lawyer. He specialized in representing workers in the fine laws. In fact, that is the name of his first publication. This refers to the law in Russia at the time which allowed workers to be fined monetarily for errors made in the workplace or tools damaged in the performance of their duties. Obviously, this was a gimmick to justify cutting a worker's paycheck. Yet, the authors of the fine laws had placed certain provisions in these laws which allowed workers to contest the fines. That was just what Lenin as an attorney needed if he were to bring a worker's case in front of the Czarist courts.
Lenin gathered a following in St. Petersburg because of his success as a personal injury, workmen's compensation, lawyer representing workers. Even when not successful in Czarist courts he gained a great deal of admiration from working people.
Not satisfied with these endeavors he immediately began to secretly educate his clients and their friends. He used his position and his contacts to gather the raw data to prove that in sociocultural evolutionary terms Russia was a capitalist country albeit primitive and terribly distorted by Czarist feudalism. This data gathering was the first phase in the creation of his initial magnum opus: The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
Ulyanov Becomes Lenin
The Russian Social Democrats were just wannabe carbon copies of the German Social Democrats at this time, but they were the only worker's party (other than the crackpot anarchists) in Russia. The few Social Democrats who existed in Russia formed their version of German Social Democracy in 1898 calling themselves the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. As one of those openly proclaiming in favor of a revolutionary Social Democratic course of action, Lenin was arrested in St. Petersburg just before Christmas 1895 and spent 14 month in the prison ``hole'' (solitary) and was then (February 1897) sent to Siberia (first he traveled to Krasnoyar town, Minusinsk district, and finally 36 miles by river downstream to the town of Shushenskoe, also in the Minusinsk district) for an extended sentence of three more years. He wrote his first theoretical book The Development of Capitalism in Russia in large part while in that St. Petersburg prison. He finished it in Siberia and sent it to the St. Petersburg printer who published it in 1899 --- the exigencies of everyone's situation meant that it appeared initially under a pen name --- Vladimir Ilyin - but everyone in and around the Social Democratic movement in Russia and Western Europe knew the real author to be Vladimir Ulyanov. As did the Czarist secret police. Ilyin would shortly be changed to Lenin.
210The Czarist secret police (the Okhrana) were well aware that Lenin was the brother of the revolutionary Alexander Ulyanov, who had been executed in the Shisselburg Fortress. That Fortress being the most secure Czarist prison located on an Alcatraz-like island in Lake Ladoga some 35 miles from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where Alexander had been held for two months prior to his May 5, 1887, execution at Shisselburg. As for his brother, Vladimir Ulyanov, the Okhrana had been keeping a close eye on him after his brother's hanging and before his arrest 8 years later in December, 1895 (he had made his first trip to West Europe just prior to being picked up on his return.) Perhaps some of the cops were even sympathetic with Vladimir because of what had happened to his brother. After all they could have killed Lenin in his jail cell had they had anything truly personal against him. Obviously they didn't.
211Siberia
Different people reacted to prison and exile to Siberia in different ways. Lenin was a rather normal political prisoner as far as the Okhrana was concerned and they soon forgot about him. Most young bourgeois intellectuals learned from this experience and would return to society as reformed and rehabilitated young people bent on achieving success in business or academia or some such thing. Some would be slow learners and return several times before they too saw the light. Overall it was a system that had worked extremely well for Czarism. Curing the stupid while they were still young enough to understand that ``resistance is futile''. Far better than alienating their families and friends forever as would otherwise most likely occur, if they were hung. These were young men and women whose families and/or friends were important.
212
Unfortunately for the Czar the exile system had not been universally applied as the case of Alexander Ulyanov testified --- its failure in this one case would insure Czar Nicolas a premature death.
Lenin's Plan
Lenin spent his time in exile planning to overthrow the entire Czarist system. If there was anyone the Okhrana should have murdered it was this young Russian lawyer in Siberia. But the Okhrana didn't know what was going on in Lenin's mind, and even if he had told them they would have laughed. How could a newspaper endanger their system?
Lenin knew he had to get out of Russia as soon as possible and as soon as his prison term expired and he was released he left the country quickly. So quickly that he had to leave his new wife behind, for her prison term still had time to run.
Lenin had a plan. That plan was to go to Zurich, Switzerland, and to start a revolutionary newspaper which would be smuggled into Russia so the most militant workers would be in direct touch with the revolutionary intellectual vanguard leadership safely abroad. In his mind he had already named this newspaper Iskra (the Spark). Why Zurich? Because in 1899 Switzerland was where the majority of Russia's Marxists were living. Some had been there for decades. Others were recent arrivals and had taken the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party leadership function to Zurich, the previous year (1898) after its initial formation and while Lenin was in Siberia. They did need to flee as the Okhrana had infiltrated their ranks from the beginning and knew more about them than they knew!
213Lenin knew he had to have money and had spent his time in exile working with Victor Kurnatovsky and through him indirectly with his coming closest associate Leonid Krassin. These three agreed on just about everything and two of them (Lenin and Krassin) would constitute (along with always a third person who varied through time) what was sometimes referred to in those days as the Bolshevik Holy Trinity! These two stuck together through the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the initial years of the Soviet Republic (Krassin passed away in 1926). From Siberia forward Lenin and Krassin (always with a third person) worked to identify funds that should belong to the people and expropriate them (rob banks, stagecoaches and ships, in other words.) About this the intellectuals in Switzerland did not need to know. Lenin felt since his family had money that should be a sufficient explanation for his financial situation as of the moment.
214Lenin's Payroll: Here is how it worked
While on the run, in the few months he had before the Okhrana (Czarist secret police) picked him up in St. Petersburg, in December, 1895, Lenin noted several things that could be done right now to negate the success of these cops. Social democratic workers were being picked up because they had no money, no safe-houses, no prearranged escape routes, and no safe medical doctors, not to mention no armorers and munitions procurers. (By synchronous comparison, Gringo bank robbers like John Dillinger - see the movie Public Enemies --- took these services for granted until Meyer Lansky made a deal with Jane Edgar Hoover to withdraw this support. As I have
explained elsewhere (The Buccaneer) this was because Meyer sent Frank Costello to Jane Edgar every week-end from the 1930's through the 1950's to sodomize the FBI chief during their weekend love sessions. For details see my book The Buccaneer.)
All of these were new things to Russian Social Democrat intellectuals in 1895, and they had been unprepared. As individuals they usually had money but it was at home and they couldn't go home to get it or they would be arrested. They had homes but all were known to the Okhrana. What Lenin realized was he needed a combat Party with its own internal structure to handle its own needs which meant its own funding --- its own payroll.
In exile for three years at Minusinsk, Siberia, Lenin and Krupskaya met Victor Kurnatovsky. Kurnatovsky was well connected to both revolutionaries and the financial industry in the Caucuses. In short, he convinced Lenin they could fund their operations via bank, steamship and stagecoach robberies and perhaps some other targets of opportunity. With the cash thus recovered they could pay their cadre (even communists have to eat, pay rent, doctors and armorers, and support families) regardless of whether the police were looking for them. Lenin wanted a Party where its cadre could hide in unknown Party safe-houses; care for wounded or sick cadre and rearm. Not to mention that the Party could then move its cadre along established escape and/or infiltration routes. They could also properly arm and rearm them as needed.
215In the case of the West of the Empire these escape and/or infiltration routes would be the same as the petroleum products distribution network, along with the rest of the Black Market flood, which had always come north from Batum and Baku.
Lenin was released along with Kurnatovsky in 1900. The former headed for Switzerland and the latter for Baku. Waiting behind was Krupskaya whose term had several months to run and this would be an excellent excuse to keep her in place and guide two more soon-to-be released Social Democrat prisoners to the Caucuses after which she would depart for Zurich herself.
In Baku, Kurnatovsky linked up with Leonid Krassin. Krassin was a capitalist, a New Class type of bureaucrat (eventually to be known as oil technocrat). Most importantly he was a Social Democrat of the direct action Lenin type. Krassin began recruiting the young men Kurnatovsky was going to need to get the robbing underway. One of these was a fourteen year old lad named Joseph Dzugashvili who went by the name of the Georgian heroic Robin Hood figure ``Koba.'' Soon Koba would be the head of Lenin's expropriation teams and Krassin would be moved up the ladder in the Czar's War Procurement Ministry. Within a dozen years Koba would be a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee known as Joseph V. Stalin.
By the time the Bolsheviks organization emerged in Russia (permanently divided from the revisionist (Menshevik) traitors of the Social Democratic milieu of nonsense in Zurich) as an independent Party, it had its own Treasury in Russia. This treasury would be full one way or another, permanently, from thence forward. Let us look at one example of how the payroll worked once funds were obtained.
Eventual leading Bolshevik, Nikolai Krylenko, was a typical example. He joined the Bolshevik Party at its inception in 1904 at St. Petersburg University and during the following year's abortive Revolution he served on the leadership bodies of the St. Petersburg City Council, and the Bolshevik St. Petersburg City Committee. As soon as he was recruited in 1904 he had been on Lenin's payroll so that by the time he was elevated
to a working Party cadre position, as he had been in St. Petersburg in 1905, he stayed on Lenin's Payroll and would have stayed there until the collapse of the 1905 Revolution and the subsequent disarray, as Party cashiers ran for the border along with everyone else.
Over the next four years Krylenko bounced back and forth between the Empire and other European locales and operated on funds supplied to him by Lenin on an irregular basis. From these he paid his expenses and those of others he was charged with supporting inside the Empire. In the subsequent seven years Krylenko followed this latter pattern of reimbursement, because it was what was required by the exigencies of illegal operation both in the civil life of Czarist Russia and in the Czarist Army where he had ended up when the February Revolution broke out in 1917.
Follow the Money
Now the question arises as to how did Lenin get enough money together to buy three ships and fill them with the most effective modern armament? Well, it did not come from worker's lunch money.
We have seen that the Bolsheviks had conducted bank robberies and the most dramatic (Tiflis, June 26, 1907) cited raised at least 450 million gold rubles for Lenin. (About 35 million 2008 US dollars.) But anyone can see by researching ship and armament prices of 1905 that just this one interrupted shipment would have cost much more than what was recovered by the Bolsheviks in that one later (1907) expropriation. (There had been a shipping accident that sunk one ship and derailed the two others and much of the armament was seized by the Okhrana and the Army.) Even considering that the maritime seamen and the trainers they carried with all that equipment were Social Democrats volunteers, many Bolsheviks among them, just the labor subsistence and medical costs on such a journey would have been immense, not to mention the cost of the ships and their cargo.
216The answer is that the Bolshevik fund raising program involved thousands of bank robberies in this time period (1900 to 1905) accompanied by nearly as many armed robberies (stage coaches and ships, included). At this critical juncture it was not a Party Theoretician Lenin elevated to the Holy Trinity but first the bank robber in chief, Leonid Krassin. Remember Lenin had worked indirectly or directly with Krassin for the past seven years. Since their collaboration had a two year introductory period (via Victor Kurnatovsky initially who was in Minusinsk with Lenin and then with Krassin waiting in the Caucuses.) ---And five years of direct relations by courier. In 1905 when Lenin moved his HQ to the Finnish Russian border area it was Krassin he brought with him (and a longtime Bolshevik ally, Bogdanov.)
217Enter the Chief Armaments Buyer for Ecuador's Military Junta
Colonel Maxim Litvinov
Armed with many millions of Russian gold rubles converted into US dollars, Swiss Francs, French Franks, British Pounds and so forth in several highly respected Parisian and Swiss banks, Vice Bank Robber in Chief, the Bolshevik, Maxim Litvinov (born Meyer Wallach of Jewish parents in Poland), along with a small group of compatriots from the Caucuses (Kamo et al) began buying military equipment from
European arms manufacturers in a variety of countries. ---And, Litvinov was able to get the Japanese to provide their best modern machine guns at reasonable prices. (Remember the trigger for the now raging revolution in Russia had been the Russo-Japanese war and Japan still looked toward getting more out of her victory than she had already achieved. Leave it to Litvinov to find a way to explain that to them with material consequences.)
Litvinov and his principle associate in this endeavor, Kamo (Stalin's youthful comrade who arranged the Balkan sources of weapons and volunteer fighters) got repeating rifles from Switzerland, Brownings and Mausers from Hamburg licensees, and in the UK alone bought 15,500 rifles, 250,000 cartridges, 2,500 revolvers, 3 tons of high explosives, loading all this and what he acquired from Japanese sources and arms manufacturers in western Europe and the UK, Litvinov then had it loaded for Russia ports including the ill-fated trip to Petersburg via the Finnish coast (we have already mentioned.)
Police found a wrecked yacht where they recovered 2000 rifles and 650,000 bullets. (Krassin said ``it was a lot more than that, including cash, but they obviously stole that and sold the other weapons.'')
This shows us that Lenin, Krassin, Kamo ( and Stalin) had reactivated the Black Sea-Caspian petroleum products route to Moscow, St. Petersburg (and every other major Russian city) once again. This means the Holy Trinity was supplying their armed insurrectionary teams (Stalin's Battle Groups) in Petersburg, Moscow, and wherever else, from the south as well as from the Finnish coastal northern route. (Three hundred, 5 to 7 man, armed insurrectionary teams (Stalin's Georgian style Battle Groups) were ordered, by Lenin, to be created in January of 1905 for Petersburg alone. Now many more were being assembled, and armed, for an uprising then currently scheduled for the spring of 1906. The exact timing and the date was Lenin's decision to make, and he opted for the revolution to be in process, to be in place, perhaps on the verge of consolidating state power, for the returning soldiers and sailors who were known to be extremely angry with the Government over its war time incompetence against Japan. He set the date as April 1, 1906.
218However, several more identical shipments did get through and the Bosses (Lenin and Krassin) sitting in Finland and/or Petersburg said ``not to worry about it we have plenty more on the high seas.'' Many gold rubles indeed must have occupied the Bolshevik treasury by the end of 1905.
Litvinov presented himself as a Colonel from the Republic of Ecuador which was deeply involved in civil war with more than two contestants for state power, all fielding military forces, South American style. He visited the armaments manufacturers all over Europe to get his list of equipment for Lenin. The Boss was planning on triggering an armed seizure of state power to begin in the spring of next year (spring of 1906.) He provided the end-user statements where necessary and had shipment taken to appropriate port for trans-oceanic journeys. In this case the ocean would be to the east and not west, for these ships and their cargo were on their way to St. Petersburg and Moscow- not Quito nor Guayaquil
At one Arms convention ``Colonel'' Litvinov stood shoulder to shoulder with the Russian Czar's top generals also there as potential buyers and of course of representatives of the Russian market. One might assume they would have been surprised to know that Colonel Litvinov was actually buying the same arms to take to their current most deadly
enemy --- for the revolution and the counterrevolution were raging at home all over the Empire.
Back at the Ranch
Krylenko along with others in the Krassin team learned how to rob in one country (the Czarist Empire) live in another (Switzerland) and bank in still another (France, England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Spain, etc.) Learning how to deposit and withdraw in circumspect ways and how to work with individual bankers to get what you wanted quietly was a critical Bolshevik ``secret department'' way of ``institutionalizing'' Bolshevik financial policy. Gold dealers in Europe would melt down Czarist bricks and other identifiable gold items and pay up to 75% (usually only 50%) in immediately exchangeable currency. But, it was a treacherous profession full of shylocks and killers and required sophistication to handle. That is how the banking and gold exchange arm of the Bolshevik Treasury had to work.
219During the six months from February to October of 1917, Krylenko was one of the major recipients of Lenin's money (much of it now recently obtained from the German General Staff). When the Bolsheviks succeeded in the seizure of Russian state power, 24-26 October, 1917, Krylenko would have switched from the Party payroll to the Government payroll and that was permanent, as it was with all of the surviving Old Bolsheviks.
Without these independent financial resources the Bolsheviks would never have been able to get off the ground. They would have remained part of the sewing circle of intellectuals in Europe, isolated from their own people, and indeed from reality.
The Source of our Error lay in our deficient Understanding of Sociocultural Stage Psychology
(Mental Template Imprinting)
Having completely misunderstood the absorption of the German Social Democrats into the boss hierarchy of the German Capitalists Lenin was stunned and shaken. He went to the Bern (Switzerland) library in September of 1914.
Why?
Because he was going back to Hegel. He spent a year trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The fact that he had to do it this way, shows how isolated he was from the reality of everyday people; the way they think. Which is rather amazing, given his many years of underground organizing and clandestine operations, not to mention his jail time and exile to Siberia for three years.
This is more than an interesting sideline to our story. It is the very essence of it. Because as you are going to see, if you haven't already, it is the idea that people, especially poor and working people, are ideologically pure of heart, essentially good, birthed with a blank slate, etc. which turns out to be fundamentally wrong. People are whatever the environmental template of society is --- culture being the environment --- and when it is altruistic people are altruistic and when it is selfish-sadistic people are selfish-sadistic. Furthermore, and finally, the template is set by the Epoch and the Stage and
is inculcated into nearly everyone regardless of class. It would take many decades to figure this out. Now, back to our story.
Did Joseph Stalin suffer from this kind of extreme naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé?
There were not many naive bones in Stalin's body. Stalin came from the most oppressed sector of Georgia's working class would-be small-bourgeois population. He suffered an alcoholic father that beat him senseless, and left him with a crippled arm and a religious, albeit wheeler-dealer, washer woman for a mother. His first sexual experience was with a religious and under-educated Georgian girl. A young woman who he nevertheless was deeply in love with; her death by poverty and cholera, while they were on the run, scarred him psychologically for the rest of his life. He later said with her death his last warm feelings departed from him forever.
At any rate Stalin had been arrested many times and had gone to prison seven times and escaped six times when the First World War broke out in August of 1914. I suspect Stalin wasn't surprised that all the traitor parties were traitor parties. What else could you expect from a labor movement that had been co-opted into the boss hierarchy of the capitalist classes? Nothing else.
Now the workers would have to pay the price of having been betrayed. For, re-division of world markets and cheap labor-power (in the colonies) was only one objective of the world war the capitalists had launched. The other was the equally important objective of killing as many million supernumeraries, unwanted, and dangerously restive socialistic/communistic European working class males as possible! Lenin understood this and so did his principal Bolshevik followers. Of all of them, it was Joseph Stalin, a direct victim of all the evils of his time, who perhaps more than any other, understood in his very soul the truths of Marx's and now Lenin's understanding.
This is what the US ruling bosses have in mind for you, by the way. Their plan is to kill you off in huge (genocidal) numbers, at home and abroad. You are no longer necessary to them. They have begun by building prisons for you, using the phony ``war on drugs'' as the excuse; engaging in wars planned to kill you; creating new diseases to exterminate you; and exploiting environmental catastrophes of geologic proportions to finish off the job. (The Katrina hurricane and the BP oil spill are local examples) -And, in this latter regard, have had the insulting audacity to put on a Hope-Crosby type of ``road movie'' to dull your perception as in the aftermath of the Indonesian Tsunami (as in ``the Traveling Clinton-Bush'' road show.) Clinton and gang show up in Haiti and years later millions still live in tents in a cess pool.
220Stalin's first importance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks was precisely because he was clear on the nature of the enemy and what was to be done about them AND he was willing to get those things done for his Party and his Chief. ---And, this clarity was achieved first of all in the real school of life. Lenin recognized these qualities in Stalin, calling him ``that wonderful Georgian.''
Stalin's Special Relationship with Lenin
One might wonder why the question of Stalin and Stalinism has been so terribly
distorted in the English-speaking world. The answer should be obvious. The ruling capitalist classes, and their academic toadies, desperately needed to attack Stalin and they found the most convenient way of attacking him to utilize the mythology spread by Trotsky about him. A mythology dragged into the 21st century by FBI agents. Not to mention the capitalists very well paid hacks like Robert Conrad and Robert Payne. However, the historical record is now quite clear. Lenin had a special relationship with Stalin.
Lenin saw that Stalin was not only a great money maker but an unusually adept national leader. As far as I know Lenin never capitulated to anyone in debate until he did to Stalin when the latter arose to oppose his view of the national question in the 1905 Bolshevik Conference in Finland, when Lenin decided to reverse himself and asked that Stalin write the Party's resolution on the National Question. Forever after Lenin treated Stalin as a theoretical equal as well as respecting him as a major financial resource.
The Lies
Lying about history is the stock and trade of capitalist academics, and especially when it comes to the history of socialism, and this continues to this very day. For example, in May of 2009, PBS broadcast the most recent attack of the few remaining Gringolandia fascist academics against Stalin: World War II: Stalin the Nazi's and the West. It starts out with a great lie of omission (ignoring the twenty two year history of Britain and France against the USSR including their every attempt at sending Hitler against the USSR during the years 1933---1941, which you will learn all about below in chapter 16 on World War II) and the PBS lies continue, one compounded on the other, throughout this miserable series.
This mini-series features the execution of several thousand Polish enemies of the people (and these were the worst people who ever lived in Poland) at Stalin's orders. I certainly would have done exactly what Stalin did if I had been in Stalin's place, and I would expect so would any other true working class leader (see chapter 16 for more on this). However that may be, these remaining fascist screenwriters proceed in their so-called ``documentary'' movie to claim the liquidation of the kulaks was a mass murder. In fact from our standpoint removing the kulaks from the countryside, exiling them for five years, (chapter 15 below) was one of the best things Stalin ever did. For liquidating this backbone class of capitalism in Russian agriculture Stalin received and is receiving, and will receive, countless kudos and our everlasting thanks for many generations yet to come. See what you think after reading chapter fifteen. Finally it is unclear to me how many kulaks actually perished out of the number relocated to Siberia or sent to prison work camps, not that the number is the key criteria. (Whatever the number, removing the kulaks from the countryside was the right thing to do.) But it is always useful to know the facts being discussed.
221Hopefully no one of you will ever give a penny to PBS, as I have mistakenly done in the past. (PBS is worse than FOX when it becomes the purveyor of historical lies and mythology, because everyone knows what FOX is.) Yet even worse is the attack ongoing in the USA by Left fakirs, who says ``what about Stalin's crimes?'' In fact, this PBS pack of lies was rushed out to counter the truth as now is being published herein and in other books. Especially since the earlier excellent movie World
War II: When Lions Roared with major actors (Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, John Lithgow) playing the roles of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt has had such an impact on contemporary thinking in Gringo academia of a positive (which is to say truthful) way; meaning a truthful exposition of World War II and its conduct as reflected in the memoirs of these three participants. PBS is after all, just another capitalist outlet for lies and misstatements of history, albeit unlike FOX (Fascist Oxymoron) it is aimed at ``educated'' North Americans as opposed to the lumpen and ignorant misled sheep targeted by the latter. Unfortunately, on world standards, what passes for political and historical education in Gringolandia is a travesty of lies and childish comic book propaganda, sometimes backed up by silly religious fairytales of the Bible School variety.
222From Trotsky to Khrushchev
The international communist movement had already handled the lies spread by Trotsky so there would have to be a new set of lies and myths from a reputable source to do the job against Stalin and the imperialists did not have long to wait. Within three years of Stalin's death, they had a new arsenal of lies to use against the memory of the man who had made Socialism triumphant across the surface of the Earth. This coming in the form of a new mythology created by Stalin's one-time right-hand man, Nikita Khrushchev, in his so-called secret report to the Party Congress in 1956. That nonsense put the icing on the anti-Stalin cake being cooked up by imperialism in conjunction with modern revisionism. (Chapter 18)
The New Class in Russia, with Nikita Khrushchev at its head, was asserting itself for political domination of the USSR and to do that they had to discredit Stalin. All of this Khrushchev crap was and is aimed at vindicating the fairy-tale novelistic history written by New York Times hack Robert Payne (in his biography Stalin) based on nothing but his own creative imagination working on Trotsky's earlier published slanders. In turn HBO took on the task of justifying Payne's fairy-tale history by inserting the voice-over of an actress speaking words from Stalin's daughter as if she had been there for all of this. (She hadn't even been born in these years.) In the process the movie producers for HBO purposely confuse her book with Payne's so the viewer never gets a true read on what she said. (What really was happening is covered in this Handbook in Chapters 13 - 16.) ---And, so there the matter stood.
223Young Stalin
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Truth and Consequences, Georgia
The only decent biography of Joseph Stalin produced by the English capitalist press, anywhere, ever, is the recent volume by Simon Sebag Montefiore. With regard to this Handbook he has produced the only reliable capitalist (in English) history of the youthful Stalin in Georgia and the Trans-caucuses entitled Young Stalin (2007, Simon S. Montefiore, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 461 pp.) Consequently, I have taken the liberty of outlining his material (in ten parts in this chapter) with an eye toward incorporating the principle dates and events in the evolution of one of our greatest leaders.
Montefiore squarely confronts the lies created from whole cloth by Leon Trotsky and then picked up and regurgitated by the paid hacks of the US oligarchs such as Robert Payne, Robert Conquest, Robert Service, et. al. ad nauseum. In his own words, Montefiore says:
``every historian has quoted Trotsky's claim that Stalin was a provincial ``mediocrity'' and (the Menshevik) Sukhanov's that Stalin was so greyly mediocre that he was just a ``grey blur'' in history in 1917
``Yet if this was so, how did the ``mediocrity'' seize power, outwit talented politicians such as Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky himself, and coordinate his programme of industrialization, the savage war on the peasantry and the ghoulish Great Terror? How did the ``blur'' become the homicidal but super-effective world statesman who helped create and industrialize the USSR, outplayed Churchill and Roosevelt, organized Stalingrad and defeated Hitler?...''
``It is clear from hostile and friendly witnesses that Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.''
You cadre can see Montefiore's obvious anti-communism and I will correct all of that as we proceed. But since our academe is composed of mostly anti-communists and we have to deal with the world we have, when it is all said and done, Montefiore is far better than what we call ``small cats'' in Mexico, like the foregoing scum (Payne, Conquest, Service, et. al.) ``Small cats'' is a phrase I learned many years ago in Mexico referencing the kind of lackey who sits on the floor near the table of the oligarch's waiting for a hand-out like pet cats often hang around the dinner table hoping for a bite. The pathetic part of being a ``gringo small cat'' is that the oligarch's spend more money on their favorite prostitutes in a weekend than guys like the low-life's foregoing will
224make in their entire lives on the various teats created for them and what they consider the wonderful perks that go with them.
Anyway, back at the ranch
Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (Joseph V. Stalin) was born on December 6th, 1878. In later years he changed the date by one year forward in order to avoid conscription into the Czarist army. The latter date of December, 1879 became the official date. Either way this makes Stalin roughly ten years younger than V. I. Lenin. The birth occurred in Gori, Georgia. Joseph's father was Vissarion ``Beso'' Djugashvili and his mother was named Ekaterina ``Keke'' Geladze.
Georgia by this time had been absorbed into the Czarist Empire, but that was a relatively recent development (completed in 1878) and the wedding was traditional Georgian and in the Georgian language. For one thousand years the Bagration family had ruled Georgia as an independent Christian country albeit composed of a multitude of nationalities extending from eastern origins in Mongolia to Turkish, Russian and even European homelands. Note that Bagration was the name that Joseph later attached to the Soviet drive to expel Germany from Soviet soil in the Second World War.
His father was a petty bourgeois cobbler and employer of laborers in a shoe and boot making small factory workshop. His mother was the daughter of a potter and gardener to the rich who died while she was young so that she was raised in her mother's family home in Gori.
Beso Djugashvili became mentally disturbed as time went on and a practicing alcoholic and lost everything. His long suffering wife Keke was somewhat promiscuous with many well-to-do men and as a result always kept her head above water as well as that of her surviving child, Joseph. It was she who got him into school and eventually into the seminary. These were educational steps far above Joseph's deteriorating family's place in Georgian life. Keke was considered to be one of the most beautiful girls in Georgia and her amorous nature cleared the way for both her and her son all of their young lives. In fact, no one is sure who Joseph's father really was. This is beyond the scope of this Handbook but suffice to say that Stalin himself believed and said someone other than ``Crazy Beso'' fathered him.
225
Learning the Truth, Little by Little
As the years since 1965 progressed and I read more and more of the original documents I came to see an entirely different Stalin than the one Trotsky propagandized and Khrushchev invented. So different that it is truly shocking.
Furthermore, because of my own involvement in the US intelligence service I
began to see how Stalin organized and led the most important combat part of the international communist movement --- the Red Secret Service. Let me give you an accurate assessment of Stalin's originating role in the Bolshevik Party.
Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili on December 9, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. (Roughly ten years younger than Lenin.) Nicknamed Soso by others, he chose the name ``Koba'' for himself by the time of his adolescence. In time he would take on a new name. His official new name would be Stalin, the man of steel. But that was some time into the future (c. 1911). For now Stalin would be Joseph, Soso, or Koba.
Koba was the hero of a Robin Hood novel about a Georgian who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Joseph continued to use Koba as his Party name in the underground world of the RSDLP. The main book Koba read was The Patricide, its author Alexander Kazbegi --- perhaps the wealthiest landowner in Georgia - had released his serfs from their serf obligations, given away his own wealth, and gone to living as a simple herder of sheep in the mountains of Georgia. Writing his Koba stories occupied Kazbegi's plentiful spare time as a shepherd during the years 1880 to 1886. The first six years of Joseph's childhood.
At the age of 8 (1887) Joseph's mother enrolled him in elementary school. Here he was forced to learn Russian, as instruction was done only in Russian, and he completed elementary and middle schooling therefore in the Russian language. He graduated with honors from this church school in 1894 and at the age of 14 (1893) was admitted to the seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, for high schooling, which was the only way toward a higher education for a poor boy. The following year, still at the age of 14 (1894), he joined the Russian Social Democratic circle (called Mesame Dasi) in Tiflis (renamed Tbilisi in 1936 by him.) There, in 1894, Koba caught the attention of the man who would become his mentor, Leonid Krassin.
Krassin was a well-educated capitalist, working for Russian wildcatters and foreign oil concerns as a manager, ``company man'' (the US term for the financier's boss of the drilling site), and sometimes as an entrepreneur for himself, wildcatting in the rough-and-tumble oilfield culture of Georgia, especially around Caspian Sea Baku and Black Sea Batum. During the last three years of the nineteenth century Krassin kept in closest touch as possible with his associate Victor Kurnatovsky who had been exiled to Minusinsk, Siberia where he had established close working relations with Vladimir I. Ulyanov (Lenin). (Lenin had become a Social Democratic leading light as he had published The Development of Capitalism in Russia in St. Petersburg in 1899 even though he was still very much in exile in Minusinsk. History was moving fast --- in fact, even faster than these revolutionary optimists believed --- The Revolution beginning in January 1905 was only five years away.)
226Krassin was also a secret organizer for what would soon be (1898) the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. (Krassin would become a member of the Bolshevik Holy Trinity along with Lenin, and become, as Lenin laughingly joked many years later, the ``finance minister of the Bolshevik Revolution.'' Krassin was always Lenin's main right hand and closest advisor and colleague.)
Koba's World
The US Civil War led to the most rapid transformation of an economy of primitive capitalist accumulation into one of massive capitalist accumulation the world had ever seen. Among the most important commodities the US capitalists were supplying to Europe were petroleum products. Among these in 1875, the production of kerosene accounted for half of the volume of the US production of oil, and kerosene export constituted 25% of US total export value. Most of this export went to Europe. It was inevitable that European capitalists would recognize the profit to be had in seizing part if not all of this oil market. The family leading the assault on the American (Rockefeller family) monopoly was named Nobel. (Later of Nobel Prize fame.)
At the turn of the century three families dominated the Russian oil industry: the Nobel's, the Rockefellers and the Rothschild's. This world Koba encountered as a teen-ager was about to be changed: by him.
The Nobel's in Russia
On the periphery of Europe, both in terms of sociocultural stage evolution and geography, was the Russian Empire. Industrialization began to get underway in the Russia's with a vengeance at the same time as massive capital accumulation was occurring in the Americas. In 1862, St. Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, witnessed a new kind of miracle. Arriving American kerosene allowed the capital to be lit at night, all night, cleanly and safely. When the night lasts nearly all day for six months of the year, this was not a minor development.
(Note also the American government in Washington was so well supplied with petroleum fuel from Pennsylvania, even in the first year of the US Civil War (1861-62) which had gone so badly for it, it could maintain the continuous export of hard-currency-earning kerosene to Europe. The Slavocrat Regime in Richmond meanwhile found itself cut off altogether from outside trade by the US blockade of Southern ports. The hand-writing was on the wall for a Marxist observer --- the fuel-starved South could not win a GNP industrial war as North America was then currently constructed. Thus, its defeat was assured and only a matter of time.)
Back in the Empire, at the head of this adventure in lighting, living in the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg, was the chemist Robert Nobel, son of Swedish originating, Russian military-industrial inventor, Immanuel Nobel. Immanuel's company collapsed and another son, Ludwig, took over trying to salvage the remnants of his father's failed military-industrial complex. Critical to Ludwig's success was the invention of dynamite by still another son of Immanuel, Ludwig's brother Albert. Ludwig dispatched his brother Robert to the Caucuses to come up with the wood for the rifle stocks for the rifles he now would produce under contract for the Czarist Army.
When Robert arrived in Baku, in the spring of 1873, it was, as I say, to purchase wood for Ludwig's rapidly growing armaments factories where rifle stocks for new Czarist Army contracts were needed. However, what Robert grasped upon arrival was an entirely new way of producing the commodity of oil. Robert immediately grasped two things about the oil boom at Baku. One was that kerosene could be made cheaply here if one had a refinery. The second was that he finally could get a second chance. Things had not gone well for Robert in life and this oil situation was one where he saw an opportunity to amount to something more than a black sheep in the family. He took the
25,000 rubles his brother had entrusted to him for walnut wood and instead invested in a small refinery.
At first it seemed that Robert had turned into another ``Jack'' as in the Beanstalk fable. Fortunately for him, he would turn out to be right on both counts.
Three years later, in 1876, the first shipment of Robert's Nobel Kerosene arrived in St. Petersburg. The Imperial viceroy for the Caucuses was the Czar's brother, a friend and business partner of Robert's brother Ludwig (the brother with the rifle contracts in St. Petersburg.) Ludwig had, therefore, the corrupt Czarist family top-dogs in his pocket when Ludwig joined Robert and arrived in Baku with a plan to do for Russia what Rockefeller had done in the USA. ---And, Ludwig was another Rockefeller. He had the ability and moreover the scientific and technical knowledge which had always alluded Rockefeller personally, although the Standard boss very much appreciated science and engineering, to build a new industrial empire and so he did. It was called the Nobel Brother's Petroleum Producing Company.
227Within a few decades Russian oil production surpassed that of the USA! By 1885 it had reached 10.8 million barrels! One reason was that Ludwig had invented bulk tanker shipping! Instead of the barrels that had to be manhandled on ox-drawn carts and primitive boats all the way north, Ludwig came up with the idea of pouring all the oil into huge ship borne tanks. He commissioned special ships that did little besides bulk-up on oil and head north. The first bulk tanker was sailing the Caspian in 1878. Ten years later bulk tankers would be sailing the Atlantic Ocean. Yet oil had to traverse the Caucuses Mountains to get from Black Sea Batum to Baku on the Caspian Sea, or vice versa, and for Russia itself the Caspian shipped oil then had to be manhandled once again at Astrakhan onto barges fit to sail north up the Volga River.
228Interestingly Ludwig and Robert pioneered two important developments in Russian industry. One was the use of scientists in charge. The first geologist on an oil company payroll, anywhere in the world, was in Baku at Robert's most advanced refinery (scientifically, engineering-wise, and technically) in the world. The second was the Nobel's decision to put labor relations at peace; acceding to the demands of local workers for a decent way of life. Both worked, especially the latter. That would turn out to be important.
Lenin's Boys
Thus, the rise of the first militant organized labor movement in Russia along the Baku-Batum petroleum corridor is at first rather surprising. In fact, it was here in the first years of the coming century Joseph Stalin would arise as the boss of Russia's first successful organized labor unions, and simultaneously he became the most important in-country organizer for the newly emerged Bolshevik Party led by the revolutionary intellectual chieftain Vladimir Illych Lenin (who at that time was in exile in Switzerland.) Stalin (Koba) (and his other soon-to-be famous comrades) would give Lenin the two things he needed most in 1903. What Lenin needed first was a real and militant, not to mention successful, organized labor movement with a permanent union in the oilfields. ---And, secondly Lenin needed money and he got that via bank, stagecoach and steamship robberies, conducted by Leonid Krassin and his'' boys.''
229
Krassin's ``boys'' were just boys. For example, Stalin started working for him in 1894 just before he turned fifteen. One can imagine the effect a grown man of intellectual and real world accomplishments like Krassin would have had on boys like Koba and why he had been hero-worshipped by the boys he recruited. Stalin soon rose to run these ``expropriations'' or ``exes'' as they were known among Social Democrats, to be the man in charge. Lenin made that decision when he decided to move Krassin further up the ladder of penetration inside the Czarist regime and get him out of the line of fire. Even so Lenin would later jokingly refer to Krassin as ``the finance minister of the Bolshevik Revolution.''
Meanwhile Stalin made the Bolshevik Party the first financially independent working class vanguard Party in the world! Lenin needed in (1900 --- 1905) about 2.5 million rubles per year to run his organization. Krassin, Kurnatovsky and his boys would supply the Lion's share. In addition to Stalin, Krassin handed Lenin a proven loyal capable cadre. Now they were ``Lenin's boys.'' They included, not only Koba, but the future head of the entire Red Army, Kliment Voroshilov, and future President of the Soviet Union, Michael Kalinin. Soon Lenin elevated both Krassin and Stalin to be members of the Bolshevik Central Committee.
In the 1880's Caucasian oil was being consumed in the Russia's by industry as lubricants and by domestic consumers in the form of kerosene for lighting. Half of this was owned directly by the Nobel's. As in the USA the real-world market was confined largely to their respective nations and Europe. That was about to change as initial phase (primitive) imperialism (shipping of constant capital --- i.e., machinery and the factories containing said machinery to cheap labor colonies) was about to advance into a new phase (advanced imperialism), as the capitalists were about to raid each other's markets.
The capitalists struggled to get control of Asian and African countries in search of their raw materials and the cheap labor they wanted to exploit them. Of course, the search for oil would be a principal target. The result of both of these practices (market raiding and colonial subjugation) would be the World War of 1914; but that was still several decades into the future. (Not to mention the other most important reason the capitalists launched the world war, which was their need to kill as many million supernumerary workers as possible, which was not yet on the horizon.) But, history was moving fast. The Nobel's would prove adept at seizing the moment. (At this moment --- July 2011 --- the gringo ruling families have the same need --- i.e., to kill as many millions of you supernumerary U.S. workers as possible.)
230Rothschild's in Russia
Two Russian independent capitalist oil producers tried to build a railroad across the mountains from Black Sea Batum to Caspian Sea Baku in order to get their oil to the European market. They were locked-out of the north by the Nobel monopoly on Russia, and this was their only choice. But midway they ran out of money and their rescue came in the form of the intervention of the famous French-British finance capitalist family the Rothschild's. Namely a massive loan to the Russian independents that brought the already oil involved family into the most important producing oil area in the Old World. The Rothschild's owned a major refinery on the Adriatic Sea and had built a strong market in Europe proper. But, they also saw the need for a secure source of more crude
oil. Russia would give it to them. With Rothschild's money the Russian independents completed their railroad from the Black Sea port of Batum to the Caspian port of Baku in 1883. The Rothschild's proceeded to take majority control of a new corporation which included their Russian independent partners in what they called the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company (Bnito). Baku was now an oil port as important as any other despite its land-locked character.
Building the Newspaper; Building the Party
As a matter of interest it was the arrival of sailors carrying ``copy'' for Lenin's newspaper Spark (Iskra) to be printed in Batum and Baku which would provide the entry Lenin needed to get his material into Russia's northern industrial centers. Stalin and his men used the distribution network from Batum and Baku of petroleum products as the vertebral chord for Bolshevik Party organizing as far north as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everywhere else in the Empire for that matter.
At any rate Bnito and therefore the Rothschild's would soon become Number 2 in the Russian oil producing world. They were about to be joined by the Rockefellers via Standard at an even higher level than before.
From God to Darwin to Marx
Joseph was an excellent student always at the top of his class in school and in the seminary (at least until the end of his seminary period when his political underground activism led to a lowering of his place in the chart of student standings.) He was considered to be an intellectual by everyone that knew him but an unusual one because of his attraction to activity with society's roughest persons (workers and the disinherited flotsam and jetsam of society.) Joseph was also quite the ladies' man in his youth and stayed that way until later in life when politics took virtually all of his time.
Joseph witnessed his first public hanging on February 13, 1892. By this time he was already an atheist having gotten his hands on a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species in elementary school. In other words by this time he had gone from being a devotee of God to one of Darwin. Once he realized that the story in Genesis was a fairy tale and that animals had evolved over long periods of time into different forms that was the end of the hold of religion on his mind. However, unlike many Marxist leaders he would eventually encounter he never gave up the religious content of his profanity.
He entered the boarding-school Seminary, in Tiflis (Tbilisi now) August 15, 1894. Normally a boy from his, by then poor, background would have been excluded by financial realities if not class. But, Keke managed to defray the costs with influence and
cash from wealthy male friends and Joseph (known as Soso and later in school as Koba) entered fully paid and with by far the best wardrobe of any student in the school!
But, it wasn't just his mother's financial ability that got him in. First and foremost it was because his teachers considered him brilliant and had given him the highest marks and academic standing. Furthermore, Koba had cut out a reputation for himself as a talented poet and as a very good singer. These achievements made him into the type of ``scholarship'' student sought after by all institutions of higher learning, including this highest tertiary educational institution in Georgia.
The Tiflis Seminary was highly respected in Georgia as the intellectual center of the nation. On the other hand, Montefiore says its boarding-school more closely resembled a Caucasian version of Tom Brown's Schoolboys.
Tiflis itself was a city of 160,000 persons mainly Georgian (26%) Russian (30%) and Armenians (30%) with fractions of just about everything else. It was a highly literary city with fifteen newspapers (5 Russian, 6 Armenian and 4 Georgian.) It had a substantial number of workers because of its role as a railroad hub and many small factories; It was the seat of the Czarist Government (Viceroyalty). Russian magnates, oilfield J. R. Ewing millionaires, Army Generals, Armenian bandit tycoons, you name it and wealthy men and women in this part of the Empire had homes in Tiflis. For the workers Marxism was coming in the form of secret study circles. For the rich there were theaters and brothels. Cosmopolitan bazaars and a multitude of hotels completed the picture.
231As soon as Joseph arrived he met boys who were already reading forbidden socialist literature and began attending secret Social Democrat meetings in the city. He was fourteen. His classmates who had been there longer took Koba to a bookstore where for a few kopeks they could check out the socialist books in this lending library.
From this library Koba got a copy of Marx's Capital (volume one) and Engels The Fight of the English Workers for Liberty and he began a lifelong campaign to master German and English. He had now grown from Darwin to Karl Marx.
In their spare time in 1892, when they could sneak out of the seminary, these boys began attending secret Social Democrat meetings (called the Third Group or Mesame Dasi.)
Koba Acts to Change the World
Note that in these days the seminaries were producing revolutionaries like hot house plants. Not only in Trans-Caucasian Russia, but also in Georgia and Armenia. In Tiflis (Tbilisi) as a member of the Social Democratic organization, Joseph and other seminarians met revolutionary railroad, factory, mining and oilfield workers, studying in secret, and immersed themselves in these workers activities.
They were studying Russian translations (done by George Plekhanov and I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov) of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels principal works including Marx's Capital Volume One. Caught reading these materials at the seminary Joseph was expelled in 1899. Over the next five years Krassin continued to instruct Koba in the finer points about organizing workers, and robbing banks, stage-coaches and steamships.
Krassin was such an obvious and enthusiastic capitalist that the Czarist secret police missed him for many years, and thus, missed his most promising student, at least until Koba had learned enough to survive prison and exile. As the years of organizing along the Caspian passed Koba would be arrested, imprisoned, exiled and escape, multiple times.
In 1900 Joseph met his first face-to-face intermediary to Lenin. Arriving in Tiflis (Tbilisi) from internal exile in that year was Victor Kurnatovsky who had met their future leader while in exile (Lenin had been exiled to the Siberian town of Minusinsk at the time he knew Kurnatovsky) and come under his sway. Kurnatovsky told Koba about Lenin whom he described as a genius who would lead them all to victory. By this time Lenin had been released, having served his prison sentence and had made his way to Zurich.
Unlike other ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂémigrÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂés Lenin arrived in Switzerland with a plan of action. Sewing circle reading and discussion groups would give way under the new leader to a secret professional organization of militarily organized combat revolutionaries. The central instrument Lenin proposed to implement the policy of the General Staff of the Revolution was a newspaper. The following year, 1901, The Spark (Iskra) began to arrive in Tbilisi via sailors on shore leave at the Black Sea port. Joseph became a follower of Lenin among the Social Democrats; at the time of the split of the RSDLP into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, Joseph, now known in the Party almost always as Koba, joined unhesitatingly with the Bolsheviks.
Azerians, Mongols, Turk Ethnics
Georgia had many ethnic groups and in the literature you will see reference to Azerians, Mongols or Turkic ethnics. These are not Ottoman Turks (from contemporary Turkey) but members of an linguistic-ethnic group originating in Mongolia some millennia before modern times and which subsequently migrated westward. Eventually, under Genghis Kahn, they began settling in northwest Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and bordering areas of Russia proper. In practice the Georgian capitalists constantly tried to divide Georgian workers by turning ethnic Georgians against Azerians the way US capitalists divided US workers between Whites and Negros for so many years. Joseph became involved with them as he organized miners, railroad, factory, and oilfield workers, and in these early years helped the Azerian leaders by sending arms and Battle Teams into Iran. He himself went to Iran to fight in these early years at least once.
232
Leninism's first Victory in Georgia --- Tbilisi (Tiflis) 1900
Working with Stalin in the Tiflis meteorological observatory at the turn of the century in 1900 was Lado Ketskhoveli. Lado organized with Stalin's help a strike of the Belgian-owned trams in the city of Tiflis (Tbilisi). Police raided the observatory and carted both men off to the Metekhi Fortress prison. Stalin's mother bailed him out by paying the local taxes he had not (which was the excuse for his imprisonment.)
Next the SD (RSDLP; social democrat) leaders assigned Stalin to organizing the railway workers in Tiflis and he took charge of two SD circles (cells; clubs). Stalin proved an excellent speaker and organizer. So good that he was able to organize a massive May Day demonstration on May 1, 1900. 500 workers showed up for the demonstration and the railway workers went out on strike en masse. At this time Kamo (Simon Ter-petrossian) showed up and became Stalin's best pupil and soon would be chief under-commander of Stalin's armed SD Battle Groups in Georgia.
This is the time that the Okhrana finally discovered not only Stalin but his mentor Victor Kurnatovsky. It is also the time that the SD railroad worker Sergei Alliluyeva first came into direct working contact with the emerging SD boss of Georgia, Stalin. (Sergei was the father of Stalin's second wife (Nadezhda; Nadya). Sergei endeared himself to Koba by always describing him to his daughters as a ``giant among pygmies.''
In 1901 Stalin led the new Leninist SD faction from an apartment above Yerevan square. Here he taught Marxism and armed revolution. Joining him at this time was Alyosha Svanidze who would be Stalin's brother-in-law when Stalin took his first wife, Kato, Alyosha's sister.
The Georgian social democrats fell out over Stalin's plan for a second mass May Day demonstration scheduled for May 1, 1901. The Menshevik types of the Third Group (Mesame Dasi) were opposed to holding it. Stalin's SD faction (early Bolsheviks) was determined to go ahead anyway. The Okhrana was determined to prevent the demonstration at any cost. Stalin was again a prime target of a secret police all-points swoop and he was to be arrested on the night of March 21-22 1901, at the Observatory. He saw what was happening as he approached his home and escaped. Victor Kurnatovsky was not so lucky and was arrested at home. Kurnatovsky was important but the real action leader was Stalin. From hiding he went ahead to lead a dress-rehearsal demonstration on Sunday April 22, 1901. This time the workers were armed and led by the first of Stalin's armed Battle Groups.
2333000 workers carrying red banners entered Golovinsky Boulevard marching to Yerevan Square. The Czar's Governor-General had moved the Army, Dragoons (mounted infantry) and Cossacks into Tiflis and they attacked the marching workers. But this time they were met by men armored to withstand whips and with guns. For 45
minutes the shooting never stopped. More of the Czar's men died than did workers. Afterwards Stalin left for Gori where he continued to lead the armed struggle in which he and his fellow future Bolsheviks conducted a no-holds barred guerrilla war against the tyrant's army, Cossacks and police. Now he met Stepan Shaumian. The latter managed to shoot and kill the railroad company's managing director and this tipped the balance of scales in the railroad strike struggles Stalin's way. From this time forward Stalin always carried a pistol.
Inside Snapshot
Stalin's First Oilfield Victory --- 1901 Baku
``I can't believe it Comrades. Every single worker has walked out of the oilfield. Baku is ours!'' So spoke Koba (Joseph Djugashvili; Joseph Stalin) leader of the Black Sea and Caspian cells of revolutionary social democratic workers.
``I know. I can't believe it either. This strike of 1901 will be remembered as the workers good omen in starting our century.'' So spoke Kliment Voroshilov.
``I think The Spark did it for us.'' Mikhail Kalinin injected. ``The workers are paying attention to our newspaper. They know us as real workers and they see that we can do something besides talk. Most of them can't read but they love hearing the newspaper read to them. Our editor Ulyanov (Lenin) is a genius. He speaks to them as if he were one of them, even though he is really a very well educated Russian intellectual. Yet, in his defense and to his credit they know he comes from a progressive family, and that his brother was murdered by the Czar in the Shisselburg Fortress'' (near St. Petersburg, in Lake Ladoga, on an Alcatraz-like prison island.)
``Anyway, what do we do now?''
Stalin, the leader sounded a note of sobriety saying,
``Before we start sucking each other's dicks we should remember without Leonid we never would have gotten this thing off the ground. After all it was he who broke the news about the invention of rotary drilling in Texas and the Spindletop gusher so that it was timed with our action informing the workers of what the capitalists intended as a result. It was then, when the workers found out the bosses were going to increase the working day to eighteen hours seven days a week, they revolted.
``It was exactly as Marx said. Exactly as our paper has been saying. Every invention that should serve mankind is instead turned into a weapon for oppressing working people. They saw all this just as we had predicted and then they revolted.''
``Where did you get Krassin anyway Koba? Why is a capitalist manager and entrepreneur helping us?''
``Actually, he got me. It was my first year at the seminary when I went to the lecture on oil technology he was giving. It was for the technocrats but I managed to get in. I was trying to get up-to-speed on how the industry works so I
could organize to shut it down. I learned he was a secret Social Democrat because he told me so. He was as interested in triggering a strike as I was!''
``I didn't think we would get this far Koba, anyway since we did, what do we do now?''
``I think we have to use the Workers Strike Committee. It needs to demand recognition of our union, a reduction from the sixteen to a twelve hour working day and for only five days a week and eight hours on Saturday. And wages should be doubled immediately and food baskets prepared for families at the employers expense.''
``What else?''
``Ask the workers. That is always the key Lenin says. ---And, let's get the rest of the copies of the new Iskra out and around while we still can.''
From Tiflis to Baku to Batum
Batum was already a big town on the Black Sea, as Baku was on the Caspian, in 1863, when it was discovered that the American form of drilling, featuring a cable lifting-and-dropping an iron bit, could bring huge quantities of oil up from only sixty feet or so of depth.
By 1900 Lenin had reached Zurich, Switzerland, and begun publishing a revolutionary newspaper for workers. The Spark (Iskra in Russian) was being smuggled into the working class towns and cities of the Czarist Empire. The following year, 1901, followers of Iskra, and therefore of Lenin, were actively putting the prescriptions of the newspaper into effect wherever they could get an audience. In the Caucuses, future Leninist leaders had taken the reins of revolution in hand and were secretly sneaking into the oilfields and organizing workers to fight for socialism. ---And, they meant fight! Georgia was full of guns so everyone Georgian and Mongol (Tatar, Tartar; Azerian) who worked in the oilfield, had guns, and were capable of conducting and enforcing an armed strike.
234Among these organizers were these three young men we have just visited. They had emerged in the oil capital of the Empire around the Caspian Sea, as the leading elements in Iskra's call for socialist revolution in Russia and the Empire. ``Koba'' whose real name was Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (soon to be known by his pen name of Stalin or the man of steel), Kliment Voroshilov (eventually commander of the entire Red Army) and Mikhail Kalinin (future President of the Soviet Union were leading this armed strike).
As we have seen, Stalin's original nickname of Koba had been taken by him after reading a novel about a romantic hero of that name - Georgia's legendary Robin Hood. His friends would use that name for him for the rest of his life.
******
``What about the Tatar (Mongol; Azerian) print shop at Baku?'' Stalin asked Kalinin.
``It's ready to go Koba, and not a second too soon either.''
``Yeah the Okhrana is going to close in on us here shortly we better get the press moving as soon as this meeting is over tonight.''
``No. Now. We may be arrested tonight.''
``You're right. Kliment can take it to Baku right now. Okay Voroshilov?''
``Yes, Koba I'll go right now. The press is already crated and the supplies. The horses and the coach are standing by as we speak.''
``Until we meet again in victory. ---And, I have to get on with this new ``ex'' (for expropriation --- meaning bank robbing and other armed hold ups) while we can still take advantage of the gendarmes disorganization. We need to get that money to Lenin as soon as possible.''
``Try and stay out of jail comrades. At least until we win this strike.'' ---And, the future Red Army chief was out the back door and on his way.
*****
In 1901, following instructions received via Iskra, Koba threw himself into organizing the oilfield workers and organizing armed strikes at Baku and Batum and then into organizing bank hold-ups, stage-coach and steamship robberies, and other armed ``expropriations'' (known as ``exes'' by the Bolsheviks.) Shortly after the 1903 formation of the Bolshevik Party, Koba (and another Georgian named Kamo), under Krassin, became the number one in-country ``provider Team'' of cash to Lenin's cause; organizing for example, the Great Tbilisi Stage-coach and State Bank Robbery (1907) that netted Lenin some 450,000 gold rubles! (About 35 million 2008 US dollars in buying power.)
In other words, at just the right time Koba provided Lenin with the two things he needed most: (1) a real organized labor movement which had won armed strikes and put their union into the oilfield on a permanent basis and (2) money. This was the first successful organized labor movement in the Russian Empire and it was Leninist thanks to Koba and his fellow Bolshevik organizers. The Bolshevik Party had also become the first financially independent working class vanguard Party in the world; again thanks to Koba and associates. Lenin recognized all of this and began to put Koba on the top of his list of people to be pushed ahead.
Among these principal organizers in Georgia were not only Koba but his closest friends including Kliment Voroshilov, future head of the entire Red Army, and Michael Kalinin, future President of the Soviet Union. Emerging under them were teen-agers like G. K. ``Sergo'' Ordzhonikidze, (1886-1937) eventual commander of Trans-Caucasian Red Army during the Civil War (and the Party there), and one of the supreme leaders of the USSR (Commissar for Heavy Industry 1930-37). Of course, Leonid Krassin (deceased in 1926) continued as the senior advisor of this Young Communist cadre.
Taking on the Rothschild's: 1901 Batum
As we have seen there were three major international oil concerns operating in Russia at the turn of the century; those owned by the Nobel's, the Rothschild's and the Rockefeller's. All three were well represented on the Caspian, especially in the oil cities of Baku (Caspian Sea) and Batum (Black Sea) where Koba had risen to be the de facto chief of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party strike organizing operations by 1901. Having built a union in the oilfields, the following year (1902) Koba took on what he
considered to be the weakest of the foreign oil combines. Namely, that of the Rothschild's in Batum.
As the unfolding began, the strike once again brought out the Czarist troops and gendarmerie. Koba and his associates (Bolshevik Battle Groups) jumped into the fight with guns and every other weapon they could get their hands on and the fighting was underway. Remember these oilfields were part of a Trans-Caucasian culture where virtually every person was armed as part of everyday life. Workers had guns available. So as Czarist troops burned the workers quarters and shot down men, women and children daring to engage in open protest and refusing to work, they were actively opposed by armed and angry fighters. Koba's teams (called Battle Groups) of armed workers fought back and forced the cops and troops to retreat or face hundreds of burning wells. The capitalists decided this was a higher price than they were willing to pay and called off their troops. The workers won the strike and went back to work with a union! It was the first Social Democratic victory in an armed strike and it electrified the Empire.
235The Caucuses Burning
Meanwhile in Switzerland, Lenin was thrilled to learn that his brand new newspaper was considered by the Czar's secret police, and by his own Party, as responsible for the Caucuses being in flames. Lenin had believed from the moment of his arrival in Zurich the previous year that the Czarist regime was very weak and open to direct attack by workers. Workers could and would engage in massive work stoppages regardless of the sacrifice in wages required to do so. Furthermore, he had proven that workers would take up arms and fight for socialism whether or not Russia was considered by bourgeois intellectuals to be too primitive for Socialism. All the workers needed was encouragement and that came from the underground newspaper Spark (Iskra). The text or ``copy'' to be printed was smuggled to Baku on the Caspian via ships with friendly sailors landing at Batum on the Black Sea, taken across the Caucuses Mountains and then printed in one of several underground print shops Koba and associates maintained. (The best and most elaborate press he kept safely hidden in Tiflis.)
236All the intellectuals needed were some balls. Then they could understand that it didn't matter whether the revolution started in Russia or in England. What mattered was that it started, and then got international, as quickly as possible. Workers with advanced industry would come to the aid of workers with backward industry, and would be more than happy to do so, since the latter would have started the conflagration that had led to their own liberation. ---And, that was Lenin's program in short. Action now for proletarian revolution. The Russian Workers Revolution would come to power in a period of transition with ``the state'' (Army and secret police) in its hands, and full scale industrialization would occur as workers in the advanced capitalist countries got their act together and joined in.
237First in Batum, and now in Baku, Koba and his fellow organizers had implanted the Party printing presses. Code named ``Nina'' the combat ready Baku Russian printing press operation by 1902, was hidden in a dugout cellar eventually expanding under several homes and city streets in the mainly Azerian working class quarter of Baku. From here, bundles of the paper were printed and smuggled as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg in the North and then to every working class quarter in the country, as
opportunity provided. The distribution network for petroleum products that flowed northward and eastward from the Black Sea functioned for many years as the backbone of secret Bolshevik newspaper distribution, another gift to Lenin from his devoted Baku-Batum-Tiflis followers led by Koba. Accordingly this network became the vertebral chord of secret Bolshevik Party cell organizing as well.
The working class action committees of Baku and Batum had set the pace and provided the model for what workers could do in other cities. ---And, Lenin knew from his growing network of informers and couriers that workers in every other city of the Empire, aware of what was happening in the Caucuses, were seeing in those committees, the model for their own organizations.
Inside the newly created Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, those who had seen Lenin as just another intellectual in exile now saw him in a quite different way. Unfortunately, some such as the father of Russian Marxism, the philosopher George Plekhanov, were simply jealous of this young upstart's success. Plekhanov chose to see Lenin thrusting ahead of himself and felt his long suffering service in presenting Marxism to Russia to begin with, was being forgotten (Plekhanov had been one of the translators of Capital Volume One into Russian; the other translator had been I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov) Others, like the newcomer Leon Bronstein (Leon Trotsky), initially sided with Lenin but then went over to the other side within the exile RSDLP leadership. Perhaps because they too were being sidelined by Lenin's ability to get things done. However, their varying motivations may have been, the fact was that what would be, in the Russian revolutionary workers movement, was being decided on the ground, and Lenin had all the troops.
238
Confronting the Secret Police, Breaking the Rothschilds in Batum 1902
Czar Alexander II poured national resources into a newly reinvigorated secret police which was called by its initials, the Okhrana, from the full new name Division for Protection of Order and Social Security. The Okhrana had earlier been Czar Alexander I's ``Third Section.'' However, even this new and supposedly impregnable secret police bastion was infiltrated from Day One by agents of the People's Will. They proved it by killing Alexander II in 1881 in St. Petersburg.
The successor Czar, Alexander III, created a dual secret police system consisting of the Okhrana on the one hand and Paramilitary Gendarme (Police) Intelligence on the other hand. It is this souped-up secret police strong-arm approach to handling dissidents that faced Lenin, Stalin and all the Bolsheviks. In fact, that confronted all of the socialists (bourgeois Mensheviks included) and anarcho-syndicalist Social Revolutionary members as well as the national independence and self-defense ethnic parties.
Devoted to the Marxists exclusively was the Petersburg central office of the Okhrana (at 16 Fotanka Street) called the Okhrana Special Section (OSS). The first primary task of the OSS was to open the mail of people on its surveillance list and by 1882 they were opening nearly 400,000 letters per year. The second task was to pursue the Marxists and sentence them to (1) death, or (2) hard labor, or (3) internal exile. The third task of the OSS was divided into (A) the street agents identifying and trailing Marxists and was a Russian Watcher Service (such as the one which formed, then and now, the center of MI5 in England.) ---And, (B) the action arm of this third section of the OSS devoted to the internal penetration of Marxist organizations by agent's provocateur.
239This world Koba encountered became his training ground in Gori, Tbilisi, Baku and Batum. As effective as the Okhrana and the Gendarme spies were they were also venal and corruptible. Stalin grew to become chief of counter intelligence as well as intelligence for the Bolsheviks and their Battle Groups, which meant he had many of them on his payroll. By 1906 Stalin would be recognized in Georgia, as number two to Lenin himself and widely admired and respected among our Party members.
Meanwhile in 1902 at Batum, Stalin took on the Rothschilds and burned their refinery within three months of his arrival. Number one underboss for Stalin in Batum was Constantine Kandelaki. Together Stalin and Kandelaki were joined by Kamo and Spandarian and along with thirty pistoleros took the oilfield workers at Batum out on strike, organized a mass slaughter of Cossacks, and flooded the city with Marxist propaganda. This oil city and Black Sea port had 16,000 inhabitants that year. The typical Georgian mix of ethnic groups from Mongol Azerians of Iran and Georgia, Ottoman Turks, Greeks, Russians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis of many types, and of course Georgians.
The Rothschilds gave up on February 17th. One key element in their defeat had been the secret delivery of a Party printing press from Tiflis (Tbilisi) organized by Stalin which printed strike material in both Georgian and Armenian. Stalin's new Oilfield Workers Union had gotten a 30% pay increase for the workers and outfoxed and outfought the Okhrana and the Gendarmes gaining a de facto legal status although the Party and its unions were still deep underground and illegal in the rest of Georgia.
Ten days later the Rothschilds struck back firing nearly 400 oilfield workers. The class war was on again. On March 7th the Czarist army occupied Batum and announced ``back to work or we deport you to Siberia.'' Workers were arrested and sent to the city prison to await deportation. Stalin organized a mass demonstration against these arrests demanding the release of the workers. A combined push of prisoners inside the jail and the demonstrators outside overcame the resistance of the Army and the Cossacks and they were freed. Then the Army regrouped and opened fire on the mass of the people killing many and wounding many more. Stalin's pistoleros fought back. On March 11th
7000 people demonstrated in attendance at the funeral of the martyrs and again a full scale armed confrontation broke out.
In the end the workers won their fight with the Rothschilds but Stalin was again on the run. This time on April 5th 1902 he was captured and this time he would go to prison.
The Empire Atremble 1901 -1902
Even Lenin was surprised when his as yet unmet leaders in the Caucuses, principal among them being Koba, succeeded in 1901 - 1902, in organizing the most eventful workers action in the history of Europe since the Paris Commune of 1871. It came in the form of a national general strike that not only shut down the oilfields of the Caspian Sea and everywhere else but also shut down every industrial city in the Russian Empire. For a moment the Empire wobbled. Could it all be over that fast?
In theory yes. Marx had said in the Communist Manifesto it was just a matter of workers changing ownership of the means of production, putting themselves and those in need among the people, at the top of the national priority list, instead of at its bottom, as the capitalists had done, and you would have socialism. Eventually, with the abolition of private property you would have a paradise on Earth where all the advantages of industrial production would be at the service of the working people rather than the other way around as the capitalists had arranged it. -And with publicly owned means of scientifically advanced industrial production, making the slogan ``from each according to his ability to each according to his need,'' a reality, you would have communism.
But, what about the resistance of the exploiters? Surely, they would mount powerful counter attacks. The capitalists were already sending the Czarist secret police (Okhrana) in huge numbers; the Army and the Cossacks could not be far behind.
Prison, Siberia, Escape: 1902 --- 1903
The Gendarmes began interrogating Stalin on April 6, 1902. However, they didn't really know who he was. When they did find out he was Joseph Dzugashvili from Gori they still knew only that he had been a trouble maker from Tiflis and Baku, and that he had turned Batum into a real mess for them. Yet, Stalin had so many aliases they did not connect all the dots. To make a long story short he was imprisoned where he made a name for himself among prisoners as a leader of the Marxist variety, but to the cops he was just one more serious troublemaker among the many they had arrested. Sentenced to Siberia for a term of two years in July 1903 he arrived in Irkutsk in November and was then sent on to Novaya Uda where he took up residence under police supervision.
Stalin did as well as expected with his time in this tiny Siberian town so far from Georgia and St. Petersburg. In December 1903 Stalin received a letter from Lenin explaining what had happened at the split Congress held by the RSDLP in Brussels and London. The Georgian reality of a split between the militant revolutionaries and the bourgeois socialists was now an All-Russian split (Bolshevik majoritists against Menshevik minoritists respectively.)
Number One in Georgia: 1904 - 1906
In January, 1904, inspired by what had happened in the RSDLP and reports of Czarist military trouble in China against Japan, Stalin made his escape and within ten days was back in Tiflis. Stalin learned upon his arrival in Georgia that the Czar's war against Japan was going very badly and that the entire nation of Georgia was revolting under one or another of the multitude of radical parties.
Throughout the year of 1904 Stalin put his old robbing and extortion teams back together and began raising money hand over fist. Simultaneously he was building Bolshevik action cells among workers in every city. I won't provide a laundry list of bank robberies, steamship piracies, or stagecoach holdups or a list of capitalists extorted. You can get that in Montefiore's book Young Stalin. Suffice it to say that by December 31, 1904, the Bolshevik ``Battle Teams'' were ready to conduct large scale raids and did so. On January 2, 1905 the Czar's army surrendered in Manchuria. On January 9th, 1905 the Czar's troops opened fire on the mass demonstration in St. Petersburg creating ``Bloody Sunday''. Then on the 27th of May the Czar's Navy was sunk at the Battle of Tsushima, in its entirety, by the Japanese Navy.
240The nation rose up. The Czarist Navy's flagship the Prince Potemkin of Taurida mutinied on the 14th of June 1905. In Georgia, Stalin's Bolshevik action squads went to taking on the Czar's state apparatus head to head everywhere. No longer just guerrilla units, now they had become the skeleton of a regular army. By the end of the 1905-1906 revolutionary period, Bolsheviks throughout Georgia considered Stalin to be Number Two to Lenin himself. A ``career builder'' would have seen Stalin as having just one more step to becoming Number Two to Lenin throughout Russia as well, and that was exactly what history had in store.
The War of 1904, the Revolution of 1905
The Third Organizational Step: The ``Councils'' of 1905
The General Strike of 1903 left the Czar's top advisors unanimous in wanting to start a war to refocus national thinking off of the internal problems confronting them.
Rather than seeking social reform with the liberal capitalists and the new class of petty bourgeois intellectual and educated bureaucrats, so in 1904 the Czarists preferred to start a war. This time they planned for a successful war. A war that would give them profit centers in Korea and China (the province of Manchuria.)
The problem came when they failed in their elective war. They had chosen the wrong victim. Japan. In this case the Japanese nation was prepared, although ruled by a small tight-knit coterie of formerly feudal aristocratic and noble families. Families that had kept the discipline of their rule over slaves and serfs while voluntarily transforming themselves into capitalist ruling families. As they applied this feudal discipline to their rule over workers they were able to catapult themselves into the modern industrial world of international capitalism.
The Okhrana, focused as it was on internal dissent, had missed all of this. Russia acted as if it had not known of Japan's industrialization and its immediate application to the construction of steel war ships with fully modern big guns. (See James Cavell's novel Gai Jin for a good background to Japanese industrialization.)
The setting chosen by the Russians for their conflict was Korea and China. But, in the event, in December 1904, the Czar's Army and Navy proceeded to disgrace themselves in after a series of embarrassing military debacles and surrendered. The war climaxed with virtually the entire Czarist fleet being buried at sea in April 1905!
In St. Petersburg on Sunday, January 22, of 1905, hundreds of thousands of people gathered under the banner of a (police agent provocateur ) Priest and marched to the winter palace --- the city was the capital of the entire Russian Empire --- to protest high prices, unavailability of food and fuel, the waste of the War just lost, in a petition to the Czar for redress. They were fired upon by Czarist troops loyal to the regime and hundreds were killed, thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands running in fear. Fear always turns to anger.
In response the Russian nation rose up. Many in the capitalist class, hitherto allied seemingly inextricably with the feudal Lords, intermarried and interbred, wanted west European style parliamentary democracy, as did the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie - especially the New Class of technocrats upon which the Czarist Regime depended increasingly. The farmers rose up under their Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders demanding redistribution of land along the lines they imagined it had existed before Peter the Great. The workers rose up under their political parties: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. As the year progressed the Bolsheviks began to get the upper hand among them. ---And, along the way individualists such as Leon Bronstein (Trotsky) arose to espouse their own doctrines and acquire in the milieu of revolution their own following.
241Trotsky cut out his following from the masses gathering around the St. Petersburg City Council (Soviet is the Russian word for Council) as he was Vice Chairman of that body and an exciting and effective speaker. In Petersburg itself, the Bolsheviks gained a mass following in the workers quarters which was also reflected in the City Council. The Bolsheviks also prevailed amongst other contenders in Moscow where they were even stronger than in Petersburg. In Russia at large, Bolshevik agents were busy. Throughout the Empire Bolshevik agitators were spreading the disease of ``socialism'' as if they were in fact the proletarian revolutionary bacilli of which Lenin so often spoke. It wasn't just ``talk'' they were spreading around, but a lot of organization as well. Organization for
what? For an armed uprising they planned to launch in the near future. In the end the Czar outfoxed the revolutionaries and crushed the Petrograd City Council and along with it the rest of the revolutionary councils that had arisen throughout the nation.
Bolsheviks on the Move
But the real story lay behind the scenes as Lenin rushed from his Swiss HQ in Geneva (Martov and the Mensheviks were headquartered in Zurich) to the safest Finnish border region closest to the Russian frontier and the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Simultaneously he built a substitute ``base'' in Galicia (then a province of Austria-Hungary) positioned as it was on the Czarist frontier. From these safe areas the Holy Trinity (now Lenin, Krassin and Bogdanov) would run agents in and out of the cities of the Empire and oversee the shipments of arms and ammunition by sea and by land to the insurrectionary staging locales at Petersburg and Moscow and as they could to the secondary centers scheduled for armed uprising. From these locales Lenin and Krassin also exercised direct control over financial resource identification and recovery (the ``ex's'' or ``expropriations''; bank robberies, steamship and stagecoach holdups, in everyday terminology.) Lenin had required in the previous two years some 2.5 million rubles per year to run his organization. Now that amount would have to be increased by several orders of magnitude given the outbreak of revolution and hopefully civil war.
242The news arrived in Geneva on Monday, the 23rd of January (1905), and within a week the Bolsheviks were on the move. What did this mean? Among other things the time had come to separate the boys from the men as Litvinov, Kamo, Koba (Stalin), Krassin, et. al., stepped up the bank robbing and arms purchasing and the Iskra smuggling networks were switched to the smuggling of arms and ammunition as well as specialist fighters as trainers for the new working class Bolshevik soldier recruits. They also congregated at Lenin's new front HQ locations on the Russian frontier when not busy at home in their respective areas of responsibility.
Lenin enters the 1905 Revolution as Boss of his own Party
The End of RSDLP Unity
The previous year (1904) Lenin had decided to ``ditch'' Iskra as it was too heavily influenced by Martov and his Zurich centered Mensheviks. Lenin had published One Step Forward, Two Steps Back as a definitive explanation to Russian workers as to why the Bolshevik-Menshevik split had occurred in 1903 to begin with and concludes with the ringing conclusion that ``Mensheviks are Traitors.'' Replacing Iskra for Lenin and the Bolsheviks was a new newspaper they called Forward (Vpered).
Forward's first issue arrived in the Empire in January 1905. Perfect historical timing as the aftermath of ``Bloody Sunday'' was just beginning. ---And Lenin's new Party line --- armed insurrection as soon as possible --- was in process and had a perfect substrate upon which to work.
As the winter ended and spring began strikes continued to spread throughout 1905 in the cities of the Empire; and throughout the oilfields and mining districts and in the port cities of the Far East. The Czarist regime closed all universities and High Schools
and tried to step up the suppression of any and all open gatherings. The regime outlawed all trade union activity.
Lenin (and his key men such as Stalin) interrupted his Chief of Operations tasks in Finland and Galicia to attend the 1905 3rd Congress of the RSDLP in London (April 25 --- May 10th) which he had organized to be a rump Congress, all Bolshevik in membership. Simultaneously another 3rd RSDLP rump congress was held by Martov and was all Menshevik, in Zurich.
Lenin returned to continental Europe May 30 (1905) visiting his home base in Geneva first. -And, he returned victorious as the de facto chief of a Marxist pure new Party, and as a member of the RSDLP (b) Central Committee as well as editor of the new newspaper Proletarii which was Forward renamed.
From March through October Krassin's men (Stalin, Kamo, Litvinov) had been gathering money (ex's) , making huge arms purchases and arranging for their transport by sea and land to the Bolshevik staging areas inside the Empire. In October (1905) Lenin set the date for the uprising. It was to begin in 120 days --- i.e., the following March (1906.)
120 Days Remaining for Czarist Sodom
On October 15 (1905) the revolution began to spiral completely out of Czarist control as another General Strike shut the country down industrially altogether. As commerce broke down city lights began to go out. Remaining schools closed. Shopkeepers shut their doors. Theaters canceled performances. Water supplies began to fail. Food stocks including bread supplies fell to dramatically dangerous lows. Business collapsed in every major city as did basic infrastructural necessities, like gas, electricity, coal, water, the postal service, and civil police and fire functions disappeared. Now the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie joined in as they too realized the current situation could no longer be tolerated --- they chose to try and move the Revolution in a direction they could at least tolerate if not actually support. Chief hope for the progressive elements of the capitalist class were the Mensheviks and so the New Class entered as supporters of Martov's gang.
243Meanwhile, the working class was acting on its own, and rather spontaneously, which shows the previous five years of Iskra propaganda had done its educational job. Workers established a new kind of government by electing a Petersburg City Council (Soviet is the Russian word for council.) Leon Trotsky got his fifteen minutes of fame when he was elected a Vice Chair of this City Council on October 26th (1905). Within a week fifty seven other cities and towns had followed the Petersburg example electing City Councils (Soviets) as their own representative bodies to take over governmental responsibilities. State power, however, (the army, navy and police,) still remained in the hands of the Czarist autocracy and not the people and their elected representative bodies.
244Panic stricken the Czar and his gang issued a concessionary statement on 30 October, 1905, which they labeled ``the October Manifesto.'' The tyrant agreed to a Parliament (Duma) and to a Bill of Rights (ostensibly respecting freedom of speech and assembly) as well as the abolition of censorship of the printed word, and the regime agreed to allow workers to legally organize trade unions. This was, of course, a lie. A
trick to mislead the masses and to split the conservative elements away from Lenin and the radicals. The Czar and his ministers had no intention of honoring their promises.
As they propagated this set of lies to the intellectuals and workers in Petersburg, Moscow, and the other industrial centers, the Czarist regime unleashed the Black Hundreds in pogroms against Jews all over the Empire. In the villages, all those known to be disaffected from Czarism were murdered, along with their families and friends.
In November the Bolsheviks responded with more armed strikes and armed uprisings in Petersburg and Moscow. Lenin arrived secretly in Petersburg in order to command the now raging civil war with hands directly on. On his way Lenin stopped at Tampere, Finland, where the local Reds had established a city government and welcomed him with a heroic reception. In exchange they got his promise that when the Bolsheviks seized state power in the Empire the Finns would receive complete national freedom.
In mid-December (1905) the Czar moved against the Petersburg City Council disbanding it and arresting its leaders (including Leon Trotsky who was held in prison in Petersburg until November of the following year (1906). On the 16th of December (1905) Lenin, reacting to the rapidly accelerating historical situation, ordered the beginning of the final armed struggle with Czarism to begin in Moscow.
Workers, in December (1905), armed by Lenin, rose to fight the police and Army garrison in Moscow's Presnya district. The Moscow garrison retreated, outfought and ideologically subverted. The Czar sent the Semenvsky Guards to suppress the Moscow (Presnya) revolt. The Semenvsky Guards had until then been stationed in Petersburg to perform the same function. They began with artillery shelling of the entire working class district which resulted in many thousands of women and children dead along with their fighting men. The Moscow revolt was effectively destroyed.
The Joint Social Democratic Congress of 1907
As we have seen Lenin had come to rely upon Stalin, as his main in-country organizer and fund raiser, by the time of the 1905 revolution. During the 1905 Russian Revolution Lenin and Krassin came to depend primarily on Stalin to get things done. Stalin had a wide range of working-class political contacts and was developing an even wider range of bourgeois contacts including those of the underworld as a result of his prison experiences which had only begun. Lenin would, in the subsequent years, up to the October Revolution in 1917, rely on Stalin to carry out the most dangerous and sensitive and the most important secret tasks confronting the Party. But it was at the RSDLP joint Congress (both Bolshevik and Menshevik factions participating) in London in 1907 that Stalin and Lenin cemented their friendship and collaboration in the great debate over the ``exes'' (expropriations).
245All the bourgeois socialists including Leon Trotsky, were opposed to Lenin's program of expropriations (bank hold-ups, and other armed robberies to finance Party activities, organs, and the press) --- strong-arm work of which he had placed first Krassin and Kurnatovsky in charge, and then in practice Stalin, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, had taken it upon themselves to conduct specific operations - and which policy Lenin defended in open debate against the Mensheviks and Trotsky at the 5th (1907) RSDLP Congress in London. After all, Lenin argued, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie had stolen all this money from the people to begin with and it was only right for the people's
champions to expropriate it on their behalf. Lenin dismissed his opponents politically, considering them bourgeois sissies, and went on with the business of building his own (Bolshevik) Party. A Party which of course did not include Trotsky or any of the other bourgeois socialists (Mensheviks.) For Lenin it was politics not personal.
Stalin, however, as we have also seen, pictured himself as a kind of ``Robin Hood'' of the Revolution. He had, for example, in these early years taken the name of a legendary Georgian Robin Hood, ``Koba''; it was his ``Party name'' until he took the name of Stalin, the man of steel. Koba remained the name his friends would use for him all of his life. The anger Koba felt toward the haughty Trotsky was not so easily assuaged.
However that may have been, at that Congress Lenin also handed Stalin much of the responsibility for organizing the secret financial investments of the Party in a variety of Russian banks; arranging transfers of cash and securities to Party safe-drops in West European banking centers, and so forth. --- And these are just a few examples of the important secret work that Lenin entrusted to Stalin from that time forward.
Stalin vs. Trotsky I
Stalin's first conflict with Trotsky occurred as a product of this 1907 RSDLP (5th) Congress debate in London, and went far to shape his dislike for the man he considered to be an ``aristocrat-bourgeois'' socialist. In a short time a mutual hatred emerged between these two. Hatred destined to shape so much of the Party's future experience. If Trotsky had been less aristocratic in his bearing and less presumptuous toward those doing all the work, and taking all the risks, perhaps even showing appreciation for those such as Stalin, the latter might have been less likely to politicize his personal feelings. I suspect Stalin's feelings were hurt and he did politicize them.
I imagine that the more Stalin thought about Trotsky, the exact kind of privileged person he hated the most, and his absolute failure to understand the dedication and importance of his (Stalin's) work, the more he internalized his hatred of Trotsky, until it was part of the marrow of his bones. Stalin ``went off'' on Trotsky within weeks of the beginning of the armed struggle in 1918 and I don't think it was just because of their principled military disagreements. However that may have been, before this was all over Stalin would bury an ice-pick in Trotsky's head. Albeit via a surrogate and far from home.
The Congress Itself
The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was the last meeting where the two factions (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) met together as if they were one Party. The 5th Congress was organized entirely by Lenin and his closest European general staff members. Lenin dominated the Congress from beginning to end --- always on his feet, arguing, cajoling, ridiculing, explaining, in short, leading. At hand were his most important money men --- Leonid Krassin, Koba, and Maxim Litvinov. Nadya Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, stayed behind to oversee business in Finland including the forwarding, and housing, and feeding, of delegates sneaking across Russia in order to gain the freedom of European access to London.
The Congress had been scheduled for Copenhagen but Denmark's government
had forbidden it at the last moment. Then Sweden fell in line with the demands of the Czarist regime to deny the RSDLP access to a locale in Stockholm. Lenin had brought about 188 delegates via the Finland route and now they had to go to London where the Brit government expressed no concern about their meeting in London (thanks to the intervention of Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald on their behalf). Showing up were a total of 366 delegates of mixed factional affiliation, and Left celebrities Maxim Gorky and George Plekhanov. The Congress lasted three long and intense weeks beginning May 8, 1907. In the end Lenin got everything he wanted including:
A class war policy of armed uprising against the Czarist regime;
This class war to be led by the Party (which he made clear meant the RSDLP under Bolshevik control or a separate RSDLP (b) altogether; a worker-farmer class alliance under this vanguard to conduct civil war against Czarism and capitalism in general;
The expropriations would continue by the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks could do as they wished.
Bolshevik deputies would continue to participate in the Duma to achieve what access to the cap Press they could and to give their own Press issues to take to the workers in their ghettos.
Inside Snapshot
Stalin Reporting to the Georgian Bolshevik Party on the Congress of 1907
``This is going to be a long report so let me suggest all of you get comfortable. If you don't mind I will stand and walk around as is my habit, as you know, while I speak. When I get done you can ask whatever questions you like. Alright?''
``Yes Koba,'' said someone.
``I arrived in London after a rather harrowing escape from Czardom at the Lithuanian border. Eventually I made my way to the sea and a friendly sailor helped me hop aboard a tramp freighter, ending up rather luckily at London port.''
Stalin continued explaining what had been agreed at the Congress concerning the details of Iskra publication and distribution. That was a little much for this audience. They were all anxious to hear what the Congress had decided on what to them were the key questions of ``democratic centralist organization of the Party'' and ``expropriations (bank robbing and other holdups) by the Party.'' All present urged him to get to the meat of the thing.
``Alright, I'll skip over the rest of this for now. As I was saying, after a close call with Czardom on the Lithuanian border, I gave the Okhrana the slip and managed to get aboard an outbound ship. I got lucky and snared one ride, rather than having to switch transport half a dozen times; landing at London's principal port after which I reported to the address I had been given. It was the residence of Lenin and I was immediately welcomed and thanked and treated like visiting royalty. He insisted I live with him while in London. He really appreciate everything we have done and told me again and again to pass this on to each and every one of you. Lenin himself had tears in his eyes when he said Koba I am counting on you and your comrades. Please, please tell them I said this.''
Perhaps Koba spent too much time on these details because his colleagues once again urged him to get on with it.
``As usual all the Mensheviks, and their running dogs like that prick Trotsky, opposed our democratic centralist mode of organization. They spout their usual bullshit about Lenin being a would-be Robespierre. Lenin responded that they were free to do as they wished because we Bolsheviks were building our own Party.
``Then they really went wild when Lenin told them the armed robberies and bank holdups would continue as long as the bourgeoisie and aristocrats exercised unchecked power over the working people. He said it was only right that the exploiters should provide the cash we need, especially since they stole it from the working people to begin with. In effect he told them to go fuck themselves.''
Stalin's audience broke into applause at this. Their leader not only stuck with them but had thrown the whole thing in those spoiled rich bourgeois faces in exile. They had stuck with him when it was most dangerous and yet most important (the money) and now they had been vindicated!
Ten Years Later
The Wilderness Years, 1907 - 1917
These details as fascinating as they are, they are also beyond the scope of this Handbook. I didn't want you to think they were unimportant so I am making this notation under this heading but will leave up to you cadre to do your own research for this decade.
Stalin in the 1917 Revolutions
Out of Exile, Back in the Saddle
When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd late on April 3rd, 1917, it was with Joseph Stalin he stepped off the train. He had just read the riot act to Kamenev, on the train, for the line and the articles he had been writing for Pravda and essentially told him ``to get the fuck away from me!''
From that day forward it was Joseph Stalin who played the leading organizing role among Bolsheviks in the (1) military preparation for the October seizure of power; (2) the guarding of Lenin personally and the hiding of him in Petrograd and in Finland until the actual day of the seizure; (3), the formation of alliances with Mensheviks, Left SR's, and individual Marxists of whatever stripe; and (4) the managing of the Party's day to day bureaucratic operations (appointments, removals, assignments and reassignments), making payroll and as chief editor of all the Party press.
The end of the Old Regime was triggered on February 23rd, 1917. At that moment Stalin was in Achinsk (further to the West from his place of exile, and a large town of 6000 persons where other Bolsheviks were living) after petitioning the Krasnoyarsk Czarist police (on February 9th) for permission to move further west now that he had only four months remaining in his term of exile. He wouldn't need to complete the process of being freed.
The Czar's regime in Petrograd was crumbling under the impact of the biggest mass demonstrations since Bloody Sunday of January, 1905 --- almost exactly 12 years earlier. This time on Sunday the 26th of February the demonstrations went over to armed struggle between the street protestors and the Cossacks and police. The next day Monday the 27th of February the Army began to dissolve as soldiers deserted and the mob seized the Army arsenal and 150,000 guns were distributed to the people. Then the police headquarters was burned and the cops lynched, shot, torn apart. It was the end of the Czarist state. On Wednesday the 1st of March, 1917, the capitalists seized direct power and declared a new ``Provisional Government'' to be in power and appointed a Prince (George Lvov) as Premier.
246The Next day March 2, 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother who abdicated himself the following day, Friday, March 3, 1917. In the meantime the Provisional Government turned police authority over to Alexander Kerensky (son of Lenin's old school teacher in Simbirsk) who ordered that all the Duma deputies being held by the Czarist police in Achinsk (where Stalin had just arrived) be freed. That was the end of Stalin's last imprisonment.
Stalin was now on the train and on his way to Petrograd, a four day rail journey from this far off locale in Siberia. He was also on his way to his first regular job since his days as a weatherman in the Tiflis (Tbilisi) meteorological observatory --- he would be the nation's new Commissar (Minister) for Nationalities in Lenin's new Bolshevik Government where the Boss (Lenin) was Chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars (Premier of the new Bolshevik Cabinet of Russian Ministers) on October 26, 1917.
Stalin arrived in Petrograd on the morning of the 12th of March, 1917. A new age was being born and the longtime main organizer of Bolshevism within the Czarist Empire had arrived at the very beginning of this brave new world. Next to Lenin himself, no one would have a greater role in shaping the future of the world's first working class government and state than would Joseph V. Stalin, for the next 36 years.
Inside Snapshot: Cementing the Bond --- Loyalty Written in Stone
Who Will Kill Whom?
Speaking quietly to the man lying next to him was Vladimir Lenin. Head of the Bolshevik Party. The night was October 26th, 1917. The seizure had just been completed; they were on the floor of a room at the Smolny Institute --- Stalin's new office as Commissar (Minister) for Nationalities, as a matter of fact. Stalin had been in charge of Lenin's personal security and had been hiding him, up and until these two days of the seizure, in a secret location (known only to him) in Finland and then in the working class Vyborg district of Petrograd, as the movement of armed men (Red Guards and the Petrograd Army detachments), got underway. These two were now lying side by side in sleeping bags, thinking and talking out loud before trying to force themselves, at their comrade's insistence, to get some sleep. They had just seized state power! Victory at last. The first and forever most important step.
247To paraphrase:
``Joseph, I wanted to talk to you here among ourselves --- just you and me. You see Joseph (at this moment Stalin's eyes had begun to tear up. Only his mother had called him Joseph) you and I have a common bond none of these others will understand. I know about your wife. You know about my brother. They will never understand the way we do about why we will never accept anything but the ultimate that we can get. Until we kill each and every one of these parasites we have not won. Furthermore until we create the sociocultural substrate upon which we will build our future --- now, not a thousand years from now --- we have done nothing. Killing these individual bastards is something you and I have to do for personal reasons. Killing their system is a concomitant. Our comrades will never understand this. We have to make them feel our pain if we expect our comrades to do the job now at hand. Our comrades must come to understand the capitalists will never give up such a large expanse as this, and it is now who will kill whom?''
248Maxim Gorky in 1912, calling Vladimir Lenin ``a bandit chief now without bandits'' continued to prove the inability of the naïve intellectuals of the Russian bourgeoisie to understand the task at hand. Gorky's ``objectivity'' implied the caveat that Bolshevism's ``cash is king'' policy, with regard to financial resource identification, was a low road. That was the view the Russian bourgeois intellectuals came to have about Lenin. Now five years later Lenin and his bandit chief Stalin had pulled it off. Shortly thereafter all of these bourgeois intellectuals were put on ships and deported to Europe. The matter was resolved.
The 1917 Revolution in Russia: Stalin Returns
At any rate, when Stalin returned to Petrograd from his prison sentence exile in Siberia, following the February, 1917, overthrow of the Czar, he immediately began putting his extensive network of Party and ``Other'' contacts back together. Creating, as he went along, many new contacts of a variety of kinds throughout the revolutionary milieu of those six months from February to October. As for example by structuring a new alliance between the Left Wing of the peasant oriented, nevertheless bourgeois, Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Bolshevik Party. These ``Left SR's'' would join the Bolsheviks in forming a new Government when the seizure took place, acting as a de facto willing ally of the Bolsheviks, rather than as members of the SR Party. ---And, this is
249but one example of what he accomplished in this period.
As a Bolshevik Party Central Committee Member for many years, Joseph Stalin was one of, if not the, senior Bolshevik Party leader in the revolutionary capital of Petrograd when he arrived in that city, in the early Spring of 1917; having taken the simple expedient of a train ride from his exile in Siberia. (Lenin was still in Switzerland; Trotsky, even if he had been there and he had not yet returned from New York City, was anyway not yet a Bolshevik.) Stalin took his seat in the Petrograd Soviet and in the other organs of working class power in the revolutionary capital; but he was quiet and voted very carefully, if at all. His job was to prepare for the return of ``the Boss.''
In other words, Stalin was doing what Lenin said the Bolshevik Party should have been doing in his absence. Of course, Lenin understood the importance of the stall-and-retreat activity of all of his men on the spot, including those who appeared to have been collaborating. Some would have to participate in the various forums as dialogue had to go on with full Bolshevik participation as far as the press and the public were concerned; that meant taking whatever positions one had to take to stay to the Left but not too far --- until the Boss got back.
It was Stalin who hid Lenin during the July (1917) days (when the bourgeois government attempted to smash the Bolsheviks and kill Lenin) and kept him in a secret location in Finland until the eve of the October Revolution. Of all those on the incipient (thus the first) Politburo chosen initially as the committee to lead the insurrection (the seizure committee in other words evolved into the Political Bureau --- Politburo --- of the Bolshevik Central Committee), this role of Stalin's was perhaps one of the most important. Why? Because only Stalin knew where the leader was and he had to bring daily reports back and forth from the Boss to the Insurrectionary Headquarters.
It was only natural, after the success of the October (1917) seizure that Lenin would continue to depend on Stalin. Why? To keep doing all those things he had been doing all along (for at least 17 years) we have just reviewed; a man proven in his ability, and therefore profoundly capable of handling the great secret tasks awaiting; so it is easy to see why Lenin handed Stalin the formal responsibility of heading up the Party's secret department. Stalin had always, from the beginning, and for many years, been the chief of secret operations, at least to the degree that he could be (and during incarcerations he was often temporarily out of action.)
Flash Forward
Before I went into the field in Peru, in 1977, (See Volume 3 of the "Idaho Smith's" Search for the Foundation!" series entitled Shining Path, The Peruvian Revolution, Jason W. Smith, 2003, Writers Press, Boise, 246 pp. Now available on-line at www.leninistbiz.com ) I was quite naive too. My real world experiences as described in the above cited autobiographical series, especially volumes 4 and 5 (Rivers of Blood! and High Finance South American Style), changed all that. These books are self-explanatory in terms of understanding people's fundamental at-bottom ideas, and how they got them, and why they will continue to entertain them, until such time that contemporary society evolves to a much higher level.
250So, it became rather easy for me to understand both Lenin and Stalin - because I was there at the same point in life. First, rather naively, with Lenin; later, more
sophisticatedly, with Stalin (figuratively speaking.) That's why I have sometimes commented that when my Peruvian sojourn was all said and done I had rehabilitated Comrade Stalin. (Go to the website WorldCat [World Catalogue] and type in my name, Smith, Jason W., for a complete list of university libraries, and their distance from you, for these and other books I have authored.)
Back to Hegel
Working out the dialectics of history by reading Hegel once again in 1914-1915, Lenin came to all the right conclusions about what had happened and what to do about it. Actually he already knew what to do about it - that was to encourage a revolutionary upheaval among the workers and in the Army. Now, after studying Hegel again, and this time mastering him, Lenin understood how the labor movement had been dialectically transformed into its opposite.
So the Bolsheviks, from the first (1914), had been busy boring-from-within the Army of the rotten regime of magnate capitalists allied with the Dukedoms of Feudal Capitalist Imperial Russia. The Bolshevik objective became one of turning the struggle of the workers and farmers onto the road that was in their interest, rather than to continue along the road of capitalist and feudal interests, onto which they had been misled.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks had the slogan. It was to turn the imperialist war into a civil war; soldiers to shoot their officers; workers to seize the factories; farmers to take the land.
What to do about Agriculture?
Note: The Bolsheviks did not propose the immediate collectivization of agriculture. They had only a tiny base among the farming masses and couldn't do anything in the countryside anyway. Of course, they wanted to end private property everywhere, including in land, but in practice they decided to pursue a policy of simply letting the farmers take the land as their private property. The farmers were doing it anyway --- seizing the vast private estates and dividing it up among themselves. Despite a few Government declarations to the contrary the Bolsheviks accepted what the farmers had done spontaneously and accommodated themselves to it, demanding only the surrender of grain and whatever else might be needed, as needed. This policy was often referred to as War Communism.
251This Bolshevik policy enraged the Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders and they would end up being liquidated after they attempted to assassinate Lenin in 1918. They had their own crackpot pie-in-the-sky formula for agriculture which did not feature small farmers as independent proprietors.
The European ultra-left as represented by such out-of-touch with reality spokes-people as Rosa Luxemburg criticized the Russian Bolsheviks severely for this attitude to the farmers (who they also wanted to collectivize immediately) and in their respective countries, as in Germany, isolated themselves accordingly from the farming masses and in the end this would be their undoing.
For example, in the middle of the Bolsheviks toughest year (1918) the one person you could always count on to draw the completely wrong tactical conclusions from
agreed upon strategic data --- Rosa Luxemburg --- had this to say when not wringing her hands:
``The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.''
The truth was far different. In fact it was this decision of Lenin's to let the ignorant Russian peasant mass --- much akin to Bison on the US Great Plains before the coming of the White Man - some 100 million totally illiterate and uneducated Neolithic level farmers (terribly unproductive) --- do as they would with the land, as long as they supported our Government, that was a stroke of genius.
You couldn't do anything with these people anyway. Not until their level of cultural achievement (in this case culture meaning education) had prepared them to be more than farm animals. ---And, it is exactly as farm animals these Neolithic farmers had been raised by their Masters and Mistresses under one sadistic dictator (Czar) after another over the previous several centuries.
Had Luxemburg used a little common sense she would not have found the newly formed (autumn of 1918) German Communist Party isolated from the farming masses, and farm originating workers. All these newly liberated Russian farm animals, cum capitalist farmers, cared about, was getting land of their own and raising and selling their crops and animal products on the only kind of market they knew about (the countryside capitalist marketplace.) Lenin let that go with the caveat, to paraphrase, that ``the farmers have to have capitalism to survive and produce for now; but they don't have to have SR and Menshevik propaganda to survive and produce - so we have had to, or soon will have to, liquidate this bourgeois press, permanently.''
Luxemburg failed to realize that the German farmers of middle and lower ranks as well as her landless farmers and agricultural workers were not much different than Russian farmers. She should have learned from the Bolshevik experience to handle the farming masses with kid gloves. When Bison stampede the ``race'' of the humans (White or Indian; the ``Lone Ranger'' or ``Tonto'') in front of them is irrelevant.
Luxemburg failed to recognize the intense nature of the peasant desire to be a capitalist farmer. For millennia these oppressed, essentially Neolithic, farmers had believed if they could just own a piece of their own land then the world would be perfect. (It would take time, experience and education to guide them in a better ``collective'' direction). At any rate, for this failure she paid with her life.
Conversely, the Russian Bolsheviks had avoided precisely this conundrum simply by being very non-naïve (real world cognizant) and doing what common sense dictated, if you wanted the soldiers and the food to fight and win a great civil war! Of the principal Bolshevik leaders it would be Trotsky who would be the first to recognize that Lenin's decision to let the farmers go ahead and do as they would with the land of the aristocrats, the rich farmers, and their church, had been a nearly fortuitous accident which had made all the difference in the civil war in Russia; a nation that was 90% small farmer.
One must assume Lenin saw the same advantage that lay in the motive ascribed to him by the SR leaders, who believed Lenin saw that newly propertied small capitalist farmers would find it absolutely necessary to take up arms and fight to hold onto their newly gained land and therefore would be obvious recruits for the Bolshevik's new Red Army. It was that Party and its Army after all which had given them legal title to the land
(as least as far as they were concerned the Bolshevik proclamations in support of their seizures was legal authorization.)
Lenin saying (to paraphrase) ``the farmers are going to do it [take the land] anyway so we might as well go along with them for now'' and this decision of Lenin's had given the Bolsheviks the support (the conscript farmer soldiers) they had to have to win the Civil War. ---And, the food to feed them.
Trotsky in the winter of 1919-1920, working among farmers of the Urals, went on to advocate the reintroduction of a market economy and the elimination of ``war communism'' (forced collections of grain and the issuing of IOU's) as soon as possible, otherwise they (the Bolsheviks) were going to lose them (the farmers --- 90% of the country.) It would take Lenin another full year to agree.
For a real flavor for what the Bolsheviks confronted among the farming peoples of Russia (and the Empire) I recommend my favorite Soviet author Mikhail A. Sholokhov and his Don novels (And Quiet Flows the Don; The Don Flows Home to the Sea and Harvest on the Don).
At any rate, the mechanics for the seizure of state power had been worked out by the Russians in the 1905 Revolution. ``Councils'' (called ``Soviets'' in Russian) had been established in St. Petersburg in that year, as well as in cities and administrative units throughout the empire. These council's or soviets were the then contemporary re-creation of the communes of Revolutionary Paris (and part of the Program of the Working Class Government for all of France in 1871.)
The job, in Russia and its Empire in 1917, would be to reestablish these councils or ``soviets'' and to put armed force (the state) in their hands. It was the job of the Bolshevik Party and its cadre to see that new councils or soviets were formed as soon as possible everywhere and to plan to take all power as soon as possible, in their name. The Paris Commune model was about to be replaced by our new ``Leninist'' model.
Revolution in Russia: Lenin Returns
In February of 1917, hungry people, led by working women of the city, rose against the Czar in Petrograd (the Czar's wartime name for St. Petersburg; the city eventually to be named after Lenin.) The bourgeois leaders, unhappy the Czar had proven unable to do anything except kill large numbers of workers and farmers through his military incompetence, seized upon the working peoples uprising to overthrow the Magnate-Ducal Regime and replaced it with a capitalist ``provisional government.'' This ``government'' made the serious mistake of allowing all political exiles amnesty, and the right to return. Perhaps because, given the demand of the masses, it had no choice. After the return of Stalin et. al., it was Lenin's return that everyone was waiting for.
252Lenin made his way back to Petrograd in a ``sealed'' train that left Switzerland, passed through Germany and entered northwestern Russia by way of Scandinavia. The ``sealed'' part was something Lenin set up so that he could deny he was doing what he was doing.
What was that? It wasn't exactly new. The German rulers had been making contributions to the Bolshevik treasury throughout the war years. They knew Lenin and
the Bolsheviks. -And now the biggest decision of all had to be made with regard to their erstwhile friends.
Lenin was pursuing an enormously important financial deal in Berlin with the General Staff of the Wehrmacht (German Army) on this trip! This bunch of parasitical Junkers (landed German noblemen) were certainly no Bolsheviks. But, they knew Lenin would take Russia out of the World War, if he won the coming struggle for power in Russia. They knew he had a chance, and that was why they had been financing him and enough reason for them to bankroll him again --- this time all the way.
Nor was Lenin attending the Wehrmacht General Staff Meeting with hat-in-hand. Lenin had his own sources of money as the Germans were well aware. What they didn`t know was that Leonid Krassin, having worked his way into the Czarist War Production Ministry, was providing Lenin via the ``provider teams of expropriators'' more and more money as he directed these teams to the best pickings for armed robberies. (Krassin's number one helper, Joseph Stalin, was in exile in Siberia, so others were doing the work.) Accordingly, the Bolshevik press and payroll was well endowed and growing. At that moment Lenin had over 1000 persons on his cadre payroll list in Russia and that number would be growing exponentially as the revolutionary preparation and fighting intensified. The Germans knew Lenin already had money and that what he needed was even more money; money he could depend upon on a regularized basis. Money that would be ever present, at hand, to accomplish his forthcoming objectives. Number one being to take Russia out of the World War. The Germans had been invited to contribute to the Bolshevik treasury and had done so, hoping they would keep a place for themselves in Lenin's good graces. Lenin gained their enthusiastic support for this the final push. The German's also agreed that, in addition to their present new funding agreement that, if he were to seize power they would immediately enter into friendly military arrangements to support his regime, including shipping weapons and most importantly modernization equipment for his war industries.
253Arriving in Petrograd with plenty of cash and more on the way, being bank wired from Germany to Sweden to Finland; a small army of financial agents left behind in place to physically handle the transfers; Lenin was ready to kick some ass! (Before this was all over Lenin would get at least 50 million gold rubles from the Germans.)
Lenin wasn't naive about money, nor about the class enemies he confronted, nor anything else, except that undiscovered country of selfish and sadistic basal imprinting that was nearly as strong in the oppressed classes (including the working classes) as it was in the masters and mistresses and the boss hierarchy of society. A common defect, if you will, of all Marxists at that time.
In Petrograd, Lenin immediately began preaching revolution against the capitalist provisional government - first on the platform of the Finland Station - just after stepping off the train. There, hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, along with deputations of soldiers and sailors, and an honor guard from one of the (previously) Czarist ships in port, formed a tumultuous crowd greeting their hero, Lenin. It was the biggest - by far - reception of any foreign leader coming home, in the months after February and before October of 1917.
Suffice it to say that Lenin found his own Bolsheviks collaborating with the enemy ``Provisional Government,'' bourgeois to the core, with a smattering of right wing ``respectable'' socialists of one stripe or another. What they the workers, and their Party,
the Bolshevik Party, should have been doing instead, he said, was to be preparing to strike out and destroy the bourgeois regime. He went directly to the workers of the Petrograd City Council (Soviet), explaining to them their historic task and with their enthusiastic support he was able to rearm the Party. His control over the funds needed to publish all the new Bolshevik newspapers and pay the entire new cadre, didn't hurt either.
The Party was rearmed in 1917 by the document we know as The April Thesis. Then the Party was hammered by Lenin into seizing power in October through letters and demands (by July he was again in hiding from the secret police; only Stalin knew where he was, having been assigned this role of protecting the maximum leader by the Seizure Committee --- i.e., the original Politburo) and with the book State and Revolution where Lenin went back to Engels and made his central point:
As Engels said, (to paraphrase,) ``the `state' is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms and arises in the hands of those who can pay their thugs to suppress the masses.'' This meant that the Bolsheviks had to seize state power from the class enemy - build their own ``state'' and establish a proletarian dictatorship over the enemy. In so doing they could THEN proceed to construct the socialist world order!
``The proletarian state is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Such suppression is necessary because of the furious, desperate resistance put up by the landowners and capitalists, by the entire bourgeoisie and all their hangers-on, by all the exploiters, who stop at nothing when their overthrow, when the expropriation of the expropriators, begins.'' (V. I. Lenin, 1919, Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, Pravda, January 24, 1919.)
Understanding What the ``State'' Is Told Lenin What Had To Be Done
I put this in bold for a reason. Because Lenin's correct understanding of the nature of the state --- any state - is the key to our understanding Lenin's success in introducing the Stage of Stalinist Socialism onto the world historical stage.
``Every state, including the most democratic republic, is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another'' (V.I. Lenin, Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, Pravda, January 24, 1919) as Lenin put it fifteen months later.
He knew he had to overthrow the bourgeois government. The time had come to do it.
The first reason Lenin had to act was the scientific conclusion mandated by the correct General Theory of historical materialism, and he had Engel's summation of Marx's work on state origins to quote directly to prove his point. (See The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels, 1888)
Now we have my study which archaeologically confirms the prehistoric emergence of classes and the state, happened exactly as a product of the class division of society where exploiter ranks had become exploiting classes. These classes would have both the need and the financial ability to use thuggery (army/police power) to establish and then to enforce their dictatorship. A summary of that study's conclusions has been incorporated above, in this book, in my discussions of the sequential stages of pre-
capitalist sociocultural evolution.
The second reason, Lenin determined to act when he did, was a tactical matter that required audacity (balls) to do what theory tells you to do because the time is ripe. The capitalist Regime was weak; the Bolsheviks had just won the elections. There was no reason to wait any longer and every reason to act before the enemy got a chance to put some bullshit parliamentary system into effect. A system the bourgeoisie would, of course, dominate.
Stalin in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
Taking Command
On the 12th of March, 1917, in the morning, with snow falling, Stalin (carrying a valise and a typewriter) and Vera Shveitzer detrained at Petrograd's Nicholas Station and walked down Nevsky Prospect making their way to Bolshevik Headquarters at the Kseshinskaya Mansion. Along the way they encountered the Taurida Palace, which building was now the Headquarters of the Petrograd City Council (Petrograd Soviet) and also of the Capitalist Provisional Government. Inside they first encountered the Bolshevik delegation to the Soviet and here these two met Bolsheviks (27 year old) Vyacheslav Molotov and Elena Stasova, and that afternoon the four of them met with the other members of the Petrograd Bolshevik Bureau. Leader of the Petrograd Bolsheviks was 33 year old Alexander Shlyapnikov. Most of Shlyapnikov's Petrograd Party was made up of real workers like himself. Shlyapnikov and Molotov had managed to get Pravda up and running right after February 26th.
254At the time 38 year old Stalin and 34 year old Kamenev were the senior Central Committee Members in-country and in-Petrograd. The Party had about 25,000 members empire-wide and about 1000 payrollee activists.
There was much ado about everything that day at the Taurida with the Bolshevik Petrograd Bureau, and Stalin left early for the home of Sergei and Olga Alliluyeva and their two daughters (Anna and Nadya) and two sons (Pavel and Fedya) in the Petrograd suburbs. He spent the rest of the day and night there regaling his overjoyed hosts with stories of Siberian exile. Only Fedya was absent being in the Army at the front. Stalin's second wife-to-be --- Nadya --- was still in High School and had just returned from Spring Break.
The next morning Stalin went to the Bolshevik Party Headquarters for the City of Petrograd and the Empire as a whole at the former Mansion of the ballerina and Czarist prostitute, the courtesan (kept by the Czar and his two brothers, her principal noble bed-mates) Mathilde Kseshinskaya. As I say, this Kseshinskaya Mansion doubled
as the de facto Headquarters for the Bolshevik Petrograd committee and the Bolshevik national party organization. Here Stalin took command of the Party as the senior member of the Bolshevik central committee and when Kamenev showed up Stalin brought him on-board as the second most senior person and CC member. Stalin also took command of the Party daily newspaper Pravda (Truth) which was the central Party newspaper organ for Petrograd and doubled as such for the new nation. Stalin kept Kamenev on the Pravda editorial board as second to him. In the process the two younger Party leaders, Molotov and Shlyapnikov were demoted to lesser positions. Stalin then was appointed as a member for the Bolshevik Party of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd City Council (Soviet). In this way Stalin became head of the Party organization and the chief Bolshevik representative in the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet. Again Stalin nominated Kamenev to be the other new representative from the Petrograd Bolshevik Party to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd City Council. At the end of the day the Old Guard had completely reasserted itself over the Bolshevik's highest leadership bodies and in the Petrograd Soviet. Now it was a waiting game. Waiting for the Boss to show up from Switzerland. They had three weeks to wait.
255On the 27th of March Lenin left the Swiss-German border on his sealed train as a first leg in the process of heading for Finland Station as his ultimate destination in Petrograd. Along the way the train would stop for a protracted number of hours in Berlin. In Berlin Lenin arranged to exit the train secretly and meet with the Wehrmacht (German Army) General Staff.
The Old Man is the New Boss: Imposing Authority and Clarity
Lenin with his chief in-exile lieutenants, including Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev and of course Nadazhda Krupskaya arrived with some 53 others at the Russian-Finnish border railroad station at Beloostrov on the morning of April 3, 1917. Boarding was a small Bolshevik delegation from Petrograd led by Joseph Stalin, Lev B. Kamenev and Ludmilla Stal. Lev Borisovich Kamenev was immediately in the dog house as Lenin yelled at him about the bad things he had been writing in Pravda and his whole bullshit attitude and political line in the Soviet and the Party Bureau.
Shortly thereafter the 46 year old, ``Old Man'', Vladimir Illych Lenin and party arrived at Petrograd's Finland Station. Lenin left Kamenev behind and detrained with Stalin. A military band played the communist equivalent to ``Hail to the Chief'' as searchlights went on and focused on the Chief as he strode to the waiting honor guard of revolutionary Red Guard Kronstadt sailors standing at attention to be reviewed. The Chief took them in stride, and then greeted an assembled 2000 Putilov Plant workers also waiting to be reviewed, and finally reached the bulk of the massive crowd of hundreds of
thousands of Petrograd workers, and their families, and just as many fascinated Russian citizens anxious to witness what everyone knew was an historic moment. Russia's new leader bellowed out ``End the Imperialist War, Overthrow the capitalist Government and All Power to the Soviets.'' The crowd went wild and the Soviet and Provisional Government leaders assembled went into shock --- including those Bolsheviks who had been following the Bullshit Kamenev line.
Stalin in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
Three Month Countdown: July 3rd to October 3rd, 1917
Trotsky was brought on board the Bolshevik Party and in the leadership sometime in June of 1917. During June he pranced on the stage of the Modern Circus to the delight of the great unwashed who loved his ``dancing bear'' routine and were the ``rabble'', quite willing to be roused, with fiery rhetoric. At his day job in the Petrograd City Council (Soviet) he did the same thing. This talk combined with the clear Leninist hard-line being taken in all of Stalin's press led the mass of Petrograd workers, soldiers and sailors to believe that armed insurrection just as soon as possible was the Bolshevik practical program.
On the 3rd of July the pot boiled over and things got really out of hand. Now, at that moment, the Boss was on a medical leave in Finland. Lenin was having one of the early episodes full of signs of cerebral arterial sclerosis and hypertension and had been so sick his colleagues had insisted on this ``vacation.'' So, the only man who could give the order to rise up was not there.
Stalin was asked on the 3rd of July by sailors at Kronstadt if they should bring weapons to the demonstration beginning that morning and he said yes. But he said it in such a way as to avoid the question as to whether there would be a Party order to rise against the Capitalist Provisional Government that day.
The problem was that the Boss was in Finland. No one else could give the order, but despite this the Bolshevik Military Organization (BMO) went ahead and gave the order anyway! This BMO claimed the support of 60,000 armed soldiers. However, in their own actual hands they had only Stalin's Red Guard Battle Groups. This situation would be changed in a few weeks when Kerensky, the capitalist President of the Provisional Government, had insufficient loyal troops remaining to stop the advance of military golpista (coupist) General Kornilov. Kornilov was marching from Moscow on Petrograd with the stated objective of slaughtering workers and all the members of the Provisional Government. President Kerensky then had to open the military arsenals and arm the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks then stopped Kornilov cold and he went on the run
256until captured and killed in Siberia. At any rate this arms distribution gave the BMO what they would need in their second, October 1917, uprising, and to avoid the defeat they were about to suffer in early July.
In the meantime, by July 4th perhaps one hundred thousand soldiers, sailors and workers had surrounded the Taurida Palace that housed both the capitalist Provisional Government and the Petrograd City Council (Soviet) demanding that the Soviet take all power into its own hands. But the Georgia originating Menshevik leaders of the Petrograd Soviet refused and dawdled.
Lenin arrived in the morning of July 4th mad as hell. ``You should be thrashed for this'' he said to the leaders of the BMO. It was too late to advance or retreat. It was a fucking mess. Lenin knew the time for a national uprising had not yet come even though it soon would.
At this precise moment the Soviet in Petrograd, and in virtually all the other cities, was comprised of a majority of non-Bolsheviks, none of whom had sufficient confidence to take power on their own, but all of whom were determined to prevent any one of them --- especially the Bolsheviks --- from doing so. Yet, the Cap Government was confronting a series of escalating contradictions (crises) which Lenin knew it could not and would not be able to handle to the satisfaction of a rapidly growing number of pissed-off Russians (not to mention the other already revolting nationalities in Georgia, the Ukraine, Finland and so forth.) At this point science told us that revolution was definitely on the agenda and soon. However, the timing required a plan and artistic leadership. This early July mass demonstration of workers soldiers and sailors in Petrograd was not the time for a national uprising to overthrow capitalism. Lenin said that at this point what was going on would best be considered a dress rehearsal. ---And, so it was.
257In the period of Trotsky's dancing bear routines at the Modern Circus, and in the Taurida Palace Soviet, Stalin had been busy administering the day to day affairs of the Party with Lenin or by himself (as when Lenin was on medical leave in Finland.)
First he had to meet payroll on a weekly basis which amounted to a great deal indeed, for if 2.5 rubles million annually had been required before 1917 for a Party with a payroll of only 1000 (in Petrograd and nationwide) you can do the arithmetic to see what would have been required weekly to pay 10,000 cadre nationwide by July 1917. Say, roughly, 500,000 rubles a week. That couldn't come from bank robberies and other ``exes'' but would have to come from the Germans as per Lenin's Berlin agreement- and it was coming. But bank-wires of that size, frequency, and number, could not help but be detected by the
Capitalist police who understood everything when it came to money and getting their hands on it.
Stalin was the editor, or in charge of, all the Bolshevik newspapers and magazines.
Stalin had to make all the decisions about Party cadre assigned to different tasks nationwide.
The uprising lost its steam and began to dissipate when the Menshevik-led Soviet refused to take power and the Bolshevik leaders (Lenin and Stalin) refused to give the order for the Bolshevik Party to move for all power by itself. On the day of July 6th Lenin told Stalin to make a deal with the cap President Kerensky to bring about the surrender of all the Bolshevik armed units and the Party headquarters and press without bloodshed if given the time. Kerensky agreed.
First Stalin hid Lenin. During the course of this one day (July 6th) Stalin moved Lenin five times. Simultaneously Stalin asked the workers outside Taurida and their military colleagues to end the demonstration and go home. Then he arranged for the Bolshevik Machine Gun Regiment outside the Taurida to go back to their barracks. ---And, he arranged for the Bolshevik garrison at the Peter and Paul Fortress to surrender. Next he organized the surrender of the Bolshevik Hq at the Kseshinskaya Palace. Also, he agreed to the surrender of the Bolshevik Press building. Finally, as part of the deal, Stalin and most of the Party leaders at Kseshinskaya and elsewhere were allowed to walk away. Stalin walked away as the delegated chief of the Bolsheviks. That is to say Stalin had been delegated by the Party leadership (Lenin) to deal with the capitalist Provisional Government and President Kerensky accepted. Finally, Kerensky had given him a ``safe conduct'' accordingly. The Cap Government troops did not vandalize Bolshevik property and eventually their offices and press were returned to them.
258Stalin changed his working residence from the apartment he shared near the office at Kseshinskaya, with Vyacheslav Molotov, to the (unknown to the cap government) new and stylish address of comrades Alliluyeva. It was here, at the Alliluyeva's, where Stalin hid Lenin at the end of the day of the 6th of July (Lenin's final move until he fled to Finland on the 12th of July). In the meantime Trotsky and Kamenev had been arrested elsewhere and hauled off to jail.
The 6th Congress
After his return from depositing Lenin in Finland, Stalin organized the Bolshevik Party Congress at the end of July. It was held in secret in Petrograd in an old monastery on Sampsonevsky Boulevard. Stalin was now the acting Party leader for the nation and for Petrograd and he gave the Main Report in the place of Lenin. He was followed by Yakov M. Sverdlov who gave the organizational report and who commented that Stalin had done such a good job his report would be very short. Stalin was named chief editor
for all of the Party press and also made head of the Bolshevik delegation at the Petrograd City Council (Soviet).
The Congress announced the listing of central committee members with Lenin of course number one, followed by Kamenev, Trotsky and Stalin. In later years Trotskyists would try and use this listing to prove that Trotsky was already superior in the Party to Stalin. The truth is that since Kamenev and Trotsky had gotten themselves arrested when everyone else had been allowed to walk free in the Kerensky-Stalin deal the Party decided it would be just as well to put their names up front and keep Stalin in a less vulnerable position. Kamenev had been in the doghouse from day one of Lenin's return as you will recall. Trotsky although a very newcomer to Bolshevism had been prancing around on stage at the Modern Circus and in the Soviet and had drawn the ire of the Cap leaders upon himself. Putting their names in front of Stalin gave the acting leader a little more flexibility in moving around and getting things ready for the coming seizure.
259Stalin in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
Seizure: 24 --- 26 October, 1917
The July 3 to 6, 1917, uprising of soldiers, sailors and workers in Petrograd was bungled, largely by the absence of Lenin (in Finland when the Bolshevik Military Organization (BMO) started the process.) Lenin returned just in time to see how the lack of leadership, and the lack of a plan, was leading to the dissipation of insurrectional strength and to a counter-attack by the Capitalist Government which put everyone on the run. Stalin kept moving Lenin around Petrograd; five times in the one day of July 6th he changed his locale. Then Lenin waited at the Alliluyeva's home for several days until shaved and disguised could be taken to Finland on the 12th, by Stalin and Sergo Alliluyeva who hid him there until October.
Kornilov
However, even though the Capitalist Government of Kerensky made every attempt to find Lenin and kill him, and then to discredit Lenin over his financial ties to the German regime, within days the cap government faced its own potentially life-ending crisis. To save itself the weak cap Government of President Kerensky had had to turn to the Bolsheviks. The Capitalist Government General Kornilov located in Moscow was marching on Petrograd with the stated intention of slaughtering the workers and all the social democrats (including Mensheviks like the Capitalist President Kerensky himself) not just the Bolsheviks. Confronted with his own imminent collapse Kerensky turned to Stalin, with whom you will recall he had established personal working relationship only weeks earlier. Stalin told him the Bolsheviks Military Organization (BMO) would save
260the regime but could not without arms. Kerensky accordingly had no choice but to arm the workers who were virtually all Bolsheviks. Overnight 60,000 rifles and pistols and ammunition were turned over to the Bolshevik Red Guard Battle Groups. Eventually 250,000 small arms went to the workers of Petrograd and Moscow. Kornilov was defeated and fled to Siberia where Bolsheviks caught and killed him. But, the important thing now, was that the Bolsheviks had guns directly in their hands and the Army was coming over to the BMO --- at least in the cities --- unit by unit --- like an avalanche. Stalin finished the process by physically seizing the BMO newspaper Soldier and arresting its leaders, bringing many of them to a Party trial. He also seized their money and instituted his own new command structure. There would be no more July's. The writing was on the wall.
261Lenin
Lenin from Finland demanded that the Party seize state power NOW. To make a long story short he returned long enough to hammer the leadership into agreement. The meeting for a final solution began close to midnight of the 10th of October, 1917 and continued until nearly dawn of the 11th. Lenin was joined by ten top Bolsheviks, with Stalin and Trotsky strongly supporting his demand to plan for an immediate military uprising of Red forces to seize state power, with only two voting against (you guessed it: Kamenev and Zinoviev.) The seizure committee was selected and included Stalin and Trotsky (who had joined Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in June, some three months earlier.) The group then decided to hold a planning meeting in five days to review the plans to be drawn up by Stalin and his central committee aides in the interim. This seizure committee was the embryo of the concept of leadership by a Central Committee Political Bureau (known thereafter to the world as the Politburo.)
262The group met as scheduled on the 16th of October and approved Stalin's plan. Trotsky was absent, working at the Taurida Soviet where he was now chairman of the Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) created on 9 October. Kamenev and Zinoviev again voiced their disagreement but were out-argued and quickly overcome by Lenin and all the others. The date was set for October 24th. Stalin said ``the die is cast.''
Betrayal
Kamenev and Zinoviev betrayed the plan to the cap press on the 18th and were expelled from the central committee. Fortunately, the cap press saw their betrayal as a provocation. The fact that Stalin went ahead, and published the Kamenev-Zinoviev letter which explained their opposition ideas, in Rabochii Put, he and they saw as a downplaying of the idea the Party was preparing a seizure. After all, to the caps it didn't make sense that the Party would publish its antithesis unless Lenin was doing what he
had done before: i.e., threaten but not seriously --- testing the water. However, confusingly, then Stalin wrote the Party's official declaration in Pravda which was: The Bolsheviks have issued the call: be ready! The caps were confused but anyone who wanted to draw the right conclusion could see that indeed the die was cast.
Two Red Military Centers
It was decided that since the Soviet's MR Committee was all Bolshevik the seizure should be undertaken in its name. The Party had by the 24th, the loyalty of the Petrograd Army garrison. Specifically, the Petrograd Garrison had voted to take orders only from the MRC or Cap Government orders only when counter-signed by the MRC. Stalin and his Red Guard Kseshinskaya Center would guard the Party installations themselves from Cap Government counter-attack, or surprise attack. In the event it was the Stalin Center that acted first.
Kerensky Moves First
Kerensky decided to go for broke and move first. He sent Cap Government loyal troops to seize Stalin's press operations building at dawn on the 24th. These offices (of the Trud Press) were attacked and the machinery vandalized by Kerensky's troops. Stalin retaliated with his Red Guard Battle Groups and after a shoot-out, by the afternoon, the building was back in Bolshevik hands. The Volkynia Army Regiment arrived shortly thereafter to reinforce the Red Guards and prevent a future assault by the Kerensky regime.
Bolsheviks Move Next
Meanwhile second-string leaders were dispatched with Red Guard troops from Stalin's Center to seize the railway depots; post office and telegraph office; food warehouses; and representatives of the Bolshevik Hq were dispatched to establish formal relations with the Left Social Revolutionaries; another to supervise the surveillance of the Cap Regime at the Winter Palace; another to establish constant telephone contact with Party Battle Groups in Moscow who were simultaneously engaging the Czarist Army and Police garrisons in that city. Trotsky's MRC mobilized the Army and Navy units in Petrograd and at Kronstadt to stand by as they would soon be needed. As it turned out in Petrograd they were only needed to reinforce the Red Guards. In Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, etc., they would be immediately needed in intense armed conflict with units loyal to the cap government.
263Stalin left the Kseshinskaya Headquarters, canceled his scheduled appearance at the Polytechnical Institute in order to be at the new Smolny Headquarters of the Soviet MR Committee where the next step would be to convene the Congress of Soviets with the new all-Bolshevik Government a fait accompli
Seizure
Everyone including Lenin made their way to Smolny and, to make an exciting two day story too short, suffice to say that by the 26th of October, 1917, the Bolsheviks had completed the seizure with the capture of all of the ministers of the Cap Government who were holed-up at the Czar's Winter Palace. At long last the Bolsheviks had state power and it was the beginning of an entirely new sociocultural evolutionary stage on the planet Earth.
The Bolsheviks Seize State Power: October 24 - 26, 1917
(November 7 --- 9, 1917 western calendar)
Knowing what had to be done; Lenin forced his Party leadership to resolve to seize power by force of arms. The story of the seizure has been told by the participants and direct observers including Leon Trotsky, John Reed (the American [Portland, Oregon] observer of these events who wrote the internationally famous book Ten Days that Shook the World!) and Joseph Stalin. First Petrograd and then Moscow and many other cities, came under Bolshevik military control. The question then became: Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (The title of one of Lenin's books of that time.)
Off on the Wrong Foot --- Trotsky Alienates the Old Bolsheviks
Lenin believed it was Oregonian John Reed who was responsible for giving the outside world the idea that the entire Bolshevik Revolution had been conceived carried out and successful only because of what had happened in Petrograd in the month's preceding the seizure October 24 --- 26. ---And, by the relatively peaceful October seizure of power in Petrograd when the capitalist Provisional Government was replaced over a period of two days by the Bolshevik Soviet Government. Lenin didn't mind Reed's somewhat myopic view of events because what was important was that news of and about the Revolution be presented to the world in the best way. After all with Reed limited in language, and access to the rest of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, what else could he have done? What Reed wrote in Ten Days That Shook the World was so beautiful and indeed archetypical of what a Bolshevik Revolution should ideally look like, that Lenin decided to take what they had been so lucky to get, discretion being the better part of valor, and worry about the details of the All-Russian reality later on.
264The seizure had been hard fought and violent in Moscow, Kursk, Samara, Minsk, Kharkov, Tiflis, and Kiev and in many other cities of the Empire. Only in Petrograd (St. Petersburg; Leningrad), thanks according to all participants and observers (including Joseph Stalin) due to the excellent work of Leon Trotsky, was the seizure relatively peaceful. Petrograd was the capital of the Empire, and thus was one tactical key to success, and therefore, Lenin's decision to bring Trotsky into the Party three months earlier proved its wisdom in the event.
The Old Bolsheviks, however, who had fought the hard fight in at least 20 cities of the Empire, where it had been touch and go in the armed struggle for days and sometimes weeks, became quite angry with the way Trotsky was presenting the October
Revolution. Indeed, Trotsky did just what Reed had done except in much more detail, but the Old Bolsheviks who were the new Governmental and most importantly Army Officers were enraged. Furthermore, they didn't care what Reed told the English-speaking world. They cared about what Russians thought!
The new officers and non-coms in the Red Army thought Trotsky was involved in a cheap power play. They believed Trotsky's real intent was to deprive them of their just honors, and rewards, for having fought tooth and nail, killing all opposition, in order to establish the proletarian dictatorship.
Typical of those who grew to hate Trotsky, for this among other things, was the future War Commissar and chief of much of the Red Army's armies, colleges, and staff schools, Mikhael Frunze (1885-1925). Another was the perhaps most colorful general of the Civil War Semyon Buddeny (1883 --- 1973) and still another Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher (1889 --- 1938) who commanded striking victories during the civil war, and commanded the Chinese KMT Army. ---And, finally, among the most important of the youngest Trotsky haters was Sergeant (1920) George Zhukov who would go on to be the Soviet's most important military chief (Five Star General --- i.e., Marshal --- and military chief of the Red Army High Command [Stavka] in 1945.).
Farmers Were the Strategic Key to Success
Lenin decided to throw the Bolshevik lot in with the farmers. Ironic that the chief of the most orthodox worker's Party in the world should have had the insight to recruit the mass of the Empire's people almost overnight because of a wise political pronouncement; namely do what you will with the land!
``Our victory was made easier by the fact that in October 1917 we marched with the farmers, with all the farmers. In that sense, our revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The first step taken by our proletarian government was to embody in a law promulgated on October 26 (old style), 1917, on the next day after the revolution, the old demands of all the farmers which Farmer Soviets and Village Assemblies had put forward under Kerensky (the man Lenin overthrew - ed.) That is where our strength lay; that is why we were able to win the overwhelming majority so easily. As far as the countryside was concerned, our revolution continued to be a bourgeois revolution, and only later,'' (V. I. Lenin 1919 Address to the First Congress of the Communist International.)
Time to Govern, Campaign Promises
Having overthrown the bourgeoisie the Bolsheviks had now to begin the real job of governing. At first most of this consisted of (A) cosmetic proclamations because there wasn't much else one could do overnight. By cosmetic I mean such things as changing the names of Ministries to Commissariat of this or that. ---And, (B) ``socialist government model building.'' For example, during the first weeks of the Revolution, Petrograd State Radio and the Government and Bolshevik press issued a long series of new laws to show what Socialism would have done, in the event they failed to hold onto state power longer than a few months. These radio producers intended to leave a ``model'' of what a workers state and government would look like, much as the Paris Commune had earlier left a
265more primitive model. But the real Bolshevik bosses were much more confident, and as history would soon prove, with good reason.
Also the Bolsheviks had (C) campaign promises to keep, such as (1) abolishing ranks in the Army and (2) giving the land to the farmers. Socialist proclamations of these sorts demonstrated the Government's desire to move in a fully socialist direction even if it didn't have the wherewithal at the moment.
However, history had outrun the pre-seizure Bolshevik program, by which I mean ideas about abolishing military ranks, and farmers seizing land, were ideas which the Bolsheviks were no longer entertaining. Now the army was theirs and this new Red Army needed officers, NCOs, and absolute discipline. Socialism was their ultimate program for farming (mechanization and collectivization) and the idea of a nation of small capitalist farmers (having divided up the land of the Lords for themselves) was no longer something the Party was interested in.
By ``not having much they could do overnight'', I mean that if this revolution had happened where it was supposed to (in classical Marxist terms we had expected an advanced capitalist country to take the point) the next day's business could have been a rather smooth transition to workers ownership of factories and the bureaucratic introduction of the Party's program more or less by the same people doing these things the previous day. However, Russia was where the revolution began because of the peculiar historical circumstance of V. I. Lenin and his ability to create an armed seizure, so Russia had become the ``trigger'' for world revolution.
All Marxists in Russia, including Lenin and his Bolsheviks, agreed that Russia could not be the homeland of world socialism precisely because it had not achieved the minimal necessary industrial or agricultural base. But it could become and in fact had become the trigger of the world proletarian revolution. At any rate, it would be in the area of propaganda, education and cosmetics that the Bolsheviks would first make their mark; then become equally well known to the world in the arena of military affairs.
Six Weeks Later
Establishing Proletarian State Power Part I --- The Police
Inside Snapshot RCP Politburo - December 20, 1917, Petrograd
Chairing and speaking was Vladimir Illych Lenin, Premier of the New Government. His audience this day in Petrograd (St. Petersburg; Leningrad) --- December 20, 1917 - was the Political Bureau of the soon to be named Russian Communist Party (b) (previously, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Bolsheviks, renamed as above March 6, 1918.)
``Comrades, you all know how serious the counter-revolutionary threat is to our government as our enemies, the Mensheviks, SR's, White Guardists and the rest of the aristocratic capitalist scum proceed with the procurement of weapons, explosives and munitions. Strikes are being organized by the same in some of our key sectors including banking and finance. So far we have been able to conduct limited operations against all of these threats utilizing our most loyal followers in the working class and within the Army. You all know Felix Dzerzhinsky who has been at the head of these special operations --- especially those designed to protect our leaders from assassination. For manpower he has
been able to rely heavily upon his own Latvian brothers in arms in the Rifle Division, as well as our Red Guards. Comrade Dzerzhinsky will proceed with a detailed report and set of recommendations.'' The baton passed. Dzerzhinsky, seated, reported.
``Comrade Politburo members, I am passing to each of you a copy of a Top Secret File, numbered one of seven, two of seven, etc. This file details each conspiracy we have detected. In each case we have sent in penetration agents to provide us with a steady flow of data and to be ready to act in a definitive way upon receiving orders. I will not read it to you. You can do that yourselves.
``In the meantime let me say that what I believe must be done and Comrade Stalin agrees, is we must create our own Okhrana. Yes, we have no choice. We have to create a secret police force to expand our counter-revolutionary vigilance and surveillance and it must have action units capable of carrying out orders to liquidate our enemies when so instructed or when it sees itself the need to do so. For the moment I have created the name ``All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Sabotage and Speculation.'' The initials will inevitably lead to its being called the Cheka for short.''
``So, Comrade Dzerzhinsky'' spoke Nicolai Bukharin ``barely two months after the workers and soldiers and poor peasants have seized power we are to recreate the Okhrana? The very organization which created hardship, misery, slave labor camps, torture and death against our class and indeed against us ourselves?''
``Yes Comrade Bukharin.''
``Well, I agree. We have no choice. But it is somehow very ironic is it not?''
``Yes. Hopefully, it will be most ironic for our class enemies. These are after all the worst people who have ever lived anywhere on the planet Earth and it is high time that they faced the consequences of millennia of oppression of working people and a multitude of enslaved nationalities.''
``Here, Here'' from everyone at the table.
``To begin with Comrade Stalin and I suggest we utilize eight commissars --- one for each department we foresee as necessary --- and a small but sufficient staff of our most reliable and intelligent comrades. Also, we need authority to investigate, enter, arrest and execute enemies of the people on our own initiative. Give me this manpower, subject to continual increase as need arises, and this legal authority, and I promise you I will stamp out every vestige of counter-revolution, given sufficient time.''
``How much time will you need to get a grip on this situation?'' asked Lenin.
``We have Petrograd close to being secured from domestic enemies but not from foreign invaders and they will come as you know Comrade Lenin.''
``Yes.''
``In this capacity I have found it necessary for planning to anticipate a civil conflict of several years duration. Perhaps a full-fledged civil war with the Whites and the foreign imperialists on one side and us on the other. So, the answer is, it will take years to fully root out all of these enemies. On the other hand we can secure, often through the use of revolutionary terror, our cities within a matter of a few months.
``As I was saying the initial imperialist invasions, other than the German which it goes without saying is already on our soil and accordingly is our first enemy, will be in the north around Murmansk and Archangel. Accordingly I am already dispatching agents north of Petrograd, to begin our counter-invasion partisan operations and to establish
long-lasting intelligence networks. As the fronts develop during the coming year we will be able to switch some of these individuals and perhaps entire partisan units to these new fronts to do the same thing. I have been able to find soldiers in the old army who have experience in counter-invasion partisan operations behind German lines and I am using some of them - all of them are under close supervision of loyal Party comrades. What we will need soon, and I have already begun the planning, is a Cheka school so we can mass produce field agents. We will needs thousands of these agents immediately and tens of thousands by the end of the first year.
``In short we have (i) internal domestic fronts for our Cheka commissars to attend to, and (ii) the areas under foreign occupation. Probably these domestic tasks will spontaneously evolve into the principal directorates of our Extraordinary Commission. The other sections being largely supportive in one fashion or another.
``There is the additional recommendation that the Sovnarkom, Premier Lenin and his Cabinet, be moved to Moscow from here in Petrograd. The Brits and the American's are already making for Murmansk and Archangel. The French and Germans could invade Petrograd directly and of course would have help from the Finnish reactionaries as well, not to mention all that scum standing by in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. We will end up tying-up our best agents, and our largest manpower reserves securing Petrograd if we do not move the Sovnarkom to Moscow.
``In short, we can and are securing our major cities as I speak, but we need full police and judicial authority to do so with maximum speed. ---And, this situation will go on for the duration of the civil conflict, however long that may turn out to be. After that, well, we will have to look at where we are then. That's it. Thank you Comrades.''
Lenin as Chairman and acknowledged leader resumed his role.
``A remark to begin with. Of course, we need to move the Government as soon as possible to a safe locale and that will obviously be Moscow. But, not yet. To move now would make it seem what it is --- we're on the run. If we get peace from the Germans and the Ukrainians, or at least Germany is in the process of signing a formal peace, then we can move and do so in triumph. But, we don't have long. The imperialists will soon see, if they haven't already, that our best forces could be crushed by a strong White Guard attack supported by their naval forces and marines, as long as the seat of Government is here in Petrograd. I have got to have a German peace first and we're depending on Comrade Trotsky to get that for us.
``Now as to the topic at hand, what do the rest of you think?'' Lenin asked.
Gregory Zinoviev spoke first. ``I think for now we should separate judicial and police authority. Not that I don't have full confidence in Comrade Dzerzhinsky, because I do, but because it is our intention to establish our own truly just system of Justice and I would like to see that get underway simultaneously with the creation of this police entity.''
``Anyone else agree with Comrade Zinoviev?'' Lenin asked. ``Because I tend to agree with him. For this very reason; we need to get our Justice system off the ground as soon as possible. But, given the conditions we now confront, and given the necessity of preserving ourselves before all else, these judicial authorities must be directed to work hand-in-glove with our new Extraordinary Commission at every level. After all, that is the way all capitalist governments work, and we must assume they know how to hold on to state power and simultaneously enforce their own system of Title Deed justice. If the
White conspiracy and their alliance with the Mensheviks et al, proves to be too dangerous we can grant full judicial authority then --- next week, next month, whenever. For now, can we all agree to support the recommendations of Comrades Stalin and Dzerzhinsky with this slight modification?''
All seven Politburo members present who were the only ones eligible to vote raised their hand, following Lenin, whose hand was already raised, indicating that there was a motion on the floor and that the time had come to vote. Stalin voted in favor of his amended motion. Dzerzhinsky being a guest remained silent. In this way the Sword and Shield of the Proletarian Revolution came into existence on December 20, 1917. A date which would be immortalized in Soviet history and would become the pay day date for many succeeding decades in the Red Secret Service. (The Soviet Government finally got its German Peace Agreement and moved quickly to Moscow.) Almost as an afterthought, Lenin remarked:
``I forgot. Should we not ask Comrade Dzerzhinsky to take command of the Extraordinary Commission?'' Lenin asked. The others agreed by voice vote.
``Now, to continue with our morning's agenda, let's hear from Comrade Trotsky on negotiations with the Germans. Then Comrade Stalin again. This time on his negotiations with the Ukrainian Central Rada. ---And, then from Comrade Stalin once more. This last time on the other work of the Nationalities Commissariat and the upcoming Congress and accompanying Declaration on the East scheduled for the Congress of Nationalities next month. First things first. Peace with Germany. Comrade Trotsky please take over.''
Establishing Proletarian State Power Part II --- The Army and Navy
Ranks Abolished for Three Months
Trotsky saw to it that Army ranks quickly returned under new names (1918), and Stalin eventually restored the officer's ranks under their old names (1935). Following the fateful accession of Hitler to power in 1933, the Congress of Victors in the winter of 1933-1934 and the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad Party Boss Sergey Kirov, Stalin was gearing up for the next great mobilization of the Soviet people, turning his attention to fully modernizing Soviet armed forces so as to be prepared to deal with any imperialist onslaught. ---And, the Congress of Victors (January 1934) marks a point only eighteen months prior to the first shot of World War II being fired against Bolshevism - the fascist uprising in Spain (July 1936)!
The older Russian system of rank names allowed officers and NCO's to carry their accomplishments on their sleeves, shoulders, collars or whatever, and these new officers were all educated according to Bolshevik doctrine. Stalin, accordingly, decided to reward them for their service during the great struggle for collectivization. An additional new rank of Marshall of the Soviet Union was introduced and Hero civil war Generals we have or will discuss in this volume, including Generals Tukachevsky, Voroshilov, Buddeny and Blyukher (also known as Galin in China where he led half of the Northern Expedition in 1926-1927 establishing a Left KMT government in Wuhan as I describe in the following chapter) were among the first to receive the honor in 1935.
For our purposes in this handbook I shall simply refer to Soviet officers by the
English equivalent term for their ranks regardless of what name was applied in Russian; as you can see there were two wholesale names change in officer's ranks and titles.
The always uneducated US Left often thinks these name changes had some (mysterious) ``proletarian'' significance other than what I have explained here, but they did not. Rank abolition had been an anachronism when it was announced (the original reason being to foment discord in the Czar's army). This outdated slogan was one principal way the Bolsheviks seized power and therefore, was a campaign promise they had to keep --- if only very temporarily --- (three months) and at least surficially to pay lip service to the idea of comradeship and equality in the now proletarian Russian army. Or, at least what was left of it (about 300,000 troops.)
Bolsheviks in Uniform: The Army-Party
Overnight a Party of intellectuals and workers transformed into an ``Army Party'', if you will, because their first task was survival --- i.e., military. Out of civilian clothes and into uniform went the Party leaders. By 1918 both Stalin and Trotsky, for example, had taken to military uniforms; for Stalin it was to be the costume he assumed for the rest of his life.
The Bolshevik Government managed to survive its toughest year, 1918. In the process the major second-string leaders of the Bolshevik cause in Russia (and the world) emerged clearly for the first time: Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Voroshilov, Frunze, Blyukher, Joffe, and many others. (There was only one leader of the first order of magnitude among the Bolsheviks in 1918, and that was of course, V. I. Lenin.)
This Civil War, which began immediately with the Bolshevik seizure of power, had to be fought on many fronts throughout 1918. But the Red Army managed to defeat all its enemies and all the capitalist countries too - for they all had troops on Soviet territory aiding the capitalist and feudalist enemies of Soviet power during the Red vs. White Civil War {1918-1920.}1919 was a tough year, but easier; in 1920, the Bolsheviks pretty much wrapped it up.
1921 featured suppression of farmer uprisings and the mutiny of the Kronstadt Naval Garrison so the fighting did not really stop for the Bolsheviks until 1922, when the last imperialist troops (Japanese) were withdrawn. In fact, the fighting in the south, against Islamic radicals, never did stop and would continue until 1939, although after 1922 the religious crackpots of all persuasions were no more than an irritation.
Leon Trotsky, you will recall was the very late coming Bolshevik, who had opposed Lenin since 1903, and only joined with Lenin in the summer of 1917. Now he was Commissar (Minister) for War, leading the Bolshevik effort in destroying the White and foreign imperialist forces.
When Trotsky transferred from the Foreign Ministry (Commissariat) to the War Department of both the Party (Red High Command) and the Government (War Commissariat) in March 1918 he inherited a thrown together army of some 300,000 former Czarist soldiers. Beginning with this, and a massive national recruiting drive and propaganda orgy, Trotsky fought on 14 fronts in four major ``theatres'' (north, south, east and west) simultaneously; brilliantly employing his interior lines for defense and offense, via the use of the railroads to transport troops and materiel from one zone on one side of the Soviet Republic to another zone on the other side, and the telephone and
telegraph. With his armored train full of propaganda, printing presses, and special troops Trotsky visited at least 36 different battle fronts during the course of the Civil War.
In the northern theater, against a fractionated enemy, Trotsky's spring 1918 offensive sealed off Russia north of Petrograd (later Leningrad) from Whites and invading US and UK forces, and then during the summer and fall of 1918 he pushed the Whites out of the classical Russian heartland and into the East; and in this eastern theater, forced them into and behind the Urals, (wherein 1919 they would be re-supplied by Japan, the USA, the UK, the French, and Italians.) Then, in late summer 1918, Trotsky turned his attention to the southern theater and the defense of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, being defended that summer and fall by Stalin and his handpicked men Budenny and Voroshilov,) and finally went on to deal with the Germans in the western theater.
266The latter collapsed for the Germans in late autumn and early winter of 1918, as a consequence of German communist uprisings at home. These revolts, in the Wehrmacht, German Navy and in the factories of Berlin and Bavaria, were aimed at establishing a ``Soviet'' type of power in Germany. The German capitalist gold ``Trojan Horse'' had backlashed and kicked the Junkers, fatally, in the head! Exactly, what Lenin had anticipated from the beginning.
The Red Army, now having more than tripled in size to 1,000,000 strong (by October 1918), saved the Bolshevik Republic in the fall of 1918 by recapturing Kazan, Simbirsk and Samara, solidifying the Soviet Republic's eastern frontier, recapturing the Czarist gold reserve, and getting the Kazan arms factories back into production. Trotsky was in command and deserves the credit.
Trotsky Re-establishes Ranks and Iron Discipline
But, as War Commissar, Trotsky's greatest contribution was in the reintroduction of professionalism into Red ranks which at the beginning of 1918 suffered from having been loaded with ``soldiers committees'' and all the egalitarianism that had gone along with the Bolshevik effort to subvert the Czarist army. Trotsky quickly reintroduced officer and NCO ranks using new titles and names, negating Soviet Order Number One that had abolished ranks in the military. (Red Army officers and NCOs would not get their old rank names back until 1935). New ranks were called ``democratic'' because they described a function such as ``platoon commander'' rather than lieutenant; ``company commander'' rather than Captain; ``battalion commander'' rather than major; ``regimental commander'' rather than lieutenant colonel; ``divisional commander'' rather than Colonel or Brigadier; ``Army commander'' rather than Major General, and so forth.
267During the imperialist world war the Reds had propagandized against the Czar's officers calling for democratic election of officers and the abolition of ranks. Now, however, one had to move on from campaign promises to the reality that a real tough military machine had to be created and that could not be done without absolute discipline and a super adherence to ranks (if under new names.)
Trotsky loved professional soldiering and appreciated the role that it plays in the state apparatus of whatever class happens to have state power.
During 1918 Trotsky subjected the newly created Red Army to the most severe discipline and demanded obedience from lower to higher ranks of both officers and
NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers --- i.e. corporals and sergeants), on the part of private soldiers. Trotsky introduced the practice of employing blocking units to prevent conscripts (largely farmers) from retreating (blocking units are positioned to shoot and kill your own men if they retreat.) ---And, he introduced the policy of ``decimation'', meaning the shooting of a disgraced unit's regular officers and political officers and every tenth private soldier for failing in the line of duty.
Furthermore, under Trotsky, it was not unusual for a private soldier to be shot for smoking or talking in ranks, while supposedly standing at attention. In fact, it was this love of professional soldiering that took Trotsky to the rather strange Bolshevik position of asserting absolute discipline within the previously loose command and control structure of the Red Guards. Or, for that matter, under the relatively lenient Czarist discipline.
Stalin vs. Trotsky II
At this time the Stalin-Trotsky schism was only incipient. They both nursed old hatreds, going back to 1907. But now it was Trotsky's love of using regular Czarist officers enraging Stalin and his military followers, who hated the whole idea. Before the Civil War concluded Trotsky had recruited over 75,000 former Czarist officers. He felt he had no choice as the Red Army grew to five and one-half million. As long as political officers were appointed as equivalents to each of these regular officers then the Reds should have no difficulty keeping control on, by definition, ``suspect'' officers.
Other differences were simply those that arise whenever there is a difficult military situation and different officers have different (each justifiable) views on tactical matters. Even in strategy, such are the exigencies of war, there may be several justifiable and opposite views on how to proceed.
---And, still other disputes reflected different ideological takes on military strategy For example, Trotsky favored armored mechanized delivery of infantry forces to the battlefield; Stalin on the other hand, while supporting the locomotive movement of Army units, also favored the use of cavalry and dragoons (mounted infantry) as the shock forces being delivered on their own power (horses). Trotsky felt his approach was Marxist because of the industrial aspect of rail and truck delivery as opposed to the more ``feudal'' use of cavalry and dragoons. If nothing else it shows me once again what I have always found to be my at-bottom most important opinion about Trotsky and that is the extreme ``shallowness'' of his thinking.
However that may be, by April, 1919, the long standing conflict between Stalin and Trotsky over many strategic policies and tactical decisions, resulted in Stalinists taking control of the five man Party Military Committee (known as the Red High Command) four to one (four Stalinists, including the new Chief of Staff Mikhail Frunze, and Trotsky). ---And, within the Party an officers group gathered around Stalin calling themselves the ``Military Opposition'', to the strategic and tactical policies of the War Commissar.
But, the new general staff worked out just fine and Trotsky grudgingly accommodated the majority, recognizing that they had good points and were often right. By the end of 1919, victories in all four front-line theaters (north, south, east and west) made it clear that the Bolshevik government was here to stay. Which meant the Stalinist Socialist Stage was here to stay. {Although, at the time no one would have suggested it
receive that name.}
In November, 1918, another Party reorganization of the military had placed Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in charge of all military activities. A decree having been issued earlier that declared all of the Soviet Republic to be a ``military camp'' and that its first task was military success. In effect these three had become the triumvirate governing the Soviet Republic with one (Lenin) far more equal than the other two. Under the triumvirate every civil resource was turned over to the military. Houses and apartment blocks in the cities were taken apart for fuel, and used as latrines when sewer workers were conscripted. Whatever was needed for industrial production was taken directly from the physical stock of the then existing nation and subordinated to a new military use. It was total mobilization and it worked.
268My properly congratulatory remarks about Trotsky's role in the Civil War should not be taken to mean that other Bolshevik leaders did not play important military parts. A great many did, and as you have seen, second to none was Joseph Stalin, who, among other military tasks assigned him by Lenin, led the struggle to defend Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) and the Red Army offensive to open the granaries of South Russia for the starving workers of Petrograd and Moscow, in 1918. ---And, after April 1919, many other worker generals of the Stalinist persuasion (e.g., Semyon Budenny, Mikhail Frunze, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Kliment Voroshilov) also played critical leading roles. Stalin often being sent by Lenin as chief ``investigator'' of military calamities suffered by Red forces. -And Stalin continued to play a leading command role until the very end of the Civil War. For example, Lenin sent him to defend Petrograd when threatened by White forces in 1919 and again gave him command of half of the forces being sent against Capitalist Europe in 1920. (Not to mention having already given him command of the international intelligence operations and other new secret activities of the Russian Party (1917) and those of the Communist International (1919).)
269Lenin's Relationship with Trotsky
Lenin had to know Trotsky had totally fucked up the 1920 Polish-German campaign. Yet he took personal responsibility and never seems to have held this unduly over the War Commissar's head. Why? Why does Lenin always seem to cut Trotsky so much slack? I think the answer is simple. Lenin needed a competent sparring partner.
For years he had kept Zinoviev close by in Switzerland even though he had to know Zinoviev suffered from the Russian intellectual predilection for endless talk and little physical action. I think for the same reason. That is, Lenin needed a foil. Especially one trained as a Russian intellectual, to keep fighting the mental chess games even though he might well be heading for checkmate.
Lenin's very first relationship with Trotsky had been in London in 1903 and had been friendly. In retrospect, I think Lenin appreciated something about Trotsky which he must have recognized at the time. He had to know Trotsky was not his intellectual equal but he also had to know that Trotsky was quite bright for a Russian bourgeois (albeit Jewish) youth and reasonably enough well-read to get as far as this group of London intellectual Social Democratic bosses.
The friendly relationship lasted only a few months and for the next fourteen years the two men were often at each other's throats. Lenin brought Trotsky on board as a
political expedient, as we have discussed, in the summer of 1917. But, from that time forward --- even after the final fight between the two at the 1921 (10th) Party Congress --- Lenin protected Trotsky from the other Old Bolsheviks --- again and again.
Why?
I think, and submit as speculation, for your consideration, that Lenin found Trotsky to be a needed foil --- arguing (sparring) partner --- as he developed policy. Lenin knew that none of the other Bolshevik leaders would ever really stand up to him if he argued vociferously against them. But Trotsky --- because of his seemingly inbred, arrogance --- always would.
Can the Bolsheviks Usher in World Revolution?
At this time the Bolsheviks were still uncertain about how long the working class dictatorship period (phase or Stage) was going to have to last before they could move on to true Communism. Lenin, in calling for a new and Third International (the Communist International or simply COMINTERN) wrote in his January 1919 ``Call'' for delegates from each country he picked (countries with Social Democratic Parties that had a ``Leninist'' type of cadre,) that he intended to fight with ``all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet Republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.'' (Emphasis added)
{Note that neither Marx nor Lenin saw their objective as being satisfied simply by achieving the Stage of Communism; in other words to them ``Communism'' as a Sociocultural Stage was just one more transitional Stage to a truly human society. The term Socialism, previously used almost synonymously with the term or idea of ``communism,'' came into widespread usage by Leninists for the kind of society they were trying to build in Russia at the time. That is, a ``transitional'' proletarian dictatorship kind of society. It is that definition of the term ``socialism'' which has become traditional, and to which I adhere in this text. In part, Marx's idea of Communism as a transitional stage is materialized in the way Leninists came to use the term Socialism. However, there is more to it than that. That is to say, even if part of what Marx envisaged as Communism is what we now think of as Socialism (the transitional part), part of what he envisaged is what we also now think of as that Stage no one has yet seen (from each according to her ability to each according to her desires and needs.)}
270Also, the real (material) way in which super-powerful and super-abundant technology will become manifest is now much more easily seen (as for example, I am prone to frequently pointing out) in such great film events as Star Trek, than it was in Marx's time. (It was Lenin, by the way, who called motion pictures the greatest art form in history.)
The point being that our further elaboration of the terms Socialism and Communism in the 20th and now 21st century makes it clear that both Marx and Lenin saw one or several transitional stages for humanity between Capitalism and a Truly Human society. For my part I think we can define the transition as having two ``socialist'' stages and the first stage of what Engels called the ``Era of Freedom'' will begin with Communism --- which itself will be just one more stage on the road ahead. Also, this allows us the freedom to engage in fruitful cross-cultural comparative analysis of the two
transitional periods in human history (1st and 2nd --- each with two stages.)
Stalin's Model
``Duplication''
Socialist Stage Expansion over the Earth
From Day One of the 1917 October Revolution the Bolsheviks were consciously building a Model of what we came to know as Socialism. You may recall Petrograd State Radio was broadcasting, literally 24 hours per day, the new laws of the Soviet Government. They did not do this because they could actually implement all of these sophisticated socialist programs and ideas. They did it so when they were overthrown (which the radio producer intellectuals still thought was the most probable end of the Bolshevik seizure of power) the world would have the MODEL of what Socialism as a real world sociocultural Stage should look like. A new and more advanced Paris Commune (1871) in other words. However the real bosses in the Politburo were much more ambitious, and successfully so, as we have been seeing.
271One of the two most important contributions of Professor Antonio Gilman to my own education was to focus my attention on this simple truth. Namely, the desired result from the first months and years of Bolshevik practical experience was to duplicate, one right after another, the pure model of socialism as developed in the Soviet Republic (1917-1924) and the Soviet Union (1924-1990).
This model projected an entire world looking like the US and its constituent States; one country after another joining the Union as history unfolded.
Ideally the world might eventually look like a Socialist Iowa with its 99 counties, each an exact duplicate of the other. That is to say each County with an equal sized amount of land, with one or a few towns. Each of these counties with a County Seat building that looks like a Statehouse. Each county with the same set of codified municipal and county laws and regulations, etc.
We can see the Leninist model beginning to take shape just by changing the name ``county'' to ``country'' and then the ongoing duplication of this structural model of Socialism in every country in the world. Of course the geographical and ethnically determined borders of various populations could never be equalized but even so each of the peoples would be given absolutely equal rights and responsibilities. Internationally, this was the practical immediate end-objective for the Party and each and every one of its cadre.
It was Stalin, who added to this view, by supposing Socialism would expand from its Soviet homeland, under Bolshevik (Comintern) aegis, to neighboring countries first. Stalin's thesis was based on the idea that experience had shown the capitalists as a class with a universal implacable nearly psychopathic anti-communism; this meant they would continue to attack socialism everywhere. As Stalin said in 1924 (Foundations of Leninism) these attacks would become even more dangerous and vicious now that Socialism was in power because the capitalists were even more scared of Bolshevism than before the revolution. (This formulation was a formalization of what Lenin had said in his Last Testament or Letter to the 13th (1924) Congress.)
272
Party Interests always take precedence over National Interests
Lenin and Stalin on the same page
As Stalin saw it as early as 1920, the future expansion of Socialism would surely require defensive war, and offensively the Red Army would be needed by Workers and poor and middle Farmers fighting their oppressors in their homelands. This need would be most easily met in those countries closest to Soviet power where the Red Army could actually get involved in protecting local Reds and extending the Socialist Stage in this cookie-cutter way. Furthermore, where Bolshevik insurrectionists needed help from Moscow against nationalist enemies Lenin said that ``class struggle interests always outweigh national independence interests.'' This cleared the way for the Red Army to get involved in the civil wars raging in former Czarist dependencies such as the Ukraine, Byelorussia (Belarus) and Georgia.
273Cookie-cutter Model
This was the center of Joseph Stalin's thinking about how to spread Socialism across the face of the Earth. While Stalin had nothing against revolution in lands far away from Russia he did think in practice Socialism would expand where it could be militarily and politically supported from Moscow and that would, of course, be in those nations bordering on Red Russia. But near or far every nation had to do only one thing and that was to duplicate exactly what the Russians had done in terms of constructing the Socialist Transition to Communism. This was a cookie-cutter model.
This had real positive and negative aspects which affected and directed the 20th century effort of Bolshevism to bring the entire globe into a pattern of Socialist (Transitional) construction. The model to be duplicated turned out to be the one emerging in 1934 with every aspect of a nation's economy being centrally planned. Workers in cities in charge of industry (via the Party and its trade unions) and workers in the countryside in charge of agriculture and animal husbandry (via the Party and its collective farms.) Everyone else gets trained for technical work including professions in science and engineering.
Now back to Europe.
Lenin to Liberate Europe
The key, to speed up the global transition from capitalism to communism, seemed to lie in linking up with more advanced working classes and their industrial bases, in Europe. Marxists in Russia and abroad, had always considered it essential that revolution would occur in the advanced capitalist countries first, so that the technological wherewithal for socialism would be in existence. Marx's theory of Historical Materialism proceeded from the scientifically derived conclusion that society had gone through a series of sociocultural evolutionary stages. Capitalism in this theory was proven to be a necessary precursor to socialism --- it was a ``given'' that the industrial and mechanized agricultural achievements of the capitalist stage would be essential as the foundation for working class political power. Marx had differed from the utopian socialists of his time, first and mainly, in this correct scientific assessment that the fully developed resources of capitalist technology would be necessary for, and acquired
274first, and before revolution of the working class variety could successfully unfold.
Russia had been seen by Lenin, accordingly, as simply the ``trigger'' to revolution in all of the capitalist countries. Now in power, the next step forward for the Bolsheviks, seemed to lie in triggering this world revolution, especially in these western European capitalist countries (or the America's or even Japan, yet it was Western Europe that was within Lenin's immediate reach.) Stalin's thesis that successful proletarian revolution would occur first where it could be directly supported politically by the Comintern and militarily by the Red Army and Navy was right in line with Lenin's Polish, German, European campaign plans of 1920. But, there were problems.
Germany
The German workers ended the World War at the close of (November)1918, when widespread self-styled ``Soviet'' (German Bolshevik) revolts in the German Army, Navy and in German factories scared the industrial magnates and landed aristocrats (Junkers) so badly that the Kaiser fled the country and the First World War was over. Then, in January, 1919, when workers could have seized Berlin and liquidated the Social Democratic care-taker Regime (a government the Wehrmacht put in power following the Kaiser's flight, and the ``surrender'' to the ``Allies''; a regime which the German bourgeoisie now prayed would save them from Bolshevism; a surrender agreement the care-taker government signed), and followed the Book of Lenin, they failed to do so. Instead they played at seizure and ended-up barricading themselves in several buildings, thereby managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!
275One important reason for their failure was the mass murder (in the World War) of millions of educated and radicalized German worker-soldiers, no longer present to play a decisive role. Another was the simple fact that there was no Leninist Party in Germany. The closest thing to Leninist in Germany was the Spartakusbund led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg.
Unfortunately, Luxembourg had unwittingly assured the defeat of the insurrection by angering the German farmers en masse with her ridiculous call for the seizure and collectivization of all of the agricultural land in Germany. Also, alienating in one fell blow the living farmer mass of the Wehrmacht (German Army.)
In the event, neither of these two proved to be anywhere near the quality of Lenin, and they failed in the crunch, miserably. This despite the fact that Lenin had sent a team of ``experts'' to help. In fairness to Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Russian Central Committee members, and soon to be Comintern leaders, Radek and Bukharin (also in the politburo), must be held equally responsible for the disgusting state of affairs that had resulted in the defeat of the proletarian insurrection in Berlin. These two, being among the luminaries in the Bolshevik advisory team Lenin had sent, went on to demonstrate that it had not been them primarily in charge of the October insurrection in Petrograd and Moscow.
Lenin should have sent Trotsky (who led the hour to hour uprising in Petrograd) or Stalin (who could have led it) --- people who had, or he knew could, get this thing done as they had in the past. Both were too busy. ---And, it didn't seem like it was such a tough assignment. All the Germans had to do was to stand up and repeat the offensive actions of 24 --- 26 October! In this rather simple boiler-plate task the Germans proved inept. As,
obviously, were their advisors.
Hungary.
Bela Kun did better in neighboring Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian territory, where Kun operated as directly under Lenin's supervision as distances of those times would permit. To begin with, Kun met with Lenin and left Petrograd (shortly before the Bolsheviks changed their headquarters to Moscow) for Budapest armed with plenty of cash and a small army of advisors. There he raised the banner of proletarian revolution and rallied the farmers to his side by pointing out that the Russian farmers had done what the Bolsheviks told them to do and had taken the land and now it was theirs. Kun quickly built an army of workers and farmers, using Russian Red Army cadre to help out, and defeated the armies of reaction on two separate occasions; as a consequence, Kun succeeded in establishing the Hungarian Revolutionary Government.
276The problem came when the new Hungarian Revolutionary Government's ``War Communism'' policy emerged as the permanent policy of the Government. After the farmers had a taste of permanently ``not getting paid'' they opted for a different kind of government.
The ruling classes of Europe had had time to catch their breath. The European bourgeoisie got lucky. Bela Kun had tripped over the ``War Communism'' part of the Bolshevik effort (meaning despite good intentions food from the farmers doesn't get paid for in any real way) as had Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. The newly capitalist farming classes turned against the Government in sufficient numbers to undercut the communist headway. As the Red support dwindled the capitalists managed to trap and defeat Kun`s army and to liquidate his communist government. Kun and his remnant forces would end up helping Russian Red Army General Frunze take the Crimea in 1920-21, after escaping Budapest for Russia.
If Lenin had gotten to the point of ending War Communism in Russia by 1919 instead of 1921, so that Kun would have had that model (NEP), the proletarian revolution would most likely have entered Germany via the Hungarian route. At the time of Kun's final defeat Lenin could not send sufficient Red Army forces to change the outcome. Even though the Red Army had reached one million soldiers by the fall of 1918 (and three million by August 1919) and was getting larger by the month, 1919 saw them deployed at distances too far from Budapest to reach there in sufficient time. Not that Lenin didn't look at the possibility closely. It would be 1920 via Poland as it played out before Lenin would get a shot at Western Europe again.
Poland
Then, in 1920, Lenin decided that the Polish capitalist-feudalist invasion of the Soviet Republic had given him the excuse to test Europe once again, this time with the bayonets of the Red Army. As the Bolshevik forces drove back Polish capitalist/feudal invaders, and their French and British allies, Lenin ordered the Red Army against Warsaw.
Thus, the previous (January, 1919) defeats of the poorly organized and led German workers would not have mattered a bit, had the forward march of Bolshevism
been successful, in the summer and autumn of 1920. Once in Germany the new German Communist Party would rise to greet their liberators and the reverses of the previous year (defeat of the insurrection in Berlin and the murder of its leaders) would be avenged and the failure of the first attempt in Germany rendered moot.
Stalin was in command of the Armies on the southern pincer of the summer 1920 Soviet offensive. He accomplished his objectives, in an orderly fashion, keeping an eye all the time on the breakout of the last of the Russian diehard White generals, Wrangel, from the Crimea, which was occurring simultaneously with the Red drive on Warsaw. Trotsky, in command of the northern pincer via his hand-picked general, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, (and the entire expedition) however, faltered; he failed to properly prepare and coordinate his attack --- he failed to cross the Vistula River and drive into Warsaw --- a critical preliminary step to the liberation of Berlin.
Trotsky's hand-picked men performed like amateurs, with 2nd Red Army Cavalry Commander, General Gai Gaia overshooting his objectives so far and fast, that rather than turning south and attacking Warsaw from its north, he ended up way to the west in Germany, his whole force being interned! Budenny might well have gone on and attacked Berlin but Gaia surrendered.
Tukhachevsky's commanders on the spot, directly in front of Warsaw in the east, failed to prevent the main body of the assault from being flanked. They left their Left flank entirely open and the Poles not being fools, and officered by French and British advisors, walked right through and turned Tukhachevsky's left flank.
(The French government sent a 400 man team of advisors and trainers to help lead Pilsudski's army, including Charles de Gaulle who would later also win Pilsudski's highest award for services rendered in the Battle of Warsaw 1920. Another large contingent arrived under General Weygand after the defeat of the Red forces in August, 1920.)
Why did a man of Trotsky's ability and experience allow such amateurish mistakes to occur? What happened to Trotsky's vaunted military genius?
Trotsky was confronted with more serious resistance by the foreign officered and advised Polish army than he had perhaps anticipated, but that was nothing unusual for Trotsky. Trotsky was a proven competent military commander at the highest level and had confronted far more threatening difficulties in the previous two and a half years, as had the entire Red Army. Furthermore the Red Army had grown to four and a half million when the project was decided and five million by the time it was underway (the largest still standing army in the world in 1920. He had overwhelming force.
The Polish-German expedition, by the way, was the focus of the 2nd Congress of the Communist International which was meeting in Moscow at the time and watching the daily combat reports coming back from the front. It was a period of the greatest excitement as it seemed as if the success of the ``world socialist revolution'' was at hand! Gregory Zinoviev, Lenin's long-time companion in exile, now Comintern President, had the previous year (1919), pronounced the European revolution all but accomplished, conjuring up the specter that the current conference would picture a Europe Red and liberated, wondering if things hadn't always been this way. At this year's convention (1920), Zinoviev had been jocular about his over-optimism of the year before, claiming that it might take an additional year or even two, to finish the job in Europe.
277Then Trotsky balked on the Vistula River, dropping the ball. History changed at
that moment. As history would have it the Bolsheviks would not get another shot at Europe until World War II. There was a lot of angry talk in Moscow of the ``we'll be backand soon'' variety, but it would not be until 1944.
This Hinge of Fate Had Far-reaching Consequences
After the August, 1920, debacle on the Vistula River, not only did the Red Army not get to Warsaw and then Berlin, but the Bolsheviks gave up considerable territory for peace. Shortly thereafter the armed struggle was over. ---And, so was the probability that socialist revolution in West Europe would happen in time to assist Russian workers in the great task they now confronted, of having to build the capitalist mode of production (technologically speaking) they should have inherited (in the program of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, anyway.)
Trotsky turned around at Warsaw not just because there were many workers and farmers in the Polish (foreign capitalist officered) reactionary armies, but, because he didn't have his heart in the entire project. In his autobiography (My Life) he says as much. I think he had already decided that Russia didn't need to link-up with the more advanced proletariat of Western Europe. He had decided that Russian workers could go it alone. They just needed a firm estafette on their backs to see that they did what they were capable of doing. I offer this opinion for what it is worth.
What we do know is Trotsky started this kind of talk in the latter part of 1919. He began transferring his military armies to the rear and converting, these demobilized military soldiers into members of new ``labor armies''. In the early part of 1920, he explained in Party circles, his view that labor simply needed to be militarized; he had been running the factories during the civil war that way. He was adamant in his rejection of any suggestion that the trade unions be allowed to run things, and now had converted military units into working ``labor army'' units in fields and factories.
Lenin stepped in at the 9th Party Congress in March of 1920, suggesting that the situation in Russia was so precarious that someone would have to protect the workers from their own state if Trotsky's proposals were to be given credence!
In my view, Trotsky imagined that the need to link-up with the German workers was no longer a life and death matter for the success of the world socialist revolution. If he had felt differently he would have been on the spot with his armies and kept both Tukhachevsky and Gaia on a short leash. He was very wrong. ---And, while history would prove that Germany was not quite a life-and-death matter for world Socialism, there is no doubt but that without advanced western European industry and labor the task confronting Bolshevism would be immensely more difficult. Trotsky's ultimate decision to retreat at Warsaw, in August of 1920, put the icing on the cake we call the Twentieth Century.
Trotsky's sudden conversion to ``internationalism'' (above and beyond that of all of the Bolsheviks) as the sole alternative to Stalin's mobilization of the Russian working population in the Five Year Plans (meaning the rescue of Russian Bolshevism by foreign workers having seized power from their capitalist ruling class) as his principal political argument against Stalin, would come much later when he was trying to build a new base at home and abroad. But there was nothing new at all here. All the Bolsheviks and many others (such as Trotsky's little, original pre-Bolshevik, group) had always been
convinced that international assistance from the advanced working classes of Western Europe would be essential and quickly forthcoming. There was nothing new about ``internationalism'' to Bolsheviks. What was new was building a modern infrastructure from scratch overnight.
---And abroad, Trotsky would succeed to a certain degree, in presenting the idea of his being the champion maverick anti-bureaucrat of the Bolshevik Revolution. (A kind of Russian John McCain). However, it was a hard line to sell to most communists in the 1930's when it was obvious to the world that it would be harder to be harder on the Soviet bureaucracy than Stalin was being.
Trotsky's lack of interest in Lenin's program to use military force to enter capitalist Europe and open the road to proletarian revolutionary linkage to Germany with the Red Army, had led to critical errors in the preparation of the European campaign. Overall there were many errors. Supplies were mishandled and never put into proper sequence to follow up the rapid advance anticipated. Trotsky apparently never knew even how many men he was sending under Tukhachevsky and Gaia. -And, military communications, long a sore spot between Trotsky and the Stalinists, were abysmal in the event.
In retrospect it is clear that not the least of Trotsky's errors consisted in putting the 27 year old General Mikhail Tukachevsky (who at the time was still somewhat of an unabashed admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte) in command of the biggest army the Bolshevik's had ever fielded (somewhere between half a million and 800,000 men out of the then five million man Red Army were assigned to take Warsaw and then Berlin.) A campaign of this size requires a supreme commander who excels in G3 (Operations and operational planning), G1 (human resources) and G4 (Supply). And, it takes time --- far more time than Trotsky and his hand-picked staff allotted to prepare for the European expedition.
A (post-World War II) Dwight D. Eisenhower type of experienced military mentality would have been the far better choice. Why? Because the sheer size of ``theater'' operations turns the whole thing into an assembly line industrial type of operation where small and even divisional unit tactical knowledge is of secondary or even tertiary importance. In other words theater operations succeed or fail according to whether the weight of converging fronts is overwhelming, or not. A matter of size and timing. A matter of supply and full TO&E and a proper Order of Battle correctly executed temporally.
General Tukhachevsky had a string of victories to his credit by the time he received command of the European Theater's Main Forces, from the Party. But, he had never before commanded a force of the size now contemplated.
General Mikhail Frunze, who had been with Lenin since 1903 (paying dearly for his loyalty by spending ten years at hard labor in Czarist captivity for his role in the 1905 revolution), and who had played a heroic role during the 1917 period preceding and during the October Revolution, would have been a far better choice. Frunze also had a string of Civil War victories to his credit, but they were of an entirely different variety.
Those of you aware of recent developments in what was Soviet Central Asia may recall the recent turmoil in Bishkek in Turkistan. It was here in the Kyrgyz part of Bishkek, Mikhail Frunze was born in 1885. It was then a Czarist Army garrison town. His father was an immigrant from Bessarabia (Romanian).
Young Michael went through the primary grades in Bishkek, High School in Verny, and College in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd; then Leningrad). In St. Petersburg, Frunze joined with Lenin in the formation of the Bolshevik Party in 1903. In 1904 he was exiled from St. Petersburg by the Okhrana (Czarist Secret Police) for participating in Bolshevik demonstrations. During 1905 he ran the local Textile Workers Union in a strike which coincided with other uprisings kicked off by the Czar's catastrophic naval defeat by Japan off the coast of Korea. As the Okhrana, and the Czar's Cossacks, suppressed the 1905 Revolution in armed struggle in St. Petersburg, Frunze was arrested, sentenced to death and then pardoned to ten years at hard labor.
Frunze Seizing Moscow
Frunze escaped in 1917 and made his way to Minsk, capital of Belarus (Byelorussia) where he led the Bolshevik fraction in the Provisional Government. Then on the eve of the October Revolution Frunze moved a Regiment of Red Guards and hand-picked soldiers to Moscow under cover. On the 26th of October they kicked off the armed struggle which lasted over ten days before all enemy groups were liquidated, the Kremlin seized and the city in the process of being secured from die-hards. It was Moscow Lenin had wanted to seize first. In the event, the choice of beginning the takeover in Petrograd was proven the wiser course.
Frunze, like most of the other Old Bolshevik officers, took an early dislike to Trotsky because he, and they, felt his, and their, role was being terribly denigrated. As time proceeded Frunze had to be ``calmed down'' by his friends, including Joseph Stalin from time to time, as he tended, while drinking, to call for Trotsky's execution at inopportune moments. Especially after the debacle Trotsky and Tukhachevsky created at Warsaw (below.)
Tukhachevsky played the game much like his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, in forced marches, surprise encirclements; massed use of artillery followed by rapid infantry strikes, and ultimately marched the endless columns of the rapidly expanding Red Army into areas being occupied. These occupying troops subdued by their enormous size much potential opposition, just as Napoleon had used his famous many miles long, ten men wide, columns of French farmer soldiers to subdue Feudal Europe.
Frunze in the Civil War
Frunze, in 1918 and 1919, moved methodically from town to town and objective to objective like a well-oiled military machine. So much so that the Party Press (which by late 1918 was the only press) had taken to referring to his victories as those of the ``methodical Frunze''. Frunze proved to be born for high command, and had a record of excellence in logistics, and TO & E (tables of organization and equipment). But Frunze was too closely associated with the Military Opposition and Trotsky would not have him.
Despite being outvoted in the Red High Command four to one, Trotsky could always count on Lenin to support him when the chips were down and the stakes were high. Once again Lenin let him have his way. Instead of giving Frunze command of the European Theater, Trotsky sent Frunze to the south to counter Wrangel --- but he waited too long for that, giving Wrangel time to offset the pace of the European campaign by
threatening Stalin's Left as Stalin approached Poland.
Tukhachevsky Concludes the Civil War
---And, Trotsky appointed, as Tukhachevsky's second and cutting sword, a cavalry adventurer (General Gai Gaia) to take command of the new and specially formed 2nd Red Cavalry Army. Gaia so far overshot his objective in Poland as to end up in Germany, with no choice but to surrender to internment (as his rear had by then been occupied by White Polish troops) demonstrating by his conduct that cavalry require the correct commanders too. Gaia proved he was no Budenny.
I would bet my bottom dollar that Budenny in that vise would have gone on and attacked Berlin! We will never know. But there had been no reason for Trotsky and Tukhachevsky to experiment with Gaia in the first place, except that General Semyon Budenny was another Stalinist.
You should also note that Trotsky had opposed the introduction of cavalry into the Red Army for some time, arguing instead the use of railroad transported troops, and had only come around to Stalin's way of thinking (build up the Red Cavalry striking arm) after White Cavalry forces had so decimated his rear in the South as to force him to admit that Stalin and his men (Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budenny, the commander of the Konarmia or 1st Red Cavalry army) had been right all along.
However, most serious was Trotsky's failure to assure close combat command and control of this European expedition. Trotsky was in Moscow or in the South during the entire thing. His chief opponent, Joseph Pilsudski, (in charge of both the Polish ``government'' he had created with the collapse of German control and his own cobbled together army) who had invaded Soviet territory, was now at the end of his tether, and was backed up against the wall at Warsaw. But Pilsudski was right with, and literally on top of, his men.
Pilsudski was left to face the Number One Trotsky had sent --- i.e. Tukhachevsky - who wasn't there either! Tukhachevsky was in Minsk --- 300 miles from the battle front. Radio communications were not what they should have been and were later blamed for Gaia missing his Left turn to come down on Warsaw from the north. ---And, the Red cipher had been broken by the Poles (the code-breaker won Pilsudski's highest award in 1921) so that Pilsudski was reading Tukhachevsky's mail and the communications of his officers.
This Polish code-breaking resulted in the British getting their hands on an ``enigma'' military encoder-decoder sometime after 1921 from which they built their World War II ``ultra'' German secret code-cracking program. This worked because the Germans had found an enigma machine too, in Poland, during the 1920 Battle of Warsaw, and they would incorporate it as the basis of their Signals and Cipher system! Thus, this German military encoding machine became simultaneously an exclusive asset of British intelligence and would play a critical role in World War II. Stalin's penetration of that asset via Kim Philby would turn the tide of World War II at Kursk and of the post-War world with the Soviet atomic bomb. Stories for another book.
Back at the ranch, outside Warsaw, Trotsky allowed an inexcusably large gap of at least fifty miles to exist between the ``right'' of Stalin's forces moving on Lvov and Tukhachevsky's ``left,'' heading for Warsaw. The Poles and their foreign advisors
correctly broke through the massive Red onslaught exactly at that point, dealing death and destruction to Tukhachevsky's forces on his entire, now exposed, left flank, while his cavalry army on the ``right'' crashed crazily forward into Germany. It was the Katzenjammer Kids meet the Bowery Boys, with Abbot and Costello thrown in. ---And there was no excuse for this amateurism in combat --- especially for an Army with as much experience as the Red Army in the summer of 1920. An army which had as much weaponry and munitions as it had ever had, not to mention the massive forces deployed and the four and one half million men in reserve! If Trotsky had been there this would not have happened. If Tukhachevsky had been there it would not have happened.
Trotsky's adherents would later blame the attack of Wrangel from the Crimea for Trotsky's ``inability'' to devote sufficient time to the Polish-German campaign. ---And, in fairness, it is true Trotsky had to rush south to rally the forces to turn the tide back against Wrangel and force him back into the Crimea. However, it is equally true that Stalin, Voroshilov and Budenny already had the situation well in hand, at least to the degree they had one eye on Lvov as they moved forward at a measured pace and another on Wrangel --- in fact, it is for that reason they were moving methodically on Poland and Germany in case their forces would have to be switched back to the south --- which indeed happened in November, when the Stalinist Chief-of-Staff Frunze took command personally of the south. Frunze arrived within two weeks of Trotsky's appearance there, and began preparing the campaign to liquidate the Whites once and for all in the Crimea (which he accomplished.) At any rate, as the Party and the Army saw it, that was no excuse for Trotsky's Number One Campaign Boss failure to be there --- General Tukhachevsky was in Minsk over 300 miles from the battle front at Warsaw.
278Stalin vs. Trotsky III
---And, something of great import happened when Trotsky and Stalin fell out over how Stalin was to use his forces, now precariously balanced between Warsaw and the South --- Lenin ordered Stalin to obey Trotsky (who was ordering Stalin to transfer the Konarmia --- or first Red Cavalry Army of Budenny - to Tukhachevsky) and Stalin refused! Perhaps it was about this time, in the late summer and the fall of 1920, Lenin first realized Stalin was now his own man.
George Zhukov
Another man was learning important lessons during this conflict and that was the newly appointed, 24 year old, Konarmia (First Red Cavalry Army) Sergeant of Cavalry George Zhukov (1896-1974). Zhukov, beginning as a private soldier, would eventually be Stalin's pick to command all Red Army battles of World War II. You can see he was trained in this environment and that his politics from the beginning were Stalinist of the Budenny (Stalin) variety, and why.
The War Goes On
However these developments may have been, Stalin was right to proceed carefully, as he did, closing on the eastern Polish industrial city of Lvov, near the Soviet
West, all the while keeping a close eye on Wrangel in the South, as events would prove. Had Stalin followed Trotsky's orders and thrown his (Budenny's) cavalry forces into the Polish meat grinder (Tukhachevsky had allowed to swallow up the cream of Red Army forces outside Warsaw,) the Bolsheviks would have been severely handicapped in retaking the southern Soviet territory Wrangel had captured, and White Crimea. Frunze was going to need Budenny's Konarmia (First Red Cavalry Army) since Gaia had lost his (the 2nd) Red Cavalry Army to interment in Germany! Not to mention the possibility that the super-inflated hopes of the imperialists with the Poles could have kept a new offensive against Moscow going from the West! (When Stalin acceded to Lenin's orders Budenny did take a terrible beating, but fortunately was able to withdraw his forces sufficiently intact to take on their next assignment; helping retake the Crimea.)
279In retrospect it is clear that Lenin should never have allowed the Polish/German expedition of the Red Army to fail. He should have gone to the Vistula, perhaps with a new contingent of whatever numbers of troops were necessary, and certainly to put order back into the Red Army, redeployed them for attack, properly prepared the reserves, and then punched through to Berlin.
Berlin is only a hop, skip and a jump from Warsaw. The failure to take it in 1920 meant that millions upon millions of lives would have to be spent to take it 25 years later in 1945! It was the greatest single mistake of the entire Bolshevik experience. ---And, it doomed the Party and the Republic to having to build ``socialism in one country.''
On the other hand, had German workers been linked-up with the Bolshevik Soviet Regime in Moscow the entire course of the 20th century would have been totally different. It is quite likely that the transition into true Socialism would have been much smoother. There would have been no Hitler --- no Nazis. Instead it took until 1975 to come to an accommodation with the world Capitalist Stage, and get on with the business of constructing the industrial base for Socialism (this time in China.) With the idea in mind of later building toward Communism so that one might finally achieve the truly humanist society we now hope to see by AD 2100. (As for example one might picture as having the technology and social relations of the Star Trek era).
We know that Stalin anticipated that the Red Army would meet with the same kind of resistance in the Ukraine and Poland that it had met all along on Russian territory. He gave oral and written detailed instructions to his secret police troops and inspectors as to the handling of situations where workers and farmers had been deluded into fighting in the armies of reaction. As they had been instructed before, in the previous two and one half years of civil war in Russia proper.
Stalin was ready. If he had been in command instead of Trotsky the Red Army would have been properly prepared, equipped, officered and deployed, and might well have gone on to Berlin, after taking Lvov and Warsaw - then Milano and Paris - all of Europe might have been Red by 1922! But, it was not to be.
Trotsky's Fall Begins in 1920
---And, the Party would never forgive Trotsky for this catastrophic failure. His power base evaporated rather quickly after the Polish debacle, because he had lost the Party's respect and the Army's too. No battle or campaign had ever been more important to Bolshevik success than this one, aimed as it was at linking Russian workers
with advanced western European workers. In this Trotsky failed abysmally for no good reason. This perception he could not afford, given the fact that for two years the Old Bolshevik officer corps had often been uniformly opposed to his policies.
Now let us look at the consequences that did unfold when Trotsky pulled the Red Army back at Warsaw and Lenin let him get away with it. For, without German, Italian, French, English, US or other working classes to help industrially backward Russia there was nothing left for the barely born Russian Soviet Republic but to improvise. Without foreign workers to assist, the Bolsheviks would have to choose between surrendering, and building by any means necessary the essential industrial base.
Stalinist Socialism Inevitable ---And in One Country
Soviet Russia would have to go it alone. With, of course, those Republics that had gained freedom from Czarism and were now being brought into a greater Soviet confederation by their own Bolsheviks. This was clear to just about all the leaders of the Bolshevik Party by 1922. In 1924, following Lenin's January death, Stalin formally called for pursuing Bolshevik objectives without foreign assistance and thus began the Soviet policy of building ``socialism in one country.''
A year later, in April 1925, Nikolai Bukharin published his paper (at the Politburo's direction) on the subject, entitled Can We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat? ---And, the following year, 1926, Stalin developed the plan even more fully in his On the Issues of Leninism, (not to be confused with Foundations of Leninism, Stalin published in 1924. My favorite book by the way; the reason I named my first textbook Foundations of Archaeology.)
The Party press would soon begin every story with: Might have been, Could have been, Should have been, Used to be, would be, Will Be. Emphasis now would be on production targets, past, present and future, not for a description of the fate of various political struggles for World Socialism. After August 1928, the focus of the Party, its Government and its State, was on the achievements of socialism in the ``construction fronts'' of the Five Year Plans. ---And, along these lines the Comintern followed.
Domestic Consequences 1921
The New Economic Policy (NEP)
In 1921, Lenin restored Capitalism in the Soviet economy because he no longer had any choice. Now that there would be no European workers to assist within the foreseeable future, a retreat from War Communism was unavoidable.
Liquidating the First Kulaks
Committees of the Poor
The farmers had been held in de facto serfdom before the Revolution, only slightly modified to allow the introduction of boss run (``fist'' or ``kulak'' run) capitalism in agriculture. The Reds had given the farmers the land of the Feudal Parasitocracy which they had already seized. These land occupations and seizures began sporadically while
the capitalist Provisional Government was still in power and when it could it tried to send troops to ``restore order'' meaning get back the properties of Lords and Kulaks when and where they could. However both the SR's and the Bolsheviks went to work after October 1917 establishing Committees of the Poor to go after the Kulaks and their land. By the end of 1918 the old Kulaks were dead or in exile. For the moment what were left were mainly small farmers and very small farmers.
The farmers knew the Whites would restore the old order, take back the land, and who knows what retribution might be in store. So, they put up with the idea of not getting paid right away --- taking all kinds of specie (IOU's) in exchange for agricultural produce the Reds needed to feed the Army and the cities. But these newly liberated farmers had in mind becoming capitalist farmers and when the Civil War ended they expected to get paid - at least for what they had to sell now and the specie could be resolved with the Government later.
However, the Bolsheviks had not given up on their ultimate plan to socialize agriculture and wanted to continue the policy of exchange in a kind of barter form. A policy which never worked out for the farmers because the cities really had nothing to exchange.
So at the beginning of 1921 these would-be capitalist farmers, having expected the return of ``normal'' market conditions (as the War had concluded as far as they were concerned), were revolting all over Russia. Farmer revolts were most threatening in the Tambov region (part of classical eastern Russia) and were suppressed only by massive deployments of regular Red Army forces under General Tukhachevsky, who now reassigned to domestic ``police'' operations, had to resort to heavy doses of poison gas to subdue rebel forces holed up in the forestry. It worked.
The farming masses were demanding a reintroduction of a market economy; they would have destroyed the Bolshevik government if they didn't get it --- and many of those previously among the Bolshevik's strongest supporters, such as the sailors of farmer origin at the Kronstadt naval base (which mutinied in 1921) turned against Lenin as the Red Army liquidated their friends and relatives back home so that they then had also to be suppressed bloodily by the Red Army. They were.
But Lenin saw that the underlying problem of unhappy farmer masses required a strategic retreat. The farmers had taken the Party in hand and won their war for the moment even though they had lost all the battles. War Communism had to go.
It is important to note that Trotsky had first proposed ending War Communism and restoring the market economy after working with the farmers of the Urals in 1919-1920. It would take Lenin, as we have seen, until the early part of 1921 to concur. In this case experience on the ground had taught Trotsky that the way to deal with the farmers was gradual --- accepting where they were, in their consciousness, at the moment, and agreeing to let that continue until an appropriate time down the road.
The Government had far more important things to deal with first --- that is, before worrying about socializing agriculture, the Bolshevik government had much to do in the cities and everywhere else in the cultural as well as economic commanding heights it now controlled.
The new policy of ``controlled capitalism'' was called the NEP or New Economic Policy. {It went into effect by Lenin's fiat in the spring of 1921; the law creating it was published on the 9th of August of that year.} It lasted through the summer
of 1928 after which the First Five Year Plan went into effect.
As early as 1922 however, Nikolai Bukharin was able to outline the Bolshevik schema for Economic Organization in Soviet Russia, the title of his paper first published in March of that year (again, at the Politburo's direction.) What strikes this observer today most strongly is the similarity between the logic and program developed by the Bolsheviks in their New Economic Policy (NEP) with that of Deng Xiaoping and associates in post-1978 China.
Making NEP Work
Stalin's Great Industrial Espionage Program
1921
``Koba, thank you for your time. I know this Tambov thing is keeping you busy but this is important too.'' Speaking was Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky.
``Of course it is. Anyway, Tukhachevsky, for once, has everything in hand out there. That's why we scheduled this. So brief me.''
``If we are to make this NEP thing work we have to be able to purchase, in sequence, those things we need most for the key industries. If we say war industries are of first importance than we need to build up our iron and coal mining, steel manufacturing, machine tool construction, and finally the military and ordnance factory machinery itself.
``If we could buy this stuff from the advanced, needless to say capitalist, countries that would be one thing. Assuming we could get credit from capitalist banks as any other sovereign government can. However, none of that applies to us. We are anathema to the capitalists --- they will sell to us only for cash up front.
``Assuming we can't engage in normal international economics we have no choice but to steal what we need.''
``I know. I agree.''
``I can do this through the Foreign Economic Intelligence Directorate as you know.''
``You already are Felix.''
``Koba look at the TO & E we have created to do just this one task of modernizing our war industries. This is the only copy and it is for you.''
``So what is your point? It's going to be expensive?''
``Yes. Very expensive and you are the only one who can assure us we will get the support we need. Neither I nor my staff want to initiate a program such as this which will absorb so much of our ready foreign reserve cash for many years, if it is going to be subject to reversal for some internal Byzantine reasons known best to the Politburo.''
``Let me study the specifics. I'll get back to you on those. However, as long as I am in charge of these matters you can be assured that only the Red Army will have a higher priority and perhaps not even them. Felix I know what we have to do. If you had not made specific proposals along these industrial espionage lines for long term work I would have done so. Let me suggest we ask Lev (Feldbin; Alexander Orlov) to draft his ideas on a long term program and recruitment of the intellectual workers who will be employed in key capitalist industries.
``You prefer him over Menzhinsky:''
``No, not really. Mezh is as loyal a comrade as there is. But Lev is a genius. He was smart enough to see through his father's Zionism and find Marx and then Lenin and finally us. His work in the North, then in the Polish campaign and finally in liquidating our enemies in the Caucuses, was superb. Now, we might see what insight he has, given his cosmopolitanism, with regard to work in Milano, Torino, Berlin and London. Now, if there is nothing else
``Thank you Koba for your time and your support.''
``Unto death do us part Comrade.''
Foreign Policy Consequences
In 1922, on the 16th of April, Lenin's diplomats, led by the aristocrat Bulgarian Trotskyist, Christian Rakovsky, negotiated the Rapallo Pact (Rapallo is a small seaside town just to the south of Genoa, on the Italian Riviera) with the new German Capitalist government of the Weimar Republic. It was the cornerstone of the new Leninist foreign policy up and until the Second World War which began for the USSR on June 22, of 1941. All in all, Lenin's peacetime foreign policy doctrine (keeping the imperialist encirclement divided) lasted nearly twenty years. In new form, it continued as the wartime policy of Stalin as the Alliance of the USSR and the English-speaking World.
The Rapallo treaty had key public features including (1) the mutual recognition of each of the signatories as the legitimate governments of Germany and Russia. Thus, Germany became the first capitalist country to formally recognize the Bolshevik Regime. (2) The Bolshevik government renounced all reparations (payments for damages caused by the World War) from Germany that Russia was due under the Versailles Treaty. An extensive (3) ``most favored nation'' trade agreement was worked out between the two. Most importantly, perhaps, was (4) the "secret protocol" that allowed the Wermacht (German Army) to train its troops on Soviet soil, with whatever weapons they liked. Since the Versailles Treaty banned many things to the German Army this was of critical importance. Also, (5) secretly, the Germans agreed to continue what they had already been doing, which was building arms factories in Russia for the Red Army. Cash was king and the Bolsheviks, in power, had plenty of that. The Wermacht had accordingly responded, thus the military factory construction organized by Leon Trotsky.
280As a matter of interest, it was in the Soviet Union that German Army officers, training under the provisions of the secret protocol of the Rapallo Treaty, would learn their soon-to-be famous ``blitzkrieg'' parachutist and armor tactics from Red Army General Tukhachevsky.
In the 1920's and 1930's the USSR would have the most advanced military forces in both equipment and doctrine in the world. Including the pioneering of ``Deep Operations'' theory (in the 1936 Field Manual for the Red Army it is synonymously referred to as Deep Battle) which featured advanced ground attack aircraft and heavy tanks moving in squares and probing deep along openings in an enemy's front, with the idea of preparing the way for a ``permanent offensive'' to exploit the collapsing enemy rear, preventing him from redeploying his forces in any planned fashion.
So, the Red Army went over to the defensive posture of guarding Soviet frontiers
and preparing for the next imperialist onslaught. But the Comintern did not. The Comintern went onto the offensive!
In Requiem
``The defensive period of the worldwide war with imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war.'' So, Lenin summed up the logic underlying the original decision to test Europe with the Polish campaign, in his September 20th, 1920, Political Report to the Central Committee of the Russian Party's 9th All-Russian Conference. -And without much further ado Lenin accepted the responsibility for, and the results of, the disastrous campaign into Europe. But the defensive wars against imperialism were over for the moment and the Bolshevik Republic standing alone, albeit unrecognized by the great capitalist powers, was at least not under attack. (For more of Lenin on this I recommend The Unknown Lenin, 1996, Richard Pipes, Yale University Press.)
281Lenin Parting Ways with Trotsky --- March 1920 to March 1921
Between the 9th and 10th Party Congresses
The split between Trotsky and Lenin in 1920 over (1) ``labor armies'', at the 9th Party Congress and the ``militarization of the proletariat'' debate of the spring, was now exceedingly exacerbated because of (2) the summer failure in Poland. It would deepen in a few more days when (3) Lenin took on Trotsky over the Trade Union question almost as if he were an enemy.
On December 30, 1920, Lenin kicked off the attack on Trotsky and his Trade Union thesis with a 27 page explanation of Trotsky's mistakes in a paper by the same name: The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky's Mistakes.'' It began:
``My principle material is Comrade Trotsky's pamphlet, The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions. When I compare it with the theses he submitted to the Central Committee and go over it very carefully, I am amazed at the number of theoretical mistakes and glaring blunders it contains. How could anyone starting a big Party discussion on these questions produce such a sorry excuse for a careful thought out statement? Let me go over the main points which, I think, contain the original fundamental theoretical errors'' (Lenin 1920 page 2 as above.)
This is one of the most important of Lenin's papers of that time and you should study it closely to see the arguments and problems of the time and how Lenin stands heads and shoulders above the others. One might say an intellectual giant among intellectual pygmies. By seeing how the Party was confused and misled so often around the complex issues of production (parity, priority, coalescence, etc.)
Note how Lenin speaks to them as a professor speaks to students. ---And, they accept that precisely because that is exactly the relationship Lenin has come to have with his followers. Most importantly see how the problems confronting the Bolsheviks now in production were simply those they inherited when they failed to inherit a fully developed capitalist stage economy. Just the opposite. They had inherited the most primitive capitalist stage economy imaginable, in a country wanting to move ahead but so primitive technologically in the cities and the countryside as to be completely unprepared to build
socialism, at least without the estafette of Bolshevik governmental and state power.
One, two, three, great Party divides between Lenin and Trotsky occurred during that fateful twelve months from March 1920 to March of 1921. By the end of 1920 Lenin had had his fill of Trotsky. By the beginning of 1921 Trotsky and Lenin were on different pages.
Permanent Revolution or Permanent State and Government
Trotsky's initial claim to fame came from his development of the thesis first presented by George Plekhanov. Namely, the concept that the Russian bourgeoisie was too economically and politically weak to fully complete the bourgeois (capitalist stage) revolution. Trotsky's development of this thesis was that the working class led by its revolutionary Party would help the bourgeoisie complete their revolution against autocracy and for parliamentary democracy --- but --- in the process would itself take the lead and turn the capitalist revolution into a proletarian revolution non-stop. He called this the thesis of Permanent Revolution.
Lenin's reaction to this thesis was one of relative indifference. In other words, he thought this may well be true with regard to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie. However, the central point is our policy must always lead the workers toward proletarian dictatorship regardless of the condition of the bourgeoisie. In other words, Lenin saw Trotsky's thesis as essentially true, but merely true. Irrelevant and immaterial.
By 1921 Trotsky's thesis had undergone much transformation and Trotsky himself engaged in much gratuitous rewriting of history to explain his pe-1917 history of anti-Bolshevism. But, the central change in Lenin's thinking was his understanding that what Bolshevism now confronted was the need for a relatively permanent state apparatus. In other words a ``permanent'' coercive State to hold power against our class enemies and a ``permanent'' Government to oversee construction of the essential industrial base they should have inherited from the capitalist stage but did not. By ``permanent'' Lenin meant several decades at least. What Lenin wants, and says again and again very clearly, is a Party devoted to the practical side of building a new economy NOT a lot of bullshit intellectualizing.
282Statistics on proposals and decrees are what are needed not poorly thought out intellectualizing about Soviet Trade Unions. Real analysis of real reports on real production matters. Read Lenin's paper on The Trade Unions and Trotsky's Mistakes (above.)
So, in short, the idea that Bolshevism could advance worldwide by relying on pressing the bourgeoisie hard everywhere and breaking through here and there via proletarian insurrection --- i.e., Permanent Revolution --- was now distinctly at odds with the 1921 Leninist position that the Party's primary task was to consolidate state and governmental power and get on with the process of industrialization which was essential to build socialism anywhere --- i.e., the Permanent Bolshevik State and Government
To paraphrase and sum up, Lenin says,
``this understanding is the only theoretical justification for leaving ``war communism'' for NEP. The practical reason --- our survival --- is another reason altogether. Now we have to make NEP work or we have only been deluding ourselves about being
able to build what we should have inherited. Although, because we have survived we may yet get the chance to succeed globally, even if we fail in industrial construction.''
How to Do It? Incentives and Mass Mobilization
Despite a century to come of ultra-left proclamations about ``moral incentives'' to increase production, as in extreme examples in power, from Trotsky to Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) and Pol Pot, we know how those would have come out or in actuality, as in China and Cambodia, did turn out, after achieving what their bosses considered to be full state and governmental power. -And when commensurate steps in industrialization were not synchronized in a Stalinist way right alongside moral incentives. This despite the fact, it was always a fundamental Marxist ``given'' that WE HAVE TO HAVE THE FULLY DEVELOPED INDUSTRIAL BASE OF CAPITALISM BEFORE IT BECOMES POSSIBLE TO BUILD REAL SOCIALISM LET ALONE COMMUNISM. Nothing could change that scientific fact and the Bolshevik leaders were real Marxists --- i.e., real social scientists. Eventually, the cold and clearly logical Bolshevik leaders of the 1920's had to win out over their more romantic colleagues, if for no other reason than because the Stalinists (and Latter Day Chinese equivalents, beginning with Deng Xiaoping in 1975) had the only sure way of handling the ongoing economic crises.
283In other words, in the last analysis the ``successful'' Bolshevik bosses were never bourgeois intellectual adventurers ready to roll the dice on untested and theoretically wrong and unsound ultra-left prejudice. Building the capitalist infrastructure they should have inherited, required a variety of moral and material incentives or simple force. ---And, they knew it. Most importantly they were willing to act accordingly.
At the same time these and all subsequent Bolshevik bosses recognized, and have always recognized, the need to campaign incessantly throughout society in favor of moral incentives, the ``socialist ideal'', the finest behavior on the part of individuals toward society and the expectation of nothing more in return. Since huge quantities of labor were not materially rewarded in any way acceptable to most workers in the capitalist world, in terms of hours, wages and working conditions, how could it have been otherwise?
Why We Communists are here
---And, comrades, let me remind you, this is why we are here. That is, we are here to break the logjams and negotiate the bottle-necks the masses encounter in the process of making history. We are here, in other words, to accelerate the process of transition to truly human society via the stage of communism. (-And, in the process of doing this, we save humanity from its otherwise inevitable self-destruction under an unguided, stochastic, capitalist mode of production.)
Lenin Defeats Trotsky
March 8 - 16, 1921 (10th Party Congress)
Two months later at the 10th Party Congress in March of 1921 Lenin was openly extremely angry with Trotsky which he need not have been if merely for effect. Because
as Lenin well aware his side would win, if for no other reason than that Koba was handling the entire Congress and the ``counting room.'' Not that he would need that. Lenin well knew he had a ``god-like'' role with the Party and ultimately the Party would always do what he wanted them to do. So, in the voting the Leninists won out decisively over Trotsky and his group.
The central topic of the fight was the very number one question confronting the Soviet Republic, namely how to organize production. What is the role of the Government and what should be the role of labor? This is an academic question now and requires a great deal of space to deal with historically so we shall move on.
Except to say Lenin having gained a decisive victory over Trotsky said ``We will come to terms with Trotsky.'' ---And he did, removing Trotskyist opponents at every level and rewarding his supporters with their jobs, in a way often referred to in North America as the ``spoils system.'' In other words, the Leninists cleaned house. They changed the rules, and now banned factionalism and debate except for a few weeks before Party Congresses and Conferences.
Then they formalized the organizational reorganization of the Party from the top down when they brought Molotov onto the Politburo and removed Krestinsky. Krestinsky had taken Trotsky's side at the Congress and was Trotsky's top man organizationally as a main party secretary. As I say replacing him was Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's top organizer and main party secretary.
Zinoviev had his status again re-upped to full member*. Across the board secretaries supporting Trotsky were replaced by those supporting Lenin. In addition to Krestinsky out went Preobrazhensky and Serebryakov, the other two main party secretaries with loyalty to Trotsky. Coming in to replace them in addition to Molotov were the Leninist secretaries Kaganovich, Uglanov and Yaroslavsky. In military matters Frunze came in as the top Leninist Party General taking charge of the Red Army for all practical purposes, where he had been Chief of Staff for years anyway. Chief instrument in this Leninist reorganization was --- you guessed it --- Joseph Stalin, who had, of course, provided all the extra votes the Leninists could ever have desired at the 10th Party Congress a few days earlier.
284*****
[*Zinoviev had been in the doghouse since he and Kamenev had betrayed the Party and the Revolution on the eve of the Revolution by going to the capitalist press and exposing the details of the Bolshevik plot to overthrow the Capitalist Provisional Regime. At first expelled, than forgiven by Lenin and readmitted, then kept at arm's length while at Politburo meetings by the technical denial of their voting rights (e.g., candidate members sitting in). Although, as far as I can tell from the voting records, by 1921 when Zinoviev was restored to full membership status he had been voting all along anyway.
Stalin, on the other hand, had a longer memory and a personal philosophy so that in 1935 when both Zinoviev and Kamenev would confront the Party once again, the outcome in 1936 would be their death. That personal philosophy of Joseph Stalin's I think might best be represented by the organization he created within the Cheka called SMERSH (Smyert Spyonum --- i.e., Death to Spies.)] In charge of SMERSH was Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's long time comrade from the early days of struggle in the Russian Trans-caucuses and in Georgia. (Beria had written a book entitled Comrade
Stalin and the Struggle in the Trans-caucuses).]
Stalin almost offhand inherits the Leadership
A Most Non-spectacular Transfer of Power
This Congress featured the de facto formalization of Stalin's role as Lenin's top man and accordingly, as the next fourteen months prior to Lenin's disabling stroke played out, as his successor. ---And, Lenin's principal enemy in this fight had been Leon Trotsky so it was not surprising to anyone at any level in the Party when Stalin and Trotsky emerged as leading protagonists at the beginning of Lenin's twenty one month long illness (May 25, 1922 --- January 21, 1924). Lenin himself would acknowledge Stalin's principal role in his communications in the years preceding his May 25th, 1922 stroke. ---And, in his final letter to the Party, (delivered at the end of January, 1924) Lenin acknowledged Stalin as the chief competitor with Trotsky for the succession, even if he didn't fully realize that this would be the main interpretation given his Letter. Specifically, Lenin said in his last Testament that the Party would have to choose between Trotsky and Stalin. In the event, (1924,) the Party chose Stalin.
285When Lenin had his first stroke, as I say a little over a year after this Congress, it was this Leninist Government and Party Leadership that was in place. It was this Government and State in place, and it had been Joseph Stalin putting it in place, from the beginning (organizing the delegates and the voting) through the implementation, of Lenin's 1921 program (wholesale replacement of Krestinsky's bureaucracy with Molotov's.)
Furthermore the Party had been extremely happy with the peaceful and orderly 11th (1922) Congress which turned out to be the first of a long series of unified Congresses, as Lenin wished. (It concluded only weeks before Lenin's first stroke on May 25th). Lenin said exactly this to Michael Borodin only days after this 1922 11th Congress (see Inside Snapshot in Ch. 14 below) and only days before his first stroke.
Stalin got the credit, for the extremely orderly 11th Congress. -And the Party got the credit for what appeared to be a coming, first good harvest since the beginning of the World War. This was the beginning of a long series of unified Congresses which again and again would support the unified Party line being presented by Lenin, the Boss (and his successor Stalin).
However,
if something unexpected were to happen, and Lenin would no longer be
there and in charge, remember, in 1921 the ``Old Boss'' had been de
facto replaced by the
''New Boss'', except that nobody knew
it. That is to say, since Lenin at 51 years of age was a very young
man (to be a national leader), and appeared perfectly ready to carry
on, at least until his first disabling stroke, the significance of
this de facto inheritance could not have been immediately
apparent to anyone for another full year. ---And, in fact, not until
a few weeks after the 1lth Congress (1922) would it become apparent
that Stalin had emerged as the Number One national leader of the
Soviet Republic (soon to be the USSR.) Even then Stalin's
initial appearance was as an unimpressive number one. Why?
For one thing, because his status seemed to depend on the ``trinity'' arrangement within the Politburo of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin. However, in reality, all of this formal alliance business between these three was important only in the minds of
Kamenev and Zinoviev. Both Kamenev and especially Zinoviev were lazy and always had been. They were more than content to lay back and let Stalin do all the work --- all they had to do was to vote the right way at Politburo and Central Committee meetings.
For another thing Stalin had so many titles, which to the rest of the world were all rather mystifying. For example what was a ``General Secretary'', or for that matter what was a ``Commissar of the Workers and Farmers Inspection'', or a ``Commissar of Nationalities''? What did being a ``One of the three Army Triumvirs'' mean and the whispered ``Chief of all Secret Departments'' (the Russian Party, Red Army Intelligence and the Secret Department of the Comintern, for example) imply? Not to mention a multitude of jobs and assignments for which the press reported he bore primary responsibility. So, as Stalin gradually emerged over the next five years, as the top Soviet leader, equivalent to President's and King's, the matter was very anticlimactic.
Unimpressive though the succession had been, the truth is simply that after the 10th Congress (1921) Stalin, who had assumed or been given responsibility for just about everything, outworked, and therefore outfought, all potential opponents prior to Lenin's death. He was, by March of 1921, de facto in charge of both the Red federal Government and the Red federal State. The great crises confronting the Soviet Union would, for better or for worse, be in his hands, primarily, for the next thirty plus years (1921 --- 1953).
The Kronstadt Naval Mutiny
March 16, 1921
Trotsky Saves His Own Ass by the Skin of his Teeth
Immediately as the 10th Congress concluded, the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Garrison (that guarded the entrance to Petrograd) mutinied. It was nominally an ultra-left revolt featuring the usual motley crew of agrarian anarchists and urban syndicalists now unhappy over the Bolshevik's failure to leave War Communism behind. The farmers wanted the restoration of the private market in agriculture and were revolting here there and everywhere, rather spontaneously, and the ultra-left cabal at Kronstadt was taking advantage of the general unhappiness of all the sailors and marines of farmer origin, who got the brunt of the negative communications from the countryside. ---And, there was a swarm of foreign agents sent from capitalist state apparatuses throughout Europe and North America, but fortunately the Cheka had a grip on most of this.
287Leading the fight against the armed Kronstadt rebellion itself, came the War Commissar Leon Trotsky, grabbing the microphone at the podium, at the very end of the 10th Congress. Remember this is the Congress that had removed him and his entire team and was in a bloody mood as far as he and they were concerned.
Trotsky cleverly demands that all the delegates get up immediately and report for armed combat duty alongside Red Army elite storm units, now lining up to cross the ice, and take on the rebels hand-to-hand. ---And, so they did. Many of Trotsky's enemies died in the bloody frontal assault on Krondstadt. Those that didn't die were now too burned-out to carry a hard-on for the man who had infuriated them so much only days before. The Congress had concluded.
---And, as matter of historical note, the rebels were liquidated and Trotsky had once again pulled a rabbit-out-of-the-hat at the last minute. In doing so he gained a
respite from the seemingly unstoppable tidal wave of opposition heading his way, this time led by the chief (Lenin) himself, if only temporarily
Inside Snapshot
April 23, 1921
Lenin and Krupskaya on Stalin
``Illych, I need a few minutes of your time if you're up to it.''
``Of course,''
``It's about Stalin. You asked me to work with him preparing for the Congress. I did and learned a lot. I have been talking to him a lot ever since. At first because of the detailed organization of the Congress and then we just started talking about many things. What I am concerned about, if that is the right word, perhaps I should say what I think you should be aware of, is Stalin as a person.
``Let me say I like Koba very much. He is about the most wonderful, true, authentic Russian revolutionary I ever met --- or more importantly than I ever idealized. But''
Krupskaya stopped in order to start over again.
``He has tremendous ability Illych, and a much broader scope of knowledge than anyone seems to be aware of. He is not the dullard Trotsky keeps painting him as. He's not a workhorse or a burro --- although he outworks everyone and apparently has been from the beginning back in 1901. For example, he knows Marxism, Illych. Better than I do. Do you know he reads one new book every day?
``I guess more importantly is (1) do you realize that he has complete authority over the police --- uniformed and secret. You know, because you appointed him, (2) he runs all the intelligence operations, not only for the Russian Party but for the Army and the Comintern? But do you realize this has given him (3) de facto authority over all of our foreign operations? Do you realize (4) the Army commanders are personally loyal to him? (5) Do you understand that he is in total charge of all the nationalities? I mean in practice not just as Commissar for Nationalities. (6) Did you know that all the Government chiefs go to him for whatever they need? (7) Did you know he works 19 hours a day every day of the year? Finally, (8) do you realize he runs the entire Party apparatus from the top down in every village, every town and every city?
288``I'm not saying all this is bad. Perhaps we are lucky. Koba loves you personally and is totally loyal to you and to Bolshevism so everything he does is put at our service. But, in terms of the future, he is the one who is going to be the next Party leader --- in his case his leadership won't be like yours --- he is ``the Boss'' in reality and he acts that way in practice. I mean they call you the Boss, and the Old Man, out of deeply felt respect but in his case he is the Boss! I hate to say it, but he is the Boss, like dime novels tells us a mafia boss is the chief of whatever they do.
``What I am saying is I think you need to start paying a lot more attention to him as a person. Why? Because he respects you so much you can shape him the way you like if you just spend time with him. If he does take over in the future this would be extremely important.''
``I see. Yes I know Koba is loyal and extremely valuable. He is without doubt our most capable and politically correct Politburo leader and I should spend more time with him just to know what the hell is going on. I will spend more time with him.''
``Every day Illych.''
``Alright. ---And no I didn't realize he had accumulated that much power and responsibility although now that you bring it to my attention I guess I should have known. Perhaps we should formalize his role in some way rather than just keep piling new responsibilities on his shoulders with the concomitant titles.
``Nadia the thing that has bothered me about Koba for some time is he never seemed happy. Only twice have I seen him happy. The first time was when he lived with me in London in `07' at that miserable Congress. Then, now, after he got married to that wonderful young woman. I think I let that mislead me. Those two are so devoted to each other I thought I could see that hard kind of gangster personality change.''
``She has done a wonderful job with him I completely concur. You know better than I about his past but I am afraid that all this has done is to make his Bossiness less objectionable to many of our comrades. Not that he hasn't internalized her humanity but I think the only thing that will really put him on the right track is you.''
``Do me a favor and invite those two to dinner tonight. Every day from now on I will start finding some excuse to meet and talk with him. Let's see what happens.''
Strategic Magnitudes in Class Struggle
As you can see from Lenin's perspective as chief of the Revolutionary Republic, no longer under attack at the end of 1920, it seemed that the previous three years of civil war had seen this defensive period go over to an offensive period of global class war, and now, in 1920, the world-wide struggle against Capitalism was falling back into a defensive mode once again.
From our Olympian perspective, which is to say all of prehistory and history viewed as a continuum, the mere existence of the Soviet Republic was an offensive move on the world stage. The defensive war within the Republic for its survival was also in fact an offensive action in the world history of class struggle. For the first time in 6000 years, since society first divided into classes, those in servitude had risen, taken power, and had at their head individuals who knew the laws of history, therefore, where they were going, and even maybe how to get there.
A lesson here is that there are simultaneously, two levels of magnitude to strategic planning. One on the historical (Olympian) level and the other on the specific momentary regional, national and international level; one global and another more restricted geographically.
Bolshevism's Global Class Struggle Offensive Switches to the Comintern
Lenin created the Comintern in March of 1919; by 1920 new Parties of the labor movement were being formed all over the world. The Comintern or Communist International or Third International, replaced the Second International of Traitors and Renegades that had participated in the First World War. ---And, it was a damned good thing Lenin acted when he did, for the subsequent failure to liberate Europe, via the Red
Army offensive in Poland in the summer of 1920, had left the global strategic advance of World Socialism in limbo.
The new Third International had immediately set about building a world revolutionary Marxist alternative in the Leninist mode to throw off the yoke of capital, and, even though the revolution had temporarily failed in Europe, there was the other side of the Soviet Republic to think about. Thus, the attention of the Bolshevik leaders focused on China.
In the meantime, the Bolsheviks wrapped up their illegal counter-revolutionary opposition at home in a rather clever way. I often refer to it as the MOCR Roach Motel solution; we shall return to this subject again below.
Simultaneously
Dancing with the Stars
Cover for the Heavy Lifting
The Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was ordered into action with regard to Great Britain in early 1920. Lenin sent his old ``action'' mentor, Leonid Krassin, to London to take charge of the effort there to secure British recognition for the Soviet Regime and initiate discussions with the Prime Minister David Lloyd George's Government and its foreign minister Lord Curzon. Curzon so disliked the Bolsheviks, and especially Krassin (who he now knew had been the chief bank robber and organizer of a multitude of financial shenanigans supporting Lenin's Bolsheviks), he refused to shake hands with him until admonished by his Prime Minister.
In March, 1922, Lenin, sent Krassin along with other Old Bolsheviks under the leadership of Chicherin and Radek and a team of new intellectual agents on the most important diplomatic mission so far in Bolshevik history! (This is the same Radek who participated in the Bukharin advisory team sent to Liebknecht and Luxembourg to guide the German Revolution in January 1919, that fucked that thing up altogether). Included in this team of new intellectual agents were Joffe, Rakovsky, and the always reliable Maxim Litvinov. The Leninist diplomatic team went first to Berlin and then on to Genoa to take up the British and French offers to negotiate the Czarist debt and future economic relations.
We have seen how Rakovsky brilliantly maneuvered the two capitalist victors against each other coming up with the German-Soviet Alliance known to history as the Rapallo Pact. (Rapallo is a suburb of Genoa.)
This was the beginning of an effort to (1) get what we could out of the capitalists by negotiating cleverly to exploit the differences between the victorious Allies (England and France), and between them and the German capitalists. But commerce and trade were really just the excuse for entering into negotiations. What was the real reason in our eyes?
Everyone on our side knew the capitalists would never agree to normalize economic relations with the Soviet Republic. Rakovsky wrote extensively about this fact and the Bolshevik refusal to do any of the things being demanded of them. Yet certain distinct advantages could be gained for the Soviet Republic if diplomatic relations could be normalized and whatever trade was allowed by the imperialists that could be useful to us would also be helpful.
But, most importantly, the second (and number 2) reason and by far the most important reason, was that to make NEP work the Bolsheviks knew they would have to engage in massive international industrial espionage to defeat the boycott of Socialist development as proposed only months earlier by Lord Curzon at Locarno. Naturally, we Bolsheviks wanted to mislead the enemy governments about this. Thus, strong sustained efforts in the diplomatic arena over a substantial period should be made in order to provide cover for the real heavy lifting being done by the Cheka's Economic Directorate.
Let us be clear about this. We were more than happy to engage in normal commercial relations with capitalists in any capitalist country. But the Brits and the French led an absolute cabal of evil against letting us engage in any kind of normal trade. Nothing like the availability of gringo capital to the PRC some fifty odd years later existed in any way as the decade of the 1920's opened. The door to normal commercial relations would remain forever closed to us as World War II approached.
We would not let foreign capitalists strangle us any more than we let local scumbag human garbage strangle us inside the Soviet Republic. There was no difference of view among Bolsheviks about this, although only a handful knew the full extent of our industrial espionage activities.
Rakovsky wrote extensively about the economic and political relationship between Soviet Russia and the capitalists of West Europe. For example, just before the Chicherin team left for Berlin and Genoa in March 1922 he wrote: ``Our whole problem is to hold out, not to count on a loan, on credits that might come after the Genoa conference. We must not forget we are still passing through a revolutionary epoch; we must look to ourselves for remedies to our own ills; we ourselves must fight the famine and the breakdown of our transportation system; and we must make the Red Army even stronger, because this is our only support.'' (Emphasis added --- Ed.)
The Chicherin team picked up on the negotiations with the German PM and Foreign Minister of the previous month (also conducted by Rakovsky) in Berlin and then boarded the train for Genoa. The stop in Berlin had been to put the final touches onto a secret treaty being prepared by Rakovsky and the Germans which would make de facto allies out of Germany and Russia in the event neither could get what they wanted from the World War (I) victorious Brits and French at Genoa.
Rakovsky wrote this summary of what they were heading into and what the Bolsheviks should expect from the capitalists at Genoa:
``They will present us with outrageous demands. We shall naturally be unable to accept these demands because in their basic conception they defy the revolutionary masses of the Soviet Republic. We shall sign no commitments that would violate the basic laws of the Soviet Republic, the laws nationalizing the land and giving the state monopoly of industry and foreign trade.'' On the other hand, ``There is no doubt that they do not all think alike. Conditions differ: some are anxious to start trade with us immediately, others are more interested in various reparations.''
The Dancers
When Trotsky came on board with the Bolsheviks in June of 1917 he brought with him a small but highly intelligent crew. This included, for example, the Austrian
psychiatrist Adolph A. Joffe and the bourgeoisiefied Bulgarian aristocrat Christian Rakovsky. These were not men who could organize clandestine armed strikes or rob banks and stage coaches. But there were things they could do that would be extremely important once the Bolsheviks seized state power which was now only some three months away.
Also coming on board after Lenin's return were other ultra-left intellectuals including George Uritsky and George Chicherin both of whom arrived soon after the February revolution from Sweden and London respectively. Many of them including these two had been friendly to the Bolsheviks. After Lenin decided to try and bring competitors on board to form a bigger and stronger bloc --- especially in the Petrograd City Council --- they joined up and soon had important jobs to carry out for the Leninists.
Leonid Krassin and Victor Kurnatovsky were Bolsheviks, on the other hand, who could both rob capitalist banks and dance at bourgeois balls. Krassin was perhaps the best Bolshevik ever at having a foot in both camps and keeping all ships heading in the right direction. I think it is safe to say Krassin was the biggest bank robber in Russian history! A kind of Jesse James and John Dillinger combined!
Lenin gave Krassin command of the new crew of Trotsky originating intellectual Bolsheviks. ---And, Chicherin emerged as the top diplomat.
Lenin gave Stalin responsibility for Nationalities because (a) Stalin was a Georgian and (b) he had written (with Lenin's assistance) the Party's only theoretical work on the problem of the multitude of nationalities existing in the Czarist Empire. Accordingly, Lenin also gave Stalin the organizational responsibility for giving the newly liberated peoples and nations within the Empire their own political leadership and armed forces to back-up that leadership.
In the Ukraine (see the Dec. 20, Politburo meeting above) Stalin conducted the negotiations with the Rada (first Ukrainian national government) and prepared the way for Red Army intervention that put the incoming Rakovsky on the throne so to speak of the new Ukrainian Red government. However, Rakovsky and his ability were soon needed in the Foreign Commissariat so Rakovsky went from being Red Boss of the Ukraine to being the top Red Diplomat in all of Western Europe.
Abandoning Trotsky
After Lenin decidedly defeated Trotsky at the 10th Party Congress in 1921 the new crew of formerly Trotskyist intellectuals defected. Latter Day Trotskyists would try and spin the relationship between these men and Stalin as the years progressed but the simple historical truth is they abandoned Trotsky after 1921 and threw their lives into the service of what the Leninists wanted in the way of socialism in the Soviet Republic (and after 1924, the Soviet Union). By the time Rakovsky got back to Russia permanently in 1927 Trotsky had long since lost both his position in the Party hierarchy and the respect he had had before his defeat at Warsaw in August 1920. In fact Trotsky was on his way out of the Bolshevik Party (expelled) altogether in 1927.
The point is when Trotsky lost out against Lenin (and his successor Stalin) at the 10th Party Congress he lost the loyalty and support of all those he had brought with him originally. Oh, some may have been sympathetic to Trotsky's side of things here and there but when it came to Lenin and Stalin on the one hand or Trotsky on the other they
inevitably opted to go with the former. At least in the early post-Lenin years if not through all of them.
-And, it wasn't just Rakovsky. Joffe agreed to go to China for Lenin after the defeat of the Trotskyists at the 10th Party Congress, the orderly 11th Party Congress, and Lenin's first stroke.
The Springtime Dance
The Genoa Quadrille
Rakovsky described his April 1922 dance of the diplomats at Genoa to be a kind of ``quadrille.'' He organized daily press conferences at the rather friendly environment of the University of Genoa where he exposed the various capitalist plots against the Soviet Republic as they unfolded day by day. The always enraged London Times complained daily about the Bolshevik propaganda successes in Italy.
But the real aim of the Bolshevik civil program in West Europe was to divide the bondholding small bourgeoisie away from the Big capitalist regimes and their program of destroying Bolshevism altogether. Thus, Rakovsky encouraged small Russian bondholders and others who felt they were owed money by the Bolshevik government, to come and see him about it. They could work things out man to man. (Or woman to man, as in the case of a woman expatriate living in London, who called upon Rakovsky to pay her the rent for living three years in her Kharkov home while Red Boss of the Ukraine! Which he did.)
In England, France, and Italy, Rakovsky managed well in dividing claimants from their respective governments. This was very important because it prevented the numerically tiny big cap classes from allying with their far more numerous brethren in the small cap classes. For example, if England went to war with Russia the small bondholders would be SOL (shit out of luck) forever.
Furthermore, Rakovsky managed to turn not only Germany against the French-English combine at Genoa but, as time progressed, France against England. With all three major European cap countries at each other's throats over Russian money and trade there was little likelihood of a united cap attack on Soviet Russia. At least for the moment.
Making NEP Work
March 1922
``So, Lev, brief us.''
``Koba, Vlad, Felix, and distinguished Comrades, what it comes down to is if we anticipate a long term cold war against the capitalist countries such as we are bogged down in now, then we have to develop a long term program of industrial espionage to make up for their boycott of socialist development.
``What does this mean in practice? Well to begin with we need to recruit our spies while they are still in college. While they are still learning the basics of the industrial engineering profession they will then sell on the capitalist market. If we can recruit them at the Italian, British and German universities then we can (1) prevent them from giving away their political sympathies in public and (2) direct their studies in such a way as to send them into a particular target profession such as chemical
engineering, as opposed say to something else like civil engineering, and then into the recruiting direction for the industrial concerns they are to infiltrate.
``This means in practice we will need thousands of controlling agents living on a permanent assignee basis in places like Torino, Milano, Berlin, London, and so forth. They will in turn over the coming decade control over one hundred thousand other engineers and scientists directly or indirectly, according to the protocols established in Felix's new Moscow Rules Handbook for Illegal Worker's Agents.
``What we will get is up to-the-minute intelligence on the details of all important industrial projects going on in these countries.''
``What is this going to cost me?'' Asked the Boss.
``Hold onto your seats. About two hundred million US dollars per year now and more as time proceeds.''
``Fuck me!''
``Koba, you and Comrade Dzerzhinsky, asked me to produce this plan because you know I will tell you the truth and what it will cost. This is the truth. If we have to make up for capitalist industrial advance technologically without normal trade opportunities then this is what it will cost us. But, we will have everything they have as fast as they have it.''
``I understand, Lev, Felix, the rest of you. I just was overcome momentarily by the cost. On the other hand if we had only NEP guidelines it would cost us just as much as trade overruns costs over the same time period. It just sounds like so much.''
``You know me Koba. I hate the costs as much as you do. But there is nothing to be gained by lying to ourselves about the extremely vulnerable position in which we find ourselves. You know as well as I that once the capitalists have a definitive technical advantage over us they will be back to give it another go. What choice do we have if we are to advance rather than surrender?
``I know. I can find the financial resources. But it won't be easy.''
``About two thirds of these costs have to do with the duplication effort back here so I was thinking in terms of budgeting you should consider the possibility that these costs could be covered in total or in part by whatever funds you have already set aside under NEP for light and heavy industrial construction.''
``Yes, thank you. That will help a great deal but it's still going to be tough.''
``I am glad this is your problem Koba and not mine. That's why you're the Boss.
Lenin's Last Will and Testament
Right after Lenin's victory at Rapallo and immediately after he met with Michael Borodin and General Blyukher (see Ch 14 below) about taking charge of the situation in China, in the spring of 1922 (April 30, 1922), he suffered the first of a series of disabling strokes (May 25, 1922). Lenin was so distressed by his paralysis, and depressed by his slow and never complete recovery; he initially asked his closest friend and associate within the Party --- Joseph Stalin --- to supply him secretly with poison.
Who else could he turn to? Stalin had supplied him with money for years, and hid him in Finland in the summer and autumn of 1917, and was well known to everyone within the leadership to be ``Lenin's Bodyguard.''
Thus, after Lenin's first stroke, Stalin had been assigned by the Politburo to be sure Lenin got the best treatment available, and he (Stalin) was to report to them regularly about Lenin's progress in recovery. He was the only person, other than Krupskaya, close to him at this point. The only one he felt he could ask because he did not want to tell his wife.
As I say, Lenin asked Stalin for poison. Stalin was so emotionally attached to Lenin, Stalin said he would rather kill himself than do this and asked the Politburo for guidance. This is the only time, of which I am aware, Stalin asked anyone in the Party for help and really meant it.
However that may have been, they instructed Stalin to talk Lenin out of suicide. Convince him he could recover and still lead, even if now he might need a larger and especially equipped semi-hospital room at the Kremlin. ---And, most importantly, make Lenin realize he was still absolutely essential. Staying alive was a revolutionary act. ``Explain to Illych that he owes it to us'' said Zinoviev.
Lenin never got the poison. But he never fully recovered either.
As his condition gradually improved in the latter part of 1922 he rapidly got back to work. But then after this December and January (1922-1923) burst of energy he had another stroke (March 7th, 1923) or more probably several strokes (March 10th 1923). It was during this brief energetic time he had insisted on finishing the dictation for his Letter to the Congress (which is what the Testament is formally called).
At any rate, in February (1923) Lenin had been feeling better and getting feisty about the low-stress environment rules his doctors had prescribed and the Politburo enforced via Stalin. Lenin became angry over this perceived attempt to control his reentry into politics and began insisting on all kinds of reports being sent to him about virtually everything --- including the most stressful issues confronting the Party at the moment --- which included the Trans-Caucasian matter. This certainly made sense if the Chief was on his way back and getting reinvolved.
-And, Stalin complained to the Central Committee that his attempts to keep Lenin on an emotional even-keel had led to ``Illych becoming angry with me over the smallest things. This would not have happened if I had not been straddled with this impossible mission. I insist you relieve me of this responsibility. Let him have whatever he likes. This has been going on for what nine months now and it is a constant struggle with a suicidal patient. Let the doctors handle him directly, if they can, and let him do as he likes. Let's face it, when he feels well enough he wants to lead and he resents me trying to stop him and I can't blame him. He's going to get reinvolved when he feels up to it, and we just have to live with that. Let him have whatever he wants.''
-And, this is pretty much what happened with the Central Committee insisting Stalin stay on. If as nothing more than as a symbol of continuity in the relationship between Lenin and the rest of them.
Inevitably, Lenin did not get better. Probably he was continuing to die slowly of minor strokes before the massive stroke that killed him at the end of January 1924. From day one of these strokes he had less than two years to live.
These strokes appear to have been rather simple high blood pressure attacks for which no one then had any cure, except to get blood out of the circulation system. Usually this was done in those days with hypodermic needles that sucked up blood and removed it. Earlier versions had done the same thing (e.g., bleeding, leaches).
Foreign doctors were called in to help the Bolshevik doctors but none of them could do anything other than suggest a multitude of ways to keep his blood pressure under control. Other than physical blood removal, most of this medical advice centered around keeping Lenin on an emotional even-keel. Given the condition of the Party and the Republic at that time (1922-24) this was a near impossibility. However, the Politburo insisted that ``Happy Days are Here Again'' measures for Lenin be rigorously followed in every way.
Stalin's attempts at carrying out these physician's and Politburo's instructions further infuriated Lenin. In fact, they led directly to, and were specifically responsible for, the split between these two old and dear friends.
Stalin fought with Lenin's wife about the importance of keeping Lenin calm and unaware of all the problems confronting the government. Stalin went so far as to have newspapers printed in one copy --- for Lenin only --- full of good news and whatever Stalin thought would keep Lenin calm and happy. ---And, it did for quite a while. At least until the Boss found out.
In the end, Lenin had no illusions. He accepted the fact that the Party insisted he stay alive as long as possible but he never was very happy about it. He dictated then (December 1922 --- January 1923), over a period of two weeks, his last will and testament.
Analyzing His Party
One by one Lenin reviewed six of the luminaries leading the Bolshevik Central Committee and/or Politburo. (At that moment on the seven men Politburo were in addition to himself, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov.)
Stalin he found to have become too rude and impolite and suggested some way be found of replacing Stalin with another comrade as General Secretary. A comrade who was more polite, congenial and indeed popular.
Trotsky he considered perhaps the most intellectually able of the Politburo but far too much of the bureaucrat for his liking, and he remarked on Trotsky's legendary problem with arrogance, and remarked on his earlier anti-Bolshevism.
---And, so on, he reviewed, one by one, six of his colleagues. When it was all said and done, none of those critiqued could have been very happy about it.
Although I think it may have been unintended, Lenin's declaration at the beginning of his Letter to the Party Congress that Stalin and Trotsky were the principle Party leaders, turned out to have the most important effect.
As Lenin saw it, disunity among the Party leaders was the chief problem for the Soviet Republic, now confronting the global capitalist onslaught. It was then, achieving that ``unity'' (of the Party and its leadership) that was the most important critical task confronting the Party.
Specifically the first threat was the capitalist international threat (where Lenin points out that the stronger Socialism gets in the Soviet Republic the more intense will be the fury of, and thus danger from, our enemies).
The second greatest threat was the ongoing, seemingly internecine, conflict between the Party's two top leaders: Trotsky and Stalin.
In effect, with this ``Letter'' Lenin probably sealed Trotsky's fate. For as the coming year unfolded (after January 1924) Party cadre saw they had a choice. Lenin said
in the last analysis the Party would have to choose between Trotsky and Stalin. Get on board with Trotsky or with Stalin. In this game Stalin had all the incentives. In the end the Party chose Stalin.
At any rate, Lenin gave this letter to Nadazhda Krupskaya (his wife and Central Committee member) to be read to the Party leadership once he passed away.
At my age (69) I have been through a few illnesses. I can almost feel Lenin's pain as he writes his last will and testament. ---And, he was cranky. Justifiably so. The entire exercise turned out to be less than fruitful --- perhaps for this reason. However, that may have been, as soon as Lenin died on January 21, 1924, Krupskaya turned the letter over to the Politburo.
The letter was circulated to the entire Politburo. A meeting was called to decide what to do about leadership now that Lenin was gone and given the fact he had left a last political will and testament.
The Politburo concurred with what Zinoviev had had to say and that was ``that Lenin's fears have proven groundless about Stalin.'' Zinoviev said he and his colleagues knew this because they had been working on a daily and very friendly basis with Stalin since Lenin's first stroke. The Politburo decided to ignore Lenin's idea about replacing Stalin and moved on.
But that was not the end of it. The entire Party was informed of the letter and the Politburo's subsequent decisions with regard to its highest other leaders at the upcoming (13th) Party Congress in 1924 (23 --- 31 May, 1924), and it was very much on the agenda. But the Party was not about to rock the boat when everything was finally going so well.
Stalin gave the Main Report in place of Lenin at this 1924, 13th, Congress, as he had the year before at the 1923, 12th Party Congress (17 --- 25 April, 1923), which began shortly after Lenin's massive strokes of March 7th to the 10th (1923) (which dates Lenin's last possibility to participate). Now, in 1924, every Congress participant must have sighed a concealed gasp of relief that the transition in government appeared to be going so well.
Under normal circumstances, perhaps that would have been the end of the entire matter. However, after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in 1927 he tried to make a big deal about Lenin's last will and testament. Emphasizing Lenin's idea of Stalin's personality and the desirability of replacing him; never mentioning, of course, that Lenin found him (Trotsky) to be too bureaucratically inclined for his liking (and by implication too much of a bureaucrat to be the Party leader).
One might think it rather strange that Trotsky wanted it all ways. He wanted Stalin to be the champion of the bureaucrats (the opposite of how Lenin had analyzed his colleagues.) He wanted people to think his (Trotsky's) intellectual superiority (which he said Lenin recognized in this last will) should have made him the leader. He wanted people to think Lenin's Testament had been suppressed and if the Party had known of it things would have turned out differently. He did not want people to know that Lenin had said the Party would have to choose between him and Joseph Stalin. He certainly did not want people to know that the Party had chosen Stalin instead of him.
As you have seen the Party had learned of the Testament immediately and discussed it thoroughly, from the Politburo down, prior to the 1924 Congress. How could
it have been otherwise? After all, common sense tells us that with Lenin's long and trusted, closest companion, and wife, Nadazhda Krupskaya, having provided the letter immediately to the Politburo, following Lenin's January (1924) death, it could not have been otherwise.
Trotsky never had any chance of using the Army to back his ploy because the Army hated him. What had occurred was the logical transfer of power from Lenin, to one of his closest and original followers, who was also the man who had helped Lenin engineer the defeat of the Trotskyists in 1921 at the March Congress.
End of Story.
Lenin and Georgia
Toward the end of 1922 Lenin began to show remarkable signs of recovery. Apparently the low stress environment ordered by his medical team of world renowned physicians had worked. By the beginning of 1923 Lenin felt physically good for the first time in many months and he was more than ready (in his own mind) to reenter politics. Unfortunately, he jumped in with both feet, exactly against all the doctors' orders. ---And on March 7th 1923, he had another massive stroke which left him by the 10th, permanently without speech, and partially paralyzed. He had less than eleven months to live.
In the weeks when Lenin's health had appeared to be on the rebound, and he had jumped into the politics of the moment, one of the first things he addressed was the completion of the plan to unify the various Bolshevik governments in the former Czarist Empire's national groups into one unified Government. A Government recognizing the equality and autonomy of many of the nationalities previously suppressed by the Czarist regime.
Lenin and Stalin had been in agreement about how to proceed in this matter in the period preceding Lenin's first stroke in the spring of 1922. This occurred in the midst of a great deal of internal Party debate about how to proceed with the former Czarist territories. One of the disputes was about how the Trans-Caucasian Republics were to be incorporated. These three Republics were Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
In the end Stalin acceded to Lenin's design where each of these Republics would be taken into the new Soviet Union as equal partners. Initially there had been a dispute because the first Party plan in Moscow was to have all three in one Trans-Caucasian Republic that would then be incorporated into the Russian Socialist Soviet Federation as opposed to being equal members in a Soviet Union with the RSSF, the Ukraine, and three others.
Stalin argued the case every way and then acceded to Lenin's plan and discarded his own, as if nothing different than what he had initially proposed had in fact happened. ---And, Stalin was right. Because, despite Lenin's intricate reorganization of the Soviet Government on paper, the truth was simple. As long as the Party insisted on the monopoly of power over the Soviet Government, it now had, (which it did and had made a matter of Law), then the real center of power and decision making would always be in the Party structure that operated the command government and its economy.
For practical purposes, by the time of Lenin's disabling illness, that meant the real center of power lay in the person (and concomitant personality) of Joseph V. Stalin.
On top of all of this argument about the shape of the future Soviet Union, Stalin's long time bosom buddy from the years of organizing oilfield workers in Georgia (and as the general in command of the Red Army forces liberating Georgia), Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had gotten into a fist fight with the leader of the opposing group of communists in Georgia (i.e., opposed to the idea of being subordinated first into a Trans-Caucasian federation and subordinated again in the proposed incorporation into the Russian Socialist Federation, as opposed to a Union of all independent Republics.) Lenin became upset about this fist fight as well as the way the entire Trans-Caucasian project had unfolded and he blamed Stalin whom he had made Commissar for Nationalities for not having prevented this.
289However, until Stalin gave up his 19 hour a day, 365 day a year work schedule his decisions on these and all other matters would continue to prevail, if for no other reason than he was doing, or at least supervising, virtually all of the work of the Government. This is not to mention his supervision of the Red State (the Cheka and the Army); a rule to note in your study of Soviet history is that Stalin always persevered because he outworked everyone else.
Whatever might have happened had Lenin not had this final disabling March 7th, 1923, stroke we will never know. My own feeling is that the two (Lenin and Stalin) would have worked things out between them as they always had before. ---And, because Stalin always capitulated to Lenin in the end.
Latter Day Trotskyists have for many decades made an issue out of Lenin's activity in the few weeks he had of lucidity at the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923. For whatever it's worth I think this entire Trotskyist, after the fact, business to have been a lot of ``playing politics'' nonsense. The Earth belongs to the living and those of you with an interest may draw more profound conclusions once tackling the matter. I mention it here because the Georgian affair has been one of the arrows in the quiver of anti-communist Trotskyism. Therefore, you cadre need to know what was really going on. This is my take on the matter --- make up your own minds.
The Death Watch Begins
Note on Lenin's Illness after March 10, 1923
By Moshe Lewin
``The paralysis of the right side of the body and the loss of speech that occurred on March 10 (1923) seemed so alarming that the government decided to reveal the seriousness of the illness. From then on Izvestia published a daily health bulletin. On May 15, Lenin was moved from his apartment in the Kremlin to his country house at Gorki. Two months later, in July (1923), a miracle seemed to have occurred: Lenin's health began to improve again. He began to take walks and to practice writing with his left hand. He was even able to visit the chairman of the local sovkhoz and spend three days with him.
``About August 10 (1923) he was allowed to write. He received Pravda every day and later Izvestia and other publications. Before long he was able to read books and had a reading list drawn up for him. It was usually Krupskaya who read him newspaper articles and perhaps passages from the books he asked for; he was far from completely cured. It was all the more astonishing that he managed to
get permission for the journey he undertook on October 18 (1923). He traveled to Moscow, went to the Kremlin by car, then set off again to wander the streets and to visit the Agricultural Exhibition. He then went back to his office, remained silent for a long time, took out some books from his library and returned to Gorki.
``Between November 24 and December 16, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky, Skvortsov-Stepanov, Krestinsky, Pyatnitsky and the editor of the Kasnaya Nov, Voronsky, came to see him. They talked to him about current affairs and brought news that Lenin listened to attentively, but he does not seem to have recovered the use of speech-the chronology contained in Volume XLV of the Sochineniya, (Collected Works --- ed.) which mentions the loss of speech, does not return to the matter again.
``At the beginning of 1924, Lenin attended a Christmas party organized at the sovkhoz. On January 19, in a sledge, he followed a hunting expedition in the forest. But between January 17 and 20 his time was mainly taken up with reading the report of the Thirteenth Party Congress (sic). Lenin appeared very attentive and sometimes asked questions by gestures; certain points quite obviously irritated him, but Krupskaya managed to calm him, probably by inventing information for the purpose.
``On January 21, 1924, Lenin's health suddenly deteriorated. He died at 6:50 p.m.''
[From Lenin's Last Struggle, 1974, Moshe Lewin, Pantheon, New York, 193pp.]
Dead Man Lying
Lenin Finished in Politics May 25, 1922
Whether he was paralyzed in bed or dead in his Mausoleum Lenin was finished in politics the day of his first stroke May 25, 1922. After that he was never more than a living (and then dead) symbol. Whether it was the bullets fired into his brain by the Left SR crackpot (Fanya Kaplan) in 1918 that was the ultimate cause or simply inherited (or acquired) hypertension responsible we will never know. What we do know is that Lenin never played any role other than ceremonial (symbolic) after his first stroke.
If it had to happen it is a good thing it didn't happen until the spring of 1922 because the Party was very confident by that time because of all the great things finally breaking for it. For example, the end of the civil war and the subsequent domestic conflict, the withdrawal of the last imperialist troops (Japanese), the treaty of Rapallo, the China strategy, the first good harvest, the preparation for unification of the Bolshevik Republics, and went on as if nothing untoward had happened.
The fuss instigated by Trotsky over what might have happened had Lenin not suddenly exited politics was and is irrelevant. ---And, the Party should have been ready. It could not forever count on the one ``superman'' who had taken them and working people in general farther than anyone else in 6000 years. It was time to ``grow up'' and the Party proved that it had. For better or for worse the future of mankind was now in the hands of the Party Lenin created, built and had placed in power. But it would never again be in his personal hands.
The Right Way vs. the Wrong Way of Looking at things
Two Perspectives on Our Situation in 1924
Comrades, this is why we are here!
Much has been said over the last century about the primitive nature of the first country in which we first seized power. Often, this conversation takes the turn of implying that the entire thing was a mistake to begin with, since Russia had no chance of becoming the homeland of the World Socialist Stage, once supporting revolutions failed.
Let me remind you that this is exactly the kind of situation which justifies the existence of us communists! If history were to resolve everything itself in the proper way --- from our perspective --- then why would we need to intervene? Why would we be needed at all? The scientific insight and foresight of Marxism is not at all the same as Cromwellian ``pre-destination'' (where every step taken by every person is imagined to be pre-ordained or pre-destined by God), but it is predictive and powerful when, like any science, it is learned, understood and applied. It is our secret weapon.
In other words, we are not along for the ride --- those of you who may be should find another line of work. Because once we get on to the killing all this sewing circle bullshit will be over. We communists intervene precisely because we understand the laws of history and therefore can speed up an otherwise interminably, and possibly fatally, slow adaptation of unguided unthinking humanity! A fictional analogy would be Hari Seldon and his science of psychohistory in the Foundation (Isaac Asimov) series of novels.
So, the fact that we did not have the ideal conditions for evolving by revolution from capitalism to communism (via an intermediary transition) is actually perfect! Perfect because we were needed, then and there, to get this process of transition from capitalism kicked in the ass and working! ---And, to do so in one of the possible real world scenarios. That is what ``free will'' means in the real world.
Rule Number One: That kind of ass-kicking can only be done by an elite revolutionary leadership which has created its own (Leninist) Party, and is committed to mobilizing the mass of proletarians for revolutionary armed action against our class enemies and their dictatorship.
Rule Number Two: Remember, no matter what form their dictatorship takes --- e.g., when it takes on bourgeois parliamentary democratic trappings - it is still nothing but a vicious dictatorship of an enemy social class that must be liquidated in its entirety, root and branch.
Our Situation in January 1924, When Lenin Died
Our biggest problems at the beginning of this year of 1924 were:
(1) The destruction of what had existed of a genuine industrial Russian proletariat. What hard times and war had not done to their numbers, had been done to workers by our leadership, as it called out workers again and again, to be the essential self-sacrificing shock troops in one or another critical battle, during the Civil War.
(2) Even our best most class conscious workers were often too uneducated to run the factories in which they worked. Needless to say,
(3) The would-be petty bourgeois capitalist farmers who were emerging from a domesticated feudal peasantry were useless to our immediate social needs. These
primitive farmers were totally uneducated and 100% illiterate. They had been herded as a mass of domesticated farm animals for at least two hundred years, and were not capable of performing any function other than that of wooden plough semi-Neolithic farming --- at least for the moment. Except to be soldiers. We could and did teach them to fight, and die, for our Revolution.
(4) As a consequence we had had to rely increasingly on a highly centralized body of elite Bolshevik commanders everywhere from the Army to industry.
(5) The old urban petty bourgeoisie recognized we were here to stay and decided that joining us was preferable to being killed by us. Besides it was the only way forward (upward) in the new social order. This was changing the nature of the Party itself as Old Bolsheviks were swamped by incoming new members; and,
(6) There were only so many positions to be filled in both the Government and the Army and Navy. If bourgeois specialists of the Old Regime were needed and thus given some of these jobs that was that much less of the limited job pool available for loyal self-sacrificing Old Bolshevik cadre! The friction between the bourgeois specialists and the Party members thus institutionalized turned out to be one of the most difficult of the inherent problems confronting the Party as it struggled to create the capitalist infrastructure the Party had expected to inherit.
(7) The command nature of Party operations that began with the seizure could not now be changed since the Party was running everything in the country. How this might be democratized to encourage maximum participation of the working masses in the future was something,
(7) As Lenin said, ``we don't know how to do.'' (11th Party Congress, 1922)
*****
These are just a few of the conundrums that confronted us once we had seized power in such a primitive place. But, comrades, that's what we are here for. Now, we must do our best to accelerate history along the lines we wish it to follow. Part of that is periodic theoretical review to see where we are and perhaps therefore where we may be going. Because we have literally the science of society and culture and their history, as our sole property, we have a great leg up to begin with. We know what we are doing and they do not, except in that limited ``quarterly'' perspective mentality they live by.
One main conclusion is that the intermediate transitional period between capitalism and communism, has featured, in real world practice, the emergence of an entirely new stage in the sociocultural evolution of humanity. That is the Stage we are currently analyzing called the Stage of Stalinist Socialism. (A distinct stage in sociocultural evolution between capitalism and communism --- probably one of several such distinct sociocultural evolutionary stages between capitalism and communism --- i.e., the Second Transitional Period, herein).
Making NEP Work 1924
When Lenin died at the end of January of 1924 he left behind, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, a vast industrial espionage organization. This organization had its primary emphasis on stealing the otherwise unavailable industrial secrets of Germany, Italy and France with smaller operations in the smaller capitalist countries
(ranging from Iberia to Eastern Europe.) These industrial ``secrets'' would normally have been available to other capitalists in other countries willing to pay licensing fees. However, the capitalist world had agreed on a program of denial of industrial process data to the Soviet Republic unless it was purchased with cash up front, and then if it was not technology which would make the Soviet Republic and its army stronger.
Neither Lenin nor Stalin had any intention of allowing foreign capitalists to strangle the Revolution. Modernizing Soviet industry would of course greatly empower the Soviet Government so it was natural, and to be expected, that the international great capitalist families would continue to deny their technology to global Bolshevism. Stalin explained all of this that year (1924) in his book Foundations of Leninism. ---And, that book itself was presaged by Lenin in his Last Letter to the Party Congress where he started out saying exactly this.
At the center of this great international industrial espionage program of the Cheka's Economic Directorate, was Stalin's favorite Chekist Lev Feldbin (Alexander Orlov). First in Italy and then in Germany Orlov recruited thousands of intellectual agents and sent them into the war industries of these two imperialist countries. Eventually all of this German-Italian work would be headquartered in Switzerland. This German and Italian industrial espionage became known as the ``Red Orchestra'' and may have numbered 100,000 by the time Orlov was finished constructing.
Inside Snapshot
Richard Sorge becomes a Master of Deceit - New Year's Day 1925
``I thought I'd get some work done while the place is relatively quiet. But, there's no need for you to be working today Molotov.''
``Koba
I thought we might catch up on a personnel matter for a few minutes
and then I will excuse myself. Do you have time?''
''Sure. Why
not now --- catching up time is what it is --- so what's the
problem?''
``It's not a problem --- the opposite perhaps. I have a new German assigned to Comintern Intelligence and I think you will find it useful to speak with him. I see an agent of enormous potential. He's outside Koba just in case you had the time to speak with him. If you don't he will certainly understand and is somewhat embarrassed to be asked to come at all.''
``Show him in Vlad. ---And eventually I'll read that file you're carrying --- I presume it's his?
``Yes it is. Here it is. To outline verbally what's in the summary --- well, it essentially says that he was a German soldier from the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie for the Kaiser's capitalist regime; he was interned for a while on the Russian Front; after the war he was returned to Germany. After his discharge he worked his way into what became our German Communist Party. He was exceptionally well regarded and was assigned as an armed guard for our delegates to the Comintern Conference in Berlin last year. He was recommended for Comintern Intelligence by Otto Kuusinen (the Bolshevik chief in Finland), so it came to you as Chief of Comintern Intelligence, that is to say, to my desk, and I endorsed the recommendation. He arrived last week.''
``Sorge, right?''
``Yes, Koba. How did you know?''
``You told me Vlad --- last week. Or was it Otto?''
Molotov was searching his memory --- he must have mentioned it in one of the briefings. But then Kuusinen had been here.
``Alright, that's enough; he speaks Russian I take it?''
``Very well, for a German.''
``Show him in. This will give me a little New Year's Day off time which I richly deserve after this last year --- starting out as it did with the death of Illych. Fortunately, we got a break in the harvest, and the imperialists are all too busy at home dealing with their own workers to worry about us. So, we bought enough time to get this country re-organized. Yes, show him in.''
Even taking into account Koba's affection for Alexander Orlov, it was Richard Sorge who was to become more the master's pet than any other single agent in the history of Red Intelligence. Stalin spent a great deal of time with Sorge during the 1920's and continued to do so in the years immediately preceding his dispatch to Tokyo. In the end, the time Comrade Stalin invested in his pupil proved to more than worth it. Sorge's penetration of the Japanese Imperial Staff at the crucial time of their preparation for war with the Soviet Union (the summer of 1939) and later (in the summer of 1941) as the Nazi's were heading for Moscow, would have been more than worth the time and effort in and of itself. But, after the Nazi invasion in June of 1941, Sorge would provide the Boss with the absolutely accurate knowledge Stalin needed to have about Japanese intentions on Socialism's eastern frontier in order to know what to do next in the war against Germany, on the western frontier.
290In the first case Stalin prepared a counteroffensive of a special type and along with his hand-picked general George Zhukov smashed permanently Japan's hopes to succeed in the Soviet East. The matter was decided in the Battle of Khalkin-Gol where the Jap's suffered their first smashing defeat of World War II (August, 1939). ---And, in the case of the great Battle of Moscow (December 1941), Sorge's spying on the Japanese Imperial Staff allowed Stalin to transfer Zhukov's Siberian armies for the counter-attack at Moscow, December 5th, 1941. Inflicting the first smashing defeat on the Nazi's of World War II.
It all started for Richard Sorge on New Year's Day 1925, barely eleven months since Lenin's death, down the Hall from Stalin's Staraya street office. Actually it was a very large suite of offices and libraries that took up half of the top floor in a building which was a Moscow city block in size. The other half of the top floor was where the Intelligence Division of the Comintern had its General Staff offices, along with the Russian Party's Secretariat. Lesser bureaus spread out all over the city from there --- depending on space availability and need to be close to the Boss (or lack thereof.) Stalin used his Kremlin suite of offices mainly for ceremonial purposes --- and, he had a cot in the former maid's quarters where he often spent the five hours he allotted himself for sleep. Otherwise he worked every day of the year.
291Robbing the Rich to help the Poor
Stalin loves being Koba
At any rate, Stalin had taken an interest in Sorge from his first day at Staff HQ. He let Felix Dzerzhinsky know he would run Sorge personally. Which was fine with the
Cheka chief who was used to Stalin's preference for direct management in some cases and had his hands full anyway.
Sorge's first assignment from the Boss was to contact the dead Czar's uncle (now in exile) and his other former associates in exile to facilitate their further financial contributions to the MOCR treasury so it could continue (and step up!) the great anti-Bolshevik struggle. If the Boss had a weakness it was his continuing desire to rob the aristocrats of everything they had --- a way, I suspect, of ameliorating the pain he felt over the death of his first wife by poverty.
At any rate, and of course, all these Czarist bosses had no idea that at the head of their great organization was one of Joseph Stalin's closest friends, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the proprietor of this real world Bates Motel! Or, what I like to call The MOCR Roach Motel.
The MOCR Roach Motel
In the interim since the winding down of the Civil War and re-establishment of law and order inside the Republic and Union, the Cheka had succeeded in getting a grip on the White Guardist conspirators aiming to overthrow Bolshevism and restore the Czarist monarchy. This had involved long and involved infiltration of specific agents into the White ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂémigrÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé leaders from Poland to Paris, and all points in between and around these capitals.
The Bolsheviks had actually created what the White Guard operators thought was their organization: the MOCR or Monarchist Organization for Central Russia. The survivors of the Romanov dynasty were among its highest leaders as were many generals left over from the Civil War defeats now in exile. Money from the wealthy coffers of these persons and their supporters flowed into the Cheka's umbrella organization for rounding up all of the monarchist opponents of the revolution into one enemy.
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Checking into the Roach Motel were virtually all of the Czarist die-hards. Checking out was problematic.
One after the other, all of the MOCR's leaders eventually had accidents, were kidnapped, or simply disappeared. One after the other, all of its projects eventually came to naught for apparent bad luck reasons. Yet the MOCR seemed always ready to pick up and get started all over again. Why? Because, its top ``organizers'' were actually Chekists.
A real world Norman Bates (Felix Dzerzhinsky) continued to run the Roach Motel with the full confidence of the Czar's remaining top relatives and bureaucrats. The trick had three years yet to run in January of 1925 before its leaders would finally discover the comedy to which they had devoted nearly a decade of their anti-Bolshevik lives. By that time in 1928, whatever they might have accomplished against the Soviet Government in its weakest period was a long lost dream, never to be resuscitated. A lot of lakes were full of a lot of bodies.
The Cheka had done it again and disarmed the most dangerous enemies of the international working class movement long before they could fire their first shots. The Roach Motel strategy had worked perfectly and would work again and again in the
future.
Tri-Partite Defense Strategy
In Summary, by New Year's Day of 1925, Lenin dead not quite yet one year (January 21st), witnessed his successors finding themselves confronting a world where the proletarian revolution, as embodied in their perhaps unworthy selves, was surrounded by the capitalist encirclement. Somehow the Soviet Union would have to be modernized while the Bolsheviks waited for workers in the advanced capitalist countries to join in the worldwide Socialist revolution. This was a realistic strategy because the Bolsheviks had built temporary but strong defenses.
This defense was tri-partite with (1) Rapallo having split the capitalist alliance in the West; (2) MOCR rounding-up the Bolshevik's feudal-capitalist opposition dropping them into a killing bottle; now (3) the sincere Chinese reformist bourgeoisie of Sun Yat-sen would be put into place to protect the eastern frontiers of the Soviet Union.
Strangely enough the latter began in London where Soviet secret service (Cheka) agent Michael Borodin had been sent to try and put order into the Council movement there from a Bolshevik perspective back in 1920. In August of that year Borodin had succeeded in welding the disparate Marxist groups in Great Britain into one authorized Comintern Party --- The Communist Party of Great Britain emerged. Borodin would subsequently return several times and a year later would organize a massive national strike movement.
Insurrection in London --- winter 1921 - 1922
``Hang the King! Hang the Lords! Hang Parliament! Hang all the Bloodsuckers!''
The chanting rocked Parliament Square. The masses of protesting workers from the Coal, Steel and Railroad Unions had just finished listening to Scott Communist leader Willie Gallagher railing against the Government's cutting of soldiers severance pay, the closing of striking coal mines, the rise in the price of coal, so essential to winter life in London in 1921. -And the Government's refusal to pass legislation allowing every man and woman a vote, especially on the question of unemployment relief, had brought the present situation to a crisis. An American was speaking to some of them --- those in front of Buckingham Palace - and he was demanding, coal now, wage increases for the mine workers, and recognition of the Soviet Republic. ---And, the crowd, approaching a quarter of a million, extended for miles, totally blocking all the streets entering and leaving Parliament Square, and isolating the Palace.
292The King, George Vth, and his wife were bravely waiting to face the mob as they called them. Protected by only a company of Guardsmen and a contingent of officer cadets, the situation was looking increasingly grim. In the Palace, panic had seized many, including the heirs to the throne.
``Father, mother, they're going to kill us all just like they did the Czar!'' cried David Prince of Wales (eventual King, if a short lived Kingship). The boy was truly terrified for only in nightmares about the Czar in Russia had he imagined such a thing. His brother (who would become George VI) tried to say something but stuttered into
silence and appeared to be drunk! (The eventual King of England; after his brother's abdication).
``Captain, take the boys away from all this,'' spoke the King.
``Yes, Your Majesty. Boys come with me.''
Another officer approached.
``Your Majesty's I beg you come with me now while we still have time. The tunnel is still in our hands but it may not be for long.''
``We are not going anywhere major. I will face this unruly rabble and the Queen insists on staying at my side. Their problem is with the Government not the Crown and I will be sure they understand that.''
``Sir they don't want to hear that. They want money, coal, and votes and God knows what all, and they hate all established authority. Sir, the communists have stirred up this mob and organized the strikes. ---And, that American out there is running the show! Lenin sent him to organize all this because the Russians are deadly serious about what they want. If we don't get you out now --- well, Sir if the mob turns on the gate, although we will die fighting, we won't be able to stop them, they will be in here in a matter of minutes. Again, I beg you --- you have to get away.''
``It didn't do the Czar any good to run major. Learn from history. Better to get it over with here and now.''
``The Kaiser ran Sir. It worked for him.''
``That's true Major. I had forgotten about that in the midst of all this.''
Not only had the Kaisers flight saved his life, in the face of the rioting Berlin ``mob'', but the German communist uprisings in the German Army, Navy, and in the factories of Berlin and Bavaria had brought the World War to an end.
By the way, this is a simple historical fact which the US rulers have done their best to obfuscate in US history books and US history classes ever since 1918, which as usual leaves the North American public with little comprehension of history other than that to be obtained from the mythology of US imperialism. In other word US citizens get little more than a daily diet of cleverly contrived propaganda as ``news'' and understanding of news, so they think somehow their soldiers must have won the First World War. In fact, the US late-coming role in the war had only peripherally to do with the denouement of the Kaiser and his regime. This substitution of propaganda for history, sadly gives the explanation for the pathetic ignorance, of even contemporary world history, exhibited by North Americans. A widespread ignorance, effecting college graduates as well as those finishing their education in the lower grades, so amazing to the intelligentsia of the rest of the world.
293``Major where is the Army?'' asked the King.
``The Light Infantry Brigade can't get through Your Majesty. The streets are barricaded, the workers are armed, and the horses have been attacked. The few other units within range have been stranded by the striking rail workers who refuse to move any military units.''
``The Navy?''
``Likewise Your Majesty. The docks are in the hands of the communists and our closest ships can't even moor at the docks. Sir, this could turn into a full scale revolution. Since Cromwell the Monarchy has not faced such a danger and if the mob turns Cromwellian they will do what they did before and they will hang you, the Lords and
Parliament!''
The King and Queen finally acceded to their Guardsmen and ran.
They need not have because the ``mob'' settled for guarantees of a new election where Labour's Left would have its right to contest, win, and take their Parliamentary seats. But it had been a close run thing.
The American referred to was Michael Borodin. Lenin had sent Borodin in 1921 to get the British would-be communists sorted out, disciplined and unified in one Party --- the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Soon MI5 and Scotland Yard would arrange for new quarters for Borodin at Wadsworth prison.
But unbeknownst to any of these participants in London was that the decision to bring Borodin back to Moscow for reassignment in China would soon be made by Lenin himself. The return arranged by Joseph Stalin.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 14: Bolshevism Spreads to China - Lessons of 1927We need to examine the initial Bolshevik experience in China for several reasons: (1) one reason is that the failure in China, on the first go-around, was deeply rooted in a failure to understand the nature of the underlying psychological imprinting of many people; (2) another is that the failure in China first time out of the box had much to do with the Moscow Politburo's ignorance of Chinese conditions (especially those in Shanghai, as we shall see); (3) not the least reason for directing our attention on this first attempt of the Bolsheviks to take state power in China is that in the end, what was achieved, has allowed China to become the center of the World Socialist Stage today.
There are two critical phases to this experience. The first is the period in which Bolshevism came to China by the invitation of Chinese Marxists. Lenin sent agents who were inclined to intervene along the lines laid down by their chief (who as we have seen created the Third International {COMINTERN or Communist International} in 1919.) The second is the phase when an indigenous Chinese Communist leadership struck out on its own path following the failure of 1927. For our purposes we shall concentrate upon the first phase.
The Leninists in Moscow turned their attention to China soon after the October 1917, seizure of power but did not dispatch agents until early in 1921. It is from that point we shall begin.
-And, to properly understand this initial experience it is necessary to pull data from three separate lines of investigation and a multitude of sources of information in order to sort out what really happened in the earliest phases of the Chinese proletarian revolution. (1) One of these are the documents left behind by the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow and their chosen instrument, the Comintern, and its agents in Russia and China; (2) another is that body of knowledge about the early history of Chinese capitalism (including its legal and illegal components), and finally, (3) we want to study the corpus of data about the history of foreign imperialism in China, especially Japanese imperialism as it impacted China in the first three decades of the 20th century.
294When it is all said and done what is most amazing is that the Russian Bolsheviks almost pulled it off. That is, they almost succeeded in China in 1921-27 as they had only a decade earlier in the Czarist Empire. Considering that the Bolshevik bosses started with no indigenous Chinese expertise, and were working in one of the great five known areas
of origin of global civilization, with a long and distinguished autochthonous sociocultural evolutionary tradition of its own, the fact that they did almost succeed, after only a few years of direct intervention, is in and of itself a testament to the power of their ideas - the truths of Marxist and Leninist analysis. -And, also to the quality of the Bolshevik leaders and their agents. But, their ultimate failure, in this first round, is also reflective of a weakness in their theory, in the one critical area: superstructural analysis, as we shall see.
Although the Chinese revolution failed in its first phase, the experience in its entirety laid the basis for the success of the Chinese Revolution twenty years later. This is because the Chinese Bolsheviks who survived the bloodletting of 1927 came to understand the weakness in the General Theory of Historical Materialism (the applied anthropology if you will) of their time. They corrected it in practice, and to a degree in theory as well, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. His eventual success was a truly historic achievement which was, in no small part, the result of building upon the experience of the daring role played by the Bolshevik chiefs in Moscow, from the beginning, which in this case was 1921. Mao's corrections were in the area of the theory of ideology (the theory of the superstructure.)
295It is this additional and equally important reason (the then extant theoretical weakness) which requires us to review the spread of Bolshevism to China in this book (where we have not the space to deal with each and every important and relevant historical event). How devastating their cognitive failure sometimes turned out. Especially, in China, in the years 1924-1927. We can see that theoretical weakness more clearly now because we now understand so much more about the ``ideological'' component of Marx's theory of the tri-partite model of culture: technology, social organization and ideology (forces of production, relations of production, superstructure, respectively) arranged in the traditional schematic way, and with interchangeable terms, as:
[Ideology] = superstructure
[Technology _%_ÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂàSocial Organization] = base (mode of production)
What do we know specifically, now, that we did not know in the early 20th century? How have we acquired this new knowledge?
To answer the last question first, we acquired this knowledge as a product of practice in the struggle to traverse the transitional period between epochs that began in 1917. We have the documents and the historical accounts we need.
Furthermore, and with regard to experience, this explication of real world events is the reason I began this series of papers, monographs and books, with my own autobiography (``Idaho Smith's'' Search for the Foundation!'' 2003, Jason W. Smith, Writers Press, Boise.) That is to say my own ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary cultural settings has allowed me a unique perspective on the documents that constitute the history of the struggle of Bolshevism in the last century. That field experience has served me well as a solid rock foundation from which to project the principle of basal sadistic-selfish mental template imprinting of people who must find themselves as the Hegelian
subjects of the contemporary world struggles, and to do so methodically in each and every one of the events of the past, the present, and speculatively into the future. Sadism and selfishness are the two ends of the broad spectrum of behavior inculcated into all those born into Servitude Epoch societies - it is the primary mental template of the Servitude Epoch.
It is no accident that practices such as those arising at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq occurred. Under Sadam or under the subsequent US management. For, sadism is one of two competing mental templates in societies that have advanced into the Second Transitional Period (between Capitalism and Communism).
The new template of altruism of the modern communist variety (emerging on a new and vastly superior technological basis rather than that of the primitive communist variety of Bands and Tribes) is emerging but is still the inferior template and will be so until (1) STAR TREK type technology is on the horizon and (2) working class governments are firmly in the saddle and not in danger of capitalist imperialist attack.
We know today that the superstructure or ideological component of culture is not simply a mirror reflecting the material conditions in which people live. It never was. In Chapter One of Volume One of Capital Marx points out that the ``fetishism of commodities'' makes, to paraphrase, `the material conditions of life appear as social relations between things.' He knew the ideological component was complex and required deep scientific insight in order to understand it properly - it's not simply a reflective mirror. As with all things, the answer to what makes them tick lies deep within those very same things, as Niels Bohr once remarked. Thus, the methodology. Which is to say we must look deep into the key factors influencing history. In this case along the three lines of inquiry listed above.
296The mode of production (the relationship between technology and social organization) of any society will determine the type of ideology that can occur (the kind of idea system that is possible.) Within Servitude Epoch societies, the primary mental template will always have two poles as opposite sides on a broad-spectrum --- think analogously of the electromagnetic spectrum with gamma-x rays on one (left) side and radio on the other (right) side --- in sociocultural evolution we have a primary mental template also existing as a spectrum with two opposite poles: one (right) side is simple selfishness/self-centeredness, and on the other (left) side, outright sadism.
In the Second Transitional Period the former template is retreating; the coming primary ``communist'' mental template is advancing. The latter also has two poles (with its opposite poles being those of ``liberal social consciousness'' and ``pure altruism.'')
However, there is a universal basal imprinting of all people, regardless of class, in a given sociocultural ``epoch'' in the ideological template of that Epoch or Period. When there are such dramatically competing templates we can expect to see widespread schizophrenia (because of the bi-polar nature of society and the competing templates.)
To date, we have seen two templates and two periods with competing templates: (1) that of the first egalitarian ``epoch'' (the altruism of primitive communism) (2) that of slavery, feudalism and capitalism --- which is to say the sadism and selfishness of the ``servitude'' epoch; and (3) the period of the Chiefdom Stages with both of these templates in competition; and (4) the current period of the Socialist Stages with the template of the Servitude Epoch coexisting with the new mental template of the as yet,
never before seen, Stage of Communism. Note, that in each of the transitional periods there are two competing mental templates - that of the formerly extant stage and that of the stage to come.
During the recent 500th Anniversary celebrations of Colon's ``discovery'' of the Americas several books appeared commemorating the occasion and some of them describe the contrast between the Spanish ronin freebooters and their ideology on the one hand and the people of the Bahamas and theirs. For example, the Spanish ronin enjoyed spit-roasting (barbequing) the Indians as they stole from them and the Bahamians couldn't comprehend such behavior. That is, the sadism of the Servitude Epoch vs. the altruism of the First Egalitarian Epoch.
Mental imprinting colors the way people behave in the most profound underlying causal way. In the early 20th century we saw that the underlying basal imprinting of sadism and selfishness of the Servitude Epoch (composed of the Stages of Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism) led to the treason of the 2nd international. -And, to other surprises within the Bolshevik Party in Russia (as confronted in Georgia and dealt with by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky,) and a few years later to the trap sprung by the decisive sector in the Chinese bourgeoisie: the gangsters of Shanghai known as ``the Green Gang.''
Had the Bolshevik theoreticians in Moscow known of this decisive underlying long-lasting mental imprinting of people in selfishness and sadism (which cannot go away until many generations have come and gone in the period of transition from epoch to epoch, and the material conditions of life have changed to support the second egalitarian epoch) then they would have anticipated such events as the treason of the Second International, the anti-Party course in Georgia taken among some Bolsheviks, and the trap sprung by the Green Gang --- examples chosen only because we have discussed them in the text - (and not to mention a myriad of other conflicts resolved unfavorably for our side.)
Also, we cannot discount the fact of insufficient knowledge about the specifics of Chinese conditions - which also led to the bushwhacking in Shanghai. The Bolsheviks understood the specifics of Russian society but were woefully ignorant of those of then contemporary China. Understanding those specifics in Russia, and the correct application of Marxist theory, brought them success in Russia. Not understanding the specifics of Chinese society, even with an almost correct application of Marxist theory (a theory at that time weak in the area of ``ideology''), was insufficient, first time around, to bring success in China.
Now let us begin with a review of what the Bolsheviks did do in China, and why. How they allowed themselves to be the loser in ``class alliance'' rather than the winner, in the first go-around with the Chinese capitalist classes.
Lenin finds Capitalism in China is Indigenous but Distorted
By Feudalism and Imperialism
China's capitalist stage begins in the late 1700's with the full scale introduction of machinofacture and its five diagnostic elements in several key soon-to-be industrial cities. Much of this invention work was done much earlier and in China not elsewhere. For example, blast furnaces existed in China perhaps two thousand years before they were invented in Liege in AD 1500 in the West. ---And, steam engines were invented in China centuries before a Chinese model arrived in France in the 1700's.
However, China is a vast country compared to the city-state polities of Western Europe. The mass of producers were fully domesticated serfs and most of the GNP came from peasant farmers under the heel of the feudal boot of the Master and Mistress classes and their eunuch bureaucracy administrating the Empire. For capitalism's productive potential to be released the national social structural situation would have to be changed, just as it had had to be changed in Europe and North America.
In the event, a role was played by the Chinese bourgeoisie, in league with British opium traffickers, similar, structurally, to the role played by Oliver Cromwell and his capitalist farmers during the English Revolution. In China we know the rise of the Chinese bourgeoisie as the Taiping Rebellion (1850 - 1860) which swept out of the south from Canton (now Guangzhou) northward, eventually taking at least half the country under its aegis and permanently undermining the imperial feudal order. Eventually, the Chinese bourgeoisie, in league with imperialists from many countries, brought down the imperial regime. In the succeeding interregnum there were many generals with their local power bases that filled the vacuum left by the collapse of imperial feudal authority. Behind these generals in key industrial centers were not only the financial capitalists but their gangster allies.
297Lenin concluded the perversion of national capitalist development by existing feudalism and invading imperialism, kept capitalism from developing in China, anywhere near as fully as Marx and Engels would have required. Therefore, for a working class revolution leading to Socialism as a Stage in that country to occur, there should be at first, at least the minimal capitalist system in existence. It barely was.
In other words, in 1922, the Russian Bolshevik Politburo looked at China, much as the social democrats of Western Europe had looked at the Russians in the pre-1917 period --- the latter often thinking Russia simply to backward to launch a successful proletarian revolution --- or, perhaps one should say ``not to primitive to launch such a revolution but far too primitive in capital development to carry it through to conclusion.'' Leninists responding that indeed they would start the conflagration and expect Europe to join in as soon as possible.
Now the Bolsheviks were looking at China as far too primitive to embark upon a socialist course but not too primitive in technological development to embark upon a stage of fulfilling capitalism's promise. ---And, a friendly capitalist government in the East would be a de facto buffer against the imperialist encirclement in the same way or even better than the way, Germany now acted as a buffer to the hostile European capitalist states in the west (the north guarded by Old Man Perpetual Winter and the south by the Himalayas (leaving only the Islamic crackpots to be liquidated which they were by 1939.) So capitalism in China was definitely there and had been in germinal form for millennia. But, it was not the predominate economic formation - machinofacture was still a tiny percentile of the Gross National Product, and far from sufficient by itself to finance a general bourgeois takeover of the entire country. (What went unrecognized was that criminal elements of the capitalist class in China did have the financial resources, should they wish to use them, to finance a bourgeois takeover of the entire country.)
298Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognized that China would continue to be converted into a colony of such imperialist powers as the USA, Japan, and the UK, if something wasn't done to bolster the Chinese bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, precisely because Chinese technical backwardness was ten times as bad as Russia's before the onset of the
First World War.
The Working Class Factor
Lenin created the Communist International or Third International by direct personal order beginning in January, 1919, assembling the delegates from foreign communists available in the Soviet Republic, adding those that had managed to make their way to Moscow by the beginning of March of 1919, when the founding convention was actually held. In charge of its Secret Department he placed Joseph Stalin (continuing to show confidence in Stalin, who he had earlier placed in charge of the Secret Department of the Russian Party.) By 1920 the Comintern was establishing operations in many countries and on every continent on Earth.
For the Comintern, the failure of the proletarian revolution to take hold in Europe was unfortunate, but not the end of the world. In the East, there was also the possibility that something might be fomented that would lead toward proletarian revolution somewhere down the road. In the meantime, perhaps a more amenable series of buffers, between global imperialist encirclement and the Soviet Regime, could be established in the Far East. Especially, in China, Indochina, and Indonesia.
In China some intellectuals had watched the Bolshevik experience closely. Among these was Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Dean of the College of Letters of Peking University. Working for him on May 4, 1919, was young Mao Tse-tung.
The date is important for it marks the beginning of the modern revolt of Chinese intellectuals, and those they could gather around them, against foreign imperialism. In this case they were revolting against the carving up of China, by the capitalist imperialists at Versailles (the victors of World War I conference dividing up the spoils of war), where Japan was handed much of China (mostly the part held previously by Germany.) The May 4th Movement as it became known, featured Chen and others influenced by Bolshevism playing important roles.
When the news, that Lenin was calling for a World Global Headquarters of proletarian revolution, reached China, it was natural that Chen and others, who considered themselves Marxists, would be among the first to establish contact with Russia's new bosses. Which is exactly what they did.
Following the 1919 founding of the Comintern, where Chinese delegates formally established contact, and its Second Congress in the Fall of 1920 where relations deepened between the two, the Comintern sent Gregory N. Voitinsky, Hendricus Maring, and S.A. Dalin to China. Under their tutelage, in 1921, the first Congress of the Communist Party of China (featuring some 11 Chinese delegates representing some 60 members) was held in the middle of a hot and steamy July, in Shanghai. One could hardly imagine that within five years the Chinese Communist Party would be one of the two most important and largest political organizations in the nation.
The delegates discovered they were being observed and quickly changed the location of their Shanghai conference. This was a most important penetration of their activities and would have long and far reaching consequences. For they were being observed by agents of their soon-to-be most deadly enemy, Big-eared Du, chief of the Shanghai Green Gang.
The Capitalist Factor
As history would have it the key "open" capitalist political organization emerging was the KMT Party of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. At the same time the key "secret" capitalist political organization was that of the Green Gang of Du Yuesheng (or Big-Eared Du.) Both organizations had branches in a variety of Chinese cities and overseas Chinese communities. For Sun, it would be Canton that would be his most important base; for Du it would be Shanghai. Perhaps the most important feature of this fact of Chinese reality is that the Bolshevik leaders appear to have been ignorant, altogether, of the latter.
While we should not be too critical of the Bolshevik bosses in Moscow for this failure, (since Big-eared Du's role in China's politics paralleled that of Meyer Lansky in the USA, and during Lansky's tenure the true significance of his role in North American politics was unknown to all but a few, and hardly any American communists) we should point out that this inability of the Bolsheviks to see Chinese bourgeois reality for what it was, was one decisive factor leading them into a trap.
(I have discussed Lansky at length in Volume 1, ``The Buccaneer'' of my autobiographical series ``Idaho Smith's Search for the Foundation, 2003, Jason W. Smith, Writers Press, Boise 330pp. [This book is available in University libraries from Boise State to Harvard or from Foundation Press It is only in recent years that the role of the Lansky organization has become the focus of scholarly attention let alone political attention.)
Sun's biggest problem all along had been the fact he believed in the bourgeois way of life; in the capitalist system, and in the then existing system of land-tenure in China. Fundamentally, he just wanted to democratize the system, more-or-less along US lines of 1781 (where only rich White Males were considered part of the ``democracy'') as he understood them, minus all the social egalitarianism of Gringolandia which was so abhorrent to the wealthy Chinese classes. As a consequence Sun had been unable to attract anyone other than bourgeois youth and foreign expatriate Chinese contributors for his KMT party. The Communists from Moscow understood this well, and spent huge amounts of time trying to convince him of the necessity of broadening his appeal to the Chinese masses. They never fully succeeded.
299 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/2011/ABCC999/20110726/399.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ from .docx from author (see ABCs.el) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nilBig eared Du's concern with the communists was with what they had accomplished in Russia, and the possibility that they could do the same thing in China. Du was not only the boss of drug trafficking in China but also the boss of much of organized labor in Shanghai, the owner of countless maquiladoras, and he didn't want competition from local communists. Du used his unions to squeeze working people and to ``shake down'' other capitalists. He quickly became the strongest anti-communist in China. His story is far beyond the scope of this book but it is critical because one of his most important protÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂégÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂés was the thug Chiang Kai-shek. (Those of you interested in Du and the Chinese Green Gang are referred to a most compelling and inclusive review of his activities in The Soong Dynasty, 1985, Sterling Seagrave, Harper and Row, New York, 532 pp.)
300The Decision to Intervene
The Soviet foreign policy victory at Rapallo, Italy, (April, 1922), was the great triumph of Soviet diplomacy in the West ---And as we have seen, Lenin's diplomats managed to split the capitalist encirclement they had hitherto confronted in Europe, by allying with capitalist Germany against the other capitalist powers. There was an
equivalent 1922 diplomatic initiative in China. Shortly after Rakovsky's success at Rapallo, Italy, the Politburo sent Adolph Joffe (one of Trotsky's strongest partisans, and the Soviet's first Ambassador to Weimar Germany) to Peking as Soviet Russia's new would-be Ambassador to China.
The regime in Peking was a military one. It was certainly not anything approaching pro-Bolshevik. But, as had been the case with the German Weimar government, both Governments could have much to gain from cooperation; not the least of which favored the Chinese official government, and whoever occupied Peking was the ``Official'' Chinese government. The new Russian government had renounced all claims to the territorial privileges and advantages of the Czarist regime in China as well as any claims that might have been forthcoming from the Versailles settlements.
So, on the one hand, the Bolshevik bosses wanted an official government to government relationship between Moscow and Peking in 1922, that would have a ``Rapallo'' type of effect in the East, with regard to the world imperialist encirclement of the Bolshevik Revolution. However, unlike Germany, where the Weimar government was relatively strong the Chinese military regime in Peking was far from stable. How reliable would an agreement with this or any of the succeeding military regimes in Peking going to be? -And, what about proletarian revolution in China? That was the other hand.
Lenin calculated, in 1922, that China had barely entered the capitalist stage. Further, he maintained that China's capitalism such as it was, was so much under the control and influence of imperialism that it existed in a distorted form. This primitive capitalist deformation needed time to (a) develop its own inherent productive forces, which meant first of all (b) that it had to escape imperialism's control (meaning by that time primarily Japanese, US, and UK capitalist investment and military occupation) Overall, in 1922, China was perhaps ten percent as industrialized as Russia had been on the eve of the World War (i.e., 1914.) Accordingly, he had sent Joffe to China. Subsequently, (after Lenin's May 25th stroke) the Politburo was to change Joffe's assignment.
301Plot Point
After much debate the Bolshevik Political Bureau (this matter was far too important to be left to the Comintern, as Seagrave points out) decided in the spring of 1922, given the shaky condition of the Peking regime, and the possibility of jump-starting a progressive bourgeois national independent government, to order Joffe south to Shanghai, to confer with Sun about China's future. This moment marks the plot point in the transformation of Soviet policy with regard to China. For, as the importance of a nationally independent Chinese Government, as a friendly treaty partner on the eastern frontier of the Soviet Republic, took paramount importance in the thinking of Lenin and associates, so the matter was de facto removed from the status it had previously held (China as one more important country with a Communist Party founded and moving in accordance with a rather boiler-plate plan to gradually work over the working classes to something quite different. In other words, Stalin's cookie-cutter model of adding new friendly Republics to the World Socialist Stage was being set aside in favor of a new policy of bolstering a friendly bourgeois government in this particular case.)
302In short, the spread of Bolshevism to China now became a matter of survival foreign policy for the Soviet Republic as opposed to the simple organization of
international class war. From this moment on the objective of the Bolshevik leaders from Lenin on down was to implement a Rapallo type of relationship with a bourgeois democratic regime in China. Proletarian revolution was definitely on the back-burner.
However, in China, this was not a popular policy in much of the Party, and the decision to use Comintern agents and CPC cadre to make the new strategy work inevitably meant that many workers and peasants thought that victory in the coming struggle would mean a rapid move into communism. This is the first source of confusion about the First Chinese Revolution culminating in 1927 in defeat --- i.e., what were its objectives? Well, whatever objectives any others may have had Lenin's objective and that of the Bolshevik Politburo had changed and now focused on creating a new democratic bourgeois nationally independent regime for China.
In January of 1923, Joffe and Sun reached, with difficulty, an agreement which proposed they jointly carry out a program designed to operationalize Lenin's idea of achieving a bourgeois democratic regime in China. As we have seen, Lenin believed a national bourgeois democracy was achievable, and would be a longer-term solution to the problem of a Chinese buffer against world imperialism than any agreement with Peking. Such an agreement with Sun, in other words, had prospects for permanency, as opposed to the short term advantages of a relationship with whatever military short-lived regime happened to be in Peking. Furthermore, Sun understood these objectives of Lenin's and why he wanted China secure from imperialism, with its own national army and a new alliance with the Soviet Republic. Sun realized Lenin thought the productive forces of capitalism would generate a stronger and stronger proletarian base upon which the newly formed Chinese Communist Party could build; given the time it would take to build a minimal industrial base in China, it would take many years before any of Sun's capitalist supporters would have to worry about proletarian revolution of the Soviet type. Rather, in China there would be communists with an eye toward revolution some years down the road when conditions were finally ripe.
303You should note this technological backwardness of China was understood by Lenin and the Politburo. It was Chinese backwardness which made Lenin et. al. settle on the idea of a bourgeois national democratic regime in Peking as the best to be hoped for in the years 1922 to 1927. This was the same technological backwardness so severely handicapping socialist construction in the Soviet Union in those years and in an even more severe form would continue to plague the development of China's road in the Socialist Stage, constantly, after the success of Mao in 1949. But, we are getting way ahead of ourselves.
The terms of the Soviet-Sun agreement involved building a loyal (National Revolutionary) Army for Sun and his KMT Party. The Politburo wanted to involve the Chinese Communist Party (then only a year and a half old) with a key role in building this NRA, if for no other reason than that would be the only way they could be sure the instrument they had in mind to democratize China could be successfully crafted. ---And, of course, to put the CPC in a historical position where it could begin to build a working class base and then, someday, do what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia.
The Soviet-Sun Agreement was conditional: if Sun could re-establish himself somewhere, as a boss, then the Bolsheviks would carry out their part - which would be to send shipments of weapons and military specialist trainers to build Sun an Army which could bourgeoisify the entire nation, securing simultaneously its freedom from
international oppression by capitalist imperialism of the Japanese, American, and British varieties. Sun did his part in Canton (now Guangzhou); as a result the Politburo in Moscow decided to fulfill their obligation under the Sun-Joffe Agreement.
Soviet assistance was formalized when Lenin dispatched Mikhail Borodin to Canton, subordinating command of the incoming Bolshevik contingent of military advisors (and their equipment) to his command. (For a full account of Borodin and his mission I recommend Borodin: Stalin's Man in China, 1981, Dan N. Jacobs, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 369 pp.)
Trotsky vs. Stalin IV: China
Trotsky's biographer, Isaac Deutscher, refers to the idea that Stalin failed and Trotsky would have succeeded in China as ``vulgar Trotskyism.'' A more authoritative source (in matters regarding Trotsky) than Deutscher would be hard to find, and, for that reason we have to take him seriously when he points out that in the two most important years of Russian Bolshevik direct involvement in China (1926-1927) Trotsky had little or nothing to say about the course the Chinese Revolution was following. In fact, on this subject Deutscher finds him silent {See pages 321-332 in The Prophet Unarmed, 1959, Isaac Deutscher, Oxford University Press, London, 490pp.) It was Trotsky's strong supporter --- the Austrian psychiatrist Adolph Joffe - who had negotiated the Soviet-Sun Agreement. It was Lenin and the Politburo that directed Joffe to proceed as he did. Stalin's involvement was after the fact, and then only due to his being in charge of the Secret Departments of both the Soviet Party and the Comintern (a responsibility handed to him by Lenin), thus he inherited responsibility for the implementation of the policy.
304Nevertheless, for better or for worse, the primary credit and the primary blame, if it is to fall anywhere, must fall on Stalin, for the reason that he was in charge of operations and for that reason alone. -And, secondarily it must fall on the Bolshevik Party's highest leadership, collectively, for failing to achieve intelligence superiority. It is not the case that Stalin was the champion of one pole of thought on China policy and Trotsky another. As true as that may have been in other areas of dispute within the Russian Party's Politburo, it had never been so over China (when Trotsky was in the politburo and later when he was not.) No, the reasons for the eventual failure, of the first go-around, in China, lie elsewhere.
There was an opposite pole with regard to Soviet and Comintern policy in China, but it was in China. The opposition to the Bolshevik Politburo policy was led by the CPC founder and chairman Chen Tu-hsiu who preferred a much more classic ``Leninist'' policy of independence from other class forces and parties. In other words, a policy mirroring that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in Russia, prior to October, 1917. Ironically, Chen wanted to proletarianize China immediately; Lenin wanted bourgeois democracy first, for China.
With regard to the path being followed by Borodin in China, it was Lenin who dispatched him. It was a Leninist policy he was instructed to carry out, which might briefly be said to be `to act to bring about a national bourgeois democratic regime in China, wherein the Chinese Communist Party would play a leading role, positioning itself for an eventual seizure of power, at an appropriate time, somewhere down the road, when the objective conditions for proletarian revolution and government had been established'.
Borodin was familiar with Stalin, who was the boss of both the Russian Party's
international secret programs as well as the secret programs implemented through the COMINTERN. As a matter of fact Stalin and Borodin had voted together in Party meetings, at crucial times, in the early 1900's, before Borodin had emigrated to Chicago, and, of course, before he had returned to Russia after October, 1917, to volunteer his services to the cause. Stalin, being the de facto organizational leader of the Party in 1923 (at least as far as its secret activities went internationally) must, presumably, have found his prior friendship with Borodin as an enabling factor for all concerned.
In summary, the China policy of the Bolsheviks was determined by Lenin, formulated by a key Trotskyist, and the entire Politburo concurred. Stalin had much of the organizational responsibility for the policy, because of his job as head of the Secret Departments of both the Party and the Comintern.
Inside Snapshot
April 17, 1922
"They've decided." Joseph Stalin remarked to his aide and fellow Politburo member Vyacheslav Molotov.
"So, it's to be Sun Yat-sen for sure?"
"Apparently. Lenin convinced all of us in the Politburo of his position. Lenin asked why you weren't there and I said you were super busy which you are. I just wanted you to know he missed you. Anyway, there doesn't appear to be a downside, no matter how the Chinese war goes we should be able to get at least as much as we got at Rapallo. So he thinks."
"What do you think Koba?"
"Ahh yes, but it's not up to me to think - only to do or die. Perhaps we can pull it off. At the least, maybe we will add a thousand kilometers of depth to our eastern buffer. Anyway, the Boss says it's to be Borodin in charge. So let's get Mikhail back from England.
"He's still in that London lock-up."
"Well, let's get him out."
"That's not going to be easy. Rakovsky says the Tory's are trying to make an example out of him. An example of us.
"Buy him out or shoot him out, but I want him here before the end of the month.''
"Yes Koba."
Lenin's Analysis to the Politburo
Vladimir Illych Ulyanov (V. I. Lenin) had become convinced that China was far too primitive in economic development to pursue even the limited Socialist course that the Bolsheviks were following in Russia. Accordingly, what was needed was a strong and vibrant bourgeois democratic regime in China, independent of US, UK and Japanese imperialism, acting as a willing de facto buffer in the East against the global imperialist encirclement of the Soviet Republic soon to be the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, stuck in Peking as Lenin's envoy to an inevitably temporary military regime, which acted as the "official" government of China, was Adolph Joffe, himself a brilliant psychiatrist and one of Trotsky's original intellectual mentors, now representing the Leninist Politburo in China. Lenin wanted Joffe ordered south to Shanghai to confer
with democratic leader Sun Yat-sen, about a new treaty of alliance between his forces in China and the new Soviet Government. The Politburo had concurred, and after Joffe and Sun had, with difficulty, negotiated an agreement (soon to be a formal treaty of alliance), Stalin, in charge of both the Russian Communist Party's international secret programs and those of the Third International (the COMINTERN), was handed the responsibility for implementing the China program. Specifically, the Russians agreed to build a modern army for Sun, similar in structure to the Red Army that had just won the Civil War in the Russian Empire and defeated all of the capitalist countries too, simultaneously.
This agreement was conditional. First Sun was to re-establish himself somewhere as a boss. Then the Soviets would begin their part --- namely sending men and materiel to build Sun an army to conquer the nation. Lenin had chosen Michael Borodin to head up the project.
Borodin had been a Bolshevik from the early days. In fact, he and Stalin had voted together in those early days during critical meetings of the Bolshevik leadership. Borodin had emigrated to Chicago after the 1905 Revolution failed and returned to Russia, from the United States, after the success of the October 1917 Revolution to volunteer his services to the cause once again. Lenin had urged him to join the communist secret service and he had done so. Currently he was incarcerated in Great Britain where he had been given several missions and most recently had succeeded in welding some of the disparate British communist groups together into one unified Communist Party of Great Britain and had been accordingly rewarded by Scotland Yard with a prison cot and board for an indefinite period of time.
305Stalin had just ordered Molotov to secure his release by extraordinary means.
Inside Snapshot
Inside Wadsworth Prison
Wadsworth was newer then - the late spring of 1922. American visitor Michael Borodin was speaking to his cell mate.
"What a shit hole. I thought US joints were bad. Cook County doesn't look so bad after this."
"Christ Yank this is the best prison in Britain."
About this time the warder showed up with breakfast and an attorney visiting notice.
"Prisoner Borodin, your Consul is here to see you. You can talk to him or have breakfast. Either or. Which is it to be?
"The Consul please James..."
"As you wish.''
James left the breakfast and pocketed the tip. Palmed to him by the American, or Russian, or whatever he was, as if he hadn't even noticed it. Borodin, being an Old Bolshevik with considerable experience with police and jails, had earlier, and quickly, placed his guards in his hip pocket.
"My friend, to me it's still fucking cold in this place... and it's nearly summer! Eat my breakfast while I'm gone.''
Breaking Out
"You're leaving tonight. Are you ready?"
Speaking was Soviet diplomat, Christian Rakovsky, the magician of Rapallo, already Lenin's choice to be the eventual Ambassador of the Soviet Republic to Great Britain. Acting in the meantime as head of the Soviet trade delegation in London.
"Of course I'm ready. But, I thought I was to wait here for now?" Borodin responded interrogatorily
"The Boss wants you back now. I flew here direct from Genoa for this."
"Which Boss?"
"Comrade Stalin. Acting on the personal orders of Lenin on behalf of the entire Politburo.''
"They must have something new for me... something urgent."
"You go aboard the Karl Marx tonight - it's a freighter loading at the quay... really, just waiting for you. We pulled it over from Hamburg yesterday..."
"You're friend the guard has been paid. The judge was paid for the order - it's real. At least until he denies it - which will be tomorrow... when it's discovered, you're missing. Two Bobby's are coming with me to get you and take you to the ship and I have paid them already, and will pay them much more the minute the Karl Marx is out of British waters. You're going home my friend!"
Inside Snapshot
Michael Borodin Takes a Tiger by the Tail
May 16, 1922 Moscow
The Staraya street office complex housed Politburo member Joseph V. Stalin, the Party's General Secretary and, one of the three Triumvirs of the Red Army, as well as Commissar (Minister) of Nationalities and Commissar (Minister) of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (a super-secret police operation), not to mention his job as chief of Soviet Party and Comintern intelligence.
Stalin's main office was simple. Nothing on the walls but portraits of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels behind and above his chair. That chair placed at the center of a long executive table-like desk. Appended was an even longer desk for those in conference, intersecting at a right angle to form a ``T.'' On Stalin's right another desk supported a bank of telephones; to his left a door led to a small army of secretaries and librarians immediately outside and available at an instants notice. Stalin's main Kremlin office was a ceremonial duplicate. Always in Red Army uniform Stalin had a holstered ``Bolo'' (.30 cal. Mauser pistol popular with Bolshevik officers and NCO's thus the term Bolo), under his military jacket and a Tommy Gun under his desk just in case.
Entering, the recent fugitive and secret agent Michael Borodin accompanied by a Civil War Hero; moments later entered Red Army General Vasily K. Blyukher. Greeting them at the door was a pacing Joseph Stalin.
``It's good to be out of jail walking around is it not Mikhail'' Stalin bear-hugged his old friend, Mikhail Borodin.
``Thank you for getting me out so fast. I was expecting to spend another winter in that hell hole. Yes, Koba it's wonderful to taste life when you get out. Nothing like the first few days of freedom after you've been locked up.''
``Don't I know it. Seven times for me! Anyway, your back, and you can thank Lenin, he ordered your return, and he is waiting to see both of you next. You know Vasily Konstantinovich (Blyukher) do you not Mikhail?" Inquired Stalin of his old friend
and now secret service agent Michael Borodin
"Of course my friend" the two men gave big Russian Bear Hugs to each other. "It's been many years but I have been following your military career - what great services you have provided the international working class movement!"
"As have you Mikhail... we are all doing our parts."
"So, Comrades why did you bring me home so fast and what am I to do now?"
"China." Responded the Boss, directly, simply, quietly. As if one word said it all. -And, in this case it did. Stalin walked to the map his colleague Vyacheslav Molotov had just had installed at the center of the room. Stain pointed at China and then at Canton (Guangzhou).
``It's an honor. But, Koba, let me ask, why was I chosen?
"You're the man...because first of all, you are one of our very best agents and, secondly, you speak English. Dr. Sun speaks English. This is such a tricky cross-class alliance that absolute understanding between us, is essential every step of the way, and speaking a common language we consider to be essential.
``-And, Blyukher here is going to run this new National Liberation Chinese Army for you. I want you two to work out your plan, show it to me, get everything you're going to need on your TO&E and give it to me. Comrade Frunze as always, will be absolutely wonderful in providing the needed materiel. Ships will be made available when the time comes, and it will take a while to put all this equipment together. In the meantime you have many books and documents to study and I have assigned a team of Chinese language experts to school both of you in that language.
``You Mikhail will circumvent Hong Kong - the Limeys are looking for you after that de facto escape from Wadsworth.'' Pointing at the respectively relevant points of his discourse on the map he continued, ``You will go by train to Vladivostok and then Harbin, where one of our freighters with Japanese registration will take you to Shanghai. Then we will have a tramp steamer take you straight up the Pearl River. Just to be sure that the Brits don't get the idea of forcing the steamer into Hong Kong harbour for some reason I will see to it that this steamer is carrying a lot of ``suspect'' sheep --- believe me they won't want those possibly diseased animals anywhere near their harbour.
``Vasily will be going in with the first ships flying the hammer and sickle. They will be carrying all the weaponry. We think this will present the best face to the Chinese --- the General showing up with his men and machines --- in force.
``These are your next briefing papers. Of course, there will be many more but I have tried to see that you read them in a logically sequential way. Tactically, when the time comes, to begin with, operationally, upon arrival, I want you to go in quietly and directly to Dr. Sun. Then even more quietly meet with Chen Tu-hsiu our Party leader in China and his men, who will be in Canton (Guangzhou), to greet you and, of course, to take their proper places. You will have about two weeks before our naval expeditionary force arrives. In short, you are to go directly to Sun Yet-sen and take things in hand. Do you understand?
"Yes sir. Where is all of this headed Koba. Obviously we are not just securing a province for a revolutionary government. Is it to be a military conquest of the rest of China out of Canton?"
"Yes, more-or-less. You two have read the briefing from the Politburo and you tell me. Remember that our Politburo is united on this question as they have been on no
other since Rapallo. Lenin himself is the architect. My point is that if I were in your position I would not try to change the policy in any fundamental way - just implement it. That's what I am doing and that's what I expect you two to do.
"Questions?"
``No Sir,'' replied Borodin and quickly the thought was echoed by the deed of salute and clicked heels as General Blyukher concurred with his political colleague.
"Now, the boss is waiting.''
The Boss in His Prime
May 16, 1922
Unlike Stalin, whose desk was always in perfect order, Lenin alternated his habits --- one day everything in perfect order and more often leaving his papers and books every-which-way while he was working. This day it was the former. Lenin was a genius who understood the importance of the image he presented to his most important lieutenants. He stood up and walked around his workplace as Stalin entered with Borodin and Blyukher in tow.
Only two men were allowed immediate ``unannounced'' access to Lenin on their own initiative: Stalin and Trotsky. These two being the other highest military chiefs (triumvirs) since November of 1918.
``Comrades,'' Lenin visibly pleased to see his old friends shook hands with each and gestured for them to sit as he in turn regained his chair behind the now famous desk in his Kremlin office, ``have a seat.'' Lenin continued, ``We just concluded the 11th Congress and thankfully it went much better than last year's Congress. I think we finally have restored discipline in our own ranks and it wasn't easy. So, I know what it must have been like in London. The important thing Comrades is we are on the march once again. Mikhael you have heard about Rapallo days ago. Now we want you to do the same thing in China, only a few months from now.
``Anyway, thank you so much Mikhail for your work in England. I think the British situation is finally under control, thanks to you, and we can hope to have a powerful force at the disposal of our cause as a result. I want to talk to you about the Council's --- what I am reading is confusing. But first, now, I have to talk to you about China and I must impose upon you once again. Comrade Stalin has briefed both of you I take it.''
``Yes he has'' replied Borodin for both of them.
Stalin nodded in acknowledgement and excused himself.
``I want you to listen to what I have to say and then ask whatever questions you may have.
``As I see it --- and the Politburo concurs --- the Chinese situation has suddenly become more than a question of organizing proletarian revolution as soon as possible. To begin with, proletarian revolution in China is not possible now. Nor in the immediately foreseeable future. China is at best ten percent as industrialized today in 1922 as we were in Russia in 1914.-And, we were by far the weakest link in the capitalist chain of countries then. There is no useful purpose to be served by trying to impose artificially a proletarian government on a nation barely into the capitalist stage and overwhelmingly composed of peasants in one or another kind of servitude and completely uneducated.
``Furthermore, as you know, our first task is to preserve ourselves --- the Soviet
Republic --- as the first international working class national base in the history of the world, and we are surrounded by enemies --- all of whom would like to see us six feet underground. We have broken the imperialist encirclement in the West --- at least for the moment. -And, I think we have a good chance of breaking it up in the East. There are bourgeois forces of a progressive nature in China and they are best represented by Dr. Sun Yat-sen who had the guts to seize the moment in 1911 and declare a revolutionary democratic republic --- bourgeois to be sure --- but nevertheless sufficiently progressive to stand against the imperialist rapists of that sorry country.
``Mikhail in your long sojourn in the United States did you have the opportunity to study its history?''
``Yes Sir. I mean, yes comrade Lenin I did.''
``I did also when I was in London. I tried to perfect my English by reading American history books. It's a very impressive history. It has important lessons for us and now especially for you, in that the similarities between emerging capitalism today in China in 1922 and emerging capitalism in the USA, especially after their revolutionary war victory in 1781, are striking and instructive. Remember in 1781 the American revolutionaries were our equivalent --- that is, the most progressive force in the world of their time. What the Chinese bourgeoisie must do now is very similar to what the Americans did at that time. ---And you should note the fact China is at least a century and one half, technologically, behind the Americans - this limits what they can do.
``What we absolutely must have is a secure far eastern frontier in every sense if we are to have any hope of defeating the capitalist cabal in the West on a permanent basis.
``Our 1920 failure to liberate Europe is coming back to haunt us as the capitalist oligarchies of Europe impose outright police state rule of the rich over the poor --- bragging about it - in country after country in east Europe, and now this crackpot Mussolini in Italy. We can't expect Rapallo to last forever. I do believe we can survive and expand the scope of the revolution if we can secure our eastern frontiers against a Chinese, Japanese, Korean or American attack, so we can focus all our efforts on the one, western, front.
``Again, directly to the point, is that we must have security in the Far East. If we can achieve security via a bourgeois democratic regime in China which will have to depend on us because all of the capitalist countries have evolved into their imperialist phase, then that is what we must build. You can see, now that the Americans are imperialists too, even they are not at all likely to share the democratic impulses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or Sun Yat-sen. Not any longer.
``I think this Chinese force with Sun Yat-sen at the helm is by far good enough for now. As capitalist industry is given a chance to develop outside the control of imperialism in China, then Chinese workers will find their opportunity soon enough. Anyway, that's the best we can do for China now. It is absolutely the thing we must do to preserve the Soviet Republic, by presenting the imperialist encirclement with a buffer, through which they must first break, to get to us. That is the program we are implementing in a nutshell.''
``Comrade Lenin,'' interjected Blyukher, ``am I to understand that we are to put proletarian revolution on the back-burner for now, and if so, how will that be received by the Chinese Party?''
``I met with the Chinese Party founder and now leader, Chen, and his associates at the first and second Comintern Congresses here in Moscow, Vasily, and I believe they are committed to international application of the principles of democratic centralism within the Comintern and its constituent parties. I want you Mikhail to explain all of this to them again --- go over their history with us - when you confer with Dr. Sun and our Party leaders in Canton (Guangzhou). Convince them, as no one can better than you, of the importance of accepting our logic and the resulting program upon which we have already agreed. Not an easy task perhaps. But these are not easy times. Naturally, they are eager to do there, what we have done here, but the backwardness of China technologically makes it far more likely that they can be successful with regards to proletarian revolution if they first have a really decent-sized industrial working class in China --- one educated and responsible. Do you think you can do that comrade Borodin?''
306``Yes, Comrade Lenin, I can do that.''
``That's your answer Vasily. Now you two must work together, like a hand in a glove. We have built the Chinese Party, we must now build a Chinese Army to do the job, and put it at the head of a united front of progressive bourgeois forces and our own communist inclining Chinese workers. Do you think you can do that Vasily?''
``Yes sir, I can. I will carry out your policy and your orders to the letter.''
``Comrade Stalin is in charge of the secret departments of both our Party and the Comintern as you know and he will provide you with everything you need. I have given him a veritable blank check to see that whatever you need is provided. You can rely on Koba. He has never failed me yet, Vasily.''
``Yes sir. I know that. We see eye to eye on everything and we always have.''
``Yes, even on Lvov and Warsaw. I remember that very well. In the end Koba was right and we wrong. But that is in the past.''
Neither Borodin nor Blyukher wanted to venture into that mine field and they sat dumb. Waiting for their chief to continue.
``No comment? I don't blame you. It's a serious sore spot still. No need to tear the scab off that wound. Do either of you have any more questions for me?
``No? Then good luck, and as we say good bye until we meet again --- in victory!''
What neither the Chief nor these lieutenants knew was that in only a few days Lenin would have the first of a series of disabling strokes. In reality he had only eighteen months to live.
Walking Along the Moscow River
``It's inspirational to serve a leader like Lenin --- every time I see him I am so impressed. He is both a professorial genius and a man of action,'' spoke Vasily Blyukher.
``-And, he does carry himself impeccably,'' chimed in Borodin. ``By the way, what is all this about you and Trotsky? I was on a mission in Mexico when the Warsaw battle took place and I have only heard rumors. They don't make much sense.''
``It's simple really. Trotsky didn't pay attention to his job. Do you know he didn't even know how many men he was sending under that aristocratic bastard Tukhachevsky?''
``Really?'' Borodin asked.
``Then that fool Gai Gaia who they put in charge of the 2nd Red Cavalry Army''
``They meaning who?''
``Trotsky and Tukhachevsky --- they're both bourgeoisiefied aristocrats and like two peas in a pod. Anyway, Gaia was to turn south just as he was due north of Warsaw and support the main infantry and artillery attack of Tukhachevsky against Warsaw in the East. Gaia missed his left turn and the moron ended up in Germany! He had to surrender to internment because his rear was by then completely occupied by Polish and German troops. Then Tukhachevsky left his left flank completely unprotected --- well, you don't have to be a military genius to see the opportunity there and Pilsudski's generals grasped the moment and drove a stunning attack into Tukhachevsky's left flank.
``Well, then Trotsky is crying for help --- in Moscow the whole time --- and that bastard Tukhachevsky wasn't there either!''
``Well where the hell was he?''
``In fucking Minsk!''
``That's three hundred miles away!''
``No shit!
``Anyway Trotsky tells Koba, who has been doing his job running the southern pincer against Lvov with Voroshilov and Buddeny just fine, to transfer the Konarmia to Tukhachevsky and Koba told him to go fuck himself! You know how Koba can swear when he wants to. Koba says he wasn't going to throw good after bad and suggested that Trotsky do his job; go to Warsaw and put order into that fucking mess he had made. Well ``the Mouth'' goes to Lenin and bitches, and moans, and cries and Lenin not knowing the details like Koba knows them, orders him to obey Trotsky and Stalin told him, politely, no!''
``He told Lenin no?''
``Yeah. It shocked me too. But, Koba was right. Anyway, those two are friends going back to the beginning and they talked it out - eventually Koba acquiesced and sent Budenny to help Tukhachevsky but Koba was right as usual and Budenny found the situation hopeless and was barely able to extricate the Konarmia. You know the rest. That was the end of our hope to link up with West European workers. All thanks to that big mouth cocksucker Trotsky. Anyway I hate talking about it. My blood pressure goes up twenty points every time I think about that mother fucker.''
``I'm sorry Vasily, I didn't realize You know when I came back in late 1917 Lenin told me, when I asked him why he had brought Trotsky into our ranks after all the years of nothing but trouble with this guy, that Trotsky got back just a few months before our seizure and he was confronted with either Trotsky as an inevitable ``spoiler'' in the Petrograd Soviet, or the possibility Leon would see it to his advantage to buckle-under on a few points --- emphasize the key point upon which we agreed namely turning this thing into a proletarian revolution at the earliest possible moment --- and Trotsky did see it to his advantage in the end, to come into a ready built, powerful, well-funded operation such as Lenin could offer him, and with a position in the leadership. It worked out, the boss said, and afterwards Trotsky had shown tremendous ability. ---And, Illych said the world had rather accidentally gotten the impression that Leon was one of our supreme leaders, so Trotsky was getting a lot of attention, and his verbal ability and energy was turning that attention to our advantage. At that time we had no idea, Illych said, that Trotsky would turn his attention to military affairs and even less so that he would be brilliant at it.
307``Anyway, changing the topic to here and now, I'm confident I can handle the political strategy. How do you feel about creating a new Army?''
Blyukher responded to his old friend optimistically.
"Of course, we can do it. But, we have to do it the way we did it here. Our way. Fuck anything else! Thank God Koba is running this operation and not that asshole Trotsky.
``Whatever you may think about Trotsky's brilliance most of us Old Bolsheviks that won the war, think he was nothing but trouble, constantly making the wrong decisions, and always in our way with his god damned Czarist officers --- 75,000 of the mother fuckers before it was all over and a pain in the ass all the way along. Anyway, we know what to do and the Chinese have to watch and listen and learn. Did you know they still play staged battles?''
"No. What's a staged battle?"
"You won't fucking believe this. Both sides get all dressed up and assume their battle stations... then they select a few fighters to march out and fight a few selected by the other side..."
"A
kind of David and Goliath setting eh...?"
"Yes, except
that they never really accomplish anything. This can go on
indefinitely. So, the first time they get going on us that way, or on
Dr. Sun, we put our shock troops together and kick the shit out of
them!
``All this is fine with me. But, frankly, by now I was hoping we would be in Germany, Italy, France, England just about anywhere with some industry and workers... not this Chinese shit hole at Canton," remarked the Red Army general and Chinese National Revolutionary Army (to be) new boss Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher.
"Vasily, you know as well as I do that we have to secure our frontiers against the imperialist encirclement. They are all around us. Now, we have fractured that encirclement; run it through if you will, with the sword of our Rapallo Treaty. I think we can do as much with Dr. Sun in China. As you heard so does Lenin.
``He knows we can't socialize China immediately. According to him China is only ten percent as industrialized as our homeland before the World War. We barely had enough workers and industry to win in Russia. Success for us in China, as Lenin points out, is much simpler in one sense because all we are trying to do is to help the indigenous bourgeois forces establish a half-assed kind of democracy amongst themselves with a little more participation than they are currently willing to accept on the part of common people. I can make them accept that by argument and logic. Eventually their common-sense will show them we know the best way to proceed.
"Anyway, we better get to work, Vasily. There's still a mountain of things to do."
"I know. By the way, Mikhail, I was told to pick a name the Chinese can say easily enough. A contraction of the first syllable of each of my two children's names gives me Ga and Len for Galen. So that's my new name General Galen."
``I heard Trotsky said your name was General something or other,'' changing his mind about what he had been about to laughingly say (General Asshole.)
``That cocksucker should have been shot after Warsaw.''
``You heard the boss. No point in tearing that scab off now. I'm sorry I should keep my mouth shut.''
-And, in this way Soviet Red Army General Blyukher became the first foreign (Soviet) military advisor posted to serve Sun Yat-sen in the liberation of the largest nation on Earth. -And, the first real commander of the Chinese NRA
(National Revolutionary Army) was, accordingly, General Galen.
Jumping Off
"I've approved your plans without change. I did add some available munitions I think will be useful to you." So spoke the ``other Boss."
"That's a lot of weaponry...a lot of money," remarked Blyukher, reviewing the Top Secret accordion file and its index.
``Initially, two hundred and seventeen light and medium tanks --- fifty four heavy tanks, our manufacture all --- seventy five planes of various types, our manufacture also thanks to our friend comrade Trotsky --- ten thousand artillery pieces, everything from mortars to howitzers and heavy field pieces --- half a million rifles and seven hundred million rounds to go with them, and several ships full of a variety of small arms of all types. In addition I have allocated ten thousand mines of various types and about ten thousand tons of dynamite. We have acquired from the Germans some new anti-tank weaponry --- rocket weapons --- no one knows how well this stuff works so you will be the first to experiment with all that shit.
"Being loaded as we speak are twenty four freighters; countless to follow." added Stalin
"That's even more money..." commented Borodin.
"One hundred million US dollars from our foreign reserves for now, and more as needed." Again Stalin finishing the topic.
"You're lucky, we had it available - the weapons anyway - building the Red Army down and building up our pitiful industry with that manpower has left us with some pretty big Army Navy Surplus depots. You might as well use it.
"The tanks and the planes will impress the shit out of the Chinese, boss", Blyukher, coolly expounding his thoughts on the matter; unresponsive to the comment about `our friend.' ``It will take days to offload and deploy all that stuff.''
"Yes, I think all this modern armament being offloaded from Soviet ships will win over many persons for you - sincere and opportunist. Comrades, just the very long time it takes to offload and deploy will impress all observers I can assure you.''
"Sincere or not boss - we need a lot of cannon fodder for the serious kind of war we're going to be fighting - none of this "staged battle" bullshit!"
"Comrades I have another meeting. Have you any questions?"
"No sir."
"Then get to it and good luck."
Borodin was a very intelligent man and knew his friend Koba had purposely provoked General Blyukher with his comment ``our friend Trotsky.'' Borodin noted how sophisticated Koba had become in the intervening years since they had last worked together ``which was after all before 1905'', he thought to himself. ``A man can change and learn a lot in eighteen years'' Instead of making slanderous or snide comments about Trotsky whom everyone knew Koba hated too, Stalin had given him the back-hand compliment about aviation, in which Trotsky had indeed been the Soviet pioneer --- at least in the Politburo --- in such a way as to do exactly what Lenin said they were not to do --- open up that wound again, with one of the generals most likely to be provoked. Blyukher, like most of the Red Army Old Bolshevik officers, had a ``hard on'' for Trotsky whom he, and they, had always despised. But it had all come to a head after
308Trotsky ``fucked-up'' as the other boss (Stalin) said ``the entire European campaign upon which we had depended so much.'' Meaning, of course, the Polish-German campaign of summer 1920, where Trotsky's hand-picked generals Tukhachevsky and Gaia had performed like amateurs.
Borodin Acts to Make Sun Yat-sen China's President
As I have said, when Sun succeeded in satisfying Moscow's first condition, by regaining his base in Canton (Guangzhou), the Bolshevik's decided to begin satisfying his first condition. Namely, that they establish an army for him that could conquer the North. Lenin sent Mikhail Borodin as the top Bolshevik boss to carry out the policy. Borodin had only recently returned from carrying out a successful and difficult mission in Great Britain, where he had been incarcerated for several months.
Borodin circumvented the British colony of Hong Kong and arrived in Canton on October 6, 1923, aboard a steamer carrying 200 sheep killed in a storm. He went directly to Sun, and we have both Borodin's record of this meeting and that of Sun. -And, to make this long story short, we know that Borodin went about stiffening the defenses of Canton.
The city of Canton was only nominally Sun's; actually it was in the hands of occupying thug troops of surrounding warlords. Borodin using Chinese communist cadre (only 540 strong, but street smart) established the first loyal ``Palace Guard'' for Sun's ``revolutionary government.''
Five weeks later (November 15, 1923) Sun fled Canton when confronted with the oncoming troops of the two warlords who had helped him take tentative control of the city not much earlier. Borodin stayed and defended the city on his own. But by this time Borodin had some of the toughest Bolshevik military men with him, including General Galen (Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher, a hero Red general of the Russian Civil War.) The Russian Bolsheviks under Galen, and their Chinese cadre, attacked the oncoming warlord troops and wiped them out.
A few miles downstream from Canton's main docks is Whampoa Island. Here Borodin proceeded to establish the military academy that would provide the officers for the Soviet style army the Russians promised to create for Sun. Here, one hundred million (1920's) dollars' worth of Soviet arms would be funneled to Sun in 1924 and 1925.The KMT (Sun's Party was known by these initials) would have an army built along Red Army lines with political officers and indoctrination at its core.
Borodin had a great deal of difficulty getting Sun to agree to the minimal preparatory measures the Russians considered necessary to build the objective conditions for a successful campaign to the North. Almost every idea which the Bolshevik advisors presented as essential was resisted by Sun and his capitalist advisors. These conditions included everything from an eight hour day for workers to land reform for peasants. Yet somehow Borodin managed to get enough concessions along these lines that mass recruitment became possible - which is to say recruitment from the masses of workers and poor peasants for the ``cannon fodder'' that would be necessary for the coming civil war the KMT and its advisors were planning.
-And along the way they had to suppress uprisings of the local bourgeoisie who were extraordinarily reactionary to begin with, and frightened to death of the emerging Bolshevik controlled army Sun was creating.
As successful as Borodin was in this regard he failed to notice that Whampoa was
being taken over by the sons of the bourgeoisie from many parts of the country. No less a bourgeois agent than Chiang Kai-shek was made Commandant of Whampoa Military Academy. Since they didn't see that they certainly couldn't see that not only were these boys bourgeois to the core but they were hand-picked by Big-eared Du and his closest confidants in Shanghai! In the end, this error on Borodin's part would seal the defeat of the Northern Expedition and Sun's and Lenin's hopes for a truly national democratic bourgeois government. Although by the time that came about both of these men would be dead. Lenin dying in January, 1924 and Sun dying in December, 1924, only a little over a year after Borodin's October, 1923, arrival.
However, having said this, I should also say it is unlikely that anyone could have done a better job than Borodin. As long as these fatal gaps in knowledge existed among every Politburo member in Moscow, what else could have happened?
The Green Gang
As we have seen, there was a rather secretive side to Chinese capitalism much as there was in the United States. In the US it was Meyer Lansky who emerged in the 1920's as the de facto chief of so-called ``organized crime.'' In China, it was Big-eared Du. Of course, both countries had their flamboyant gangsters; persons to whom the press referred constantly. But these men would always serve simply to distract attention from the real bosses.
Big-eared Du was one of China's richest men by the time Borodin arrived in Canton. He shook down everyone with money in Shanghai (and elsewhere), controlled most of the labor unions, and was involved in every racket that men can imagine, and some women too (for example two of the three Soong sisters were his close collaborators.) Prostitution and opium were his monopolies in South China. Of these various rackets, drugs were the biggest - every bit of opium in Shanghai - and every shipment of opium, heroin, and other opiate derivatives that left Shanghai was controlled by Big-eared Du and his Green Gang cartel.
One of Big-eared Du's protÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂégÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé's was a young gangster with a long rap sheet himself, named Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang was an early member of Du's Green Gang and as such he was part of the most powerful secret criminal society in China.
Du was not a ``light person'', but the type of vicious sadist that rises to the top in societies of the Servitude Epoch. (The sort of person the USA rulers liked to put in charge everywhere they could after 1945.) Yet, for a ``light'' view perhaps of the Green Gang at play I might recommend the opening scenes from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! Where a relatively sophisticated archaeologist almost succumbs to a dinner joke, (where Lao is the name for Du.)
Du got Chiang out of the street action that had given him his rap sheet in extortion, contract murder and bank robbing. Du covered up much of Chiang's police record with the usual hand-outs of money. He had decided to use Chiang for greater things. Namely, to be a ``General'' somewhere, and as it turned out, a general for Sun Yat-sen, in the new army being created by Du's most deadly enemies - the Russian Bolsheviks and their Chinese agents.
First Chiang was taken from ``the street'' and given a high paying ``cover job'' as a broker-dealer on the Shanghai stock exchange. There he made himself useful handling the money of the Green Gang and its clients, swindling others, and was able to earn
sufficient rewards to live the way he wished.
Then Du dispatched Chiang to Japan, where he was indoctrinated in the philosophy and methodology of Japan's fascist military elite and ruling cliques, and most importantly facilitated the movement of heroin from China to the USA via Hawaii. Chiang was well prepared by the time Du dispatched him to serve Sun.
In Sun's service Chiang quickly stage-managed some dramatic deeds on his new ``chief's'' behalf. These activities fooled Sun and set Chiang up to be Sun's delegate to Soviet Russia.
Chiang left Canton for Moscow in August, 1923. Ostensibly Chiang was to hurry the Russians into sending the promised assistance. In reality the decision had already been made in the Politburo to send Borodin, so Chiang's visit would be irrelevant in that regard. However, it was Chiang who had wanted to go to Moscow, and he had talked Sun into sending him. Chiang was operating under Big-eared Du's orders to find out as much as possible, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, about what the Russians intended to do in China, and to make an assessment as to whether they could do much at all. If they could, how much and how soon?
Chiang was only in Moscow for three months but he carried out his mission admirably and fooled the Bolshevik leaders too, including Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek, Chicherin and Zinoviev (Lenin was too ill to meet or speak with him. Stalin too busy.) Chiang returned to Shanghai and gave a full report to Big-eared Du. Du then made his most important move in the ``chess for keeps'' game he was playing. He arranged for Chiang to be made Commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy. Du also arranged to supply virtually all of the cadets that his Bolshevik enemies were going to train for him. Boys whose families had been lifelong members of the Green Gang and who also had sworn a secret loyalty to that master criminal society. The die was cast.
1923
China, At Last!
History records the night of 23 October 1923, as having one of the worst storms on record immediately adjacent to Pearl River China. Michael Borodin was sick as a dog as were some two hundred odd sheep. Borodin survived his nightmare at sea - the sheep did not. At the Canton docks the dead sheep were taken off first so as to be rapidly prepared as food. As instructed, Borodin quietly found his way to the headquarters of Chinese KMT Party leader Sun Yat-sen.
Sun was awakened when Borodin arrived and immediately descended to the waiting room where the Russo-American waited sipping tea. Borodin stood and saluted. Dr. Sun then extended his right hand in friendship. Sun took his hand in the most Western way and by address indicated the two should relax and speak in English.
``Comrade Borodin, it is indeed an honor. I hope your trip was not too uncomfortable. We all feared for your life frankly, when we heard you were coming in the middle of the typhoon.''
``Mr. President, it was a terrifying experience and several times I was rather sure that my promise to Comrade Lenin would end up at the bottom of the sea along with me but history has seen me through it and now it is up to us to serve her as well as we can.''
``May I ask how is Vladimir Lenin? We hear he is very ill and may not recover.''
``He is very ill and I don't know what the recovery looks like. But the Soviet
Republic --- now the Union of Republics is more appropriate - although the exact form has not yet been worked out --- is very strong and getting stronger by the day, month and year. You have no need to fear on that ground. The government and most importantly the Party and its leadership are unified as never before, each man and woman within it committed to making our agreement work. I personally watched the loading of over a dozen ships with war materiel before leaving Vladivostok. Over one hundred ships will be employed initially. Not only are we in the process of delivering everything we agreed upon but much more besides. You will have the most advanced armaments in the world delivered at the Canton docks beginning within a matter of days Dr. Sun.
``Aeroplanes and tanks?'' The Chinese leader was specific.
``Absolutely. Seventy five Aeroplanes of our own manufacture. These are the most advanced warplanes in the world thanks to Comrade Trotsky and about 275 light medium and heavy tanks also of our own manufacture. All we shall need is aviation gasoline and regular gasoline and diesel fuel for the tanks and the trucks accompanying them and this army can march. If we can get that fuel here fine --- if not we will buy it abroad and import it. First, however, we need to discuss this army and its training, for everything shall depend in the end on the quality and dedication of your individual fighting man. Just as it did in Russia during the civil war. This is going to be our biggest challenge. Yours and mine.
``Yes, of course. ---And, the most difficult. You know nothing like what we propose has been expected of individual fighters in this country for a long time.
``But let me suggest that first we take you to your quarters so you can get some rest. There will plenty of time for all of this once you have begun to recover from your very arduous journey.''
This time Borodin did not argue. Michael Borodin was truly exhausted. Fifteen thousand miles by rail and ship and not one mile of it without its own peculiar discomforts. ---And, the typhoon has just about finished him off --- it had taken close to his last reserves of physical not to mention emotional strength; then his sleep, while traversing the Pearl River, had been fitful at best.
Sun indicated that he should follow a small army of apparently female servants who led the way, rising, shaking hands and noting that they could begin again the next day once Borodin had recovered sufficiently to begin again. The first audience was completed. The mission of a lifetime, not to mention of history, had begun.
Building Sun Yat-sen a Government
The first Chinese city Europeans entered upon discovery of the sea route around Cape Good Hope of South Africa was Canton, and they didn't get this far until 1518. In other words, at the same time Spanish ronin were embarking upon their Conquest of Mexico, these Portuguese free-booters had finally arrived at the Great Asian Capital of Canton, from which they had been de facto excluded for well over a thousand years.
Excluded by distance and ignorance; e.g., how far away is it and how do we get there? Both factors being key allies in the permanent wall built against Europe by the Islamic Regimes of the Near East and South Asia. However, as the Europeans were soon to find out, the Asian's had no interest in them and their shoddy goods. At least other than the few things on which they did have a tight hold, such as White slaves and English Wool, not to mention a few serviceable firearms of the sidearm magnitude.
Consequently, Portuguese sailors had nearly been hanged en masse in Calicut when they arrived there with glass trading beads!
The Chinese learned that the Europeans had access to cash. More all the time, as they had acquired the New World almost by default, and were busy stealing the gold and silver from Mexico and soon Peru. So, despite their insulting "trade goods" as cargo the Spanish, Portuguese, and within a century the British, would learn that gold and silver would pay their way into China's imperial markets any time.
With time the foreigners would find a way to acquire silver (opium trafficking) without having to run a balance of payments deficit in the European capitals of incipient capital (we are still in the Feudal Stage; at the time of entering Canton the Europeans were still two and a half centuries from official industrial machinery centered manufacture --- machinofacture - in private hands - i.e., capitalism --- the date: 1765.)
1923 witnessed another beachhead being made in Canton. This time by the communists, with Michael Borodin at the point, being the first to arrive. Within days he was joined by General Galen and his staff, when the Soviet freighters began showing up at Canton's docks. Tanks and planes rolled off these ships. Quite possibly the first time that Cantonese had ever seen such weapons! As we have seen Borodin had gone directly to Sun.
Lay of the Land
Borodin awoke rather late. Exhaustion had literally knocked him out for nearly nine hours. As he swung his legs to the side of the luxurious double king-sized bed he saw the servants were awaiting him with warm water, towels, food, drink and he reacted accordingly letting them lead the way. Actually he had never seen anything like this. No one spoke. Not them, not he, and as the curtains were slowly drawn to allow his eyes to adjust to the daytime of Canton, Borodin was compelled by curiosity to stand and walk to them. A set of doors opened by still more, silent, obsequious servants, this man-of-the-world realized that this was the ``Chinese way'' and he continued along his own silent line of inquiry.
To himself he remarked ``what a beautiful day and what a way to welcome it. I see what the Chinese bourgeoisie likes and what they fear to lose.'' Always the Marxist.
-And, it was a beautiful if extraordinarily ``bright'' day. ``Nothing like this since Mexico,'' Borodin continued to remark to himself. For North American, Russian, English cultural prejudices were deeply ingrained and always featured sunlight subdued as it was north of the New England and Old England, St. Petersburg and Moscow latitudinal parallel, separating them from everything to the ``brighter'' south.
The terrace unfolding for him featured several chairs around a table and the servants were already placing foods on the plates in front of him. One plate at a time. He sat and hungrily took in what must have seemed a mountain of food to the slight men women eagerly serving him. One girl giggled as he swallowed an egg, a pork chop, and a bowl of Chinese spiced rice, then turned for something more, as if that had been an appetizer. That was more food than she would have consumed in a week.
About this time as he would later recall in 1927 when briefing his new supreme boss, Joseph Stalin, (Lenin having died in January of 1924) a military officer appeared in full western garb. He saluted saying,
``Comrade Borodin, Dr. Sun invites you to meet with him as soon as it is
convenient.''
``Please tell Dr. Sun, I will be with him in just a few minutes.''
The officer departed and Borodin continued his feast.
*****
Always one step ahead of the situation Borodin had adopted Joseph Stalin's habit of wearing a military uniform. Accordingly, after a much needed bath and toilet, he allowed his body servants to dress him with the clothes he had instructed them to prepare. In this tunic with matching overalls and highly polished Prussian style military boots he proceeded to meet Dr. Sun, as what he was; political officer of General rank in the Red Army of the Soviet Republic. It was a uniform Borodin would assume for the rest of his career in China. In appearance he fit right in. Would reality come to reflect appearance? Borodin wondered.
Sun spoke as Borodin entered and seemed more agitated than the previous evening.
``Your leader, Comrade Lenin, has asked me to speak to you as I would to him.''
``Yes sir, that is correct. Not that I could in any way speak as well as he on anything but he has asked me to speak frankly to you, in his name, and to see that we implement immediately the agreement. I am prepared to do so and of course to listen and follow you in this matter. You are, after all, the President of China.''
``Not yet. Not really. In fact, I am here, as I am sure your agents have told you, due to fortuitous historical circumstance. I was able to convince these two low-life thugs who call themselves ``generals'' to give me Canton only because they believe, because I have told them so, that you Russians are going to give us the weapons they want. That is the naked and sad fact. They have no commitment to the Three People's Principles, or anything else except their own personal enrichment. But this ``deal'' has gotten us this far. This is the stark and unadorned truth. You do understand me?''
``Yes sir. I do understand. ---And, we can begin today to make a new reality the situation in Canton. Believe me when I tell you I know exactly what to do and how to do it. Everything we shall need is now on the way --- it's on the water and I know you will be impressed. In the meantime I have asked our Party to provide me with a battalion of troops to replace these guards you have at the moment. It's what we might call a real Palace Guard because it will have only one task. Securing you, your family and advisors and your government.''
``Thank God! You do understand the situation. ---And you are already taking the essential steps. Thank God. Perhaps the Three People's Principles can now begin their historic task at taking command of a new Chinese nation.''
``You can count on it. As the American's say --- `you can take it to the bank.'''
``You are an American of sorts as well are you not?''
``Yes sir. I guess you could say that. I spent twelve years in the United States. Mostly as a school teacher in Chicago. I considered myself an American then and if it had not been for Lenin I would still be there teaching. ---And, organizing unions.''
``You were a Leninist before emigrating to Chicago?''
``Yes sir. I joined the Bolshevik Party in 1903. I participated in the 1905 Revolution in Russia. Mostly in St. Petersburg, now Petrograd. The Czarist regime
crushed our revolution and I ran for my life. I met my wife also running and we decided to go the United States and try and build a new life. We did and as I said we taught school and tried to make a contribution helping poor working people organize unions in their own self-defense. Then Lenin brought the revolution to Russia. As soon as we saw what was happening she understood I had to go back. She stayed there. She works for us now but she made it possible --- by working and sending me money --- to get me home --- to Petrograd. You know the rest.''
``They told me Lenin had sent you on other missions: Italy, Mexico, Great Britain and now sent you to me.''
``Yes sir. That's all true. But let me ask you about what you have done. Lenin told me that `you had the guts to seize the moment and declare an independent republic when the opportunity arose.' He admires that tremendously.''
``He does?''
``Yes sir. He does. He told me that exactly when we first spoke about our --- that is the Soviet Union's new - China policy.''
``When can you establish this new palace guard?''
``Perhaps tomorrow. I have to meet with our Party leaders next. Chen Tu-hsiu to be specific. But I have already ordered over five hundred fighters from our base in Shanghai to Canton. They might be here already because the order was issued from Harbin only days ago as I boarded the freighter that took me to Shanghai and there I met with some of them. I am not sure, they were not sure, just how many days it will take by train from Shanghai but the moment they arrive we will put them into place --- quietly at first --- I don't want these war lord ``allies'' of yours to become alarmed before Galen arrives. By the way Galen is the name of our best hero civil war general whose real name is Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher.''
``So, it is to be Blyukher. I am glad to hear that. He was never defeated in your civil war as I understand it.''
``That's right. Never defeated in the Civil War. Instrumental in the revolution in his home province. Dedicated in his very soul to the success of our historic world cause.''
I can't tell you how happy I am to hear all of this. It's what I had hoped for dreamed of, actually. But really, until now I was afraid all would prove to be an illusion. It's been a very long and very difficult struggle.''
``Yes sir, I know it has. I want you to know that you have my word that we will perform everything we have promised. Sir, I want you to trust me to the bitter end.''
Chen Tu-hsiu
``Comrade Borodin it is an honor. Where to begin? Your trip? Your meeting with Dr. Sun? You tell us?''
``Comrade Chen. I bring you salutations from Vladimir Illych Lenin and the entire leadership of the Communist International of Working People. But I suspect you already know all of this. What we must do is get down to business. Let me ask you, have our troops arrived from Shanghai?
``Yes comrade they have. ---And we have supplemented their number as only about three hundred are here at the moment, more coming as I understand it, as per your order. So we have about 540 men at your disposal?
``No Women?''
``No sir. This is China and our first volunteers turned out to be men.''
``I want you to see that from this moment on that our women comrades are as important to our military success as are our men. This is critically important. Women were as important to the success of our Red Army in Russia as were the male recruits. It is important that we establish in practice our principles. You understand I am sure.''
``Now that you say it so clearly I do. Frankly until now that had escaped me.''
``Next, how secure are we going to be from the warlord bastards that Sun used to get into power in Canton in the first place. That is the next most important thing.''
``This is the most important problem you have to face?''
``NO, that we have to face. I am just an advisor. This is your revolution. You have to come to believe this and put it into practice otherwise we are just pissing into the wind.''
``Excuse me?''
``An American expression I poorly translated. But the point is that you are the ones in charge. I am here to help YOU win. We in the Soviet Union are not here to impose anything! You must lead. If you don't lead then how would we be any different from the imperialists imposing foreign rule. Comrade Lenin was quite explicit about this. I want to call this meeting to a halt until you and your comrades in the leadership of our fraternal party here in China have had time to discuss what I have said.
``I will assume that once you do we can proceed to the next phase which is how I can help you recruit, train and lead your own workers and poor farmers, women as well as men, in the coming struggle to liberate China. ---And, frankly, I am still quite tired from my rather exhausting trip. Come to me when you are ready and we will proceed.''
Borodin rose, bowed as he had been taught and excused himself. The first meeting between the new foreign representative of international communism and the leader of China's Communist Party was over.
Chen Tu-hsiu II: Paying the Piper
Borodin had been tired and perhaps that was the reason he brought the initial meeting to such a quick conclusion. Retreating to his quarters in Dr. Sun's temporary mansion in Canton for much needed toilet and sleep. Yet, he knew from the beginning that he must establish the politically correct relationship with China's Party even if it were only to last for a short period of time in real world practice. China's communists had to take their place at the helm, even if only in training.
About this I have spent many hours contemplating. After 1991 I had the opportunity to gain limited access to the archives of Joseph Stalin, the Comintern and indeed, before that (1965), to those of the Chinese Party. I knew exactly what information I was looking for and of course this made the matter relatively simple.
Once the information began to become available the things I discovered made me see something at which I could not help but marvel, as the years passed and I became further acquainted with the supportive documents; this man Borodin was a real genius --- the perfect foreign agent. In later years it made me wonder how he had acted earlier in Italy, Mexico and indeed in the United States. Was he that good then? Or, were these learning experiences? I knew how he had performed in London when the splits between all the forces asking for accreditation to the Third International had been involved, so I had never doubted Lenin's wisdom in selecting Borodin for China. But it was not until I
fully internalized all the documents that came to my attention in later years, that I truly came to appreciate a genius at work.
What Borodin did on this issue of feminism in China was a stroke of genius. As was his insistence that the Chinese take the leadership in the formation of policy; albeit a policy already determined for them, although about this determination they did not need to know. Quite the opposite. The true mark of a professional agent for our cause --- for the Comintern. Making Michael Borodin, in my humble opinion, one of the ``firsts'' of the truly ``greats'' in our service. Now let us move on.
``This Comrade Chen is the initial Order of Battle (OB) plan for Canton. This is a military term we use to describe the arrangement of military units on one, our, side and those of the enemy on the other side. This initial plan was developed by General Blyukher whose name here will be Galen. A name he says will be easier for Chinese to say than Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher.''
``I see.''
``Galen will be here soon, but the first phase of this OB is the next page, and is simply establishing a Palace Guard as he has named it. The idea being that the President's physical security is our first task. The question to be asked simultaneously is can we use President Sun's existing home as the headquarters for the Revolution? Can it be secured for him as a home. We think both needs to be combined for the moment especially now that the actual number of troops at our initial disposal is only about 540 Chinese.
``Yes, for now President Sun's home is quite adequate. He chose it I suspect precisely because it was defendable. Let me introduce you to Comrade Xi.''
``Comrade''
``Esteemed Comrade.''
Chen continued, ``Comrade Xi is a dock worker and the head of our Party organization in Canton. He can answer your questions far better than I.''
``Do you agree Comrade Xi that this home of Dr. Suns can be defended and expanded simultaneously to serve as Government headquarters?''
``Yes, for now. But not for long. It is only a matter of time until Canton is attacked by superior forces to ours and when will we be getting more forces from the rest of China and also from your country? Finally, we must quickly recruit several battalions of fighters here in Canton. I have been working on that. But even when we have them, which we will within a few days, Canton is by its very nature a difficult city to defend. My own thinking is that we should move the Government and its headquarters including Dr. Sun to Whampoa Island, which you will have passed on your way to the Canton docks. It's a small island just a few kilometers from city center but safely in the middle of the River.''
``I see. Alright. When General Galen arrives you can work that out with him. For now we have to secure Sun where he is, and I want you to get your men into position as quickly as possible, even if they are without modern weapons. Weapons will be arriving with Galen on the first ships along with uniforms. Can you get this done today.
``Yes sir.''
``Excellent.
``Now when can we expect these gangsters to attack us --- the ones who gave Canton to Sun I mean.''
``Soon. As soon as they find out that the guns are going to us, and not to them, they will attack.''
``That's what I thought. Alright. Now what we are going to do? All of you and me that is, are to prepare a battle strategy to attack them first. We will strike at the first opportunity, once Galen arrives. This means to get your military recruitment underway explaining as you go, to your men that they will have salaries, uniforms, guns and everything else they need as soon as the Soviet ships arrive in Harbor. Can you recruit with these words and with promises?''
``Yes sir. I have already been doing that. What I need is money now. That will convince them we are serious.''
``I brought money. In various currencies. Mostly US dollars as we thought that would be a universal currency in Canton. How much do you need?
``We have five hundred forty dedicated fighters who need money only for food and shelter and their families. For them that is very little --- in total ten thousand dollars for two weeks.''
Borodin reached into his briefcase and produced the cash. He noticed as he did so, and as he handed it to Xi, the man exhibited a noticeable facial expression of relief and gratitude. The Russian comrades were going to be as good as their word. Everything would be just fine. In fact, wonderful. ---And, the fact that Borodin did not hesitate to treat him as the man in charge of the fighters and proved it with cash was the icing on that cake.
``Now, you have things to do and I have to speak at length about political matters with Comrade Chen.''
Xi gave his best salute and turned and left with his hands shaking. He had never in his life had so much money in those hands at one time. This was very real!
Galen Arrives
What everyone would remember was not the huge ship that sailed into the harbor because the Cantonese were relatively sophisticated in this regard, although the ship arriving was of original Battleship Czarist Class, but the flag. The crimson red flag with the gold hammer and sickle. ---And, aboard Soviet Marines, in full dress uniform and heavily armed, at the side.
Shore side, cannon were fired in salute and the arriving ship was followed immediately by more, one after the other, apparently no end in sight. In fact, this was the first and most elaborate Russian naval presentation since before the World War! ---And, indeed, as planned, it had the effect. The people of Canton continued to arrive until over one hundred thousand had gathered shore side backing up into the back alleys and streets leading to the docks.
The Northern Expedition: June, 1926 - April, 1927
The death of Sun left the question of succession open for resolution. As is often the case in such matters there was a lengthy struggle. Big-eared Du's candidate was, of course, the Commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy and Du would successfully eliminated Chiang's rivals by bribery and assassination, as 1925 and 1926 unfolded. Which is to say, when bribery failed Du specialized in the surgical removal of trouble making obstacles at the right time and place (in a fashion similar to the way in which US
gangsters would serve their ``legal'' bourgeois allies in the US in years to come, as in JFK, RFK, MLK. etc.)
A marriage was arranged for Chiang Kai-shek. The many times married, and always accompanied Chiang, married the sister of Sun's wife. (May Ling Soong, would become his accomplice in the theft of countless billions of dollars from the Chinese people and his US patrons). This marriage was facilitated by the third Soong sister who had married extremely well and would be one of China's greatest financial wheeler-dealers. (Sun's wife, the remaining Soong sister would become one of Mao's closest allies.)
-And, while Chiangs accession to the top spot in the KMT, the NRA (National Revolutionary Army), and as anointed successor to Sun Yat-sen was occurring, the final touches were being put on the Du plot to trap and destroy the Communists. After they had trained and led the NRA to victory, putting all of south China, north to Shanghai and Wuhan, under Chiang's control.
Reviewing the course of the Northern Expedition in detail is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that the Communists did their job, with Soviet pilots flying ``recon'' for the advancing Northwestern Front under the Bolshevik General Galen. Communist cadre roused the peasants and workers along the way so that they were always greeting this advancing front as liberators, carrying out their own reforms and revenge as Galen's army moved on.
Chiang took a slow, and never radical, route to the northeast.
Eventually Galen's Front reached and took the tri-city industrial area of Wuhan where Galen (Blyukher) established a Left KMT Government.
Before they ever left Canton, Chiang had arranged massacres of Bolshevik workers and cadre in that city. As usual Chiang managed to patch things up with Borodin, blaming the actions on ``right wingers'' in his coalition. Borodin didn't believe him but he went along with the ``patching up'' because it was Party policy, and Comintern policy, to make this cross-class alliance and military campaign work at virtually any cost.
It had always been a toss-up as to who would betray who the first. Borodin and Chiang knew they would eventually settle with each other, but both had reasons to wait until Wuhan and Shanghai were taken - they were each jockeying for the best position from which to betray the other. What Borodin didn't know was the nature, extent and planning of the Green Gang and its cadre inside his army! Nor the extent of the greed of many who should have sided with the Bolsheviks, in the cities - a form of the mental template of selfishness and sadism, which the Bolsheviks did not yet recognize - thus, could not avoid.
The struggle for Shanghai became a replay of the exact same types of ambushes, betrayals and massacres by the Green Gang against Bolshevized workers that had occurred earlier in Canton. Again and again, from February through April of 1927, Chinese Bolsheviks kept getting caught unawares, unprepared and consequently slaughtered. Again and again, Chiang managed to play the innocent. Again and again, the Russian Bolsheviks let him get away with it.
All this time Chinese Party founder and chairman Chen, had been against the alliance and against the Comintern policy. But Chen had buckled under, each and every time, to the imposition of international democratic centralist discipline. Chen had preferred a typical ``Leninist'' policy of ``separation'' from other political tendencies -
from the beginning. A policy much similar, in other words, to the Bolshevik attitude toward everyone else in Russia, before October, 1917. But the Moscow Politburo was unified in its ``alliance'' strategy for China, which after all had been initiated by Lenin himself. A tragic irony in many ways.
Crisis in China Begins in 1927
Meanwhile the final phase of the Northern Expedition in China was underway. Galen was near the tri-city of Wuhan. Chiang Kai-shek was about to enter Shanghai. Michael Borodin, however, was very worried. For, it was becoming increasingly clear that the right wing of the KMT forces wanted to get rid of their Communist Party allies now that victory was in sight and Borodin was unsure of the measures being taken to prevent that from happening. Indeed to beat the KMT rightists to the punch with a coup of his own. The key to Borodin and Galen's strategy was the establishment of a Left KMT government at Wuhan which was a classic working class concentration of the Petrograd type. The idea being that this government could call on the mass of workers if necessary to protect it along with, of course, Galen's army.
309Ideological Lessons of 1927: Bolsheviks Growing Up
Finally, in April, 1927, Du and Chiang carried out their joint Green Gang-NRA final attack and massacre of Shanghai workers and their Communist leaders. Chiang finally came out into the open as China's fascist dictator moving against communists nation-wide in a blood bath that featured many tens of thousands of men, women, and children, peasants and workers, murdered. (Including Mao's wife and her unborn child.) A price was placed on Borodin's head and that of all the Bolshevik advisors, the Chinese Communist Party outlawed, and Chiang declared dictator. Galen's Chinese ``front men'' in Wuhan were suborned and the Left KMT Government collapsed; bought by Du and his bags of money from Shanghai.
In the event, the Chinese bourgeoisie, thanks to their gangster component, had done-in the Communists before the Communists could do them in. (A later replay would be Hitler's successful attack on the USSR, which beat Stalin to the punch with nearly disastrous consequences for World Socialism.)
Big-eared Du was made a ``general'' in the ``new'' NRA (now, without communists) as part of the gigantic reward to which he treated himself. Presumably feeding five thousand communists and their families into the boiler furnaces of Shanghai's weeks-long running locomotive engines was a bonus of intensely exciting sadistic sexual pleasure. (The template of altruism of Shanghai workers was confronting the template of sadism of the Shanghai capitalists.)
Now, as the new head of the Opium Suppression Bureau, Du also gave himself a complete and legal monopoly on the drug business in all of China. ---And he took command of all of China's legal trade unions! As a key de facto Minister in the new Regime Du would continue making mountains of money until forced to flee the mainland for Taiwan in 1949. Interesting, is it not, that Harry Truman later estimated Chiang Kai-shek and his gang (Du et. al.) to have stolen more in four years from 1945-1949 from the dumb gringos than they had made in all their previous years ``work'' with the Japs put together.
The fact that Truman would admit to his own stupidity in this regard is a
fascinating comment on US imperialism of that moment, in and of itself. Think how powerful Wall Street must have been then to write-off 22+ billion dollars as if it was nothing. ---And, this was when a billion was a billion (long before the 500% Nixon devaluation of 1971, accomplished by taking the US off the gold standard internationally, to finance the Vietnam War). The US imperialists certainly are not in that position any more. Now, all of the money they need to finance overseas aggression has to be borrowed!
More importantly Du taught both the Russian Bolsheviks and their Chinese cadre something new about the nature of underlying human imprinting which Mao and Stalin at least eventually internalized and never forgot. Neither would be quite so naïve in the future --- especially, now that they realized naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé was a very relative thing and that they themselves had been played for naïve fools by the biggest of the ``big boys.'' (If you want to play with the big boys you have to learn to play hard.) Another reason I think Mao found his future wife Jiang Qing fascinating, for she had been inside the pleasure dens of the Green Gang and knew all their secrets.
In the meantime, Borodin, Galen and the rest of the Russian Bolshevik cadre still alive and some Chinese too (including Sun's wife), fled China for the Soviet Union across China's northern frontiers. Elsewhere the other, surviving Chinese communists holed-up in ``base areas'' in different parts of China. The most important of these base areas would be the Hunan-Jiangxi mountainous region where Mao would create China's first Red Republic. Another story for another time.
Mao's Famous Wife
With one final comment about Jiang Qing, Mao's eventual fourth, final and famous wife, who had been an AMW (actress, model, ``whatever'' --- less generously the ``w'' would stand for ``whore'') for the Green Gang. She gave up her popular film career (acting under the name Lan Ping) to join the communists in Yenan (she had secretly joined the CPC in Shanghai in 1933 at the age of 19) where she became the Chairman's ``wife.'' She was able to provide Mao with much inside information about the sadistic pleasures of Du, Chiang, and the Madams' Soong and their hangers-on, once he was in Yenan and she joined him in 1939. These ladies (two of the Madams Soong) by the way used toilet paper that cost a $1000 per square in the 1920's),
Learning, Little by Little
Little by little the Bolsheviks and their foreign allies were learning. They were learning the true nature of their enemies and, of course, that implied what had to be done. Done in general strategic terms and done specifically, in each of these cases. The Chinese experience, in short, taught the Bolshevik bosses, and all of us as well, that the underlying nature of human imprinting is the predominate mental template of the Epoch in which we live --- which in this case was more than just selfishness, and came in the form of a finely developed sense of sadistic social relations and personal indulgences. Something one should not forget in dealing with the bourgeoisie --- or for that matter anyone else not thoroughly understood as to motivation. The best practical reason for relying on workers, especially when guns are involved, is precisely because they are the most predisposed to our cause --- or, at least, should be. As the Workers Party, we owe it to our class to establish internal security procedures to be sure that what could be is and
310what should be will be.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 15: The USSR: From NEP to the Five Year PlansBy 1926, although things appeared to be going very well for the Bolshevik Regime in the USSR in many ways, (and in China for the Communists too), the world's capitalist classes began to become very uneasy about apparent Bolshevik success in achieving social justice for the masses of previously downtrodden people. Those big ruling capitalist families in Europe saw Bolshevik success as being responsible for their increasing difficulties with their own working people. Now their own workers were demanding such things as national health care and unemployment insurance. If the Russians could do it, given all they had suffered in the World War and Revolution and Civil War, then the rulers of Britain, France, Italy and Germany certainly should be able to concede partial social welfare as well. We Bolsheviks got the credit from the masses and the blame from the capitalists. Of course, the bourgeoisie were right as far as us Reds went, but what they could not admit was that capitalism itself had brought them to this.
311The international big capitalist class, especially in Europe, concluded the USSR had to be destroyed, renewing their aggression, which they had temporarily let slip into a condition of stasis. The prime example was our number one enemy in Europe the United Kingdom. Britain would remain our primary problem in Europe even after Hitler took over in Germany. (At least until he attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941.)
Our Ambassador to England from September 1923 until June of 1926 was the ``magician of Rapallo'', (i.e., the Rapallo Pact, April 1922), Christian Rakovsky. Rakovsky published a telling theoretical paper about then (1926) contemporary British capitalism entitled The Decline of the World's Shop (In Communist International) on his way out the door of our London embassy. His main points were that:
(1) The ongoing economic crises in Great Britain were structural and irreversible.
(2) He found this to be true across the board in British manufacturing industries and particularly acute in the mining and textile industries. The ruling Brit oligarchy and the class behind them could
(3) Find no way out of the coming class struggles and were desperate to stop communist news and influence from reaching British workers. He predicted they would
(4) Do everything to break formal relations with the Soviet Union and
(5) Work in every conceivable way to subvert the Communist government in Russia including organizing subversion and war.
In the Event we will have Fifteen Years until the Capitalists Attack Us
Shortly after the publication of Decline the Brits did exactly these things and began their determined campaign under Baldwin and Chamberlain to create a London-Berlin-Rome axis where Germany would take the lead in a Holy War against Bolshevism.
British banks pulled their loans to Russia, even though the Bolsheviks had the best credit rating in the world next to that of the USA.
The Japanese capitalists made a secret deal with Chinese mobster
Chiang Kai-shek who was the nominal and he hoped soon actual, commander of the KMT Party's National Revolutionary Army. What kind of deal? A continuation on a national scale of what the Green Gang had been doing for them in Shanghai (e.g., providing cheap labor for Japanese maquiladoras, and safe packaging of opium destined for Western Hemisphere ports on Japanese ships) with bright prospects for a prosperous tomorrow. This secret illegal trade relationship included a quid pro quo; in exchange the Japanese promised secret military support in the upcoming ambush of the communists; one Chiang and Big-eared Du were planning for Shanghai for 1927. The Japanese capitalists were often craftier than their European counterparts, who were openly hostile to the Soviet government, (although they viciously suppressed Japanese communism) playing down at this point ``state to state hostility.''
312In China the capitalist half of the alliance with the Reds, which was predominant in many ways inside the KMT, although the communists operated as full members, openly, began their planning for a post-Massacre (scheduled for 1927) governmental structure, with a variety of ``war-lords''.
The way in which Borodin operationalized Lenin's idea of a joint cross-class alliance (Chapter 14 above) to establish true bourgeois capitalism in China, depended for its success on sincere bourgeois leadership, such as Sun Yat-sen had seemed to offer. Of course, Sun was now dead (December 1924) and his leadership mantle had been usurped by that group of bourgeoisie least likely to be amenable to Lenin's ideas for a bourgeois democracy for China. But Borodin didn't know that. Nor did the Russian Politburo. What I mean is that what Lenin wanted for China (in 1922) was first and foremost a US type of bourgeois democracy, at least as independent of foreign domination as the US had been after military victory over British colonialism in 1781. This, in short, is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been shooting for, for China. When the deal was made with Sun (January 1923), it seemed as if this was quite feasible. ---And, to repeat what I have already reported it was China's extreme backwardness which made all this logically necessary in the first place if one were to gain a safe and secure buffer for Soviet socialism in the Far East.
313In other words, in the Russian Bolshevik Politburo's view (from 1922 forward), China was in far too primitive a condition both technologically and socially to jump into socialism and would be far more likely to succeed along a bourgeois democratic path --- meaning the security of world socialism --- i.e., the USSR --- would be far better served with a stable and healthy and friendly capitalist regime in Peking, than in any dice shoot for proletarian dictatorship which at best could end up as it had in Russia, with a tiny working class and its Party sitting on a nation of ignorant peasants.
In 1927, the Bolsheviks in Russia began to remember that war with the
capitalist countries was inevitable and that the way things were going they would be unprepared. NEP was doing well as far as relative prosperity was concerned but the rate of industrialization was pitifully slow. Without capitalist bank credits for foreign entrepreneurs willing and able to build factories in Russia and the other Republics, industrialization would be even slower!
Furthermore, the Cheka's Economic Directorate had been so successful at lifting foreign technology that factories and machines were piling up everywhere because the infrastructure into which they were to be inserted lagged far behind need.
Furthermore, without a secure eastern frontier, given the failure of the China policy in April 1927, the military danger of encirclement by the advanced capitalist countries would be twice as great. Stalin had a solution in mind. He began putting it into effect in the second half of 1927 and speeded it up in the early months of 1928, so that by August of that year he was ready to go for broke.
Our Own Crisis Was Also at Hand if Hidden
As far the outside world was concerned the Soviet success was a matter of fact and in these capitalist countries it was assumed that much the same reconstruction was happening in Russia as had happened in their own countries after the First World War. As far as the big capitalist families of Western Europe were concerned the only difference was that the caps would have appropriated the surplus value as profit in a capitalist system and, as far as they were concerned, the Russian communists were buying the support of their workers and farmers by their injudicious use of government funds. As far as industrial progress was concerned our enemies could not have been more wrong. We had serious problems at every level within the national economy. Fortunately for us the capitalists had no idea. We had destroyed their intelligence networks they had originally put into place with the MOCR Roach Motel.
314Having a ``base area'' in a backward country (e.g., Colombia), where we establish social justice, is not the same thing as building Stages of Socialism and the Stage of Communism in a country.
The Economic Crisis flows from the anti-socialist fact
Of inheriting an insufficient capitalist mode of production
Scarcity --- not the Plenty Marx and Engels had required --- underlay everything
--- 1928: Sorting Things Out, What Must Be Done
All Bolsheviks were convinced by the end of the Civil War that the USSR's modernized industrialization had to be achieved if the Party had any hope of staying in power and leading humanity into the world communist stage. It is elementary Marxist theory that one cannot build socialism, let alone communism, without the advanced industrial base of capitalism. Achieving full mechanized industrialization is the rationale in our Theory for the entire sociocultural evolutionary capitalist stage to begin with. It is precisely for this reason that Marxist historians have always pointed out that Capitalism was progressive in its time. (No
longer, as it has entered the phase of Imperialism.) It is this preparation which makes the slogan ``from each according to her ability to each according to her needs'' a practical political possibility. In other words, Marxists and Leninists knew that no amount of moral or ideological incentives could make up for the servitude epoch reality of selfishness and sadism imposed on the masses, with a primitive economy of scarcity such as we had in the middle 1920's. The question was never whether to build the necessary infrastructure. For us, from the beginning and continuing to this very day the question that must be posed in backward countries is how do we build what we ideally should have inherited and how long will it take?
Applicability of this experience to the USA and Canada
The Soviets had no choice in 1928 but to follow the Stalinist total planning solution. On the other hand the Chinese communists did have a choice because of the radical shift in world balance of class forces and military power in 1975. They then opted for a mixed economy. The ultra-left program of Madame Mao had failed miserably in getting production moving (and they had given it the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.) This time, in the PRC, the capitalist second economy would be open. This time China would have a second capitalist economy under Party control (such as NEP might have become had the USSR not faced unremitting imperialist encirclement, strangulation, sabotage and everything else it had confronted as the caps prepared for one more World War all-out assault against the USSR, necessitating Stalin's Five Year Plan first economy emphasis.) Now the second economy would be open, legal and above ground, and, most importantly and by far the most different factor, it would be legally regulated and policed. (See Chapter 18 to see what happens when the second or capitalist economy is denied to exist and kept underground.)
315Either way, it was this question that had to be answered. The Chinese have answered it this way with the idea of ``Socialism with Chinese Characteristics'' --- meaning --- ``Two Systems One Country''. Or, capitalism and socialism under Party dictatorship.
We have exactly that question today each time a backward country takes a ``socialist'' course. But, a much more advantageous situation today. Furthermore, neither the US nor Canada is backward. This is irrelevant here.
We have had some three decades of bullshit from the US ultra-left because of their failure to understand that there is no mandatory formula for a purely coercive approach to the construction of the mode of production we should have inherited, just because Stalin and later Mao had no choice but to do what they did. (What the naïve North American ultra-Left should be doing is studying what has happened, as explained in this book, and then doing something concrete to seize power in the USA and Canada.)
At any rate, the choice must always be measured by how long will each road take and what will be the cost to our own class support. (In other words what will it cost working people in the USA and Canada? Since almost everyone works in North America, we should say working people (broadest definition from trash collecting to subatomic physics and brain surgery) plus the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and so forth, can be included in whole or part as the main constituency of the class alliance undertaking the transition to Communism. (In the case of the military we will get only part in the pre-coming Civil War period.) The 3000 or so billionaire and centi-millionaire families in this country who
currently own the Government will be dispossessed of everything and probably shot. That will be the end of the national debt problem and provide in ownership a permanent source of income for our new People's Government.
We have a choice. In the cities we can go immediately to full public ownership of the entire major infrastructure and all the major corporations --- i.e., Socialism - and still leave room for the individual entrepreneur. On our great far western and mid-western, and eastern farmlands as well, we can go immediately to Socialism with both public owned ``Agribusiness'' farms (we will have seized) existing side by side with individual capitalist farming families, co-ops and religious minorities.
In other words, the Socialist transition in the USA should be of the Classical Marxist type with a mass social movement by working people to directly establish real Communism having become the most important part of the inherent nature of a clearly transitional socialist ``phase''. (In still other words, in the USA and Canada ``socialism'' will be a stage passed through so quickly that its real nature (function) is to be an introductory phase to the stage of Communism --- it will not be --- as it has had to be in backward countries - a distinct long-term sociocultural ``stage''). It should be short and sweet and essentially we will be building the Communist Stage once we seize state power.
The first ``given'' we got from our sole possession of historical science. (The capitalists first fatal Achilles Heel was their political (class) inability to grasp the science of history discovered by Karl Marx and his ``general'' Frederick Engels. By analogy think of modern medicine versus witch-doctoring.) Namely, that worldwide class war would continue as it had for six thousand years. It was only a matter of time until the biggest capitalist families attacked us in a Second World War. We had as Lenin pointed out we had ``a little time but not too much'' to get ready for this global assault against the USSR (which is to say against the World Socialist Stages in the process of birth). This was a necessary matter of fact and not a theoretical possibility --- it was a theoretical certainty. The only hypotheticals were those surrounding this inevitable conflict such as: how many if not all of the major cap countries will attack simultaneously? Can we avoid a two front war in Eurasia? How much time do we have? How can we get the minimum industrial mode of production we should have inherited on our own and how long will this minimum industrial preparation take to put into place?
316Every time we turned around we found ourselves stymied by lack of capital. This fact of needed constant and financial capital (machinery, factories, money) being in critically short supply resulted in a long series of production nightmares. The best recent summary and exposition of the consequences of this scarcity, you can also read in Hammer and Rifle, by David R. Stone, 2000, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 287 pp.
As the post-Civil War period began to unfold in 1923 the Party began to create a series of Government bureaus (e.g., Gosplan --- the State Planning Commission) to undertake the Planning a Socialist Economy should feature. In these years 1923-1928 the central antagonistic contradictions within the primitive inherited capitalist economy became acute and demanded resolution.
One of the first of these Government institutions was the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Another, NEC, the Supreme National Economic Council (Vesenkha), another,
the Federal Council of Labor and Defense (STO) and its HQ Executive Body (RZ). ---And, the Worker's and Peasant's Inspectorate (Rabkrin)
Also the State (Army, Navy and Police) had its institutions planning bodies to insure that military needs were adequately taken into planning consideration; such as: the War Planning and Mobilization Directorate (MPU) of the foregoing STO; and the Revvoensovet (Revolutionary Supreme Command Council, 1918-1934) which was the military's main planning input authority.
However, there were emerging central irreconcilable contradictions within the primitive Socialist economy. Among the most important for you to understand in an introductory course are the following problems which I will illustrate by taking just two examples from the hundreds of monumental undertakings envisioned in the First Five Year Plan: the first at the Automobile-Truck factory in the old city of Nizhniy Novgorod (renamed Gorky) and the second at the newly created city at Magnetic Mountain (Magnitogorsk.)
Scarcity and the Problem of the Bourgeois Specialists
A: Cheating: Scarcity underlay everything making funding and supply of needed and essential machinery and parts an ongoing problematic matter. Managers often hid excess production capability, whether in the form of labor-power or raw materials and machinery, as a buffer against failure due to lack of materiel.
B: Limited Employment opportunities: There were only so many jobs to go around within the Government, (and for that matter in the Party and the State.) If bourgeois specialists were seen as essential to the construction of Soviet industry then they would take too many of the jobs that should have gone to Party members who had fought and died for the present system and their children. This was a structural antagonism and could only be resolved by creating more jobs (and replacing the bourgeois specialists as time passed and as soon as possible.) A struggle between Old Bolshevik would-be managers and the new bourgeois specialists unfolded, beginning at the very beginning of Government planning. In other words, exactly the same kind of split occurred in the new managerial class that had occurred earlier in the officer class of the Red Army.
317Scarcity and the Problem of Wrecking
C: Wrecking. Failure to meet quotas, make production deadlines, and the like was taken by upper management and the higher authorities very badly. In the atmosphere of personal dislike and hatred existing among Old Bolsheviks and bourgeois specialists it was a simple enough thing to jump to the conclusion that these failures were purposeful rather than what they mainly were: inherent bureaucratic problems in such a primitive productive economy.
D: Shock Labor - Proletarian Enthusiasm: On the other hand throwing shock labor at problems could break production bottle necks and went a long way toward proving that the slackers (in fulfilling quotas, making deadlines, and innovation failures) were ``wrecking'' socialist construction on purpose. Our concern, and Stalin's and fellow theoreticians, was not with those who actually were wrecking but with the broader overall social contradiction between these two key classes (bourgeois specialists vs. Old
Bolsheviks) in production. But, because of this factor of morally spiritually decisive working class shock labor, a decisive breakthrough in production had been accomplished. The Party used the one thing it had which our enemies did not and that was the spiritual superiority of a mass of producers working for the social good. It was this idea of workers engaging in self-sacrifice of material comforts today, for the achievement tomorrow, of a true proletarian society where each person lives in equality, justice and material well-being of all in a world of plenty where all the necessities of life for everyone are easily produced and which they would receive ``according to their needs'' and nothing more.
Stalin vs. Trotsky V
The struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin requires additional comment at this moment. Trotsky began losing the fight the minute Lenin died in January of 1924. Stalin had gathered the reins of state and governmental power in his hands and he knew how to use them. Trotsky had alienated the Bolshevik Old Guard and without Lenin's protection well, it was only a matter of time. The man leading the Old Guard was Joseph Stalin, but if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else of the Old Guard type who disliked and confronted Trotsky, and the end result would probably have been exactly the same.
The truth is Trotsky and his arguments had become a Legend, mainly in his own mind, irrelevant compared to the great real world crisis the Party confronted at home and abroad. His idea of whipping up international revolution was already Party policy and being carried out on a daily basis through the Party's ``Secret Department'' and through the Comintern and its legal as well as secret departments. What could be done was being done and that was that. Lenin had said in his Last Testament that the Party would have to choose between Trotsky and Stalin and it had chosen. ---And that was the end of the story. As for background,
As we have seen Trotsky and Stalin hated each other, and had for many years. Mainly, this was a personality clash that arose because of the polar opposite class backgrounds of these two men. Stalin came from a dirt poor, abusive family. He had had to fight for an education which meant the Seminary. Trotsky came from a very wealthy family that would have been part of the major nobility if they had not been Jewish. Trotsky had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had had every advantage that money could buy. Stalin hated the bourgeoisie, especially those in his Party!
Trotsky and Stalin had been the principals in the 1907 debate about bank robbing as the source of Party funds. Stalin's hatred of Trotsky was more than political --- he found himself up against the exact type of person he hated the most. That is, the kind of person who had had all the advantages that money could buy and was still claiming to be in the Party of Labor. A very obtuse person (Trotsky) who failed in Stalin's eyes to understand his (Stalin's) sacrifice and dedication.
Trotsky's every public utterance on Stalin drips with contempt. The worst part is everyone can clearly see that Trotsky's contempt for Stalin is the contempt of the new rich bourgeois for the poor self-educated worker, or god-forbid, the farming serf, that is getting a little too uppity! Everyone but Trotsky can see this ``master class'' attitude on his part. Since most of the Party members are self-educated workers, soldiers, sailors and farmers, Trotsky's public disdain for Stalin's mannerisms (singing funeral dirges at
weddings and vice versa) and hobbies (hunting, fishing and mountain climbing) were projections onto them of the same kind of disdain and they resented it. It was bad enough for the bourgeois intellectuals to act that way without having to put up with it in their Party and Army.
I think Stalin encouraged this misreading on the part of Trotsky and his allies. Why? (A) Because, precisely because, he knew their childish and derogatory commentary were alienating men and women who they would have to have at every level within the Party if they had any chance at all of outvoting the Boss. ---And, (B) because he knew they were letting their class background prejudices mislead them as to his intellectual acumen.
The childish commentary on Stalin's hobbies speaks for itself. As the years progressed we have learned so much more about Stalin and the clear Marxist content of his written works, than perhaps he had been willing to let the world know at the time, we have to revisit our entire socialist history.
As for Stalin's Marxist acumen, I know the Trotskyists were unaware of Stalin's propensity to read one new book every day because none of us knew this until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the limited availability of Stalin's records. We all did know however, Stalin conducted studies of specialized topics on a regular basis.
The former certainly made him the equivalent of any other Politburo leader past, present or future, in terms of Ph.D. level intellectual preparation. Multiple Ph.D.'s, ranging from (petroleum) geology to, eventually, nuclear physics (under Beria's informed tutelage.) Along these lines we see Stalin intervening intelligently in many technical scientific disputes ranging from genetics to anthropological linguistics. (Lysenko vs. Vavilov and N. Y. Marr vs. Stalin himself, respectively.)
Given all this complimentary talk about the Boss how about the case of genetics, where we know Stalin was wrong? As has been reported by the late Harvard historian of science Stephen Jay Gould (Natural History) Stalin was wrong for good reasons, or at least quite understandable and legitimate scientific reasons.
The point being Stalin did not brag about intellectual accomplishments, or even refer to them often in his public discussions. Although, an intelligent perceptive observer would have noticed that when Stalin did speak on such matters he was completely informed.
In the case of language, culture, and personality, anthropological linguistics in other words, Stalin was right and set things straight in rather short order (e.g., the debate between Stalin and N. Y. Marr).
Stalin had lived and worked inside the Empire of the Russia's his entire life, except for a few trips abroad to see Lenin and participate in Party meetings. He had gone to prison seven times and survived. Not to mention having escaped each time. If nothing else it shows that Stalin knew the real world and was capable. He always did (excepting their autumn 1920 Polish campaign differences) what Lenin wanted him to do, until 1923, when the two men split over the way Stalin handled a bunch of assholes in Georgia.
About this incident Stalin was exactly correct in my opinion, as you may have surmised by my comment above, but however that may have been, it was this incident that decidedly marked the end of his long and special relationship with Lenin; the man Lenin had initially termed ``that wonderful Georgian.'' The man Lenin had relied upon,
perhaps more than any other, to do all those things that he knew had to be done, and for so many years. Stalin was emotionally attached to Lenin and never, even to himself, apparently, allowed the thought that anything other than Lenin's ill health had been responsible for their untimely rupture. For my commentary on the matter see Lenin and Georgia below.
-And, Lenin was out of touch with reality by this time. He had had several strokes; it was just a matter of time until he died. -And, he had always been quite naive about the underlying template of human behavior. In January, 1924, Lenin did die.
Then, in 1925, one year and one day after Lenin's January 1924 death, Trotsky was removed as War Commissar (allowed to resign), where he had been outvoted four to one anyway since 1918. The removal had been predictable after new Army leadership was formalized at this Congress but the fact was Trotsky had lost out as the sole decision maker in March 1921. (-And, even before that in November 1918, Trotsky had lost out as sole military commander when Stalin and Lenin as well as himself were each made one of the three principal military leaders of the Soviet Republic, now declared to be a ``military camp``.) At any rate in 1921 the victorious Leninists had brought Frunze in as the de facto new Army chief of staff under Voroshilov. Now, under Stalin's 1925 leadership, Frunze and Voroshilov's roles were official and Trotsky was completely out of military affairs and no longer War Commissar
318Trotsky's Exit
After his 1925 military affairs demotion Trotsky refused all other assignments and sulked. Accordingly, under the no nonsense Stalinist regime, Stalin, Trotsky's most important nemesis, took advantage and demanded Trotsky's ouster from the Politburo on ``disciplinary'' grounds. (There would be no Lenin for protection now). Thus, later in 1925, Trotsky lost his position in the leadership of the Party, and out of the political affairs of the Party leadership, when he was removed from the Politburo, where he had alienated almost all of its members.
In 1926, Trotsky was removed from the Central Committee altogether, for factionalism. In 1927, he was expelled from the Party in any capacity. In January, 1928, Trotsky was exiled to Soviet Turkestan; then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, when he landed on an island near Istanbul with $1,500.00 in severance pay handed to him by the head of his Cheka escort.
After several years at Principe Island, Trotsky lived and traveled through Europe and finally took refuge in Mexico City as the guest of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas and former Mexican communist, the muralist (now Trotskyist) Diego Rivera, at the latter's home. In the home of his host, he had an affair with Frida Kahlo (Rivera's wife) and subsequently was forced by his own misbehavior into a far less secure Coyoacan (Mexico City) home where he was eventually assassinated by one of Stalin's finest (Ramon Mercader). This business with Ms. Kahlo and the assassination is pursued in more depth below in Chapter 16.
However, we are getting far ahead of ourselves.
*****
As I mentioned in the Preface to the 2006 edition, the Party never liked Trotsky and didn't want him (in the summer of 1917 anyway.) Lenin wanted him then, despite
their many years of mutual antipathy, and in a leadership position, for his own reasons, which we reviewed in Chapter 13 and again in Chapter 14.
In early 1918, Lenin moved Trotsky from the foreign office to the war ministry because he appreciated Trotsky's no nonsense, absolute discipline, take charge and get it done, attitude. As always I defer to Lenin's judgment in this matter but it is also true that Trotsky, in the opinion of many of his contemporaries, did not do well at all in the Civil War. There was constant conflict between Trotsky and Stalin over every aspect of military operations and this continued throughout 1918. In April 1919, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky were able to replace Trotsky's Chief of Staff (with Frunze who took Vatsetis's place) and three of the remaining four seats went to ``Stalinists'' (in the five-man Party War Committee --- leaving Trotsky as War Commissar and four Stalinists!) Trotsky's advocacy of using former Czarist officers in huge numbers (Trotsky recruited well over 75,000 of them --- this would be a five and one-half million man army, and Trotsky felt he had no choice) was one of the major reasons for his being disliked by the Old Bolsheviks, and the new working class officers, during the Civil War. Also, the Stalinists did not believe the political officer equivalents for each Czarist officer was sufficient and Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, began the wholesale introduction of Chekists as political officers.
319Another, more justifiable criticism was about Trotsky's arrogant ``ruling class'' personal behavior, especially toward the working class officers of the Red Army. Something Trotsky tends to admit in his autobiography My Life.
When Lenin's protection was withdrawn by death it was only a matter of time until Trotsky disappeared from the scene. As I say, if it hadn't been Stalin who confronted him it would have been someone else, and I am rather sure the result would have been the same for the reasons we have discussed in this book.
``War Communism''
Who or Whom? The question had been posed specifically, and that way, by V.I. Lenin. The subject? Whether socialist or bourgeois power would prevail within the Soviet Republic in the long run. The worker or the capitalist? Everyone knew eventually the Party would have to confront and resolve the agricultural situation in its way or give way to a bourgeoisiefied semi-feudal agrarian regime antithetical to its socialist goals. If that were to happen Russia and its confederated Republics might look something like an H. G. Wells futuristic welfare state. This was not what the Bolshevik leaders wanted, even if some were willing to live with it indefinitely. It was certainly not what Stalin and his closest comrades wanted.
The 1917 redistribution of land had been largely spontaneous as farmers rose up and seized the landed estates of the feudal Lords and the privately owned capitalist farms of the City Magnates. Although the Bolsheviks had advocated ``Land to the Farmers'' unconditionally, what that meant in practice depended upon who you were talking to. Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party members, by far the largest of the farmer parties, knew what they thought that meant. According to them there would be a return to the village collective with everyone assured of equal access to good land and a large portion set aside for the collective good. SR's Left and Right divided along the lines of who was the most egalitarian so that Left SR's tended to side with Bolsheviks more often than
their own Party members. The Bolsheviks wanted collective farms and cooperatives with all the land the property of the nation, leased to these new entities. The Mensheviks would have been happy with a simple free market second economy in the countryside leading wherever it was to lead. The Cadets wanted compensation for the seized landowners and perhaps restoration wherever possible.
The debate ended as the Bolsheviks suppressed internal counter-revolution simultaneously with the 1918-1919 defeat of the main White forces and foreign invaders. What were left were the farming masses with whatever land in their hands they had been able to grab for themselves, and a central Government in Moscow willing to accept that as long as the farming families surrendered grain, meat, poultry, and other goods and services, as demanded by the Government. A Government embattled at home and surrounded by enemies, which had to feed the working class, the cities and most especially the Army. This policy combined with the issuing of specie (IOU's) was what the Bolsheviks had come to call War Communism.
The New Economic Policy (NEP)
Lenin's spring 1921 repeal of War Communism and the re-introduction once again of capitalist market economics in the countryside had worked out alright. At least it had not empowered the enemies of Socialism in any dramatic way. That was because as yet there was no new wealthy dominating rich farmer class. It would take several years for well-to-do strata farmers to separate from middle and lower strata farmers and, of course, from landless agricultural workers. The latter being those who had lost out altogether in the free-for-all, grab-bag affair that had been redistribution in 1917.
The Government, for all of its desire to help, had been pitifully unable to do so. The countryside had rebuilt according to its own history and traditions and at-hand possibilities. Of course, human and animal-pulled wooden-plough prepared fields did not require great technological input anyway.
Inside Snapshot
Sorge Read In At the Highest Level: August 1926
The Mechanization of Agriculture
``Richard, I want to show you something.''
``Thank you Comrade Stalin.''
``We are stepping up production of our own tractors from our own tractor factories.''
``That's wonderful.''
``Yes it is. You see here, we are getting, an entire Ford Tractor Assembly line as well as the subcontracting sources, again building our own factories, to support it.''
``Yes sir.''
``With this one plant alone we will be able to produce about 600 tractors a month to begin with and more as time proceeds. That will double our tractor production per month by the time it is fully on-line.''
``Yes sir.''
``Do you know how many we need?''
``I have no idea sir.''
``We need to support on the American scale our needs, keep in mind we have the working people to put into these factories because the American System allows a multitude of jobs to be created along a broad spectrum of tasks to be performed in production, a minimum of 20,000 tractors a year for five years. Really we will need twice that to supply the entire countryside when it is collectivized. This would just barely keep us up to where we need to be in agriculture. That's not enough. The truth is I need one hundred times that much.''
``I see. But, the countryside is barely collectivized.''
``Well, that is about to change. Anyway, do you know what this particular factory costs us?''
``No sir. Again I have no idea.''
``I paid ten million one hundred thousand dollars for this first factory plus an ongoing contract for that much every year ad infinitum and probably more. Paid in cash. The capitalist banks won't advance sufficient credit to buy more.''
``So to produce one hundred thousand tractors we would have to import or build twenty big factories like this one and pay in cash.''
``Exactly. You're quick Richard. That's why I spend so much time with you. Of course it's enjoyable for me to socialize with a person more of my type in terms of life experience. Especially someone of your real world experience who understands what I am talking about first time around.
``Do you know what our foreign reserves look like?''
``No sir''
``Good, you shouldn't know. The truth is we have less than one hundred million US dollars in our banks today. All of it is committed. Where am I going to get two hundred million dollars for Ford?''
``Jesus Christ! I don't know.''
``Exactly. It's all I can do to pay for this one factory right now. We cannot industrialize without money. We don't have the money and furthermore we won't be getting it from the bloodsucking international bankers. As you may have read the British banks have just notified us that they are canceling our line of credit. ---And, they are calling in their existing loans meaning I have to pay them off now in cash. This despite the fact that I have maintained our payments exactly as required and have the best credit rating in the world among capitalist bankers excepting only the USA government's credit rating.''
``So what do we do?''
``Exactly. What is to be done?''
``Thank you for informing me sir, but what is it that I may be able to do to help?''
``I know what has to be done, don't worry about that. What I want from you is simply your understanding of our current crisis and the importance of you doing exactly as I tell you to do. In other words, that my instructions are performed exactly as I say, in the coming years. You do your part and I'll do mine.''
``You can count on me sir. I am your man; unto death do us part.''
``Thank you. That's all for today Richard.''
Assignment Europe: December, 1926
The Boss was speaking to the graduating interns from the Comintern's Intelligence Division at year's end 1926. He was winding up what had been a fairly lengthy question and answer period.
``It's time for each of you to gain some essential international field experience with our parties. Yes, Our parties. As you have surmised the difficulties we have had in the Soviet Union are reflected directly in the thinking of our foreign comrades. This is not a good thing. They should be worrying about developing strategies for seizing state power in their own countries not worrying about what we are doing here to combat our terrible economic backwardness. They have the industry we need and the best contribution they can make is to get that industry into our collective hands via revolution at home. For a variety of reasons this logic is not going to be universally accepted in our Parties.
``Another and not the least reason the foreigners are again looking to us is to provide them with the model of what they are supposed to do. But in practice, all our high-falutin pronouncements of October over the radio aside, our model has developed in stages and continues to do so. They will always be playing catch-up if they insist on duplicating what we did step by step. The idea is to duplicate socialism as a system at the level comfortable for the nation involved. That will be far different in Berlin than in Ulan Bator (Red Flag in English; the capital of the People's Republic of Mongolia - Ed.)
``At any rate, as I say for a variety of reasons, these factional disputes will continue to arise in these parties and we have to be prepared to surgically excise the trouble-makers. It is after all the primary justification for our Organizational Division to exist --- that is, to see that the policy of the International Party is laid down and adhered to in the Leninist spirit of democratic centralism. To that end the Organizational Division is now going to need help from the Intelligence Division.
``Accordingly, each of you will spend the next two critical years, in the field, in Europe west of our frontiers, ostensibly as Organizational Division cadre. Some of you have already begun.
``This is more than a training exercise. I am going to have to ask you young men and women to grow up a little early. You see our country and our class are under attack. Of course we have always been under attack since October 1917. All we have had are periods of respite when we can catch our breath and get ready for the next round. Right now the capitalists of all the advanced capitalist countries --- Germany, France, Italy, Britain, the USA and Japan not to mention their empires and allies --- are trying to reach an accord to go to World War once again --- against us --- united amongst themselves. This we must prevent at all costs. It was Comrade Lenin's doctrine of keeping the capitalist encirclement divided, formalized at Rapallo in the spring of 1922, which has kept us safe so far, and is the foundation for our current policies. Although you should be aware the shape of those policies may shift radically. What do I mean by that?
320``We have to prevent by any means necessary any block between Germany and the rest of Europe. Such a block would inevitably be directed against us as I am sure you know. We also have to keep the US and Japan from allying against us in the Far East as they began to do during the Civil War. At all costs, in other words, we have to prevent capitalist unity against us and encourage world-wide anti-capitalist unity of workers and farmers.''
``Thus, from time to time you may be called upon to perform dangerous missions.
``Finally, as agents of the Organizational Division, you will be checking the background on each member of these foreign parties --- particularly leading members --- remember, always provide a summary of that person's political involvement, if any, with the current arguments in the international communist press about ongoing developments in the Soviet Union. You will each be instructed in the day to day activities of Organizational Division agents and we expect to see you on your first assignments in Western Europe in January of next year --- which is about two weeks away. So we will not be seeing each other again until each of you returns --- at which time I want to meet with each of you for a personal debriefing.
``Thank you for your ideas and your time.''
Comrade Stalin left the podium and the students stood at attention. The graduation was over.
The Five Year Plan
Throughout 1928 Stalin adjusted ``the pace'' of events in agriculture apparently trying to decide how to maximize the speed of the collectivization once the First Five Year Plan officially got under way in August. He found that rapidly expanding its scope (geographical broadness) as well as its depth (the actual collection of tools, animals and other farm equipment and livestock) had overall given the best results. In other words, seizing everything, everywhere, worked best.
What also became apparent was the inability of the agricultural capitalists and their sympathizers to keep pace with the Government's increasing demands and the Party's use of (1) agitators to whip up the poor and middle farmers and then the employment of (2) bureaucratic armed troops (Chekists) to see these decisions carried out with maximum speed and thoroughness.
The kulaks lost out altogether, immediately, and were largely deported to virgin lands in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia, to begin again as common farmers. Exiled for five years they could eventually return but were forever banned by reason of class background from participating in the collective farms or farming cooperatives. Thus, after starting over again as common farmers for five years they would eventually confront the need to find other kinds of employment in the cities. Consequently most of the adult deportees did not return, but of their children most did. This would be a problem for the Soviet Government it had only set over for five years, and the Party and the Government would eventually have to deal with these unfortunate offspring.
The industrial half of the Stalinist solution moved along much more smoothly than did the situation in the countryside. The reason for this was the Bolshevik's complete control of the labor movement in the cities and their decade of experience in organizing the national economy and securing it international partners in development --- willing and unknowing (as a huge amount of industrial espionage had been underway for many years. All of it under the direct supervision of the Boss.) The agricultural half of this resolution was more difficult but it was accomplished.
The Great Struggle for Collectivization and Industrialization
The idea of collectivizing agriculture in these small-holding farmer kinds of countries goes back to Karl Marx. Lenin had also written about it from a theoretical
standpoint. The idea of massive industrialization was feasible. If one had the money. End of Story? Not really.
As we have seen, Stalin had been forced into a corner by history. Now he had finally decided what to do. Namely, to both collectivize agriculture and industrialize the nation simultaneously. But he was not the sole leader yet. He had to work carefully to maintain his plurality in the political bureau, the central committee and in the Party Congresses and Conferences. He proved to be an excellent politician and he kept his markers out. The First Five Year Plan was his answer for industrialization.
To pay the cost of industrialization Stalin needed a lot of money. He got much of it internally from the turnover tax (a kind of sales tax) that eventually took about 90% or more of the average industrial worker's income in the form of the prices workers had to pay for their daily bread. He got much of the rest of it, also internally, from the collective farms. The farmers in the USSR would play the role assigned to the colonies of the Capitalist world in its industrialization.
August 20, 1927 - NEP Will Not Suffice
Stalin Informs the Central Committee that the time is at hand
By 1927 the economic crisis was deepening. ---And, not just because of the Kulaks, or the inherent problems we have just reviewed. By mid-1927 the crisis was deepening because of success: i.e., the Cheka's economic directorate priority, to which so much funding had been allocated, had paid off and all the targeted equipment was on hand. But the necessary infrastructure to support all the new incoming factories and equipment simply was not being finished on time. As a consequence machinery was piling up everywhere in the Soviet Union waiting for the completion of the infrastructural basics.
As the summer concluded and the news from China had time to sink in to the minds of the Politburo, Stalin called an emergency full meeting (plenary session) of the entire Central Committee to hear what he had to say about the crisis in industrialization. Stalin spoke from a stage at his Kremlin Theater to a large body of the most loyal and dedicated members of the Communist Party with a series of charts enlarged and lighted behind him. Much as Ross Perot would do with his US infomercials many years later Stalin explained to his colleagues the details of the current crisis and what he intended to do about it. Stalin handled the entire meeting personally and, something rare for him, never stopped talking, cajoling, persuading, brow-beating, until he got everyone into line, exactly as Lenin had done in the most important Party Congresses. (e.g., The 1907 Party 5th Congress in London. Stalin had been there as you may recall and had learned well from his mentor.)
321``Comrades, far worse for us at the moment than anything happening in China is the fact that we have hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of brand new machinery sitting under tarpaulins in the rain, and soon it will be snow and ice. If we don't get that equipment installed now, quickly, we may lose a great deal of it. The only way to make this stuff impregnable to weathering is to get it working.
``I am going to have to replace the shock teams I have been using so far to meet each of these bottle necks with a mass movement of the Soviet population into preparation of the infrastructure. We have to have the basics now.
``By which I mean the foundations of these steel plants behind the Urals will have to be implanted with the blast furnaces and steel pouring equipment even before the walls and roofs are finished. We have to get the dams finished that supply the power we need at Magnetic Mountain (Magnitogorsk.) Also, we must have this hydroelectric power if we are to get our aluminum manufacturing equipment installed before it too goes to rust. Those infrastructural basics have to be ready to receive that power even if they have no foundations, walls or roofs. Regardless of sacrifice our aluminum plants will be ready to receive power.
``At Gorky (Nizhniy-Novgorod) we need steel assembly roofing plants constructed now if we hope to get our truck industry producing with all the new American components and manufacturing equipment right now, and if we hope to have the Main Plant completed before next year. Even then, none of those automotive plant buildings will have walls in their first nine months.
``The list goes on and on but what it means is we need millions of workers sent to new infrastructural tasks. There can be no fucking around here comrades. Either we industrialize regardless of the cost or we are defeated. We have perhaps ten years to get ready. Either we do it or they crush us.
``My plan to solve this crisis is in what I am calling, as many of you know, our First Five Year Plan. Under its auspices we can work with a draft of all able bodied unemployed men and women to go to the production fronts, such as those just mentioned, and they can be paid as we can afford to pay them.
Meaning, specifically, in terms of wages, we can feed them and their families, and as we can, we will distribute cash to them as well. In terms of hours and working conditions it will be up to the Party cadre to convince workers of the importance to their own well-being, and their own government and state, to make New Agriculture work and to make the industrial implantation work.
``These steps and the coming First Plan will mean the end of unemployment in the Soviet Union. But that will still not be enough labor-power. We need ten million industrial shock workers today! We will get them within a year but they will have to come from agriculture. We will need thirty millions of these infrastructural workers by the third year of the Plan. Once collectivization gets underway we will have them.''
``Comrade Stalin to get ten million workers from agriculture will require a complete restructuring of agriculture, will it not?
``Yes, next year. I need you to authorize these steps now.''
More questions, more answers for the better part of the day.
The Politburo and the entire Central Committee listened to what the chief had to say. They had read all the briefing papers and appendices prior to the meeting as provided by Stalin's top bureaucrat, and fellow Politburo member, Vyacheslav Molotov. Finally, they voted unanimous approval. What else could one do? What choice did Bolshevism have in the real world of hostile capitalist encirclement?
The ``Fist'' Again
By 1926 a new class of rich farmers had clearly emerged. In only five years a new agrarian ruling class had arisen. These were called Kulaks, after the rich farmers of the Czarist period, who acted as the gendarmes of the Czar's dictatorship in the
countryside and thus were referred to as the ``fists'' of the Regime. The new rich farmers were assigned their old name once again. Kulak being the Russian word for ``fist''.
Below them in wealth were the middle farmers which were a very large percentage of the farming population and finally the poor farmers and then the agricultural laborers. However, the commanding heights of village and countryside production were dominated once again by these new rich farmers who could and did determine Black Market prices by storing, withholding, and selling as market conditions dictated, the largest and most significant percentage of total village or area grain and meat output.
Now, in 1926 the kulaks began to flex their newly created muscles and were indicating a readiness to challenge the central government in Moscow over prices and delivery. They wanted better prices than the Government was offering or they would not sell. The Government continued to opt as it always would, indeed had to, choosing guns over butter.
The Fist Meets the Cheka
Furthermore, they, as well as all of the other farmers, wanted things to buy. Goods from the cities were simply not getting to the villages, or were coming in such small drips and drabs that nothing other than the idiosyncratic second economy private market could be created for them. They wanted the foreign market opened up for selling and buying whatever they wished to sell and for buying whatever they wished to import. Putting the international law of value of the capitalist world order back to work in the Soviet Union would have destroyed the Government's rationing and price control system. It probably would undo the socialist accomplishments everywhere including in industrial production. What little capital the government had for industrial investment had to go to heavy and medium industry to support the fledgling agricultural machinery market and the overwhelming needs of the military. This meant little or no official consumer industrial production occurred and even less of what was produced got beyond the urban market.
322This inability to provide home grown industrial products to the countryside was the Achilles Heel in the Bolshevik agricultural NEP. The kulaks were taking advantage and would continue to exploit this terrible weakness in order to gain their objective. Their overriding objective was not to get a Coleman Lantern primus (stove or burner) from Leningrad. Rather they wanted to set the market price for their goods wherever they liked, and then to get that price paid by whomever including and especially the Government.
In short, the kulak dominated agricultural economy gave the kulaks the ability to strangle the Bolsheviks eventually, if not immediately, and these rich farmers were not responsive at all to the Party's call for patriotic support of the effort to industrialize the nation. By which the Party leadership meant larger voluntary contributions from the farmer's stores of grain so the Government could continue to be able to buy all the factories and equipment it needed to carry out its industrialization program.
The Second Proletarian Revolution: Now in the Soviet Union Itself
In 1926 the handwriting was on the wall and something would have to be done quickly or the crisis would be upon them. This uncomfortable position of being cut-up by both the inability to produce consumer goods as one blade (having chosen in favor of long-term industrialization) and the demand of the kulak led farmers for higher prices for their grain, meat and poultry as the other blade, was referred to by economists of the time as being in ``the scissors crisis.''
In 1926, Stalin was fairly firmly in the leadership saddle and had been for at least five years. He had decided that to industrialize Russia and mechanize and modernize its agriculture an entirely new approach would be required. It wasn't too hard to see what had to be done but the task was monumental in scope; the intensity that would be required to achieve success was unclear to all except Stalin.
The Boss intended on ``melting the scissors'' by liquidating the tailors. He gave them one last chance as the harvest for 1928 began to stand impressively in the fields, with a special trip where he hoped to convince his opponents of the importance of conforming to the Government's agricultural program. They refused, often insulting Bolshevism in the process. Anticipating an unreconstructed capitalist led peasantry, Stalin had begun his counter moves in the latter half of 1927 and these had been speeded up in 1928 until his tour of the countryside in August. Then it became apparent he was ready to drop all pretenses and go for broke in forced collectivization of the entire farming population of the Soviet Union! The Party would mobilize volunteers to go to the countryside but the main instrument of social policy would be the Cheka. Lenin's wisdom proved itself in the event for without this ``sword and shield of the proletarian revolution'' we would have failed in our agricultural policy.
323Up and until this time the Soviet experience with forced collection of agricultural and animal husbandry products had been extensive but of mixed quality and results. Most of it acquired during the Civil War. Since then there had been only occasional need to resort to force to collect what the Government was due. That is until the winter of 1927-1928 when Stalin backed emergency collection measures to counter-act the kulak withholding of grain reserves.
Then in the spring of 1928 the Government was able to relax these forceful collections and allow the planting to proceed apace and the market economy to work unimpeded. The beginning of the great change would come after this fall's harvest.
1928: Stalin Takes Over Agriculture
Again: the struggle began in August, 1928. This time the Party would take the farmers in hand the way it had wanted to ever since the farmers had taken the Party in hand and forced the restoration of a legal ``market'' second economy in 1921. This time the Party was prepared internally to pursue the task to the bitter end. ---And it had just the man at its head (Joseph Stalin) to see the mission would be accomplished - no matter what the cost. This struggle to force the farmers into cooperatives and collectives was the greatest war the Bolsheviks ever had to fight until World War II.
The Middle Peasants Will Snap to Attention
The agricultural half of the Stalinist solution moved along on time or beat the schedule established in the end by the Boss himself who constantly pushed his planners to set higher production goals. The Party began the wholesale use of volunteers along with Chekists to remove the rich farmers --- kulaks --- from the equation. As Molotov put it, the removal wholesale of the Kulaks physically from the countryside forever will make the middle peasantry snap to attention!
Kulaks were specifically not allowed to participate in coops or collective farms because of their class backgrounds. As Stalin said, to paraphrase: ``these persons as individuals were perhaps guilty of little themselves but they are from a class guilty of every crime against humanity imaginable and will accordingly be required to pay the price.'' (Stalin on the question of Kulaks) The price was often deportation. Trainloads after trainload of Kulak families were deported for five year terms of exile to virgin areas of Siberia, and central Asia, to begin again, this time as common farmers.
However, while he was liquidating the power of the kulaks as a class, it was also true within the Party; Stalin lost support over the years of the First Plan among his bureaucrats. Why? Because the societal contradictions created by ``the pace'' of the Stalinist solution were often enormous. As you may have surmised, these problems often required a heavy hand. Deportation disrupted social life throughout the agricultural regions. All of this dislocation interfered with the regional bosses' opportunities to meet their production schedules.
Furthermore, the production targets themselves were so high they often made compliance impossible for either workers or managers. Yet the Boss would not listen to his underlings pleas and increasingly found their protests to be indications of subversive counter-revolutionary sentiments and accordingly they shut up.
In the end the Stalinist solution worked because it gave the Russians something they absolutely had to have: a modern industrial infrastructure. ---And, it worked because Soviet workers were willing to make the great sacrifices necessary to make the socialist dream a reality. ---And, it worked because the remaining farming families accepted the inevitable and got down to work.
Inside Snapshot
The War Danger and Foreign Investment
Sitting at his Staraya Street office desk Stalin was working on a mountain of papers when Poskrebyshev announced the presence of two top Chekists. Stalin motioned for them to be seated in front of him as he continued working.
``Koba, I have some bad news I'm afraid.'' Speaking was Comrade Menzhinsky who had stepped in to fill the hole left by Felix Dzershinsk's untimely passing.
``What is it?''
``The MOCRists have escaped.''
``How did that happen?''
``In short, the top guys figured it out and put out the warning. At the moment, on the other hand, all of the organized White subversives have either fled the country or are in our hands.''
``Exactly, don't worry about it.''
Cheka boss Menzhinsky was shocked. He had expected Stalin to have a fit.
Instead he seemed almost happy about it.
``You're not mad.'' Menzhinsky commented rather than asked.
Stalin stopped working, looking up to address his guests.
``Not at all, I think this is best. After all the Party and the country are well aware of the danger posed by foreign capitalists on the march against us once again. The Shakty case proved it to them. The Fifteenth Congress confirmed this fact as part of the General Line. Now, we need to give foreign capital the opposite impression. As a matter of fact I think I mentioned something like that to you and Beria just a week ago did I not?''
``Yes, actually, I thought you were joking, when you said `I wish they would just get smart and get lost so we can move on' but I guess we got lucky''
``Of course, we did. After all, we are the ones who have been saying we are weak, surrounded, in danger of being overthrown. That doesn't do much for instilling confidence in foreign investors does it? Right now, Ford declines to build our automobile complex because frankly they have no confidence we will last long enough to produce a profit for them. I will get their equipment but I am going to have to buy it in cash up front so they get their profit now. Anyway, you guys have a lot more important things going on right now, especially in the Economic Directorate, than a bunch of pathetic Czarist conspirators, and you are doing great work. You keep that up and play down the foreign danger, as far as anything we let out to the capitalist world, alright? In other words, they should think we are beyond all internal danger, quite strong, absolutely credit worthy having the best credit rating of any European nation, and determined to industrialize --- at fair prices --- no matter what the cost. `---And, to prove it we are not even looking for the MOCRists! We wish them well in skulking around European fleshpots and acting as doormen at the George the Fifth (Hotel --- Ed.) in Paris, ha.' That is what the foreign capitalists and their banks need to have as their new view of the new Soviet Union. Their new view of us in the Soviet leadership and our absolute self-confidence.''
324``Yes, Koba. I agree. ---And, as you say, the monarchists would have been a waste of a lot of our agents time had we arrested them. They are nothing. I need our agents in other areas. As usual you have seen straight to the heart of the matter Koba.''
``Anything else?''
``No Koba and thank you for your time.''
``Anytime comrade. Especially for you and your assistant here. Comrade Yagoda is it not?''
``Yes sir. Thank you for remembering.''
``I am well aware of the good work you have done Comrade, never doubt that.''
Stalin ushered his guests to the door of his Secretariat office.
A rather sharp turn was underway. Only four months after the Party had gone on record as seeing foreign invasion and accompanying subversion as its number one concern, it's recently confirmed high leader was saying they were to eliminate that line altogether, at least as far as foreign consumption was concerned.
1929 --- 1930: Stalin Takes Over Industrial and Military Planning
In 1918, the Red Army officer corps had divided into Bolshevik officers and former Czarist officers. From 1923 until 1928 the Soviet Government likewise divided
into Bolshevik bureaucrats and bourgeois specialist bureaucrats. So despite five major agencies working on ``planning'' there was in the period 1923 to 1928 in effect, five years of No Plan. The Red Army had managed to win the war and in the aftermath the Bolsheviks won out over the Czarist officers who died or were terminated. But conditions did not permit such a peaceful transition in industry and it took time to train the new generation of technocrats. By 1930 it became apparent to Stalin and his closest associates that they would have to directly take over the national planning themselves. Central to this takeover was the idea of having a series of Five Year Plans with a series of goals to be accomplished in 5, 10, 15 and 20 years.
The Molotov Government
In 1928 Stalin stepped in as the Party Boss of his Second Revolution (the Revolution from Above) by taking command of the agricultural front --- the forced mass collectivization. In 1929 he began taking complete Party control of the industrial front (including supportive infrastructure). The actual implementation required a new Government.
In 1930, Rykov was finally replaced as prime minister by Molotov which also entailed the top spot as Chair of the Defense Commission. Across the board, for his new Cabinet of Commissars and Agency Chiefs, Stalin brought-in trusted and experienced Old Bolsheviks. Some continued their previous responsibilities to which were added new ones (e.g., Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the Red Army general who had liberated Georgia, continuing to be the Chair of NEC was the new Commissar for Heavy Industry; Leonid Krassin (dead since November 1926) had a top deputy Alexander Tsiurupa who took over international finance while another Krassin protÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂégÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé Gregory Grinko stepped in to run the Finance Commissariat; Lenin's bank robbing chief and long-time financial boss Maxim Litvinov came in to take over foreign affairs and eventually would be the USSR's ambassador to the League of Nations; Nikolai Kuibyshev was the new chief of Hq (RZ) STO; Valerian Kuibyshev took over as Gosplan boss; Kliment Voroshilov continued as boss of the Red Army and Navy and as War Commissar (having succeeded Frunze when Frunze died in 1925) and would become the new defense Minister in 1934).
325By the end of that fateful year of 1930 Stalin found himself as the Boss not just of Party, State, and Government, but Boss of what turned out to be the greatest and fastest industrialization of any country in the history of the world. Underlying all was a new recognition. The Boss and his men had realized that no matter how you cut it up, the pie available to the Soviet Government was simply too small. You had to bake a much larger pie --- in fact, many much larger pies. In economic terms this meant you had double and quadruple the output of basic industries like electrical power, steel, coal, machine tool construction, factory construction of heavy and light machinery, etc. This solved the problem of insufficient bureaucratic jobs to go around. It also would solve the problem of industrial inferiority vis a vis the capitalist countries who had our Soviet Union encircled.
326A Taste of the Problem
Furthermore, by 1929 it became apparent that the bureaucratic warfare and byzantine politics of the existing system of managerial control had proven totally unfit
for the demands now being placed upon it. No matter how much intervention had occurred from the center since say 1926 the bureaucrats continued to hide equipment, raw materials, suborn subcontractors and even marshal private (second economy) sources of labor-power. Experience had proven that only the closest, hands-on, diligent supervision of the commanding heights of new industrial projects (e.g., the foregoing mentioned Nizhniy Novgorod Auto-Truck Plant and the undertaking mentioned below at Magnetic Mountain) could insure that the goals and specifications of the Five Year Plan were met.
This meant that the Boss himself and his best men had to take command. But first some of these bottlenecks need to be described.
Nizhniy Novgorod (Gorky)
How did one go about the actual construction of a tractor or automobile plant in a planned economy? Let us take one example of how the nightmare of learning how to do it turned out, at the Nizhniy Novgorod (Gorky) automobile and truck plant. The first stage of Plant construction cost the USSR $30,000,000 US, paid to Henry Ford's Company and calling for two phases of construction to build an assembly plant in Russia with components now purchased from the US to be operating in 1929. ---And, a second phase where the Soviets would receive an entire manufacturing plant for A to Z building 130,000 automobiles and trucks by 1930, constructed under one overall authority, the All-Union Automobile and Tractor Manufacturing Association (VATO). Initially it was to be implemented by two other agencies (Metallostroi and Avotstroi) overseen by the two main planning agencies (NEC and STO) and the resulting mess having to go to the Party's highest authorities for resolution. (It would take until the end of the Second Plan in 1937 before this 130,000 annual production rate was actually achieved.)
327Real Freedom of the Press
We Bolsheviks believe, and believed then, in suppressing the capitalist press, now and forever. However, criticism from the Party press over Government activities (except during the war years) was always ongoing and intense. An excellent example can be seen by the way the Press exposed the chaotic disgrace going on at the NN Auto-Truck Plant by the Soviet journal For Industrialization (Za Industrialization). Many of these articles were written over a two year period by its correspondent in NN, Boris Agapov.
The Crisis
For Industrialization reported in mid-January of 1930 that all was not well at NN. VATO chiefs had been receiving glowing reports from NN since the project was announced a year earlier. In practice the chiefs of Metallostroi and Avotstroi spent the first day of the meeting screaming epithets at each other and it became apparent that little actual progress had been made at all. Only ten percent of the needed amount of equipment and supplies was being received on a daily basis. Avotstroi had balked at paying the prices demanded by Metallostroi which retaliated by putting its overload of demand from other concerns ahead of Avotstroi's orders. This mess was corrected right
away but the VATO bosses had to send special agents to handle the situation.
Even then the in-fighting simply shifted to other theaters of the industrial front while the main lesson learned by local managers turned out to be ``improvisation''. Confronting the planning failure of a 48 million brick shortfall in March, managers learned to get it some other way (in this case buying out the supply of a second economy silicate factory nearby) or face the consequences (which by now could include mandatory death sentences for failure to meet quotas.) Avotstroi complained by April it had insufficient locomotive and truck transport to move supplies from the delivery yard to the construction sites. Again the center had to send Adjustors to get things squared away.
Agapov did not hesitate to give his opinion which was to get Metallostroi out of the picture and set up Avotstroi as the principal subcontractor for VATO at NN. Which is what happened at the end of the summer (end of August, 1930) when NEC reorganized everything under its new Politburo assigned trouble shooters Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Lazar Kaganovich. These two long time Bolshevik leaders were sent to NN armed with the authority of the CC-Politburo (and as the new Chair and Vice-Chair of the National Economic Council on September 10, 1930.) Ordzhonikidze was simultaneously told to prepare to take over the now to be created Commissariat of Heavy Industry.
These two finally got the mess under control at NN but it would not be until November of the following year (1931) that the first batch of Ford Model A automobiles and Ford Model AA trucks began to roll off the production lines. In the meantime there had been a host of serious problems not accounted for in the Plan. For example, For Industrialization reported in October (1930) that the bureaucrats had failed to plan for the right amount of the right kind of alloyed steel. Neither Avotstroi nor Stal (the steel supplier) had made plans to supply these needs as they had hoped to import the steel they needed --- Stal had thus failed to even prepare the productive capacity for the right kind of steel. This implied, obviously, that unplanned expenses and time and resources had to be made and appropriated to a special steel industry just to keep NN going on time.
328In retrospect, we can see clearly that the CC-Politburo intervention via Ordzhonikidze and Kaganovich saved the situation. They brought with them in their September 10, 1930, takeover at NN a large staff of trusted and able cadre that (1) mobilized the spirituality of the cause among workers as well as (2) tackling the specific mechanical bottlenecks. By the beginning of 1933 Ordzhonikidze could report to Stalin that annual production had been over-fulfilled by 30% with auto and truck units rolling off the lines at about 130,000 vehicles per year. This lesson was not lost on the CC-Politburo and its chiefs in the new Stalin Government headed by Vyacheslav Molotov.
Magnetic Mountain (Magnitogorsk)
NN was a well-established Czarist town and Bolshevik City. The Party had a large and important apparatus on hand when the First Plan leaders announced their choice of NN to be the center of the Auto/Truck industry. On the other hand the Party Planners had also decided to build another ``show city'' in the wilderness, out of nothing on hand whatsoever.
Everything for Magnetic Mountain and it's A to Z steel manufacturing complex at the center of a satellite of cities devoted to large-scale industrial manufacturing plants, had to be imported to the chosen site and planted into the virgin land. During the years of
its construction (the 1930's) every attempt was made to jump ahead in social organization along lines which would serve as a ``model'' for new socialist humanity. For a wonderful exposition of what Stalinist Socialism could and did achieve I recommend the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Stephen Korkin, 1995, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Great advances were made in the development of education from kindergarten through tertiary levels of university and technical institutes. Great advances were made in training working people to discuss daily events from the class struggle perspective to determine what a ''socialist'' course and/or perspective should look like on each of the many issues arising in Soviet life. At the same time old ideas, some then contemporary Bolshevik ideas, were set aside in favor of publicly discussed and agreed upon modifications (as in the areas of marriage, divorce and abortion.)
No area of cultural life was ignored as the buildings comprising Magnetic Mountain were constructed to house every area of social as well as technological life.
Ten Years Is All We Have
Suffice to say we Bolsheviks prevailed once again. Collectivization gave Stalin the agricultural produce he needed to sell at home, and abroad, to come up with some of the cash to buy all the factories and machinery that the Soviet Union needed if his program to bring the USSR to modern capitalist levels within ten years were to succeed. {``We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it or they crush us.'' Stalin's speech to the industrial manager's conference on 4 February, 1931.} Almost as importantly Stalin had eliminated the class enemy on the land. These kulaks and their hangers-on had been the backbone of Russian capitalism and now they were gone. The countryside was socialist, unified in political lock-step conformity with the Red government in Moscow.
329Even though overall agricultural production was drastically reduced because of the sabotage of the kulaks, the portion the government received went way up! {Kulaks were rich farmers - kulak is the Russian word for ``fist'' - originally these were the local bosses the Czar and the aristocrats used to keep the common farmers in line - thus the term ``fist.'' After the revolution this class was reborn among the winners in the grab-bag redistribution of 1917.} If the Soviet government got 10% of the previous overall private farm output that was a lot less than 90% of the collective farm output, the Soviet Government now received.
For Stalin collectivization was a tremendous success. He had eliminated the class enemy on the land inside the USSR and gotten a permanent source of planable income in the form of agricultural goods. The capitalist farmers had been brought to heel.
1929 - Evolution of the Red Army Industrial Complex
Getting the Red Army Modernized
Arming and equipping the Red Army had been the Bolshevik's primary task from the earliest days of the Revolution as you have seen. This military build-up evolves through several distinct stages.
(1) Initially, the Bolsheviks inherited what was left of the Czarist Army which by January of 1918 was about 300,000 men. They had been equipped with small arms (rifles, pistols) produced in Russia in the arm's factories of Kazan and Petrograd. We have traced the origin of large scale rifle production in the early pages of Chapter 13 (Robert Nobel in the Caucuses). Suffice to say ongoing military factory construction had provided what the Czar's Army had come to rely upon.
However, these factories never produced enough arms for all the Czarist soldiers. This was a function of the low level of produce-ability inherent in these early factory installations and the huge numbers of farmer conscripts who were expected to pick up the rifle of dead comrades and use them as their own. Russian capitalists had been slow to invest in new and improved machinery in the arms factories because of the cost and because they had an already guaranteed Czarist Government contract for what they did produce.
(2) In the second stage the Bolsheviks had to recapture lost arms factories and get them into production. Then they had to ``beef up'' rifle and pistol manufactures everywhere, so that each soldier in this multi-million man Red army would have one. During the Civil War (1918-1920), the War Commissar, Leon Trotsky, convinced the Germans to build more factories for him. He did this with large quantities of money spread liberally among the Wehrmacht General Staff and the German Government everywhere appropriate, while the war against Germany was still going on. With the coming of peace in the autumn of 1918 this German war factory construction, in the Soviet Republic, for everything from small arms to tanks and planes really got underway. All this construction was fueled by cash purchases financed from the wealth seized from the Czarist ruling oligarchy and its Church, or cash paid to Lenin from the German's themselves.
330(3) With the end of the Civil War and the coming of NEP, the Economic Directorate of the Cheka was given the primary task of securing what was needed from the surrounding hostile capitalist world, in order to build even more factories and to further ``beef up'' the standing TO and E of the Red Army.
(4) What slowed things down all along was the inadequacy of the Soviet industrial complex. It was not until 1931 that an industrial complex sufficient for the job imagined by Stalin and the Politburo was in existence. Some of the first examples of what could be done were military (the T-28, T-34 and the Sturmovic) as well as agricultural. (We have reviewed Stalin's emphasis on tractors above in his conversation with Richard Sorge and illustrated some problems with the automotive truck and other massive civil engineering installations.)
(5) The T-28 tank is another early and important proof of Soviet industrial progress with a military orientation under Stalin's Plan. From the time Stalin took over the tank industry personally --- that is to say January, 1930 - until that industry could turn out the best battle tanks in the world, was only three years (1933.) Let's see how that aspect of industrialization progressed, albeit after a rough start, from the standpoint of its number one customer: the Red Army. But first,
Cracking the Whip: The Crisis in the Oilfield
As the first Plan got underway in August of 1928 it immediately became apparent that, despite initial reports from Party cadre in charge of the Baku oilfields, there was an insufficient supply of oil coming northward. Stalin knew the oilfield better than any Bolshevik (now that Krassin had passed away at the end of 1926) and he took emergency measures after a thorough investigation that fall. In January 1929 Stalin notified oilfield managers that failure to meet their quotas of oil produced and any further falsification of dry holes as producing wells would result in mandatory and automatic death sentences.
Panic stricken field engineers and middle level management blamed second economy privateers for falsification of records and furthermore demanded they get the most modern French equipment to log wells prior to casing them. Stalin agreed and the Schlumberger brothers were brought from France to try out their technique, newly invented, of running an electrical cable down-hole and then withdrawing it on a tool in such a way that one end of the cable rubbed up against the open hole sidewall. The other end was anchored to the ground on the surface. Differences in resistivity of an electrical current being run through this wire-line told several things including what kind of sedimentary layers of rock the wire-line down-hole was touching and what they contained (all sedimentary rocks down-hole are wet with oil, gas and/or water.) Luckily, for everyone involved, the Schlumberger brothers got better results in Baku than anywhere else in the world where they had tried the technique. This by the way is the invention of modern wire-line electrical down-hole logging. It meant that engineers would not have to take their lives in their hands every time they had to make a decision about whether to case a well or not (casing a well means running steel pipe into the well and then cementing it to the formation).
331Stalin brought the Schlumberger family and their entire staff to Russia and built factories to produce the equipment and technical schools to train Russian engineers. This made Russia the technically most modern oil producing country in the world and the Schlumberger's the wealthiest family in France. It also allowed a tripling of Soviet oil production over the four years of the First Five Year Plan (1928 --- 1932). This made all the difference in the inevitable oil based GNP Second World War now only a decade away. The Red Army always had plenty of fuel as did Soviet industry.
Our Free Press Again
Stalin Takes Over the Tank Industry
One year after the First Plan began, in September 1929; there was a flurry of expose reports in the pages of several military and industrial journals. The same muckraking campaign we have discussed with regards to failures at Nizhniy Novgorod had overtaken the Red Army itself; this time over the manufacture of Tanks. The Politburo demanded an explanation and in December it was provided by independent investigators. Their report condemned the NEC. Thus in December (1929) the Politburo
delegated emergency authority (blank check) to a special team to get the Tank Industry up to Plan standards immediately.
``the Politburo, and mainly Comrade Stalin, demanded from us: take all measures, spend the money, even large amounts of money, run people to all corners of Europe and America, but get models, plans, bring in people, do everything possible and impossible in order to set up tank production here.'' (War Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, 1932)
The BT (high speed) Tank
Adopted by Red Army 1932
(6 varieties produced through 1939)
Armor thickness: bulletproof
Horsepower (1932 version): 400 (36.4hp/ton) Jumps 15 --- 40 meters
Machine guns: Two (.50 and .30 cal.)
Main gun: 45 and 76 mm KT-26 cannons (1932, 1939)
Initial shell speed:
Produce-ability Any auto plant anytime 6,456 existed June 22, 1941
Tracks: Caterpillar and Wheels
Engine: BT-2 (1932) 400 hp M-5 36.4 hp/ton (three times the hp of the best 1942 German tanks)
1939 version called the BT-7M had a 500hp diesel engine
Produce-ability: any auto plant any time
Speed: 69 mph/110 km/hr
Tracks: a. unpaved roads 52
b: Paved roads 63
Wheels: Paved roads 125
Underwater submersible
Diesel engine over powerful
The 1932 version could jump from 15 to 40 meters
By the beginning of the Second Plan in 1933 the most advanced tank in the world was the Soviet manufactured High Speed (BT) Tank. It all began in the year 1931, when the Cheka got its hands on two of the most advanced Vickers tanks in the British TO and E. Among many then advanced features these tanks featured independent suspension of the wheels driving the treads on the tanks and this made them much more adaptable to a variety of land surfaces, and allowed them to be built closer to the ground, with a resulting low silhouette. Soviet copies would have this suspension plus other features such as much heavier cannon and effectively thicker (slanted) armor.
It was also the year the Cheka bought two of US manufacturer George Walter Christie's tanks, for cash under the table, and phony shipping papers as ``tractors'' to a
tractor end-user in Odessa. No other Army in the world than the Red Army was paying any attention to Mr. Christie's work (including the US Army) so he was cash short. In fact the Russians saved him from bankruptcy.
In 1932 and 1933 (the end of the First Plan and the beginning of the Second) across the board Soviet tanks of three classes were emerging as qualitatively superior to any of the tanks of the capitalist nations. The most important of these was the T-28. These first newly designed Main Battle Tanks, were produced in three major Soviet factory complexes but were so simple in design as to be buildable in any auto works factory; thus, they were also produced in secret in several of the new Five Year Plan arms factories behind the Urals. They became available in large numbers (more than the rest of the world's tank forces combined) in 1934. The T-28's were by far the best tanks in Europe as of 1933. The next question became can we produce enough of the right types to insure our victory in the inevitable coming world war?
332The T-28 Tank (series)
In 1933, the Red Army adopted these new T-28 tanks as its Main Battle Tank to be backed up by a slightly smaller tank and a considerably heavier one (so that all three principle armor attack tactics could be employed in a single battle.) In 1937 the T-28 gave way to the then ultra-modern T-34 design as the new Main Battle Tank and the T-28 dropped down to serving the function of mass armor attack primarily in support of the T-34 vanguards along with the other lighter tanks such as the IO. However, when compared to the German panzer series, the T-28 was always an overmatch for them. The T-34's absolutely commanded any battlefield against any German tanks once they took the field but for purposes of comparison they are far too advanced to be comparable to Panzers. The difference in everyday terms is the difference between a heavy weight fighter and a middle weight.
333So, for comparable statistics we should compare T-28's to German Panzers. At the time these were the only serious contenders in the armor world. This same year (1937) all T-28's were made submersible to a depth of 4.5 meters through a river over half a mile wide with a downstream force of one meter per second or less.
T --- 28 Panzer
Armor thickness 30 mm. 15 mm
Horsepower 500 250
Machine guns 4 or 5 2
Main Gun 76 mm 75 mm
Initial shell speed (1938) 555m/s 385 m/s
January 1, 1939
The Soviet Union has a total of 21,100 battle tanks (of all classes) ready for action
September 1, 1939 --- Nazi's invade Poland
Red Army adopts the T-34 as its Main Battle Tank on December 19 1939
From that time until the day the Second World War began for us (June 22, 1941) The Red Army was equipped with a total of 1363 of these best ever T-34 tanks. Within six months of war's beginning our factories were kicking out 35 per day or 1050 per month. (Stalin had hoped to delay this war another year at least which would have given him at least another 12,600 probably more. This in itself might well have prevented the Nazi attack or redirected it elsewhere.)
T-34
Armor thickness:
Horsepower:
Machine Guns:
Main Gun: 76 mm (reputedly the best gun in the world)
Initial shell speed:
Tracks: Caterpillar --- very wide, all terrain
Engine: Diesel especially designed for this tank.
Produce-ability: Easy. Any Auto manufacturing plant
The T-34 Tank (series)
After the fascist army officers rising in Spain (July 17, 1936) Stalin decided to intervene as we shall see (Chapter 16 below), and the Spanish Civil War produced the long-awaited combat observational specifications of performance, armament, armor, reliability and produce-ability the Soviet government needed. These were channeled directly to the Soviet engineers in the major show industrial cities, including the secret ones being constructed behind the Urals; engineers who were responsible for improving this Main Soviet Battle Tank. By 1937 the first of the perfected tanks --- the T-34 --- in its first combat tested, new and improved form, was coming off the secret military production lines.
These T-34 tanks featured ``slanted armor'' which effectively doubled the amount of steel an incoming projectile had to penetrate in order to kill the tank crew, but at half the weight of the German tanks! This made the T-34s the fastest tanks in the world, which combined with their heavy guns, and independently suspended wheels driving the treads, created a de facto invincible Main Battle Tank.
Stalin went on to build over forty thousand of these by the end of January 1944, so that by the time the finalized version came on line in large numbers (July 1943) the Red Army had the best and biggest (over 100,000 T-34's by the wars end) which had made the Red Army armor force the biggest in the entire world (May, 1945)). The ``Stalin'' tanks (T-34's, 1942-43 versions and KZ's) dealt the final death blow to the Germans at Stalingrad, Kursk and each of the ever increasing number of large scale battles that forced the Germans back to Berlin in less than two years after Kursk (July 1943).
The Sturmovic Fighter-bomber
Air power was part of the Army in all the advanced countries of the time. Of equal importance to Stalin and his planners to the land Main Battle Tank (T-34 ``Stalin'' tank) for the Red Army, was the warplane called Sturmovic (Ilyushin-2; Il-2).
The Sturmovic was made of metal and wood. The main cabin and engine-bearing fuselage was a one piece steel unit, made of such powerful defensive armor it was virtually impervious to bullets other than those fired by the very largest cannons. The stermovic's rear assembly and rear fuselage was made of wood which made up in weight for the heavy armoring of the personnel carrying frontal steel assembly. Its fuel tanks were self-sealing so that they too were impervious to being blown up by the ignition of the gasoline fumes which would otherwise be in the partially empty tanks in combat.
Fifty thousand Sturmovic air-tanks were produced by the end of World War II and they were by far the best warplane of any nation during that great conflict. They insured the Red Army of control of the air and of the battle on the ground.
The Pace: Five in Four
In the Plan's third year, 1931 Stalin decided to wrap up the First Plan. That Plan was in shreds anyway compared to its structure at the beginning. The slogan Five Years in Four or simply Five in Four spread overnight across the country. Little children ran through their playgrounds that day singing ``Five in Four, Five in Four.'' Stalin then kicked off the Second Five Year Plan a little over a year early. (The First Plan wrapped up its loose ends after a total lifespan of 4 years and three months.) This time, with the Second Plan, the Boss and his Plan commissars had a solid grip on the mechanics of central planning and forecasting. Furthermore, despite the chaos of the First Plan years, the errors and disasters, when it was all said and done there had been tremendous infrastructural progress in heavy industry, machine tools, and heavy and light machinery manufacture as well as electricity production and oil and gas exploitation.
334But on the question of ``pace'' Stalin was persevering. The Boss seemed to insist always on the hardest way to go. Why? To maximize the speed and scope of agricultural collectivization-mechanization and to assure the absolute maximum rapidity in the construction of power, steel, machine tool, heavy and light manufacturing, chemical and fuel industries.
The pace also became a way of keeping potential opposition from solidifying around anything! By the time a few managers might succeed in getting the Central Committee to grant an audience the entire equation would have changed as millions more workers were sent to tackle new targets --- e.g., hydroelectric power construction, river linking canals, behind the Urals coal mines and steel industries --- and the issues of the day had changed completely. Whatever ill thought out policies had precipitated the managers audience were now ``ancient history'' compared to the new problems emerging by the increasing demands of the Boss to (i) increase the rate of collectivization to 100% (ii) pour steel before the walls and roof of the factory are finished (iii) decrease dry holes in the oilfields to zero (iv) factories and mines to 24 hour production days --- and, oh --- by the way, this is now seven days a week!
335Opposition within the Party was there and growing --- it was there and growing because the ``pace'' demanded by Stalin was oppressive. Not only in hours worked but under conditions far worse than might have been tolerated by workers from capitalist
bosses; yet, Soviet labor proved loyal to Stalin and conformed. The pace was oppressive but Soviet labor found that what they were gaining made it worthwhile.
Not the least reason for this conformity, and the belief in it, was the 24 hour a day propaganda campaign in the arts including motion pictures, the radio, the press, and ad hoc committees created everywhere to bring every artist in the country into the campaign to build a new socialist motherland with posters and graffiti.
It was on the question of pace, however, that Trotsky made a principled point of attack against Stalin. Beginning from his exile base on the Island of Principe (off the Istanbul, Turkey coast) and continuing throughout the First Five Year Plan Trotsky kept up a drumbeat attack on the Stalinists for the forced pace of both the mechanization of collectivized agriculture and the forced installation of everything from the new steel industry to the hydroelectric, machine tool, and massive automotive complexes arising literally from the bare Earth all over the Soviet Union.
Stalin could have stopped Trotsky cold, any time he wished. Why did he let him continue his ongoing assault against everything he was doing, building, dreaming?
One must consider the possibility that Stalin found Trotsky's nearby ``treason'' to be useful in his political campaign at home to silence the opposition. Trotsky could not be a very worthy conspirator against the USSR after all unless he was alive and shooting off his mouth. Then it would be quite reasonable to jump to agreement with the Comintern line that he (Trotsky) as a man of action would naturally be actively organizing all kinds of uprisings and conspiracies against his nemesis.
As Stalin unfolded the trial of the Zinovievist-Trotskyist Opposition in June 1936 it became apparent the central issue was going to be sabotage of ``the pace'' of the Five Year Plans. In this limited way the prosecutors were right. Zinoviev and Trotsky had publicly opposed the pace and made that opposition the center of their political opposition.
Whatever Trotsky, Zinoviev et. al. thought they were doing the real effect had been to set themselves up to be the principal targets of the most recent Cheka drama. I suspect these two so disrespected Stalin's intelligence they never saw they were walking away into the sunset of political oblivion. However, that may have been, objective observers within the Party could see the real targets were going to be anyone with a history of objecting, even quietly, to the pace set by the Boss anywhere anytime for any reason he might consider sufficient at the moment. Smart bureaucrats, who could, ducked for cover and conformed too.
The Cheka drama might be really unusual in another country and culture but those of you familiar with the modern history of Russian literature will see some obvious historiography in the way the trial writers and choreographers worked. The point is the specifics of the drama were nothing beyond the central point of the stupidity of opposition to the most rapid pace humanly possible in industrial and agricultural and infrastructural, not to mention military production, which was the social structural point of the entire matter. It's not our job, at this time, to make a moral or ethical judgment on these developments only to reconstruct them so we can accurately understand what was going on.
Comrade Stalin then proceeded to explain how the pace could be stepped up thanks to the socialist dedication of miners led by Comrade Stakhanov who had increased coal production by several thousand percent on their individual shifts! With
Stakhanovism Stalin had the ``solution'' to increasing the pace. Total speed-up on the job advocated and enforced by trade unions. The opposition was completely cowed --- in fact, all opposition was now dead (sometimes literally not just politically). ---And, just to be sure, there were a few more trials, public and en camera.
1937 - Reorganizing the Military and the Military-Industrial Complex
The final phase of the Stalin purge of the Party-Government-State apparatus in preparation for the next phase of the worldwide class war featured many generals from the old days replaced by a new generation of officers. It was this new generation of officers who would win the coming World War (II) for Stalin.
Chief in importance among the newly emerging General class was George Zhukov who was given command of the Soviet Far East Military District. You will recall when, in this Handbook, (Ch. 13) we last saw Zhukov, he had just begun as a Calvary sergeant at Lvov and Warsaw (1920), after service as a private soldier, in the Konarmia (1st Red Cavalry Army) under Buddeny and was a long time Stalinist.
The military and military-industrial complex purge of 1937 - 1938 brought critical war industries, especially in aviation, up to the most modern par then in existence. From the new institutes (e.g., Ilyushin) came what Stalin was demanding and which turned out to be the most important air weapon of the Second World War the Ilyushin 2 (IL2) or ``Sturmovic'' tank-buster. This air tank ground-attack aircraft (what is called a fighter-bomber in US parlance), along with the T-34 Tank, (also, qualitatively the best tank by all historian accounts of any and all countries of the entire Second World War) both came from the early Soviet lead in tank and aircraft design, Spanish civil war experience and the military and military-industrial complex purge-reorganization which began in 1937.
336The Sturmovic was a mass producible heavily armored fighter-bomber, especially designed to fly low to the ground for close air support to attacking infantry and armor. It could fly slow enough to do the job on the ground and fast enough to drive off the best German fighters.
Imagine a land tank with wings coming at you at 100 feet off the ground firing heavy cannon and .50 cal. machine guns and then dropping one of a hell of a bomb! Worst of all your bullets have no effect! Heavy armor and self-sealing gasoline tanks made the Sturmovic seemingly invincible as Nazi warplanes and anti-aircraft ground fire, found their bullets bouncing off or seemingly having no effect!
This weapon was designed and produced according to specifications provided to industry from Orlov and Stalin! These specifications a direct result of combat experience in Spain. The Sturmovic is the air-tank Stalin was fighting with Tukhachevsky about wanting 20,000 of. Probably more than any other one thing it was this single critical issue which led to the latter's death. Tukhachevsky wanted to build instead a heavy bomber fleet to take the war directly to Nazi Germany.
(However, the personal-historical hatred we know Stalin had for Tukhachevsky should not be underestimated. Stalin would tolerate Kalinin's alcoholism, barely, because of their old times together - for the same reason, their mutual historical experiences, he would cut Tukhachevsky no slack at all.)
The T-34 ``Stalin'' tanks were also designed on the basis of Spanish civil war experience to have slanted armor which doubled the amount of steel an enemy shell had
to penetrate, while giving the Red tanks a heavier punch at half the Panzer weight --- thus, at half the weight of German tanks, the T-34's were very fast, safer (diesel as opposed to gasoline engine), better protected, and with the additional plus of being heavily armed with bigger cannons than any of the Nazi tanks.
These changes perfected (in personnel and equipment) the 1938 Red Army Field Manual theory of Deep Battle, and took on new and great importance, because the theory and method of what the Germans would call ``blitzkrieg'' could actually be implemented. (Something the Germans originally learned from the Red Army instructions of General Tukhachevsky during the early Rapallo years.)
The new weapons provided our side with the best tank and best close-air ground attack warplane of the entire coming World War (II) regardless of side. In short, the military changes won the war for us.
Furthermore, by June of 1941 the Red Army was not only the biggest army in the world it also had three times as many tanks and twice as many warplanes as all of the rest of the world combined. This overwhelming numerical superiority combined with Stalin's construction of the vast coal-steel-machine tool-tank and aircraft factory construction behind the Urals, saved socialism, when the inevitable imperialist war against the Soviet Union began.
The Tukhachevsky Affair
Every single aspect of this modern war capability came as a direct result of the five year plans and everything they entailed. Both the historians of the US imperialists and the Trotskyists are allergic to the truth in this matter, for obvious reasons. This is why they have given you a totally arbitrary, one-sided, and always false, version of the particular event known in socialist scholarship as the Tukhachevsky Affair. We will pursue this topic in depth below.
The Pace: I
For Stalin ``pace'' was a question upon which compromise was not possible --- not any real compromise. For example, at the beginning of the 1928 harvest, the pace of the forced collectivization had forced a temporary compromise to come from Stalin who blamed those underneath him for pushing the pace too far and too fast. In his Pravda article ``Dizzy with Success'' Stalin seemed to be coming to the defense of the mass of the now pathetic capitalist farmers. But, after the grain was in, in early 1929, the moment the Party and Police were back in the saddle, the pace was pushed even faster. ---And, by whom? By the Boss himself.
Experience
Why? Because Stalin had learned, as a fourteen year old boy, the way to win (organizing strikes and robbing banks) was to keep moving so fast the police could never catch you. It kept him out of jail for years. In the 1904-1905 war and revolution, he learned the way to beat the Czar was to keep events moving in front of him and out of control. Stalin found during the Civil War (1918 --- 1920) the way to win was to move troops quickly from one part of the Soviet Republic to another part using trains and
trucks, relying on the telegraph and telephones as opposed to courier dispatches of old, cavalry and dragoons (mounted infantry.) It is Trotsky's Red Train which military historians never seem to fail using as an illustration when commenting on Bolshevism's commitment to modernity in warfare, but it was Stalin who used the railroads more than any other of the three supreme commanders (himself, Lenin and Trotsky.)
At the same time, Stalin was shrewd enough to see the superiority of Budenny's Cavalry when fast and hard hitting movement was what was needed, and several times had shown his ability to move a powerful (Budenny's First Red) cavalry army across a vast distance and go right off the march and into combat against superior White or foreign (e.g., English, French, Polish) forces, dealing them death and total destruction. It was the combination of these successes of Stalin's in the Civil war which gave him a much deserved military reputation among his peers.
Stalin learned during the aftermath of the Civil War how important it was to move extremely fast against the opposition; whether that opposition came in the form of revolting would-be capitalist farmers in Tambov (where General Tukhachevsky's quick application of poison gas on rebel peasant forces brought about their demise), or mutinous sailors at Kronstadt (where Trotsky led an immediate attack by the Party members in Congress in Petrograd along with available Red Army forces, liquidating the mutiny before it could gain support), such potentially lethal opposition could be kept isolated and thus overwhelmable by a rapid movement of superior forces against them.
By this time the idea of speed combined with deep probing armor thrusts backed up by close-air support for superior infantry frontal assault was the basis for the new Soviet military doctrine known as Deep Operations (simultaneously known as Deep Battle as in the 1936 Red Army Field Manual.) This doctrine had as its first principle the use of deep behind the lines armor and air attacks to break up enemy formations before they could get their act together and retreating formations before they could regain their footing. This is exactly the strategy Stalin used against the Kulaks and other capitalist elements in the countryside
In short Stalin had learned the utility of speed and surgically applied overwhelming force in getting a decisive victory once you made up your mind about where you wanted to go. Stalin knew what he wanted in Russia: (1) a modernized and socialized capitalist industrial base and (2) a socialized mechanized agriculture.
It was for this reason Stalin did not compromise on the question of pace. He really could not without giving his opponents the breathing space they would need to organize against the man in control of the Party and its State and Government. Nor could he reduce the pace if he really believed what he said; namely, the USSR had only a decade in which to prepare for the final imperialist world war the capitalists must inevitably unleash against us.
The Congress of Victors --- Winter-Time with Stalin --- 1934
During the middle of January, 1934, the build-up for the Party's greatest Congress since the death of Lenin, exactly a decade ago, was well underway. For two weeks beginning January 26th the Party's highest officials met in Moscow for the Party's 17th Congress. The Press was calling it The Congress of Victors. The last Congress of that name as the Soviet press frequently pointed out was held by the Victors
of the Napoleonic Wars in Vienna in 1815. That time Russian troops backed up international reaction. This time in the winter of 1933-1934 Russian troops backed up the world's First Worker's Government.
For Stalin the outcome was bitter sweet. Why? Because while the Congress gave him the adulation he deserved for the great successes of the First Five Year Plan and Okayed his decision to launch the Second Five Year Plan over a year early, discontent among the Party brass was seething just below the surface. The Party rank and file faithful may have been thrilled with the Boss but much of the brass felt terribly abused and insecure.
The Victors further agreed with Stalin's now famous summation speech; e.g.: to paraphrase, `the Soviet Union which four years earlier had produced only four million tons of steel now produced over six million tons of steel annually; the Soviet Union which had the most primitive machine tool building industry now had a massive one; the Soviet Union which had the most primitive chemical industry now had one adequate to the most modern demands; the Soviet Union which had no aluminum industry now had one; the Soviet Union which had had an uncertain supply of petroleum products now had a permanent supply and transportation system of ships and pipelines. The Soviet Union which had no hydroelectric power industry now had one of the greatest in the world.'
Stalin pointed out that in the four years from 1928 to 1932:
Population in the urban areas had doubled from 16 to 31 percent; within that figure one had to take into account the rapid proletarianization of these cities with the number of industrial workers jumping from 3,124,000 to 7,921,000.
The number of women workers employed in the years of the First Plan jumped from 2.795 million to 13.9 million --- a jump within overall employment for women from 24% to 39% of the total work force.
By the end of the First Plan the number of workers beginning their industrial careers since 1926, had reached a level of 45 to 60% depending on the specific industry.
Industrial production overall had doubled within these four years.
Not only had steel production increased over 50% so had the production of coal jumping from 35.4 million tons annually to 64.3 million tons annually.
Electricity production to support industrial expansion had tripled jumping from 5 million Kilowatt hours to 14 million kilowatt hours.
The list went on and on, and everyone knew this was the bottom line. They had given Stalin what he wanted and had demanded and when you stepped back and looked at the results of the past few years you knew that the Boss for all of his seeming unrealistic demands and enforcement measures had been right after all. Fundamentally, that also meant he had saved their lives. For if the capitalists succeeded in their eventual inevitable world war against them, the Party leaders and cadre would be hung along with their families and friends.
On the other hand the voting went heavily against Stalin wherever it counted. ---And this in a Congress organized by the man who had organized every Congress since 1917! His regional bosses were extremely pissed off!
The Boss, of course, finally persevered in the vote count and in the formalities of leadership approval, but it was as close run a thing as was possible in those days. Stalin had reason to see treason all around him and this time within the Party itself!
The Pace: II
Yes, the Congress of Victors was a tremendous success for the Russian Party and for the international communist movement too, which saw what came out of the Congress as approval of Stalin's leadership. But, quietly, at home, Stalin knew he would face significant opposition from within the Party to his leadership. Opposition left over from these early years as well as overcoming contradictions not even thought of at the moment. ---And the Boss planned on stepping up the pace!
Stalin Names the New Class: as the ``classless intelligentsia''
Stalin had to have managers - bureaucrats - to run the publicly owned means of production; he went about creating a new class that he called the ``classless intelligentsia,'' until by the mid to late 1930's there were over ten million of them. Along with the industrial workers and the collective farms this made the Regime very stable. As long as oppositional elements were continuously weeded-out by the secret proletarian police, the Stalinist Socialist Stage was permanent!
Class Struggle in the Nation leads to Class Struggle in the Party
Stalin, like all politicians, used pressure against his opposition. -And, there was an increasing amount of opposition to Stalin's break-neck pace of industrialization not to mention his increasingly heavy demands on the collective farms. When he announced the law that made death sentences mandatory for oilfield managers failing to meet their quotas, the Party and government bureaucrats revolted. This incentive program could spread to them and was too much!
At the Congress of Victors in 1934 they named Sergey Kirov - the Leningrad Party Chief - to be Stalin's successor in the event that he was to die or be recalled! In the voting for Party Main Secretaries (there were 4) Stalin got 1056 votes and Kirov 1055 votes! This made him the official successor. Then the Congress ordered Kirov from Leningrad to Moscow where he would be the Moscow Party Boss. That would have put him right next to the seat of government and power in the Kremlin. Kirov confided in Stalin about the meeting forced upon him the previous day by regional Party bosses who wanted him as their candidate. Kirov was perhaps Stalin's closest personal friend, and he offered to refuse the appointment, but Stalin would not hear of it. Kirov continued his close friendship with the General Secretary (First Secretary) (Stalin's then current, most important official title) who urged him to accept the appointment.
337However, Stalin was warned. He wasn't omnipotent and the bureaucracy wouldn't stand still for that kind of punishment, just for the radical and seemingly impossible speeds he was demanding in the industrialization of the nation. ---And one-time Politburo luminary Nicolai Bukharin and associates were already plotting Stalin's assassination, as we have learned in subsequent years.
In the event it was Kirov who was assassinated before he could get to Moscow. Stalin believed Zinoviev (and his organization), which Kirov had replaced as Party Boss (bosses) of Leningrad, to be responsible. However that may have been, Stalin used the
Kirov assassination. (Kirov was probably Stalin's closest friend,) as a pretext to launch a series of internal purges of the state and government apparatus and the Party itself. As Stalin saw it eliminating his opponents in the Party, Government and eventually State (Red Army, Navy, and Police) was the only way to maintain the rate of industrialization. -And, Stalin was convinced that Socialism as a Stage could still be reversed, in the coming capitalist World War, if the USSR was not totally modernized, industrially, by that time.
As you may have guessed Stalin equated any person's opposition to the Party Politburo and Central Committee Plan and Pace with such a person being a criminal counter-revolutionary. Subsequent trials centered on the accusation that Trotsky, Zinoviev and other well-known long time trouble makers had conspired with Hitler and the British and the French and innumerable others in attempting to sabotage the pace of the Five Year Plans in order to sabotage the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership. The defendants linked to these plots in a variety of ways.
Soviet Socialism Continues Encircled by Imperialism
Meanwhile, in China, Mao Zedong had built a Red Base Area in Kiangsu-Hunan, and had withstood four successive ``anti-Red Bandit'' campaigns of the fascist Chiang Kai-shek, and his Nazi German and Imperial Japanese advisors and suppliers. Finally, in 1934, Mao had had to launch the Long March of some 7000 miles across all of South China, and then up China's western frontiers, swinging east to Yenan in the northern mountains of Shensi. It was a two year long migration and featured this mobile army fighting on a daily basis. Eventually, the Chinese communists were in the right place for the coming struggle.
Shensi was part of the very heart of Ancient China, and always had been. Furthermore, this put the Chinese communists on the frontier with Soviet Mongolia and the USSR. Given the plans of the Japanese capitalists to attack both the People's Republic of Mongolia and the Soviet Union this was strategic gold! Japanese military forces could not deal with those two and leave their entire left flank open to attack!
By the middle 1930's, the European capitalist classes in country after country had placed total police state regimes, called ``fascist,'' over the mass of workers and peasants. The European capitalist rulers were fully committed to fascism, and to the destruction of their own native labor movement, and the Red Heartland of Socialism in the USSR.
They had begun by placing in power fascist regimes; such as that in Hungary after the defeat of Bolshevism's (Bela Kun's) first attempts in 1919 to establish a Bolshevik government, where Admiral Horthy became the first fascist leader; then in Italy under the rabble-rousing (previously social democrat) Benito Mussolini, who had given the name ``fascist'' to his philosophy of the rich ruling the poor; then came Portugal under Dr. Salazar; then, in Spain, General Franco. Of course, in Germany, they appointed Hitler. All these men were committed to raising legal violence against workers as their first principal and political program. Lesser fascist leaders took command in places like Austria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
338Only France and the United Kingdom had not yet gone fascist. France soon would with a little help from her friends in high places (the Duke of Windsor) and the French
Hitlerites. -And, in London the capitalists were relying on a succession of Tory (Conservative Party) governments to put a London-Berlin-Rome axis together.
On the far right of Britain's Tory class were those, such as the Nazi Duke of Windsor, who would be on the General Staff of the British Expeditionary Force in France, in 1940, and would engage in ultimate treason by providing all the information at his disposal to the Nazi's. Then, the British capitalists figured, (with or without their former King) they would be able to liquidate the labor movement in Great Britain and join with Hitler in a worldwide onslaught against Bolshevism.
This was the policy of all of the Tory governments in the 1930's, but became shamefully obvious under Chamberlain as 1939 approached. Concession after concession was given to Hitler; he was allowed to take country after country. Finally, in 1938, Chamberlain betrayed Czechoslovakia with whom Britain and France had a solemn collective security treaty! Both the British and the French ruling classes refused to step up their war preparedness because they wanted to be sure that a clear and present signal was being sent to Hitler. Namely, that they were no threat to him. Hitler should just go right on building his military machine; go right on and attack the USSR. A task they were not up to, given the Red sentiment in their own countries and, as Winston Churchill had pointed out in 1920, the Bolshevik's ability to maintain massive standing armies indefinitely.
339Stalin's Spies: The Proletarian Secret Service
As you will recall, Lenin had placed Stalin in charge of both the Russian Party's intelligence service and that of the Comintern. One division of that service had to do with reporting on the machinations of the imperialist governments and ruling classes against the proletarian State and the world wide working class movement. ---And, here Stalin's spies gave more than yeoman service --- they provided absolutely essential information in a reliable and continual way. Among those we know about, because of their public exposure, were the British Ring of Five, also known as the Cambridge Five: Harold Adrian Russell ``Kim'' Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald D. Maclean, and Anthony Blunt (adding the American Michael Straight would make it the Ring of Five). The first four recruited by Alexander Orlov. More on this below.
340Also a separate British ring, only two of which members are known, ``Sir'' Roger Hollis (eventual head of MI-5) recruited in China by Red Army G2 and John Cairncross (Cairncross was another G2 recruit but had a separate control from Hollis, as did Wallis Simpson the Duchess of Windsor, another G2 recruit, more on her below). ---And, in Japan, Richard Sorge, embedded in the Nazi embassy in Tokyo. Recruited by Otto Kussinen, Molotov and Stalin. Also, the so-called Red Orchestra in Germany and Switzerland created by Orlov, not to slight Steve Nelson and associates in the USA, who ran the espionage program into the Manhattan Project for Beria. Each with its own recruitment history. There were many more Soviet spies - many of this caliber - many still unknown.
341All in all, these spies provided Stalin with the inside information as to what the British and American rulers were doing and plotting, and the Germans and Japanese. As a consequence Stalin was able to plan his military strategy knowing what all commanders dream of knowing and that is ``the intention and activity of one's `friends' as well as
enemies.'' There was almost no anti-Soviet plotting by the British and Americans or the Germans and the Japanese that Stalin didn't know about all of the time! (Including their secret development of the atom bomb.) That in itself is a tremendous accomplishment and makes the Soviet Secret Service the most successful of all such entities that have ever existed. (Read Kim Philby's book My Silent War and my book, The Buccaneer, for that matter, for some of the ``inside'' on intelligence activities of those days.)
One might ask, if all that is true, and it is, how is it that Hitler caught Stalin unawares on June 22, 1941? Especially since both the English and his own spies were warning him of the Nazi buildup and intent to attack. ---And, the answer is, that Stalin had to make a judgment call and he made the wrong one.
But, it was an understandable one. The British and French ruling classes had been involved non-stop in trying to start a German-Soviet war and it was provocations of this type which had been keeping Stalin busy --- and his spies --- for a decade prior to the Nazi attack. The Brit-French conduct during the Spanish War had been aimed at putting the Russians in a position from which they could be denounced and subsequently attacked by the so-called democratic continental powers (France and England) in alliance with Germany and Italy. The British-French ruling class failure in that regard began to become apparent when Hitler switched his emphasis from Spain to first Austria and then Czechoslovakia. Meaning, as 1937 unfolded, Hitler's focus was on Germany's World War enemies, France and England, and perhaps not so much on Bolshevik Russia (i.e., Spain), at least for the moment.
342At that point --- June 1941 - Stalin had no reason to trust the life-long virulent anti-Bolshevik Winston Churchill, who would have done anything to take the German pressure off of his back and certainly would have loved to see the Nazi's switch their forces to an attack on the Soviet Union. ---And, the Nazi build-up along Soviet frontiers coincided with other Nazi war-making in the Balkans and against Greece. Goods were still moving back and forth, as per the Rapallo Treaty, between the Soviet Union and Germany, some of which the Germans could not do without.
Furthermore, and most importantly for Germany, to attack the Soviet Union would be suicidal --- Stalin had limitless natural resources, and limitless human reserves, and the most advanced armaments in the world on the eve of the German attack.
The Red Army had just proved its power by destroying the Japanese attack in Mongolia. Stalin credited Hitler with too much intelligence to provoke such a war at that time --- a war he could not win --- certainly to provoke such a war while his war with the UK and its empire was far from finished. Stalin had to believe this based on the results of the Spanish War and the performance of German and Soviet tanks and aircraft, where Soviet arms were proven far superior.
Hitler on the other hand felt if he didn't move now, in 1941, the Soviet superiority would be twice as great within a year or three times as great within two or three years. In which case by the time Germany might win against the British it would be an exhausted Germany emergent; one that would not have the ability to even consider attacking the Soviet Union. Finally, Germany had failed in its program to develop an alternative source of oil. It had to have Soviet oil or give up on its program of world conquest. This oil had been largely cut off, by Stalin, since 1936, and was just one more practical reason for destroying Bolshevism.
---And, this objective, of rolling back Bolshevism, was one the nincompoop in
Berlin would not give up. For practical political reasons he had to keep Germany's ruling capitalists behind him. That meant he could not appear to be changing his mind about liquidating Soviet Russia and its communist base in Germany. No, if he was going to do it he had to take the chance that surprise and luck would do the job, and 1941 was the last year Hitler correctly reckoned that he would have a chance relying on those two factors. Only a mentally unstable analyst could have reached the conclusion that a historical, and indeed epoch making, choice, that at best could be fifty-fifty, should be deduced. Even so, unbalanced, in the end, Hitler got close enough to satisfy his sponsors, at least for the moment (1941).
But the point is even though Stalin's intelligence service was warning him; Stalin still had to make the final judgment call and his decision turned out wrong. So was FDR caught off guard at Pearl Harbor six months later. When you are in the ``receiving'' position there is only so much you can do. No matter how much vigilance you practice a well set-up trick can work, as proved by Hitler in his assault on Bolshevism and by Hirohito in his assault on the USA, although, in the end Stalin was right and Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union failed, and with its failure Nazism was crushed.
Stalin's Boys
As you might imagine, had you been running the biggest intelligence operation in history for some fifty years (1903 until 1953), you would probably have a special place in your heart for some of your stars. Stalin certainly did. Among those who earned his everlasting affection several are worth looking at closely for a moment, even in a handbook. Why? Because as case studies they show us so much about ourselves, our movement and the people drawn to it. As such they constitute models for those of us who would like to make similar contributions to humanity's struggle to enter the Era of Freedom, as Frederick Engels called that period soon to begin, in the near future in other words, with the Stage of Communism. Let us take a glimpse at several who entered the proletarian secret service after the establishment of the first worker's government and state in history.
343Within six weeks of the October 1917 seizure Lenin and the then quite small Politburo authorized the creation of the All-Russian (Federal) Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation (on December 20th, 1917). Russian initials for this new body led to the use of the term Cheka for this and every subsequent Soviet intelligence department regardless of name. For example, members of the last of the Soviet intelligence agencies --- the KGB (Russian initials for Committee for State Security) --- and perhaps the most famous --- were still called Chekists. ---And still being paid on the 20th of the month (the day the Cheka was created in December 1917, during the Politburo meeting of that date as we examined in detail above in Chapter 13.)
344Lenin and the Politburo were acting on the recommendations of Joseph Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky. Stalin was on the Politburo. Dzerzhinsky was not. At this time there were only seven Politburo members and all matters having to do with state security had been handed to Stalin by his colleagues because Lenin wanted it that way. Lenin wanted it that way because Stalin had been acting, when not incarcerated, as chief of all Bolshevik secret financial and other similar activities since 1903.
Dzerzhinsky had been incarcerated and brutally treated after the failure of the 1905 revolution and was burning literally with hatred for his oppressors and the class they served. He had the habit of wearing jackets with the sleeves cut short enough to show the scars of the manacles that had been on his wrists for many years. He had recruited a special force of Latvian Riflemen to act as his agents in his work during the October 1917 seizure and thereafter they were the first ever-present Praetorian Guard of the Bolshevik Revolution. These two men --- Stalin and Dzerzhinsky --- were the closest of friends who saw eye to eye on the nature of the world-wide class struggle and how to conduct it for the people's side.
At any rate, as I say, Lenin had directed Stalin to prepare the report on the condition confronting the Revolution in terms of security and how to fight subversion from the enemies of the people. Stalin had done so but turned the December 20th meeting over to Felix Dzerzhinsky who he proposed to take command of the new Commission which the two of them were recommending to Lenin, to (1) protect the Revolution's leaders and (2) to guard the Revolution itself. See chapter 13 for the minutes of the Cheka's formative meeting.
Alexander Orlov
Lev Feldbin was a young lawyer and scholar who had been drafted into the Czarist Army and when restrictions against Jews becoming officers were abolished, as a product of the February bourgeois revolution, Feldbin was commissioned. He soon became a Bolshevik and after the seizure had been recruited by Dzerzhinsky into the Latvian Riflemen Red Guards. Here he was at hand when it was decided someone had to try and subvert the Anglo-American invasion from within, in the area of Russia north of Petrograd. Dzerzhinsky and his friend Joseph Stalin decided on Feldbin as one of the two to take charge of that area and Feldbin was personally given a new name more in accord with the locality and of course all Chekists would have secret identities anyway. Stalin picked the name Alexander M. Orlov for Feldbin.
345The Romantic Years
Orlov and his comrade Maria Rodontslov fell in love and the two were married and together for the rest of their lives. ---And what lives they were. Always at the forefront of the global class struggle. To make their long story too short let me say that Orlov succeeded in bringing the Anglo-American forces into the orbit of Bolshevik sympathizers and ended up as the leader of the secret military forces Stalin needed to protect his flanks on the ill-fated Polish-German-European campaign of 1920.
Afterwards Stalin made Orlov the top Chekist for all of Europe and in that capacity Orlov recruited the British Ring of Five --- Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Michael Straight, and Anthony Blunt. The Russian Government finally admitted this in a book published there in 1993. Orlov had been the Soviet Resident in charge in London from September 1934 to October 1935 and operated through Arnold Deutsch the ``Group Leader'' for the Cambridge 5 and Orlov took over control directly of Philby, Maclean and Burgess in February of 1935 as he was concerned MI5 was closing in on Deutsch. Contrary to Spycatcher author Peter Wright's implication, Sir Roger Hollis,
MI5 chief in the 1950's and 1960's, (as well as John Cairncross) was not recruited by Orlov but by Red Army G2, and in China not Europe. It was Hollis that warned Stalin of MI5 closing in on Deutsch. I learned about Hollis in June of 1961 from my KGB contact in London, Lady ``X'', as described in my book The Buccaneer.
These are only a handful of the most famous of Soviet spies and so I mention them here, but the fact is that Orlov recruited thousands of men and women, especially in Germany, but also in Italy and France where he served as the ``resident'' (chief of intelligence operations) for the Cheka's foreign department.
At the Foot of Carlos Prieto
It was not until 1962 however that I discovered from my most highly placed source in the international red secret service, the Mexican Communist, playwright and Soviet agent, Carlos Prieto, what would become Orlov's greatest accomplishment. Namely, the penetration of the US government at many levels with one objective. No, not the atom bomb. That job was handed to Steve Nelson to run for the Cheka. (At least this is what Steve Nelson told me in Portland, Oregon, in 1963 when he was trying to recruit me.) Orlov had a more important task. What could be more important than the atom bomb you may ask? I know I did.
The answer appears complex because it demonstrates the extreme sophistication of Stalin's personal intelligence expertise as well as that of his closest associate and fellow Politburo member Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin confronted a situation in 1936 which led him to believe that the Rapallo arrangement with the capitalist world was about to give way to a new united onslaught of the European capitalist class against the USSR and also that he had to get ready for a simultaneous attack from Japan. In other words all of the world's capitalist countries against the USSR and the People's Republic of Mongolia. A two front war that could not be won! Despite the fantastic progress in Russian industrialization the fact was that it would take longer than the ten years Stalin had been talking about to get Russia sufficiently industrialized to win a Gross National Product World War II. Unless, unless, the United States were to join with Bolshevism.
346It was clear by this time that Bolshevism was not going to seize power in the USA. At least not in the foreseeable future. Had that opportunity ever been present the American communists had missed it. So, how could the US be persuaded under a capitalist government to join with Russia against Europe and Japan? Stalin did not know, but he felt that the FDR government in the US was at least relatively neutral with regard to the USSR and if some set of circumstances might emerge which would put the US at war with Germany or Japan --- especially Japan seemed possible (Billy Mitchell wasn't the only one who could see the obvious) --- then the FDR administration might well ask Russia for its support. Then the practical basis for changing the nature of the Rapallo World from a Soviet-German alliance against the rest of the imperialist countries into a Soviet-American alliance against the rest of the imperialist countries would exist. Stalin didn't know how this could be made to happen, but he knew if there was anyone in the Cheka who could influence US events in this direction it was Orlov.
347An Historic Strategic Decision
Accordingly, in 1937, Stalin called Orlov back from Spain (where he was running Cheka operations in support of the Soviet-allied Republican government against Spanish fascist chieftain Francisco Franco, and overseeing the shipment of Spanish gold to Odessa) and explained his new task. Again making this fascinating story too short let me sum it up by saying Orlov established an elaborate ruse and made his way to New York, along with his wife and daughter.
This is not the place to go into further details of his mission and many of the details are still considered highest state secrets in Putin's Russia. However, the ruse worked and when many years later Orlov was discovered living in the US he managed to fool his FBI interrogators convincing them of his ``true'' secret refugee status.
In fact, they didn't find him. He wrote a book claiming to be an enemy of Stalin and upon its post-World War II 1953 initial partial publication the FBI read it and got in touch.
Stalin could not believe how incompetent these Americans were. Stalin said to Beria about the American FBI in 1952: ``Apparently we are going to have to have Lev write a book. I can't believe it. How these guys survived the war is amazing. Anyway Orlov did it once so he can do it again.'' But that is another story for another book, except to say Stalin read Orlov's report on March 1, 1953, and the next day had his fatal stroke. Orlov went ahead as planned, presumably because Beria told him to do so, with a series of articles for LIFE magazine in May of 1953 which later became the core of the book he had cooked up with Stalin.
At this point in time Beria still entertained the idea he would become the next General Secretary and one imagines he might have wanted the same access to Ike that Stalin had to FDR when it was critically important. He could not know he was about to be replaced by a Khrushchev led coup in a matter of only a few weeks.
Since the truth of Orlov's 1938 mission is about to be exposed by the Russian leaders themselves (Putin, Medvedev et. al.) it might as well be mentioned here that the reality Stalin spoke of was, as Molotov well knew, that Orlov's secret access to FDR had been crucially important in getting Harry Hopkins to Moscow in the critical months of 1941 and firming up US support. ---And, there was a new reason by 1953 for Orlov to need the attention of the USA's newest high leader. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected in November 1952 and Stalin wanted to establish contact with the new American President in the same way he had with FDR. Orlov had done it once he could do it again. Orlov you will recall had established direct contact with FDR in a manner later to be used by Albert Einstein.
348Stalin's comment on US intelligence acumen was simply a remark as to the efficiency of the FBI, under Jane Edgar Hoover, which the Russians considered a joke. At any rate, that direct contact between a trusted emissary of one nation and the boss of another, was and is, an old and distinguished mechanism in the diplomatic corps of many nations over many centuries
So, of Stalin's Boys it was Lev Feldbin (Alexander Orlov) who occupied one of the ventricles of what so many consider to be a rather cold heart. Stalin himself, by the way, felt that way about himself --- at least he said after the death of his first wife ``with her passing my heart turned cold.''
Inside the SS --- Richard Sorge
When it comes to being the Boss's favorite pet, no one stood higher in Stalin's affection than the German Richard Sorge. As we have seen, Sorge began his adulthood as a soldier in the Kaiser's army and was interned in a Russian POW camp. After the Capitalist Provisional Government was established in February of 1917 Sorge made his way back to Germany where he eventually joined the soon to be formed German Communist Party (Autumn and Winter of 1918.) There he became a leading member, and when the Comintern held a Conference in 1922 in Berlin, he acted as a bodyguard for several delegates including Finnish Communist leader Otto Kuusinen (the man who brought me into the international communist movement in June of 1961 when a copy of his book (Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism) was personally given to me in London by the chiefs of the Communist Party of Great Britain.) Kuusinen recommended Sorge to Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky and accordingly he was recruited.
349At this time the Cheka's foreign operations were at Starasky Square in Moscow where Joseph Stalin had his main offices and secretariat. Here he met Sorge for the first time and the two men hit it off big time. Sorge had learned Russian while a Czarist prisoner and Stalin knew a little German from his years of working the oilfields of the Black and Caspian Seas. Sorge went on many foreign assignments for Stalin but the one that changed the world was his mission to Japan.
In Japan Sorge had a blank check as far as money was concerned and he used his Chinese and Korean espionage agents to build a radio system that would send clear, ``in the open'' (verbal communication) as well as code, for Sorge with ``Moscow Central'', or directly to Molotov (Stalin), from wherever he established his base in Tokyo.
In the event, Sorge established his radio base near his office which was in the Nazi embassy in the Japanese capital! Yes, by this time Sorge had become a Colonel in the SS intelligence service and been assigned to this nest of evil in the Nipponese capital.
Sorge told Stalin that the summer 1939 attack of the Japanese on Mongolia was a test. One faction inside the Jap general staff (Sorge attended their meetings as a German observer at their request) wanted to expand and seize Siberia for all of its potential and as a place to put their army of unemployed. The other half of the Japanese general staff wanted to attack south and seize all the colonies of the British, the Dutch, and the French and expel the Americans from everywhere in Asia and the Pacific --- especially from China which this faction wanted to take completely into the Japanese ``co-prosperity sphere.''
Sorge gave Stalin the detailed Order of Battle of the Japanese forces on the Mongolian frontier. Stalin saw immediately what Sorge had seen. ---And, that was the Japanese did not have modern equipment and depended on suicidal soldiers to accomplish their missions. Accordingly Stalin sent General George Zhukov to take command of the most modern land and air machinery the Soviet Union had, including planes and tanks jerked right out of their design institutes and prototype production lines.
As a matter of interest these new tanks and planes had been perfected as a direct result of our intervention in Spain. They had been the best planes and tanks by far in Spain and had been further improved, immediately, in the USSR war plants in the years from 1936 to 1939.
Shit Kicking
When Zhukov attacked the Japanese, at the end of August 1939, at the Mongolian-China river border formed by the Khalkin-gol River he wiped out their entire 80,000 man expeditionary spearhead and destroyed what armor they had and virtually their entire committed air force. It was a ``turkey shoot'' as Soviet soldiers took on the Japs two to one with flanking waves of the most modern tanks in the world supported by the world's first fighter-bomber close-air-support warplanes in a new Soviet tactic called Deep Operations or Deep Battle. (Actually, as you will see in Chapter 16, Soviet pilots had flown prototypes of these fighter-bombers in Spain to the extreme distress of the Falangist (Franco's fascist Party) forces attacking Madrid in November 1936 and thereafter, they dominated the air in 1937 and in 1938 they turned the tide again and again in land and air warfare in Spain.)
350To give you an idea of desert warfare in those days think of a tank with a heavy cannon capable of accuracy at several miles against a supposedly armored Japanese target, itself unknowing and in any case unable to do anything but run! Before they could turn and run, again and again, Soviet tanks blasted Japanese ``tanks'' and mobile artillery to smithereens and Soviet ground-attack fighter-bombers finished off those further away. In the meantime charging Soviet infantry took on the men of the Japanese spearhead hand-to-hand.
Russians are a lot bigger than Japanese. These men took the Japs apart like a surgeon gone mad! The Mongolian landscape stank of decaying flesh for the better part of the year! An otherwise bad year for us had turned terribly wonderful.
Japan had assembled another million men to follow their spearhead into Siberia but when their spearhead was liquidated they sat dumb. The Imperial General Staff back in Tokyo was shocked and permanently resolved not to get involved again in Soviet territory and decided to move south against the Europeans and the Americans. This made Pearl Harbor inevitable. Stalin's boys had done it once again. Richard Sorge namely. One of our greatest heroes.
Preparing for Nazi Attack
As 1940 and 1941 unfolded Stalin arranged his Western forces quietly. Too early obvious preparation for defense against a broad attack might well trigger that attack even earlier than it was already planned. Too little preparation and the USSR would not be able to go over to a counterstrike or a preventive attack of its own on Germany. For example, deploying troops and aircraft to the western frontier would be provocative as seen from the Nazi side. Yet, failure to do so would make assault against Nazi Germany a lengthy process to prepare when the time came, and what if the German's were to attack in the meantime? Would it be better to have occupied forward positions or deep defensive positions? Difficult questions. As we have seen Stalin wanted to wait one more year, BEFORE this inevitable war began, or perhaps two if at all possible, so he could keep building the Red Army in both men and materiel. ---And, jockey as best he could to prevent a unified capitalist onslaught.
351The Second World War Begins for Us
Two years later Sorge warned Stalin the Germans were going to attack on June 22, 1941, at 6:00 a.m. WST (West Soviet Time). But, this time Stalin chose not to believe it. He convinced himself that Sorge had been taken in by his own SS misinformation bosses. Of course, Sorge was right, and thus rose in Stalin's esteem.
Accordingly when Sorge next told him the Japanese had rejected Germany's demand that they enter the war against Russia, Stalin paid attention. (The Anti-Comintern Pact Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, had signed required all to come to the aid of any one of them involved in war with the other capitalist countries but primarily the Soviet Union as indicated by the name). Now he began preparing to shift George Zhukov and his troops from Mongolia and Siberia to the Soviet West. Consequently Zhukov smashed the Nazi's at Moscow in December 1941 dealing Hitler his first massive defeat of World War II.
Shortly after this final transmission where he spoke directly with his close friend Joseph Stalin, Sorge was uncovered by the Japanese secret police. Jailed, tortured and executed, the Boss's favorite spy passed into the pantheon of Soviet heroes. To this day Sorge's Japanese grave is the contemporary site of an annual pilgrimage of many communists wishing to pay respect to the Boss's favorite. Respect we should pay today!
Michael Borodin: From Chicago to China
Some of Stalin's boys had been with him in the very early years. One was Michael Borodin. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution Borodin, a member of the Bolshevik Party, had fled Russia for the United States. Along the way he met another person --- a young Bolshevik woman --- and she became his wife and accomplice in Chicago where they both went to work teaching school and trying to help working people build a political base.
When the Capitalist Provisional Government was established after the February 1917 revolution in Russia, and then within six months his own Bolshevik Party turned the revolution socialist, (the Bolsheviks seized power in early November 1917 on the US calendar), Borodin made his way back to Moscow. There he renewed his personal friendship with Joseph Stalin, met with Lenin, and following Lenin's advice was recruited into the Cheka's foreign operations department. Borodin went on several missions including Mexico and the United Kingdom where he accomplished much and made his mentors proud. So proud that they sprung him from jail in London and gave him a new assignment. China.
Borodin arrived in Canton (Guangzhou) China in December 1923 on a tramp steamer with two hundred dead sheep killed in a hurricane (typhoon). The Brits were looking for him after the jailbreak in London and he could not venture anywhere near Hong Kong on his way up the Pearl River; thus, the tramp steamer.
If his arrival lacked a certain dignity that was soon remedied when the rest of his team arrived a few weeks later. For Stalin had sent several thousand Soviet advisors and nearly fifty ships full of small arms, tanks and airplanes. Why? Lenin had argued for and gotten unanimity in the Politburo for a policy of intervening in China to support the creation of a progressive capitalist government under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen. In charge of military operations for Sun Yat-sen was General Blyukher, a hero general of
the Red Army in the civil war and now Lenin's hand-picked chief of Soviet-Chinese military operations in China. We have already reviewed this topic in depth in chapter 14.
Kim Philby
Finally, as a case study is Harold Adrian Russell ``Kim'' Philby. Kim Philby was the son of a rather famous, in his own right, British iconoclast Harry Bridger St. John Philby, Orientalist and Arabianist, who would become the closest personal advisor to Ibn Saud, King of what is now Saudi Arabia. His descendants still rule. St. John Philby engineered the US entrance into Saudi Arabia cutting out his British compatriots. The Saud family that rules today owes virtually everything they have to him.
But it was St. John's son the world would come to know best. Orlov recruited Kim Philby, via Arnold Deutsch, and three more of the rest of the British Ring of Five (where he was the resident spy in charge from September 1934 to October 1935 and took personal control of Philby et al in January 1935). Orlov subsequently guided Kim through the maze of Spain in 1936 --- 1937, heading for a career in MI6 (the British Secret Intelligence Service.) It took some six years to get him this far because Kim had rather carelessly let it be known far and wide that he had communist sympathies in the late 20's and early 30's so this had to be covered up.
Once inside MI6 Kim rose rapidly because he did such great work, work largely conducted by Stalin's Chekists who were helping him accomplish his assignments in Iberia (German agents in Spain and Portugal being shot down like flies). Eventually he became chief of Anti-Soviet and Anti-Communist operations for all of MI6. Along the way he became a member of the XX (20) committee so named because these two letters together look like a ``double cross''. This referred to the British breaking of the German military code via the machine code-named Enigma --- and the subsequent formation by Anglo-American-Canadian intelligence of the project called Ultra. Needless to say all this data was transmitted to Molotov forthwith. ---And, Kim found out about the atom bomb almost immediately and that meant of course Stalin found out immediately. Even more importantly as a member of the Twenty XX (double cross) Committee Philby acquired all of the information he needed to give directly to the Boss about Enigma (the German military code broken by the Brits and how they did it, which is to say, how the machine worked.)
352After the war Kim was recommended by ``M'' to become the next ``M'' (really ``C'' but since one-time MI6 agent Ian Fleming made the letter ``M'' famous as the code name for the MI-6 Chief I have used it that way.) Then US President Harry Truman asked that Philby be sent to Washington to guide the American former OSS agents, at their request, in setting up the US equivalent to MI6 --- that is, the CIA.
Kim turned down the offer to become M because he said it was more important to help the Americans get into the fight against communism. Kim was in at the beginning and throughout the formation of the CIA and supervised some of its earliest attempts to overthrow Soviet power. The most famous of these being his sabotage of the CIA campaign against communist Albania. Anyway, this story has a long way to go but I think you get the idea. The gringos certainly did and spent the next twenty years trying to find moles left behind by Philby without success.
These are just a handful of the agents who were close to Joseph Stalin. If it is true you can judge a person by the friends he keeps then our judgment about Stalin should reflect these associations with heroes of our cause.
Our friend and colleague John Baker has prepared the following ``inside snapshot'' review of the Course Outline and Abstract of his upper division anthropology course and kindly allowed its reproduction here.
Inside Snapshot
Anth 437: Theory and Method in Soviet Spy Recruiting
John Baker
As if Stalin did not have enough on his plate at home in the period after 1926, there had been a series of embarrassing Soviet espionage exposes in Western Europe, and some of them had come home to ``the Boss'' himself, if for no other reason than that Joseph V. Stalin had accepted the working title of ``the Boss'', if only by not rejecting it. In 1930, Stalin asked his favorite spy protÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂégÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé Lev Feldbin to come up with some sure fire way of preventing these stupid stumbling's from happening ever again.
Lev Feldbin (Alexander Orlov) suggested to his close friend and sponsor at the Cheka's highest level, Joseph Stalin, that problems with (1) his foreign agents having been uncovered and subsequently tied to him, and (2) problems in the quality of the information being received, could both be resolved by making a wholesale change in recruiting policy.
Orlov took responsibility for the then current mess in European high level espionage operations because he was the one who had invented the approach of recruiting industrial espionage agents from the working classes (albeit often engineer-level trained workers). Such men and women were simply not fit for duty of the kind required of persons working as assistants to ministers for example. They made mistakes due to their class backgrounds which quickly made them suspect to the secret counter intelligence police agencies of the advanced capitalist countries and even when they were not at fault their class backgrounds brought them under suspicion first.
I will let Orlov tell the story in his own words:
``This officer (himself --- Ed.) took account of the fact that in capitalistic countries lucrative appointments and quick promotion are usually standard to young men who belong to the upper class, especially to the sons of political leaders, high government officials, influential members of parliaments, etc. To them promotion is almost automatic, and it does not surprise anyone if a young man of this background, fresh from college, passes the civil service examinations with the greatest of ease and is suddenly appointed private secretary to a cabinet member and in a few short years assistant to a member of the government.
``Accordingly, in the early 1930's, the NKVD residenturas concentrated their energy on the recruitment of young men of influential families. The political climate of that period was very favorable for such an undertaking, and the young generation was receptive to the libertarian theories and to the sublime ideas of making the world safe from the menace of Fascism and of abolishing the exploitation of man by man. This was the main theme on which NKVD residenturas based their appeal to young men who were tired of a tedious life in the stifling atmosphere of their privileged class. And when the
young men reached the stage when their thinking made them ripe for joining the Communist Party, they were told that they would be much more useful to the movement if they stayed away from the party, concealed their political views, and entered the ``revolutionary underground.'' The idea of joining a ``secret society'' held a strong appeal for the young people who dreamed of a better world and of heroic deeds.'' (Orlov, 1963:108-109)
Orlov was a genius as Koba had recognized many years earlier and in no single area of expertise than that of selecting his chief captains did he excel more. In charge of recruiting the scions of the British ruling class he appointed Arnold Deutsch. Orlov traveled to London as Chief Resident Spy for the Cheka in 1934, and in that capacity oversaw Deutsch's work first hand. In January, 1935, after being warned by Stalin that Deutsch was under MI-5 surveillance, Orlov took direct command of Philby, Burgess and Maclean. Let me quote just two more paragraphs from Orlov's 1963 book (Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare, 1963, Alexander Orlov, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 187 pp.) to illustrate one of Arnold's main recruiting methods.
``A very important part in influencing the young men was played by idealistic young women of various nationalities who already had a smattering of Marxian theory and who had acted as a powerful stimulus which spurred the young converts to action. Having been brought up first by governesses as sissies and later sent to exclusive private schools, they were charmed by the daring Amazons, and their intellectual association with them often blossomed into romances which frequently culminated in marriages. These young men hardly regarded themselves as spies or intelligence agents. They did not want anything for themselves --- least of all money. What they wanted was a purpose in life, and it seemed to them they had found it. By their mental makeup and outlook they remind one of the young Russian Decembrists of the past century, and they brought into the Soviet intelligence the true fervor of new converts and the idealism which their intelligence chiefs had lost long ago.
353``The NKVD intelligence no longer worried about attaining promotions for their charges. The promotions came automatically, and the NKVD chiefs looked forward to seeing some of the new recruits in ambassadorial posts a few years hence.'' (Orlov, 1963:109)
Thus Feldbin (Orlov) had once again persevered and having taken a severe problem off the Boss's plate, and in hand, resolved it perfectly.
Cairncross, later known within Cheka circles as a ``ladies man type'' liked to say ``that a woman would always prefer ten percent of an outstanding man to ninety percent of a mediocre man.'' Cleary he saw himself as belonging to the outstanding man category. I see this as a logical corollary to Deutsch's Amazon recruiting axiom. At least for the heterosexual three (Philby, Cairncross and Straight) and the bisexual one (Maclean) of the Cambridge Five. (Burgess and Blunt being homosexual were beyond Deutsch's Amazon reach and were approached in a different way.) Interestingly, the notorious ``womanizer'' Philby was known by the codename ``Son or Sonny'' and Burgess as ``Little Girl'' reflecting if nothing else Deutsch's and Orlov's attitude toward their sexuality.
Another person of the Amazon type utilized by Stalin was Wallis Simpson. She was recruited in China by Red Army GRU (G2 in this book --- Ed.) (Along with Roger Hollis, who later in MI5 warned Stalin about MI5 surveillance of Arnold Deutsch.) In China, Wallis Simpson was a high class prostitute recruited via the good offices of Anna Louise Strong. Simpson went on as we all know to be the paramour and in fact wife to the Prince of Wales. David (Windsor) was noted by Winston Churchill in one of his memoirs as an example of the sad travails of being a Royal in Britain. Along the way Churchill mentions having seen David, while in the early charge of Wallis Simpson, naked after bath, and that he was to paraphrase ``completely shaven from neck to toe, like a newborn baby, including his genitalia.'' One can imagine the Amazon Simpson babying her lover and then fucking him to death in those ways only an experienced courtesan of her sort can. Wallis Simpson not simply acquired a laundry list of men as husbands before she met the Prince but had survived in the tough world of Shanghai prostitution where one would have to be very competent just to maintain one's head above water. She made short work of David and forever after had him under her Amazonian spell.
354Note: Trotskyist and other imperialist historians can't get over being able to describe Orlov's 1937 departure for New York as a defection despite the exposes now common knowledge such as provided by Dr. Smith in this book. I remind the reader that had Orlov really defected he would have given up Philby et. al. sometime after his establishment of USA residence in 1938. He never did. Not even as late as 1953 in his Life magazine articles when both Philby and Blunt not to mention Cairncross and Straight were still deep undercover (Philby being daily examined in London as he was under suspicion for the Burgess Maclean defection; Philby was cleared within two years by Harold MacMillan in the House of Commons.) Not in his subsequent book based on the Life magazine articles and not in this 1963 book when Philby had already escaped to Moscow. In fact Orlov who died in 1973 never did give up anybody! What kind of defection was that?
355The truth is that the Orlov articles and book were part of a plot cooked up by ``the Boss'' and his favorite spy (Feldbin; Orlov) to reestablish contact with the US Presidency as they had with FDR in 1939. On March 1, 1953, Stalin read Orlov's first report on his progress in that regard and the next day (March 2) Stalin had his fatal stroke. Orlov went ahead with the Life articles (and later book) presumably because Beria (his controller from 1938 on) told him to continue with publication. At that point Beria thought he would be the next General Secretary (he could not have known Nikita S. Khrushchev was plotting a coup that would replace him within weeks) and Beria must have wanted to have the same sub-rosa contact with Ike that Stalin had with FDR.
Note: What is a Ladies Man? Well if we set aside the psychopaths who prey upon women for evil purposes my experience has taught me that what we are usually looking at is a man who prefers the company of women to men -And a man who is fascinated by a beautiful woman's sexuality (anatomy), (with a liberal interpretation of the world beautiful.) Such men want to spend as much time as possible with a given woman (usually numerous women according to travel and life experiences, as a sailor might have in every port, so to speak) and when the ``womanizer'' in question is with that ``special woman'' he is extremely attentive, kind and polite, solicitous and romantic, and most especially after these qualities ``exciting''. Many women including beautiful women have never, or rarely, had that kind of attention and they appreciate it, and respond in kind.
356Some of them have been mistreated by men or at least disappointed and so they are especially appreciative. For this reason the genre ``ladies man'' does not die out as female liberation proceeds apace.
There had never been any doubt in the minds of our Bolshevik leaders they would eventually have to fight another great conflict. Lenin's doctrine of keeping the capitalist countries divided (formally begun with the 1922 Rapallo Treaty) could not last forever. But, if it were to last long enough to allow us Bolsheviks to prepare for the great conflict, in whatever ways were available, then that would be good enough.
It was the most basic Marxist science that the class struggle had to be played out internationally as well as nationally. We were, after all, after them. We were devoted to our last breath and first aspiration to the liquidation of the capitalist class worldwide. Likewise they were devoted to our destruction. There would not be, nor could there be, according to our historical science (that is to say our historical materialist theory of social and cultural evolution), anything other than a final climactic class-war planet-wide. From 1924 to 1941, as it turned out, we had only seventeen years to jockey for the best position from which to fight that final battle or battles. The final battles would turn out to be a century away but in the meantime this battle against world imperialism would fill the bill.
357From 1917 to 1941 our northern frontier was protected by the Red Army and Navy and the then solid ice pack that existed through much of the year restricting imperialist naval thrusts. Our southern frontier was protected by the Himalayas and deserts and backward areas such as Persia, Afghanistan and northwest China which imperialism would find it difficult if not impossible to utilize for a broad attack on us. Thus our problems were East and West. East against Japan and the USA and West against Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France and the lesser fascist countries of Iberia and East Europe. We will begin with the Western Front.
Along the way, from Rapallo (April, 1922) to June of 1941, there were numerous conflicts between the Soviet Republic (after 1924 the Soviet Union) and the rest of the capitalist world. Perhaps the most difficult was the opening shot of World War II, that of Spain (1936-1939). Not because of the military complexity of the armed struggle, for that was none too unusual. But, for the international political gamesmanship of the 1930's, where the capitalist classes of France and England were busy trying to ``pacify'' Hitler (which is to say busy encouraging Hitler to turn his attention to his oft stated goal of war with us - the USSR) and trying to provoke the Soviet Union into one or another, seemingly transparent, traps. Traps that would have the effect of making it easier for their Governments to appease Hitler and turn against Stalin and the rest of us also. ---And to attack us together!
358This de facto imperialist conspiracy was the entire substance and foreign office focus of British and French ruling class policy from 1926 until the actual turn of the coming World War in 1941. As a matter of interest I once heard (Portland Oregon 1963)
Hyman Lumer (CPUSA leading member) lecture on this subject and one important point I recall was his opinion that FDR was ``at best neutral and at worst pro-fascist, that is from 1933-1941, but as time progressed FDR tended toward neutrality and then outright hostility to European fascism.'' Subsequently I spent over forty years following the information flow and have been able to confirm this thesis beyond any reasonable doubt. I think Stalin was sensitive to this evolution of FDR and the New Deal and this sensitivity provides an understanding of the reason for Stalin's decision in the early phases of the Spanish Civil War to pull Orlov out of Spain and send him to New York. More at Eleven.
After the events of 1933 and 1934 in Germany and Russia the Soviet Party authorized a step up in war industry and a restoration of command ranks of the old Czarist variety in the Army. In 1935 names given during the Civil War to the officer and NCO ranks reverted to the traditional rank titles as the USSR prepared for war, the officers and NCOs being rewarded accordingly. A new highest rank of Marshall of the Soviet Union (equivalent to a US five star general) was created and five four-star generals received the honor.
The Chinese had been fighting fascism since 1927 as we have seen but for us communists in the USA it was in Spain we first confronted modern fascism. For the Soviet Union too Spain would be where world socialism and our armed forces first tested our instruments of war against theirs. World War II began, in reality, in Spain, in July (on the 17th) 1936 although we Bolsheviks would not be in that war formally for another five years. That is, until June 22nd, 1941. Let us take a closer look.
The Spanish Civil War (July 17, 1936 --- April 1, 1939)
The Spanish Kingdoms of Isabel and Fernando (Castile and Aragon) emerged from the 1492 discovery of the New World and the nearly simultaneous discovery by Portuguese explorers of the Muslim circumventing Cape of Good Hope (tip of South Africa) route to the South Asian and Far Eastern parts of the Old World, having put a permanent mark on Spain's subsequent sociocultural evolution (and that of Portugal too, of course.) Namely by creating national enterprises bent on ``looting'' as opposed to ``producing'' (commodities) to acquire wealth. By stealing the gold, silver, and slave labor of the Americas, tremendous quantities of capital were accumulated in the hands of the feudal ruling classes of Spain and Portugal.
Isabel: The Boss
Isabel wore the pants (literally) in the Fernando relationship. She was not some kind of sheltered fairy-tale princess. She put together the army that conquered Moslem Spain and the secret police force keeping her and Fernando in power as Queen and King of Castile and Aragon and their newly emerging Spanish Kingdom. In the process she expelled the Islamists and the Jews. She appeared, frequently at the head of her army, mounted, in leather from head to toe, booted, in tailored Spanish chain steel armor. What Isabel wanted Isabel got. Just to be sure, she had her always present guardian force (the Hermanidad) of privileged thugs who became her Praetorian Guard, and secret police, to see her will was made so.
The global ideological agent of Isabel, (the Pope of Rome, Alexander VI), the former Archbishop Borgia, Isabel's lover and sycophant, declared the world divisible between two Papist powers, Spain and Portugal. The Pope drew a line for Isabel dividing the entire world. He was giving virtually the entire Western Hemisphere to Spain and everything east of the line to Portugal (which included the eastern promontory of South America, thus Portugal got Brazil). ---And, so the world was divided effectively for two centuries as far as the bosses of Europe were concerned. But the point is the two ``superpowers'' of Europe (Spain and Portugal) were bent on looting hard gold and silver not on manufacturing commodities.
Needless to say Isabel's suborning of the Papist authority to the monopoly on enslavement and exploitation of the New World leaving Britain and northern Europe out of the picture altogether was a de facto declaration of war against emerging protestant Europe. This became a war between the Papal superpowers against England and northern Europe. Spain against the rest of Europe, especially the Netherlands and England, countries it wanted anyway, for their capitalist component. Thus in the 1500's, Anglo-Protestant Europe was continuously in a sub rosa Cold War of sorts (as in the movie Elizabeth, The Golden Age) Nonetheless, the intercontinental conflict was deadly as the Iberian New World colonies would testify, raid after raid .
In 1588 the Spanish royal family-nobility oligarchy made a fateful final error and suffered massive naval defeat in its attempt to invade and occupy Great Britain. Not only would the victorious Spanish have divided all of the land and wealth but done so with the stated objective of destroying protestant power in England and bringing Elizabeth to Rome for a public burning. The Spanish failed, learning in the process that Captains of FedEx shipments of stolen New World gold and Manila Galleons filled with far-eastern riches were not automatically qualified to be Captains of war vessels. With a little help from her friends (the weather) the limey's managed to fight off the invasion and drive it to self-destruction against its North Sea escape route.
At any rate, the Iberian road to riches, stood and stands in direct contrast to the British way which involved producing commodities for sale at home and abroad --- which is to say the British, being locked out of the Western Hemisphere territories of Spain by their military inability to challenge the Spanish Monarchs, had to go the capitalist route like it or not (and in those days the capitalist route was far less profitable). Supplemented along the way with a lot of piracy (buccaneering) or if you prefer ``privateering'' in the Caribbean, as well as exploration with a view to colonization of the Indian subcontinent.
(For an entertaining view of this early Caribbean period I recommend the Geena Davis 1995 movie Cutthroat Island (based loosely on the adventures of several female pirates of some renown and one socialist pirate who ended up in Madagascar) which gives an entertaining and technically correct view of the British New World in 1668 which was only the Caribbean and New England. For an excellent view of the latter part of this four hundred year period (~1810) I recommend the A&E series Horatio Hornblower. The more recent Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander, Far Side of the World) illustrates the condition of terminal feudalism/early capitalism in Europe (Napoleonic wars). As does the 17 part Richard Sharpe series (John Cornforth).
However, unbeknownst even to themselves, in the long run the British (and the French) were on the far better road to super profit creation via capitalism and the Spanish were not. All of this history had to catch up with the Spanish, and it did; but it took four
hundred years! Even so it is an interesting dialectical conundrum, for while the Spanish path aimed as it was at avoiding class antagonisms known to be associated in the rest of Western Europe with capitalism of the industrial variety which might have generated a fatal weakness in their system in the short run, it was simultaneously weakening Spain vis a vis England and France, in the long run
As the nature of West European and North American economy began to shift to manufacturing, even ever so marginally at first, the shift was simultaneously being made into whose hands actual cash and commodities were accumulating. No longer was the ruling class source of wealth the farmers held in servitude as serfs (or slaves in Eastern Europe) but the workers paid by the hour and thus the capitalists were without the additional burden of having to feed and house their labor force, which if held in absolute servitude would have to be fed and housed all year round. (Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations notes this fact on page one, pointing out that the capitalist route was a much more economical one --- which is still why capitalist wage slavery is the normative preference over master-slave stage, chattel slavery.) Now the owner of the means of production simply dismissed labor when no longer needed and those thus dismissed were on their own. Serfs and slaves have to be fed and housed all year round by their masters and mistresses; workers for wages were (and are) fucked after working hours. Freedom is not free.
359Thus, over a period of several centuries, the hand of the manufacturing and financial bourgeoisie grew until they became the determining factor in Anglo-American politics rather than the class whose policies, (the Spanish in the New World or the Portuguese in the Old) were leaving their profiteers far behind. James Cavell's book Shogun illustrates perfectly the role played by British privateers in breaking the Portuguese-Catholic Church control of European trade with Japan and China. As such I consider this a good introduction to the National Geographic's World's Toughest Prisons series (See the show on Santa Marta, Mexico and Lurigancho, Peru.) Cavell's East Asia series is essential reading for those of us who have not had personal experience in the Far East (such as myself.)
360Note: Clavell spent World War II interned in a Japanese prison camp outside Singapore City called Changi. These experiences later provided the basis for his first book King Rat. Changi was very much like the gringo sponsored (and financed) prison in Peru called the Lurigancho Center for Social Re-adaptation in Lima, about which I have written two books concerning my own experiences (Rivers of Blood, High Finance South American Style.) What I left behind is shown several decades later in the National Geographic Channel ``World's Toughest Prisons'' show about Lurigancho (Lima, Peru.)
Thanks but No Thanks!
Furthermore in those four centuries (1518 to 1921) the feudal ruling classes considered Spanish industrialization at home in the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon to be completely out of the question. They knew if they allowed the emergence of mercantile capitalists possessing commodities often created by proto-machinofacture and its essential use of labor-power as the source of all wealth in these factories, they would also be creating their own grave diggers! (1) That is, the creation of an industrial proletariat would be terribly destabilizing. Industrial workers being far more difficult to
control than landless agricultural workers. (2) Furthermore, and at that time most importantly, some of the small bourgeoisie would become big bourgeoisie quickly and many of them would be financially very well off. Inevitably this would mean the King and his Court, not to mention the nobility, would soon come under their sway (become their lenders and bankers) as their class aristocrat brothers had in every other European country. Thus, the Iberian monarchs decided for industry they might have to have, and for the profits that came from the creation of capitalist proto-commodities, they would grab as grab can in the rest of Western Europe, thereby achieving this objective. Or not, (e.g., see the movie Elizabeth, the Golden Age.)
We'll Take Capitalism Our Way, Thank You
This is why, in the 1500's, Spain took military aim at the Netherlands and England. ---And in a more sophisticated way Isabel took aim at the workshops of Italy, installing her lover (bribing the voting cardinals), the infamous Archbishop Borgia, as Pope of Rome (changing his name to Alexander VI). Meanwhile Spain's resources were devoted to the tiny ruling class behind these monarchs --- which is to say their luxurious life styles --- and to the construction of a powerful naval force to control these new global provinces. By placing capitalism in its true form outside the boundaries of Castile and Aragon the Spanish feudalist rulers secured the labor and social peace they wanted at home, and for a long time.
No need for public education here (beyond the guilds necessary to construct powerful Manila Galleons), so the early start the Spaniards had made in terms of education was reversed. The reversal lasted nearly four centuries and featured a steady decline in public education including higher education where 60 odd universities were reduced to fifteen and more and more lower grade education handed to the religious authorities of Roman Catholicism (so so-called public education in Iberia resembled so-called public education in the contemporary Islamic world).
For the powers that be --- the ruling aristocrats and their nobility --- it was a system which had worked very well. If it had not been for the US declaration of war against them in 1898, as far as they were concerned (and like our contemporary imperialists they were ignorant and blind to history) the Old Regime could have gone on forever.
Spain Forced Into the 20th Century
However, it was the war of 1898 against the North Americans which brought a new day to the Iberian Peninsula --- at least in the Spanish part of it. The gringos wanted the Spanish Road into China and it was this they got when they defeated the pitiful naval squadrons of the Spanish and seized the Philippines. (The Cuban part of this Spanish-American War was just an excuse and gringo intervention there had to happen that year unless the gringos were ready to let Cuba win its independence on its own merits, given the advances of the Cuban revolutionary forces of Jose Marti.) The Philippines had been the major road into China for Europeans for all of these four centuries and at one time in the 1500's and 1600's the only road. The gringos wanted it, knew they could seize it, and proceeded to do so. Again, for fascinating insights into the status of Europe with the Far East in 1600 read James Cavell's Shogun.
361The Philippines
The loss of the colonies --- especially the Philippines - to the US meant large numbers of de facto expelled overseas Spanish expatriate capitalists would make their way back to their homeland, bringing with them the technology of capitalism they had been using to create profits overseas. So in the early 1900's the arrival of Spain's foreign expatriate capitalists and their New Class technocrats doomed the old order.
Twenty Years Later
But the Old Regime would not go quietly, so Spain became the center in the 1920's of an intense intra-bourgeoisie struggle and an intra-feudal classes struggle. These struggles were intense precisely because the newcomers would not wait. Too many years had gone by already! The idea of ``waiting'' was dead on arrival. The newcomers wanted modern government and modern property concepts to go along with their technology and would not take no or ``later'' for an answer. Practically, realistically, how could they take ``no'' or ``later'' for an answer when their entire way of making money (earning a living) depended on industrial manufacturing? Consequently, the returning expatriate capitalists had been linking up with like-minded Spaniards at home. The feudalist Monarchy would have to give way to a capitalist Parliamentary system where the bourgeoisie could settle their differences among themselves.
362These struggles were being exacerbated simultaneously by an increasingly aggressive working class movement in the towns and cities and in the countryside. What would happen?
Beginning in 1931 with the election of a Parliament and the abdication of the King, Spain began a downward spiral toward civil war that climaxed on July 17, 1936. The date of the revolt of Spanish fascist Army officers against the newly elected Popular Front Government of the Republic was, in other words, a direct response to the election of a Communist encouraged Popular Front government.
They Won, We Lost and Why
However the reality was that while the elected Parliament was definitely radical it was just as clearly not a communist government. If it had been a Bolshevik government, such as we had in Russia after October 1917, the way the Spanish civil war could have been conducted would have been entirely different. The truth was that the Spanish ruling classes had assumed the worst (us in power) and struck a preventive first blow. The reality was that we Bolsheviks had helped place in power in Madrid a Mickey Mouse coalition of incompetent boobs.
In the end, the Spanish ruling families were right to do (from their perspective) what they did, because we could not stop them, even after two and a half years of civil war. Even when world fascism was completely destroyed in 1945, the Spanish ruling families continued in power in Spain for the rest of their lives. In fact, they still are in power albeit under a social democratic regime. Remember this as one more lesson about social democracy. It is just a ``cover'' better called social fascism.
The Working Class Factor
Anarchism, perhaps the most pernicious anti-working class ideology then operating in Europe, had had success in Northern Italy and Spain during the 1800's. It was such a serious threat to proper working class ideology that General Secretary Karl Marx sent the First International of Workingmen away from Europe to the USA as we saw above. In the US the then (1876) 19 chapters of North American communist First International workers dissolved it altogether, as Marx had wished, and went on to create their own Workingmen's Party of the USA.(Pick this up in Part III Chapter 23, below.)
However, in Spain, the anarchists had created a following among the oppressed masses of landless agricultural workers in places like Catalonia and Andalusia. For us in North America think of the Grange with its ``agrarian radicalism'' over the last century or so and you will have a rough idea of what this kind of thinking amounts too, although in North America the farmers involved were far better off than those who had literally nothing in Spain. Yet the rural political idiocy shines through. This anarchist tradition among the landless agricultural laborers of Spain provided the base upon which the trade union form of anarchism could and did build as the returning capitalists began creating factories in Catalonia and Andalusia.
One can see that, what Karl Marx might have called the idiocy of rural poor peasant landless worker life, meant among other things the only relationship these oppressed masses had had with any state (army and police) --- for 6000 years - was one of being the subjects of insatiable ``tax'' collecting. This was the extreme and unjust extortion the rulers insisted upon; rulers who saw to it a host of inhuman indignities were visited upon the lower-than-farm-animals farmer population, regularly. The idea that the state (the army and police) --- any state (any army and police) - is the source of all evil (the main anarchist tenet) found easy acceptance among this mass of dehumanized poor.
This is all anarchism is in reality. That is all it has ever been. Mature intellectuals here and everywhere should already have learned this and most have. But there are still those around too lazy to undertake a scientific study of history. Marx and Engels proved what the state is and archaeology has confirmed that judgment. End of story.
The Lay of the Land
From 1902 to 1909 Spanish anarchist leaders built a following among the industrial proletariat emerging in the new capitalist factories originating in this rural hell. These are the anarcho-syndicalists (Syndicate being another popular term for ``Unions'' in those days.). In 1909 they created their first national trade union called the CNT --- which stands for Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (National Work Confederation). Syndicalism is the theory that workers can take control of a nation simply by taking control of shops, factories, farms and other enterprises without first confronting and destroying the bourgeois state.
Marxism was not without adherents in Spain. It had its own union called the UGT (General Workers Union) and with the return of the expatriate capitalists it began to
grow rapidly. Proper Marxism (Bolshevism) calls for armed confrontation with the capitalist state and its destruction before workers can proceed to construct socialism.
But there are Marxists and there are Marxists. It was not until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that correct Marxism (Leninism --- the PCE) really took off jumping from perhaps only 10,000 members that year to 200,000 members by 1918. It was however still quite small compared to the 700,000 members in the anarchist CNT that year. In the succeeding decade the UGT grew to one million members as did the CNT and the landless agricultural workers were a larger class still at over two million. The UGT was still quite divided (revisionists vs. revolutionaries) in terms of socialist objectives and had of course an underlying strong trade union issues orientation.
So as 1936 dawned, the CPSU (b) General Line (thus, the Comintern general line) had only the very small Spanish Communist Party (PCE) representing it in Spain. Against that stood not just this massive anarchist problem but the additional complication of real Trotskyists and a plethora of so-called ``independent'' Marxist groups including what quickly became a de facto quasi-Trotskyist ultra-left Party called the POUM (which roughly translated stands for Workers Party of Marxist Unification) under the leadership of Trotsky's former personal secretary Andres Nin. Finally there was the Socialist Party of Spain (the principal Party in the UGT) which Stalin wanted in 1936 in unification with the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The Socialist Party leader furthest to the Left was Francisco Largo Caballero, who had taken on the title of the ``Spanish Lenin'', but he was far from that. Largo Caballero did not want to unify with the communists and this along with other fallings-out led to his early replacement as the Civil War unfolded. (In May 1937, after the siege of Madrid was lifted and our International Brigades led counterattack threw the fascist forces and their 150,000 Italian troop allies well back on their heels, Largo Caballero was tossed out as Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic and replaced by Dr. Juan Negrin, our candidate.)
363The truth is there was no Spanish Lenin. Nor could the Comintern make one out of the raw material available which included the best of the Spanish Marxists such as Dolores Ibarruri. Stalin knew all this and had sent his favorite Chekist --- Alexander Orlov --- to make a personal tour of the Spanish situation in the spring of 1936. Orlov left behind a working cadre of Chekists in key cities to support the Republic should Stalin decide to do what he was thinking about in April and May of 1936.
Stalin did decide to act by way of sending volunteers and instructed Orlov to make up for lost development time in what might otherwise have been a typical Party-building exercise in a de facto Third World (colonial type) country. Orlov did his best, but in the end nothing the Soviets did could turn Spain into a country with a unified working class under Leninist leadership --- not in the short time available.
The Technological and Political Status of Spanish Capitalism
Capitalist technological applications were not restricted to mining and agriculture but were making rapid inroads in far more complex technological areas such as aircraft construction. For example the best airplane engine of the entire First World War was built in prototype form by the Spanish steel complex and auto manufacturer Hispano-Suiza. The actual construction shifted immediately to the advanced capitalist countries for use in the air war of that Great Conflict (1914-1918). Spain did not have the
manufacturing capability yet to produce aircraft by mass production, but as we can see it definitely had the corps of scientists and engineers from which such capability could be built and in the years after the World War, Spanish capital and its workers got on with the job.
Thirty Years Later
However, in the thirty years following the end of the US-Spanish War, the returning expatriate Spanish capitalists had had an insufficient amount of time to come up with a unified national political solution to their problems. As we have seen these were problems peculiar to the stunted developmental road Spain had been following for four centuries. The new would-be rulers had to confront the sociocultural consequences of problems that face any nation undergoing rapid social and cultural evolution, not to mention this specific developmental inheritance. That four century historical interregnum of national technological stagnation acted to drag the entire nation behind as it attempted to hothouse its way into the modern capitalist world.
As in China it would be the criminal element within the capitalist class which came to the rescue. Meyer Lansky, Big-eared Du, and Chiang Kai-shek had a new equal and his name was Juan March!
``Background'' Inside Snapshots
United Front against Fascism
1935 The Seventh Comintern Congress
``George (Dimitrov), I needed to see you before this extremely important Comintern Congress.''
``I understand, Comrade Stalin. I know how important this `united front against fascism' strategy is going to be and I don't see any real problem since the Trotskyites are not present and even if they were their program is so far left it effectively negates any united front with the social democrats.''
``Fuck them and listen to what I have to say.
``You have no idea how many foreign capitalist plots the Cheka uncovers on a daily basis against our Socialist motherland. In Western Europe there is just one fascist coup attempt after another and eventually one of them in some unlucky country is successful. I don't give two sweet fucks about `strategy agreement'. What I want is for the British comrades to stand up and stop British intervention against us no matter how it is disguised. Karl Marx stopped this exact same class of mother fucking cocksuckers (this is the best my limited ability at English interpretation can give the Russian profanity --- ed.) from entering the American civil war on the side of the slavocrat regime in Richmond and I expect them to do the same thing now! ---And, the French comrades and so forth. Marx did it on his own and forged an alliance of working class elements and financed it with international union contributions. He didn't have an entire state apparatus and its financial resources to help him as they now have. God dam it, I expect them to start effectively standing up against the fascist capitalist plot to form a united front around a London-Berlin-Rome axis for World War II against us! Now do you see?''
364
``No. Not exactly Comrade Stalin.''
``Jesus Fucking Christ George. You are as loyal a comrade as there is but you are fucking dense. You need to use this Comintern Congress to fire up the comrades to stand up with armed resistance in France, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and so forth. Wherever they can, they should stand up and fight back in armed strikes and hopefully armed insurrection against this international capitalist war policy against us. Guns in the streets George. Against fascism and force the social democrats to take our side or theirs. They have to learn how to fight fascism in practice! Our unions are to make it clear that these `democratic parliamentary' countries will not countenance a joint attack with the fascist states against us, or face civil war...
``Buy me more time! Believe me when I tell you I am pushing our labor-power beyond its possibilities as it is! Even so, I have to have at least five more years of freedom from war to finish our minimum industrialization, and we need our foreign comrades to fight against war and for peace with us. Comrades in the UK and France and anywhere where the fascists don't already have complete control.''
The boss rested and waited.
``I see Comrade Stalin. Okay, I'll do it. It's not exactly how I planned to implement a united front policy with the Second International but I think I see what you mean, and I certainly understand why.''
``That's it George, You come and see me when the Congress is over.''
The boss walked to the door, opening it, indicating as he did that the Comintern's new leader, George Dimitrov, was dismissed. The Boss was still pissed off, thinking, ``This Dimitrov is too stupid to run this thing, for Christ's sake, why did I pick him?''
Back at his desk Stalin hit the intercom button: ``Poskrebyshev where is Molotov?''
``On his way Boss.''
``Show him in when he gets here.''
Trotsky and Stalin had been the only ones with access to Lenin unannounced. With Stalin no one had access without announcement. No one had access without being fully searched. Just in case Stalin had a ``Bolo'' (.30 cal. Mauser pistol popular with Bolshevik officers and Non-coms) holstered under his military jacket (and a Tommy Gun under the desk in his office and on the floor of whatever car he was riding in which itself was changed daily).
Molotov entered as Poskrebyshev opened the door, announcing ``Comrade Molotov.''
``Vlad refresh my memory. Why did I pick this Bulgarian, Dimitrov, last year?''
``I don't know how many you consulted but when you asked me I recommended him. Now, before you explode Koba let me say I know what you are thinking. But Dimitrov has strong points, not the least of which is he reads every petition and letter sent from every Comrade, not to mention from every Party, and he responds to each thoughtfully and personally. He spends so many hours at work his colleagues call him `stone-ass'.''
``So, that's why you picked him he has your nick name, ha ha.''
Molotov continued unfazed.
``He is well liked. He is certainly well meaning, with an outstanding class and political background. What he lacks in audacity or quick reaction capability can be made
up by close advisors and I have several for you to look at. Also, we can bolster his good points as well with a larger and better organized secretariat. In short, don't worry. I understand the situation and have it in hand.''
``Thank you Vlad. I feel better now. Yes everything you said is true and we will have a man up front the Comrades like. That's extremely important. I like the guy --- it's just that he seems such a cream-puff. Anyway, no matter how many spies we have, nor how many soldiers and sailors and airmen, in the end it is the Comrades around the world who can stop the capitalists from attacking us as a united front. As long as we have one side or the other of the imperialist camp when war breaks out we will win. If we have the industrial base by that time equivalent to any one of these two emerging camps.
``Now I know what to say to him.''
The Boss walked to the side of his main desk and hit that familiar button.
``Poskrebyshev get Dimitrov back in here.''
``Yes sir.''
Poor George Dimitrov almost had a heart attack when several Chekists tackled him at the gate before he could get in the car taking him back to his hotel. But, they soon had him back upstairs, if somewhat flustered and irritated he was shown in
``Comrade Dimitrov'' announced Poskrebyshev.
``Sorry if they roughed you up George I just wanted to go over one important thing with you. I know you have done great work in Bulgaria and for the Comintern but I want you to start thinking in broad historical terms. Our North American comrades have placed a man at the head of their Party (William Z. Foster) who thinks the way we here in the Politburo do. Meaning in broad historical strokes actually materialized, as he sweeps one mass of workers in one critical industry after another into the right kind of unionization. Their Party then recruits the best and brightest in this emerging mass movement. We need to be doing similar things internationally via the Comintern. For example we have these Nazi Summer Olympics coming up next year --- Why not have the Comintern organize an alternative Socialist International Olympics in Spain somewhere?
365``We have been in the League of Nations, for what two years now - and all that pile of shit is, is a cabal of fascist nations and fascist enabling nations. Italy is attacking North Africa and Ethiopia. They are trying to find a place to put their unemployed workers and poverty stricken farmers without making any changes to ruling class ownership of that sorry fucked-up country. The Brits own the League of Nations and do pretty much what they like there which right now is to bend over backwards to urge Hitler to attack us! The only important capitalist country not actively attacking us there is the United States and that is only because they had the good sense not to get involved with all that human garbage. Max (Litvinov) does the best he can but he needs help too. The Comintern should use our mass organizations to begin demanding the League do the things that Litvinov is demanding. Like standing up to Mussolini and Hitler!
366``Anyway, the point is to try and sweep natural opponents of fascism into different kinds of mass manifestations. That's it George. Any questions?''
``Yes Comrade Stalin. Do you think this time I can go back to my hotel without getting the shit beat out of me?'' Then he laughed.
As did Stalin and Molotov. Dimitrov was on his way. Stalin would have placed his arm around him but Stalin was too short so he simply walked Dimitrov into the Foyer where the Chekists who brought him were awaiting their own fate.
``Boys you did good. Comrade Dimitrov agrees do you not?''
``Of course comrades and I appreciate your devotion to service to the chief of our international working class movement.''
``Now Boys do you think you can get him back to his hotel without beating the shit out of him?''
``Just a light beating Boss?'' The Sergeant joked.
Stalin frowned and that was the end of the jesting and they were on their way as the Boss said,
``Go.''
General Tukhachevsky at the George V Funeral in London 1935
``Thank you for this complete report on our Prima Donna. I don't need this right now but we're going to have to deal with it.'' The Boss walked to his friend Lavrenti Beria with good hand extended. They were in Stalin's Staraya Street office complex; a building where they both worked. The subject: the Red Army's most famous officer.
Beria was the Party Boss for Georgia but had been increasingly called to Moscow by The Boss to assist in Cheka national operations. In another three years he would make a permanent transfer to take over all Cheka operations in the USSR and abroad.
``He started out as a Bonapartist. Only that cocksucker Trotsky would have hired him and pushed him forward. Then he was a communist and now he is an ultra-left communist or Trotskyite undercover'' commented Beria.
``I wouldn't care about all that if he would keep his mouth shut. I told him in no uncertain terms to do exactly that before I sent him to the funeral of that piece-of-shit King in London but it obviously didn't do any good. You know the problem Lavrenti. If the Nazi's get the idea we are going after them no matter what, then they may well fall for the Baldwin plot to construct a London-Berlin-Rome axis. Tukhachevsky is effectively a provocateur with all those bullshit speeches abroad, about how we are going to rap the Nazi pig's snout so well it will never dare stick its nose into our socialist garden, blah, blah, bullshit! He wants to fight them right now and I certainly do not. Before a week had gone by the Anglo-American forces would join in against us and then the Japs and the Frogs.
``We will have to deal with him eventually. The real problem is he has a base of support in the Politburo and they won't replace him unless he presents a clear and present danger. He would not have ignored everything I told him before he left unless he was conspiring with others, certainly in the Army, and probably in the Politburo too. He may well plan on using his ultra-left ``attack Nazism'' talk to build a base of support in the Army and the Party for a Bonapartist coup, somewhere down the road. That is what he has always been --- a Bonapartist. Even though he denies it now. I want you to get ready to handle this --- we will need irrefutable proof. Remember, we cannot survive without Rapallo intact in the West. Lenin knew it and set it up this way. I won't let this aristocrat cocksucker Tukhachevsky, or anyone else for that matter, negate this arrangement.
367``Furthermore, my friend, Tukhachevsky already has a base of support in the officer corps. This is mainly true out here in the West but his influence runs throughout the Red Army. The worst part of that is he is resisting the reorganization of the military-
industrial complex along the lines I have proposed as our general line in the air and on the ground in terms of the land tank and the flying tank we have to have when this Second World War starts. I am not sure why, but I think it has to do with the differences in how Deep Battle is to be implemented among our officers --- even in the Frunze academy. It may be simply because I support the land tank-air tank approach, that he opposes it. There are always plenty of malcontents with this Deep Battle strategy who will listen to this kind of talk. His idea of building a massive heavy bomber fleet would mean we would not have the money to build the Sturmovic fighter-bombers which are far more important for the kind of war we can fight. His call to build one hundred thousand tanks is ridiculous. We can't build that many Ford Model T's yet. If we even tried we would be bankrupt in a year or two.
368``At any rate I know he was conspiring with Zinoviev and so probably others too. Can you handle this when the time comes?''
``Yes. How much time do I have?''
``Given the necessity of getting unanimous Politburo consent, as much as you need. Given the condition of Europe now, perhaps two or three years.''
``As you can see in the report we have total penetration on (Czechoslovak President) Benes. That's where we will get the proof. I'll keep you informed.''
``You're ready to pick them up whenever?''
``Of course.''
``I don't want the Cheka involved at all. That idiot Yagoda is on his way out and I'm not sure his replacement is any more reliable. Besides the Lubyanka leaks like a sieve as far as the Party is concerned. Use your own network (SMERSH) and do keep me informed step by step as the intelligence accumulates.''
``Is there anything else Koba?''
``Yes. One more thing.''
Death of a King: Wallis Simpson 1935
``Lavrenti what I am about to tell you is known only to me and two men in Red Army Intelligence. When we were in China in force, Red Army G2 (GRU) recruited a number of English-speaking agents. One of them is an American woman named Wallis Simpson. Actually Lav as I recall she has as many names as we do, but in her case it is because she has had so many husbands. At any rate the latest man in her career is the Prince of Wales...''
``The new King!''
``Yes. This piece-of-shit is going to be coroneted soon, now that the funeral of the old King is completed. The problem is this guy is an outright Nazi. A personal friend of Himmler and Hitler and he acts as a German agent in his own country. This makes this particular royal reactionary unacceptable to us. This is exactly what we do not want. ``(British Prime Minister) Baldwin is engineering a plot against us of his own and the class behind him currently does not want to go to war with us with Hitler at its head. I don't want them to change their mind because of this new cocksucker on the Throne. So, what is the answer?
``In this case, because we have Prince David's girlfriend on our payroll, it seems to me we should be able to get him to abdicate, hopefully before his rapidly approaching
coronation. Fortunately, the Baldwin clique hates him and I want you to run her in such a way as to make her multiple previous marriages an `unacceptability' issue over which Baldwin will force this new King to do exactly that. How exactly would this be done? ``The Prince is all fucked up sexually just like all the Brit aristocrats and completely subject to fetish manipulation. This is how she hooked him. He will give up the Throne rather than his daily sexual excesses which at any rate could not be easily satisfied elsewhere for a whole bunch of reasons. Am I amusing you? ''
``I'm laughing because I never dreamed such a thing was going on and probably wouldn't have believed it if you hadn't told me. Yes, I can get her to continue to take him down the fetish road to Roman decadence, if everything checks out in the file.
``Koba, as usual you caught me by surprise with this but I don't need to know who they are, but I do need to know if there are other Army Intel agents in England that the Cheka does not know about? This will be an important consideration in planning.''
``Yes. But I think we should run her as an individual agent with a specialized control.''
``Of course, and G2 will know about the others so we won't step on any toes.''
``This is the only copy in existence of her file. Take it with you and brief yourself and then link up with the GRU generals. I want it back and NOT copied. Lav I know you can do this and you are the only one I trust to take over the project. That asshole Yagoda I have already blocked from working with any of our networks in West Europe and I certainly would not want him or the Cheka under his leadership, or anyone else's for that matter, to know anything about this.''
``I understand. I'll take care of it. I promise you their new King will resign.''
``Thank you Lav.''
-And, as an historical note, the King did abdicate.
British Collaboration with Fascism
In the decade 1926 to 1936 the British ruling class was as deeply involved in plotting to overthrow the Soviet government as it was possible to be. By 1936 this led to outright support for fascism in its various forms, although in ways more subtle than sending troops. Its new blatant pro-fascist foreign policy began in Spain. After 1936, British and French ruling oligarchs would continue to try and get the Germans to take the point right up and until they were either overcome (as the French were in 1940) or until after Hitler had first taken them to the mat (as he did with the UK, also in 1940).
The policy in short was to attack the USSR once the Brit and French ruling cap families could get Germany to take the point. The strategy of the British ruling Conservative (Tory) Party was to manipulate events so as to come up with a London-Berlin-Rome axis. What had thrown PM Stanley Baldwin (and his successor Neville Chamberlain) a curve was the unexpected ascent of Hitler to power in 1933.
The reason this ascent of one King from another had thrown them into a tizzy was because the minority section of the British ruling class was cravenly pro-Nazi and led by this new King Edward VIII*. In his short pre-coronation time on the Throne, this new King, (who would last less than one year), had threatened Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in March of 1936 with abdication should Baldwin go to war against Germany
for any reason but at that critical moment because Hitler had just militarily seized the Alsace-Lorraine region on the French border.
Baldwin represented the majority section of the ruling cap families and they did not want to go to war with Russia with Hitler at the head of Germany! Furthermore, they had no use for the new King's idea of restoring total Monarchy --- a la the years prior to the coming of Cromwell. ---And, Cromwell was their greatest most terrifying class memory.
*****
*[Note: Later, as the Duke of Windsor, at the outset of World War II in 1940, David (formerly the Prince of Wales and formerly, abdicated, King Edward) would perform the ultimate treason in providing Hitler with all of the British and French defensive plans just in time for the Germans to break through by circumventing the Maginot line and striking through the weakest front of French defenses. At the time the traitor Duke was on the British General Staff in Paris, preparing the joint defense of France from Nazi invasion. Britain never had a greater traitor than this Windsor King.
The Duke's brother (George VI) and always stupid King of England sent one of our agents (Anthony Blunt --- then #5 in ``what MI-6 called the Ring of Five'' as the Crown would later be forced to admit under Margaret Thatcher) to search for and destroy his brother's, (former King of England, David's [now Duke of Windsor] 1930's and 1940's) letters to the Nazi's, the sitting King believed to be in the possession of Windsor relatives in Germany. Still worried that the Windsor treason might still be bad enough in the public mind to dam the entire Royal Family, we have seen today's masters of propaganda try and prettify the moron George VI in the recent hit movie about this stuttering fool. At any rate, Blunt went right into Germany following the American and British troops as they entered Nazi Germany. Whatever he found was taken directly to King George VI of England (and, of course, Joseph Stalin.) I assume this would have made Stalin laugh his ass off. Of course, Stalin had known about David, and his Nazi plotting, for many years, as you have seen in part in the section Death of a King: Wallis Simpson above.
369Allergic to Cromwell
However, it was only the British ruler's allergy to Cromwell (and the English Revolution of 1640-1680; see Chapter 12 above) that stopped an immediate joint attack on the USSR by Britain, France and Italy with Germany in the lead. When one sets aside what was in their minds the ideological nonsense, it was clear to Baldwin and the great majority of Britain's wealthiest families, that Hitler was another Cromwell and that they could not stomach! After all Cromwell had almost finished them off, abolishing the Monarchy and the House of Lords.
Alexander Orlov kept Stalin apprised of the machinations of Baldwin's cabinet and Edward's rancid Court via his spies Philby, Blunt, Burgess, and Maclean. Meanwhile in Spain the billionaire boss of criminal bosses and Spanish fascist chieftain Juan March was sufficiently encouraged by Britain's de facto collaboration with Hitler over the Alsace-Lorraine he authorized armed revolt (and provided all of the finance) for Spanish
fascism and gave the go ahead for a Spanish fascist army officers uprising once again. The fascist revolt began in July (17th), 1936.
However, Stalin (again because of his spies) had anticipated this development and had dispatched Orlov to Spain in March of 1936 to prepare the way for indirect intervention when the time came. This because the Chekists in charge of Iberia had kept Stalin apprised of the secret fascist conspiracy to overthrow the moderate bourgeois Madrid regime. He knew it was only a matter of time until the plot was brought to fruition.
Counterpoint
Stalin realized it was important to put up some resistance to the fascists in Spain for a variety of reasons but he could not (officially) send the Red Army. He would have to rely on Orlov's organizing partisan and perhaps regular warfare along the lines of what he had done for Stalin in Russia's civil war as we have already reviewed.
Orlov left behind a working network of agents and Stalin followed up with (unofficial --- in fact, disguised) Soviet pilots and tank crews and then infantry in the form of volunteers (what became the International Brigades) when the fascist conspirators succeeded in moving their army from North Africa to the peninsula.
Stalin knew the delicate nature of the work in Spain. Accordingly, he pulled Orlov out of his British and other West European responsibilities and gave him sole command of Soviet operations in Spain in August (1936.)
The Tire Meets the Asphalt --- August 1936
So, by the time Juan March gave the order (July 17th) to overthrow the Republican government in Madrid, Stalin had his organization in place in Spain, barely (July 30th), 1936. ---And, within weeks, international volunteers began to show up along with Soviet troops and weapons. For them and for us, as the tire-met-the-asphalt, as they say, it would be a chance to do a little ``ass-kicking.''
Inside Snapshot --- Spain and Stalin's Decision
August 2, 1936
On a broiling Moscow summer day in early August (2nd), 1936, Joseph Stalin, in military uniform, was pacing in front of the door leading to the foyer of his Staraya street office, as was his custom in dress and conduct, awaiting the arrival of his European Spy boss code-named Alexander M. Orlov (Lev Feldbin). His secretary, A. N. Poskrebyshev, announced the arrival of Stalin's closest associate and Politburo member Vyacheslav Molotov, and seconds later the arrival of Orlov.
Molotov examined the map of Spain, someone from Stalin's secretariat had set-up in the center of the room, minutes earlier. Stalin bear-hugged the entering NKVD General.
``Thank goodness your back Lev.''
``Koba. It's always wonderful to see you again. You too Vlad.''
``We have as much time today as you wish. Now go ahead and brief me on Spain.'' Stalin continued to stand as Orlov went to the map and began as follows:
``Following the instructions you gave me I proceeded under alias to Barcelona and then visited our Party leaders in each of the cities you specified. Along the way I deposited our Spanish speaking intelligence officers and a small staff in each of these locales. Of course, we have short-wave contact with all of them. We are now in a position to do whatever we may be ordered to do next.
``As for the situation in general, it's a mixed bag. On the positive side the Republican government controls the center and most populated portion of the country. It has an excellent armored force, good aircraft and an outstanding navy. Furthermore the working class is uniformly anti-fascist and totally committed to volunteer labour to the degree necessary to man the war industries. Premier among these industries is the Hispano Suiza industrial complex.
``On the negative side the problem area is already clear. At least to me. ---And, that is even normal military education is unavailable to what will have to be a new generation of Army officers, since almost all of those field grade and above (Major and above in US parlance --- ed) are fascist traitors and have now to be replaced. Not that this is the worst of it. The Anarchist, Syndicalist, Trotskyite, and other ultra-left Marxist nutballs are a far more serious problem because they have fractionated portions of the working class, in those areas where they have an apparatus. Our own Party is still quite small but that will change, I suspect, if we intervene along the lines you indicated you were considering a few months ago. On the other hand it may be too late for us to turn the tide with our volunteer forces, although I think it is now a matter of timing.
370``If we intervene quickly we may be able to save the Republicans, at least for the moment. Our prestige and that of our correspondent Party will increase enormously. In short, if the Republican's lose, it will be because of the ultra-left crackpot ideas which have infected the Army. By which I mean all this bullshit about soldier's committees, direct election and worst of all direct recall of officers and NCOs. As usual, the ultra-left has learned nothing from our experience in our Civil War.
``My recommendation is that we force the imposition of clarity on the Left. They must be made to accept the advances in the organization of the people as a whole in the form of their own Revolutionary, if not Red, Army. However, inevitably, we will have to convince the Republican leaders to liquidate the entire ultra-left, before it can completely infect and thereby totally destroy the Republican resistance. Or, we will have to do it ourselves.''
Normally used to cover maps for tracing, the Old Bolsheviks had gotten used to using transparent paper to plan battle tactics. Orlov pulled down on a transparent paper rolled tight above the map of Spain and drew a line with a red crayon and drew several black crayon circles.
``Now on the map this is what the current disposition of forces of both the Republican's and the Fascist Order of Battle looks like. These are the danger points. A seizure of Madrid could be ``the checkmate in four moves'' that would end this war before it really gets started.
``To prevent this collapse from occurring and to prepare a decent war plan for1937 we would have to do, at the minimum, the following.''
Orlov then handed one copy of his ``eyes only'' final report (the only copy) to Stalin directly who took it to his desk and placed squarely in front of the chair he would eventually assume when resuming desk-work.
``As the fundamental decisions are yours and the Politburo's I want to raise the question of whether it is worth it to invest the time and treasure necessary to secure this rather primitive country's Left Government. I mean even if they win they will require huge amounts of foreign assistance or investment, however you want to look at it, and whether this is worth it when we are struggling to prepare for the inevitable coming World War here at home, should be, I think, the central question.
``Finally, I don't think Yagoda is up to this. I have had nothing but trouble with him over our European operations and he is completely out of his depth. It is bad enough we have to keep him out of the UK altogether. In Spain we can't afford one fuck up.
``Now Koba, I'm ready to answer specific questions.''
``First Lev let me thank you for your wonderful work. You have always made me proud, and while I have made many mistakes over the years, appointing you chief of European intelligence was certainly not one of them. Quite the opposite. While you were taking care of business so brilliantly in Spain I have been confronting a rapidly escalating international situation that has required the kinds of critical decisions you refer to and I'll bring you up to speed,
``As you know Baldwin gave Hitler Alsace-Lorraine in March. That was their signal to Germany that England did not oppose their territorial readjustment ideas --- which of course includes Hitler's long promised attack on us. It may be the civil war in Spain is going to be the critical test to the Germans as to whether they are really ready for war with us --- in short, we have to bloody their nose in Spain for our own good. ---And, there is the additional fact the Spanish can pay for our assistance --- they have perhaps a thousand tons of gold in their treasury we could take as equity against the cost of armaments and which we could use.
``However, dialectically, it is definitely a great risk for us to get involved in Spain. You can be sure that the ruling oligarchy of capitalists in England and France will try and terrify their own bourgeoisie, especially their petty bourgeoisie, with the specter of a ``Red Army invasion of Spain.'' They want to join with Hitler and Mussolini for a combined attack on us. As you know it is only the Brit's desire to remove Hitler and put in a Government in Berlin more amenable to their anti-Cromwellian prejudices which has so far delayed the Baldwin plot for a London-Berlin-Rome axis against us.
``On the one hand, I need and must have combat specifications on reliability, fire power, armor, speed and most importantly produceability, for our new Main Battle Tanks. -And, we need all kinds of specs for our aircraft. This mess in Spain gives us the objective conditions for such combat testing.
``On the other hand, as I just explained, we certainly cannot send the Red Army. Nor the Red Navy. But we can send entire necessary military units in civilian clothes and then put them into Republican uniforms for their tank force and air force. What we can do openly is to send international volunteers --- the first contingent of these will be primarily our best Soviet youth --- but the International force should emphasize the non-Communist anti-fascist youth from the major capitalist countries that will have gone to Spain to fight fascism. We are to be seen as a good friend and partner in the spirit of the ``United Front against Fascism'' doctrine adopted last year by the Comintern Congress.
``I can and will send our modern tanks and warplanes and the crews to man them but again they will have Republican markings and their drivers, crews and pilots will wear Republican uniforms. As you send back data on machinery performance I will see that we update the engineers in the design institutes and get the changes and modifications performed super quickly. Oh yes you Lev. You're taking over in Spain.
``I will provide you with a blank check on Chekists. You should pick the staff you want while you are here to take with you and appoint permanent liaison officers to secure a continuing flow of men and materiel from the Soviet Union to the Spanish Republic. I will see to it that they get 100% support here. It's up to you to see that they are properly deployed in the war zone. This should be child's play for you as it is a replay of what we did in the Civil War, together Lev, and especially as you disrupted the Polish capitalist-feudalist armies in 1920.
``Finally, the Spanish have the money to pay for our support so I expect them to use it. If they did not we would of course pay the bill but since they do have it and as you properly point out we are in a life and death struggle to industrialize before the next worldwide assault of the capitalists against us, they should use it. This money is in the form of hundreds of tons of gold and silver; the remnants of their rape of the New World. The day will come when I will tell them through Ambassador Rosenthal to send that gold here for safekeeping and for security against the cost of our military support. But you have to take charge of that personally Lev.
``As for Yagoda I will replace him.
``Before you go to get things together I want you to come with me to the Kremlin. I have a visiting Party delegation from the United States. I want you to meet them. We'll take advantage of the opportunity to talk and grab a bite to eat along the way.'' The Boss was always thinking several steps ahead.
Juan March as Meyer Lansky and Big-Eared Du
As we have seen Spain had its own boss of the illegal capitalist element in the equation and his name was Juan March. The Spanish equivalent of Meyer Lansky and Big-eared Du, March was variously referred to as a ``gangster'' and a ``pirate'' (all true) but was in fact, and most importantly, the Spanish top organized crime boss. Furthermore he had selected General Francisco Franco early on as the ``comer'' he was going to back. He wanted someone competent to overthrow the silly government in Madrid.
Francisco Franco
Franco was almost a dwarf in stature, but he had proven his military competence in Africa and his intelligence as chief of the Army War College. Most importantly he was a dyed in the wool fascist of the monarchist persuasion.
Carlos Prieto once told me (~1962; in Mexico City well before Franco's death) the most fascinating thing to him about Franco ``is that Franco actually believes he is inferior to the Monarchs as are all common people!'' I pass it on to you for what it's worth. (See my book The Buccaneer for more about Carlos Prieto then one of Mexico's leading playwrights, communists and red intelligence agents.)
I recall the most interesting thing about Franco to me when I had visited Spain in April, 1961, while just beginning in the US military intelligence service, was that Franco was still alive and running the show!
March and Franco Together Forever
Anyway, March's price? Total control of Spain's foreign commerce.
In the end Juan March would succeed by gaining legal complete control of foreign commerce from Franco's insurgent government. Most importantly initially in the sale of the ores of Rio Tinto and those of Asturias and the Basque Provinces to Nazi Germany.
March would pay his way alright --- by paying all of Franco's costs in the build-up to fascist rebellion. Wherever and whenever Franco needed cash and credit, March was there with that cash and credit in small, medium and huge quantities as the right wing fascist officer's conspiracy took on new life. Nor were his banks just in fascist countries but in England as well, where Baldwin and Chamberlain were well aware of what was going on and turned the other eye.
Cynics might imply non-accidental causes to General Sanjurjo's crashing on takeoff from nearby Lisbon, Portugal, in an over-loaded airplane the night the rebellion began in Spain. However, that may have been, one thing is for sure and that is with the passing of the Old General, who had before fucked-up an attempt to overthrow the Republican government, the revolt had to find a leader. March was more than ready to back the ploy of his favorite general, the rather dwarfish Franco, who at the moment was stranded in Spanish Morocco unable to cross into Spain as the Spanish navy was in the hands of the Republicans.
March had hired a plane in London to go and get Franco, languishing in the Canary Islands, and take him to Morocco. March paid the freight all the way. He then financed Franco's emissary to Mussolini charged with buying 12 planes to help ferry fascist troops from Morocco to Spain. He deposited 1.2 billion US dollars in gold in an Italian bank at that time. The real purpose was to pay the cost and especially the bribes to the Mussolini gang for 150,000 Italian troops.
March had his hand everywhere where Franco was going to need it, and this gave Franco the edge when he needed it most. Even though it was Hitler who first succumbed to Franco's entreaties for help, sending 20 JU-52 transport planes to lift his North African army into peninsular Spain and overall sent the most important help to him from the fascist bloc of countries (sending the German Fleet and hundreds of fighter planes to uncover the loading and unloading of Franco's North African troops), it was the Italian Mafia March had to please to get them and Mussolini involved. He did so with his transfer of such large quantities of money to Italy and its Mafioso bankers.
Once again, speaking historically, the gangster element of the capitalist class had saved their class brothers from themselves. March was instituting a fascist dictatorship in its own Spanish mafia image.
In the event it was Hitler's air and sea power that lifted Franco's Foreign Legionnaires and Spanish Ghurkas (called Moors) to Spain. These were the troops the fascists used under Franco to massacre Badajoz and then the manpower for their march
toward Madrid. It was Mussolini's soon thereafter arriving troops that gave the final impetus to the fascist Franco's drive on Madrid.
The Kirov Matter Concluded
In August of 1936, while Stalin and Orlov were perfecting their Spanish strategy, Zinoviev who had been brought to trial in June, along with several others, for conspiring with Trotsky and other foreign powers against the Soviet Union, was found guilty and sentenced to death. He and they had been charged with inspiring and organizing the assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934. Zinoviev and then Kamenev were shot following their confessions and conviction. On top of the evidence supporting the Government's charges, their record as traitors on the eve of October was held against them in fact if not in law. Meanwhile,
The War is off and Running
During July and August, 1936, Hitler's JU-52 transports made 461 flights transferring 7,350 troops from Spanish Morocco to neighboring Spain. Into Spain in September, 324 more Nazi flights lifted 5,455 more troops. The rest of Franco's fascist troops came from North Africa on German warships protected by hundreds of German fighters. Rebel generals in Spain began coming over to Franco bringing some 120,000 more Spanish troops with them. Hitler would send 50,000 German troops to help Franco, Mussolini 150,000 Italian troops; Dr. Salazar the fascist dictator of Portugal sent 20,000 troops to help Franco. In terms of war materiel the fascist block (Germany-Italy-Portugal) sent the Spanish Fascist army 1,150 tanks and other armored vehicles, 1,650 warplanes and 2,700 artillery pieces.
Our side immediately began the shipping of very large quantities of war materiel and troops to the Spanish Republic. This was not an easy task. Our only military naval support for Spain was in the Black Sea. So, unarmed freighters had to carry all this to Republican ports at Barcelona and Valencia. Nazi and Italian warships and planes constantly watched this activity waiting for a chance to attack which would have to be in the unloading process unless these two aggressor nations were ready for war with the Red Army which they were not.
Orlov was commanding the Soviet effort on the ground as we have seen. Also, incoming top troubleshooters included General Jan Karlovich Berzin Chief of Red Army G2 (Intelligence) as direct official liaison and chief military advisor to the Spanish Army and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, who led the seizure of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, as Consul-General in Barcelona. Rosenthal went to Madrid as official Ambassador.
The first Left boots on the ground to arrive were 2000+ Soviet volunteers In September (1936). Then in October and over the following several months some 60,000 foreign volunteers arrived to form International battalions grouped into International Brigades which were then used to stiffen the ranks of the loyal Republican Army units. The North Americans for example formed several battalions the most famous of which were the Abraham Lincoln battalion and the George Washington Battalion of the 15th International Brigade most of whom arrived in February 1937 and played a key part in the breaking of the fascist siege of Madrid. In the process, the George Washington
Battalion was largely wiped out and the US fighters were consolidated into the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In everyday talk the North Americans became the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The first Soviet equipment reached Spain after the Soviet and other individual foreign Red volunteers on October 12th. These volunteers and these Soviet planes, tanks, artillery and small arms saved Madrid when the Battle began there nearly a month later. ---And, by that time thousands of European volunteers were arriving to stiffen the ranks of the Republican Army.
Stalin initially sent Spain 648 warplanes, 407 tanks including 60 armored cars, 1,186 artillery pieces, 20,486 machine guns, 498,000 rifles. To instruct and use these weapons Stalin sent 2,065 ``Specialist Commanders'' including 772 pilots, 351 tankers, 100 artillery men, 222 general advisors, and 204 interpreters.
The Soviets would send over the next three years many more tanks, planes and small arms as well as a huge amount of food, fuel, lubricants, medicine, medical personnel, and the shells, bullets and bombs that are used up on a regular basis during combat.
Our Heroes save Madrid but at a High Cost
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Of the 60,000 volunteers we sent to Spain we lost at least half of them and the majority of that loss occurred during the initial phases of the Battle for Madrid (November 7 - 23 1936.) Then the fighting for Madrid went over to the siege of Madrid which continued until May of 1937.
In April and May of 1937 the International Brigades led the Spanish Army in an assault against the fascists and their Italian allies on the ground (another 150,000 men) and the Germans in the air (the Soviet air corps destroyed the advance guard of German aircraft and negated their air assault). All in all, in the fighting for Madrid, we lost at least 20,000 men.
Of the 60,000 Internationalists there were at least 3,600 US males. Among the International Brigades there were also 80 women in the consolidated US unit named the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, including Marion Merriman, the wife of US communist Major Robert Merriman, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion's first combat commander. (It was Ernest Hemingway's friend Merriman who was the model for Hemingway's hero Robert Jordon in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls). Today there is the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at New York University where one can do research and which is available online at http://www.alba-valb.org/ .
Some of the US fighters got there on their own in time to fight in the Battle for Madrid which began November 7th, (1936). The bulk arrived in February of 1937.
As I say many US women also went to Spain. At least 80 went, not as soldiers but as nurses, secretaries (including Marion Merriman), ambulance drivers and truck drivers. (See the movie Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War, 2002, by filmmaker Julia Newman 58 min. Netflix.) These were people who put their lives on the line, where only their mouths had been. This included a Black nurse who along with nearly 100 Black male soldiers made this Battalion the first all racially and sexually integrated US combat unit in history.
Assisting the International fighters and the Spanish fighters were not only Spanish and other doctors from many nations but US doctors and the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. Bethune literally invented the modern method of taking blood transfusion equipment to the battlefield rather than losing patients who first had to be transported to hospitals in the rear over what were often treacherous roads unhealthy even for normal persons to traverse. Footage and stills of Bethune are shown in the Julia Newman film above. Bethune went on to China to assist the Chinese Communists where sometimes he was the only medical doctor in the Chinese Red Army forces. In China he is today a household word but blacked out by the capitalist press in North America, so here hardly anyone has ever heard of him, even in his own country.
371Steve Nelson came to world attention in Spain, including drawing the attention of Stalin and Beria, as the top political officer and then as the Battalion's combat commander. Nelson was perhaps the best commander the Battalion ever had. He went on to run Beria's penetration of the Manhattan Project and later as a chief of the Party's campaign against the fascist (part time homosexual, full time alcoholic) from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. Rare footage of Steve Nelson can be seen in the movie The Good Fight available from Netflix (as are two other Spanish Civil War documentaries.) No people deserve more respect from us 2011 Bolsheviks than those who went to Spain.
Next Generation of Red Army Officers comes from the Spanish Civil War
As the Spanish war unfolded during 1937, Stalin began the purge and reorganization of both the Red Army and its supporting Military-Industrial complex. Spain turned out to be the key most important training ground for the new Red Army Officer Corps, including the elite Marshal's Council and 40 new Generals from the upcoming field grade officers. Many future high ranking officers fought in Spain as Lieutenants and Captains.
As I say, forty new generals (1 to 4 stars) and rear admirals were promoted from this corps of ``blooded'' combat officers who had volunteered for Spain. Of those some became critically acclaimed for their conduct during the coming Second World War including R. Y. Malinovsky, who became a Marshal and Commissar for Defense for the USSR; K. A. Meretskov became a Marshal and Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; G. I. Kulikl, became a Marshal and Deputy Commissar for Defense of the USSR; N. G. Kuznetsov, became a Fleet Admiral (Naval equivalent to an Army marshal) and Commissar for the Red Navy and a member of the STAVKA high command throughout the entire war.
Our Secret Service Heroes do Their Portion
Kim Philby
Kim Philby looked more ``Windsor'' than the Windsor's. Average too tall in height, cool and clear blue eyes, blond hair, perfectly slim and fit physically, proper pedigree, perfect manners, proper educational background from beginning to end and high marks to go with it. Now he was in Saragossa at the Maria Isabel, the finest hotel in that city in 1937. He had been sending reports from Burgos since February of 1937 and by May, thanks to his father and Orlov, had been made The Times official
correspondent attached to the fascist Falangist Party's forces now unified under General Francisco Franco.
His editors turned out to be thrilled as he had provided The Times, and gained its editors, the prestige which had evaded them for some time, in terms of ``balanced and fair'' coverage of the ``Continental'' fascist right (in other words a fascist propagandist a la FOX). Philby had the ability to write reports that made Spanish fascism seem enlightened, and more importantly invincible, so that it was the better part of valor, no matter what political position a Tory happened to take on the matter of fascism in general, to see the wisdom in supporting this particular fascist --- which is to say General Francisco Franco. Even the Tory anti-Nazi maverick Winston Churchill found Philby ``objective, convincing and probably right.'' Philby's dispatches always mentioned Franco's concern for common people, his perfect credit rating, and the normalcy of life in Falangist controlled parts of Spain, not to mention the always perfect maintenance of law and order.
372In 1937, Philby had insisted that only the Cheka's in-country Iberian chief work with him --- to provide him with what he needed to know, and in turn so he could provide what Cheka hit men needed to know to carry out sabotage and killing missions. (Later, after recruitment into MI6, Philby was acting, as far as MI6 was concerned, as chief of his own recruited team of Spanish shooters, eliminating the need to use the double ``O'''s* and Philby was paying for it with a generous Cheka budget, although MI6 had no idea. Even so, his 1937-38 ``lone wolf'' track record in Spain and Portugal provided the cover for him to do the same thing on a larger scale when MI6 would send him back to Iberia as their agent.) It was a ``freebee'' for London HQ, M* would appreciate, with so many tasks for the double ``O'''s to accomplish elsewhere.
373Ian Fleming
The MI-6 Chief's real code-name was ``C'' not ``M''
*Ian Fleming, a former MI6 agent, (and scion of one of Britain's wealthiest families), and James Bond novels author, so indoctrinated everyone with his terminology I am using it but will explain where appropriate the real terminology. In this case OO [double O] stands for the real term ``licensed'', meaning licensed to kill. ``M'' was actually ``C''.
SMERSH
On his own and completely without the Cheka's knowledge, originally provided by Orlov at Molotov's private direction, Beria's organization (nominally a special section of the Cheka --- SMERSH Russian acronym for ``death to spies'') - had secreted a radio system in an invulnerable position and in 1937 Philby would use it as necessary which would be hardly at all. For his job was not to provide intelligence to the Red Secret Service, but to build his own credentials for a mission still years away. Unless, of course, he should run across information that needed to be provided to Comrade Stalin immediately --- thus, the radio direct contact with the Kremlin was available. Cutting out Yezhov, and all of Moscow Center, Philby routinely reported, after 1936, while in Spain,
374directly to Orlov, and then with Orlov's 1937 reassignment, to Beria, and Molotov; even directly to Stalin (when exigent circumstances required it.)
Philby needed, to be successful, a constant flow of accurate data about many things Moscow Central did not need to know he knew. This was provided to him on a regular basis by a Spanish librarian, controlled directly by Molotov (which is to say Stalin) with impeccable Spanish aristocratic ``cousin'' class credentials and absolutely without any Left contacts whatsoever in her own culture. When Stalin wanted Kim to know certain highly sensitive background information, it was provided to her, and via ``Moscow rules'', she fed it to him when he appeared at her library. In turn when he asked for specific information she transferred the request on her own radio, and if an answer were forthcoming Philby would pick it up at his next review of the daily Spanish press which was available, on a daily basis, to hundreds of eager readers --- of which, to spying eyes, he was only one more.
375This SMERSH agent survived and I met her years later (1962) in Mexico City, via the good offices of KGB agent Anita Boyer. (Anita was the former wife of Canadian, and Soviet spy, Raymond Boyer who was the first identified, and self-confessed, Soviet Agent in Canada at the end of World War II. After Boyer she became the wife of US oligarch Frederick Vanderbilt Fields. Divorced from him she became in Mexico a prominent person in the film industry. ---And during this year (1962) when Cuban (DGI) and soviet (KGB) intelligence were often at odds, she provided access to the home of Carlos Prieto, to shake it down about me, on the first night I met her. Another story for my autobiography ``Idaho Smith's Search for the Foundation''.) For those of you with more than a passing interest, Anita was always our agent (and Raymond and Vanderbilt-Field's Cheka controller. Take my word for it,)
376Stalin Takes Direct Command of Spain
As you can see the situation in Spain was fraught with danger for the international working class movement in general and the USSR in particular. A mistake of any kind, even a seemingly small one, could be disastrous, leading to World War. Worse, a world war with all the cap countries on one side and the USSR and Mongolia on the other.
After the Battle for Madrid stabilized successfully for the Republic (May 1937), Stalin who had taken direct command of all Spanish operations of the Comintern and placed Orlov in direct command, on the ground, now began a purge of the Cheka's foreign operations with the aim of making it a more reliable tool.
Stalin knew full well he could not continue to run each of the rapidly increasing number of Orlov super-agents on a personal basis and that meant the Cheka management of its foreign operations had to be brought up to speed. But could the managerial hardware of the Cheka be returned to the same high level it had exhibited under Felix Dzerzhinsky? The answer turned out to be yes, but it was a process rather than a happening, and it started like this:
Inside Snapshot
April, 1937
``Thank you Vlad for filling in.''
Molotov automatically arose from the Boss's chair and stood to the side waiting to hear the outcome of what had just gone before.
``Fucking Christ. I can't believe Kalinin was so drunk that he fell down and had to be removed from the stage. Can you imagine how that affected all those school teachers? ``
``I'm sure you put it straight.''
``I did but it took all morning. I am glad I went. Only the Army is more important to us than these teachers who have the minds of our youth in their custody. Fortunately, the bullshit propaganda campaign turning me into a super-hero worked to take their minds off of Kalinin --- the President of the Soviet Union for Christ's sake --- and onto me. Yes, I got us passed the debacle of that drunk on the stage and as importantly I got a real feel for their problems. They are a loyal and dedicated bunch. They need more money and we have to get it to them.''
``Yes sir. I'll get on it now. Any specific recommendations?''
``A mountain of them. Poskrebyshev has the book. Molotov, this Kalinin thing cannot happen again. From now on for the rest of his fucking Presidency he will be watched 24 hours a day. The first time he has a drink he will be taken to the Lubyanka.''
``I understand.''
The boss sitting at his desk grabbed a telephone to his right and punched a familiar button.
``Beria. Put the President in a hospital. Not a regular hospital he will intimidate the doctors as soon as he sobers up and wants another bottle and he will leave a place like that. Arrest him. Put him in a rehab and don't let him out until I say so. Keep me informed.''
``Yes, Koba. Consider it done.''
The boss hung up.
``Now, what were you saying about what happened to Philby?''
``He was detained with his code on tissue paper in his pocket at The Great Admiral Hotel in Cordoba; about thirty kilometers from the Seville Front. He was able to eat it or he would be dead by now. It was just an accident as far as we can determine. An overzealous Franco policeman brought him in, even though he had a right to be there, and had checked ahead of time at Seville with Franco's cops just to be sure. Anyway, he's out of pocket, until we can replace his code instructions. Burgess is on his way to Gibraltar now. They'll connect and eventually he'll be back on line. In the meantime he's laying low and doing his job for The Times. We still have our radio contact.
``But, Koba, that's not all. Yezhov seems to think you want Philby to get close to Franco and kill him.''
``What!''
``I take it you did not authorize Philby assassinating Franco.''
``Of course not.''
``Yezhov told me that Philby should be instructed to get close to Franco and kill him. He said by your order.''
Stalin threw one of his rather regular fits.
``Where is that little cocksucker?''
``At this precise moment he is in Leningrad.''
``Vlad cancel any orders he may have given to that effect and get that little fucking dwarf here fast --- even if you have to arrest him. I cannot believe that that bullshit talk we had about Philby and Franco could be interpreted that way. If he is that stupid he has to go. If he is not stupid then he is a traitor highly placed. What the fuck is going to happen to this country when I die? I can't believe it. How long would Philby last under torture --- 30 minutes?
``He would probably have a heart attack and die before they started.''
``Exactly. -And how long before it comes to my doorstop. Franco assassinated by an irate Spanish worker is one thing --- by me quite another. How long before they find out about Philby's communism?
``Fuck my eyes! What was the dwarf thinking?''
The Boss, on second thought, relieved Molotov of this responsibility and reached for one of his telephones, punching the familiar intercom button.
``Beria, the time may have come. Arrest Yezhov. He is surrounded by armed guards. You know what to do but bring him to my Kremlin office first. I want him ASAP I have to talk to him myself. Then, if necessary''
``I am already prepared.''
``Lavrenti. Just be sure he is unarmed when he comes to the Kremlin. Otherwise the boys will kill him. I want to talk to him first.''
``Done.''
The Boss hung up and turned to Molotov:
``You have done extremely well Vlad. You always do extremely well --- by far you are the most competent person I have ever known. Now, as you know, it's time for me to take over directly, meaning Philby's reports come straight to me through you. Until the Cheka foreign operations are reorganized I want it out of the circuit. You can read Philby's messages of course but I would prefer, when possible, you do it here in front of me just to be sure there is no delay in any communication, by definition urgent, or I wouldn't be getting it instantly. ---And, of course, keep talking to him on the radio for us.
``Vlad it's absolutely imperative that we move our top men up the ladder. War is at best just a few years away. I have to have a man next to M and whoever the British PM happens to be when that time comes. I want you to get him through Spain in one piece, and be sure he is safeguarded to the degree you can. He is going to have to be there for a while. After all, we don't know for sure how long this fucking mess in Spain is going to go on. But, I want him there for as long a time as possible. You see it is very likely that the Brit Capitalists are going to end up with their long desired London-Berlin-Rome axis in which case the role of Philby as anti-Soviet anti-Communist chief within MI6 will be absolutely critical. This is the only way we have at the moment anyway to build his prestige in British ruling circles. You know I don't care what it costs as long as you keep him as safe as possible, actively sending back journalistic pro-fascist dispatches to that idiot Capitalist newspaper. When the time comes for Philby to go back to London we will engineer his recruitment into MI6. History will take care of the rest.''
377``Beria is our best man for the Iberian peninsula. Let me suggest that you handle Philby via him.''
``No, Vlad, I'll handle Philby the way I say. Now, what about Sorge?
Philby Win's the Red Ruby
As a matter of historical interest Philby was always in danger in Spain just by being there and always at the front. In 1937 a Soviet bazooka shell hit the car he was riding in and killed all of its occupants except him! Philby walked away and gave a good report to the London Times about Franco and his concern for foreign correspondents such as himself. For this he was rewarded by Franco with the Order of the Red Ruby for Courage and the fascist dictator kissed Philby on both cheeks in the presentation! Exactly what Stalin wanted and Yezhov would have prevented with his stupid plot to have Philby kill Franco. This little episode weighed heavily in Philby's favor when recruitment into MI-6 came up three years later.
La Dona Gloria von Furstenberg and Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler
This night (April 23, 1937) Kim had been invited to a very special private party by La Dona Gloria von Furstenberg, a courtesan highly desired by the fascist perverse, at her villa outside the Falangist temporary front headquarters city of Saragossa. Gloria's soiree was arranged this night for luminaries of the Nazi and Italian delegations to Franco's insurgent Regime. She had told him she expected Nazi Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler to make a personal appearance and urged him to attend. She considered she was doing Kim a favor, as a correspondent who could be counted upon to put the right spin on things, if and when, Himmler's appearance in Spain should become noticed elsewhere by the foreign press - most of whom she considered to be de facto under the influence of Bolshevism.
378Kim had NKVD's ``background'' on Gloria. He knew she was originally a Mexican prostitute who had become quite successful with wealthy men before she was fifteen years old, and now was quite wealthy herself, having acquired high status in international sexually decadent fascist circles. The song ``Gloria'' pretty much sums up Gloria's youthful career in Mexico.
All of this might turn out to be of interest to a run-of-the-mill spy. But, in Philby's mind not sufficiently important to take any chances on having to transmit wireless communications to Moscow. So in fact, he was not looking forward to this dinner party and had already decided to make himself a less desirable conversational partner by getting drunk. A not altogether unpleasant thought in itself. Something that made his work enjoyable if the truth was told...
On his mind at the moment was his planned visit to the Front with key Front generals in charge of the upcoming offensive from the Fascist salient at Saragossa. Although he would go, to present himself to the leading luminaries of international Nazism as a person of positive interest, perhaps useful to them in the future.
Attending he found that the rumors about Gloria were understated. Everywhere were, what then was called ``female impersonators'', who in actuality were highly feminized males. Men with breasts and large buttocks both enlarged by hormone treatments. Surgically advanced in their profession via the removal of one or more floating ribs to give a wasp figure and of course larger breasts. Dressed accordingly as tempting courtesans they acted as the servants and choreographers of pleasure. ---And, as Philby was trying to tie himself to an actual woman --- in this case Gloria herself --- he
came face to face with Heinrich Himmler the person who had been designated of positive interest to him by his hostess.
Spilling the Beans: The Danger of Being Earnest
Philby and Himmler
``We hope that some arrangement may be reached in the not too distant future with your government to join us in the holy war against Bolshevism''
Kim responded with ``I believe we are trying in The Hague to accommodate that desire.''
An accord without Hitler. The British rulers had their outright Nazi's but its majority wanted something other than a poor-White-trash nincompoop at the head of Germany before they would willingly follow a German military adventure against Russia. Class was too important here. Fundamentally, in their eyes, Hitler was just another Cromwell. They had barely survived him. After all Hitler had not hesitated to duplicate Bolshevik propaganda against the rich (albeit deflecting it against rich Jews) and against their Parliamentary form of resolving problems among themselves. A German Cromwell some said. They were not about to panic to the point of cutting their own throats via a lunatic semi-socialist like Hitler just to get at Stalin.
Accordingly, Baldwin had dispatched secret agents to The Hague led by MI6 `double ``O'' men' Stevens and Best to organize Hitler's assassination and substitution by a ``responsible'' German capitalist leader. Philby had been made aware of this by Orlov. There had to be a responsible German at the head of German State and Government for the Brits to go along. But, so far, the Baldwin initiative via his team in The Hague, to kill Hitler and substitute such a ``responsible'' German ruling class leader had been fruitless.
But the negotiations had not been broken off. In fact, if he could read between the lines of the Reichsfuhrer's statements the negotiations were not only on-going but might well produce positive results. Himmler took Philby's comment as evidence of his ``high connected family'' (e.g., St. John Philby) knowledge and sympathy. A serious error as it turned out.
``Time will tell Mr. Philby what is possible. I know, what some of my countrymen do not, that your Prime Minister is one of us anti-Bolsheviks and he simply wants a change in our leadership, for obvious reasons, before we come together in common cause --- a military final solution - against Bolshevism. I have heard many good things about you. We would like you to help us build a bridge of friendship in Britain once this mess in Spain is wrapped up.''
``I will do my best'' at which point Gloria took the Reichsfuhrer by the arm saying ``Don Himmler, I want you to meet someone or other'' and off they went. It had been a rewarding evening after all because Himmler had admitted that he knew about and therefore that he was involved in the secret dealings between the British PM and other high Reich officials against Hitler!''
Kim managed to extricate himself early and spent the rest of the evening sobering up; approaching, activating and using his direct contact with ``the Boss.'' That night he told Stalin what he had uncovered. (The radio call came in right after Stalin began his five hour nightly sleep and he had to be woken up.) It was worth it. Philby told him
Hitler's hand-picked secret police boss was in actuality already conspiring against him (Hitler) with personal representatives of the British Prime Minister. Furthermore, their objective would be, if this actually came to pass, a common war against the USSR!
Humility
Some of our heroes I knew personally. Abraham Lincoln Battalion veteran Steve Nelson, who became my mentor in Oregon in 1963-1964, as I have recounted herein and in my autobiography (Idaho Smith's Search for the Foundation Volume I The Buccaneer --- go to WorldCat for a library near you), was one of the first. Another, Dan Bonnel, a professor of Botany at Boise (Idaho) Junior College who told me in 1962 about executing Italian fascists (in 1937) before breakfast. Then it was in Los Angeles while helping Frank Pestana (1973-1974) I first met veterans Alvah Bessie and Irv Goff, among others. When around these men I always felt somewhat in awe as a young man, as I have described in my autobiography. Nor do only communists feel this way; for example, James A. Michener later lamented his failure to join them when he should have, and no greater popularizer of democratic history exists in our country than Michener.
379Warning! Be Alert!
For those of you young people just learning the ropes let me say the rest of the outfit that inherited the name CPUSA is not made up of communists but of people who comprise a kind of right wing deviation known throughout the world as modern revisionism. Their sponsors were the old Soviet leadership in the USSR and East Europe. In the USA now they fit in the center of the Obama Democratic Party which is where their leaders should go (but then they would lose their Party incomes.) They got the name through historical happenstance as you will have learned herein (at least in part) and that is all that remains of their communist origins. The real communists in the USA are elsewhere as for example here with the Communist Party USA (Foundation).
Anthropology --- Elman Service
One of the two most important Marxist cultural anthropologists of our time, Elman Service got his baptism of fire in the Spanish civil war. He passed away in 1996 --- sixty years after he volunteered to fight Fascism in Spain with us. Immediately upon his return to the US he headed for the University of Michigan where he would spend the rest of his life. There he wrote many of the most important anthropological theoretical treatises and ethnological compilations (e.g., Profiles in Ethnology) of the 20th century. Service stayed faithful and true to Marxism throughout his life and was a great inspiration to me and for my own theoretical work long before I realized he was an Abraham Lincoln Battalion veteran. (The other most important Marxist cultural anthropologist being
380Marshall Sahlins I have mentioned before several times because of his work, especially Stone Age Economics.)
Spain: 1936 - 1937
Spain was a war in which Bolshevism had nothing to gain. Except, of course, to have another de facto ``Third World'' country in the Socialist orbit. But that is all it would have been - Socialism, once again, essentially in name only. A poverty stricken peasant country at an even lower level of development than Russia before Bolshevism. Spanish workers would either have to duplicate the Soviet effort at bootstrapping into the 20th century industrial world or wait for the Russian workers to send them the machinery and factories they would need. The Soviet Union didn't have any extra factories or equipment. It had had to sacrifice everything to modernize as it was. Stalin wouldn't have had to pursue the course he was pursuing if the Soviets had anything extra.
381Furthermore, Stalin was confronting an inevitable two-front war at that moment. Japan on his eastern frontier and the Baldwin-Chamberlain plan for a London-Berlin-Rome axis on his western one. Even if Spain were to Bolshevize and do everything perfectly (a mirror image of what was then occurring) it would be a third, and impossible to service, front, given the geographical facts of life.
In short, Spain was never anything but a pain-in-the-ass for us. But, it was one we had to confront and Stalin did his best to help the Spaniards, who were their own worst enemy, when it came to doing the right thing.
Why a pain-in-the-ass? Because, besides the obvious inability of Spanish workers to do anything to contribute other than maybe holding on to their momentary gains, the (1) left wing of the Comintern, not to mention (2) ``independent'' socialists (largely British with some quasi-Trotskyists under their leader Andres Nin, Trotsky's former personal secretary, organized as the POUM in Spain), and (3) the real Trotskyists, were demanding that the Soviet Union join in an international effort to save the Spanish Republic and indeed to spread revolutionary socialist politics to that country.
A more backward part of Europe probably did not exist when the fascist Army officer's revolt began July 17th, 1936, as far as working class preparation was concerned. This fatal flaw would soon become apparent as the Civil War unfolded. ---And, the most fatal flaw of all being the large number of farmers under the influence of Anarchism to which the Stalinist model of the future was anathema. In other words, Bolshevism in 1936 Spain did not have the same kind of farmers as it had had in Czarist Russia in 1917.
For the Soviet Union to intervene directly is exactly what Hitler and Baldwin and Chamberlain wanted. It would terrify the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie in the UK and France and prepare the basis for a London-Berlin-Rome axis which would then attack the USSR! This was the objective fact. It was the center of British and French Foreign policy from 1933 to 1941. Furthermore it was the reason Stalin was right in describing Trotsky as an objective ally and agent of Hitler.
What to do?
As we have seen, in that instance Stalin sent ``International Brigades,'' composed often of bourgeois youth from neighboring countries with democratic (anti-fascist) inclinations and many communist youth as well. In fact, the communist youth were the
backbone and mainstay of the International Brigades, organized by the Yugoslav Joseph Broz (and later Marshall) Tito operating then out of Paris under the direct supervision of the Boss. ---And, another of Stalin's favorites, a hero of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, Andre Marty. Stalin sent Marty to take command of Comintern troops at Albacete, Spain, in 1936. Marty had become world-famous when he led the French sailors mutiny that ended the French attempt to intervene in the Russian Civil War, specifically to save White Crimea. Instead Marty had turned the French Fleet against the French Capitalist Government!
These ``Internationalists'' saved the day for the Republic and gained Stalin considerable respect, as illustrated by the success of Ernest Hemingway's book For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway's hero in this novel was Robert Jordan based on the US communist Robert Merriman who was the first combat commander of the American volunteers organized into the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the XVth International Brigade when it went into combat against the fascists in the Battle to break the siege of Madrid in February 1937. It was well known to the entire world that Hemingway and his future wife, Martha Gellhorn, were strong supporters of the Republic and of the International Brigades in particular. Hemingway's and Gellhorn's, non-communist status helped the United Front way of fighting for the Popular Front government immensely. Gellhorn maintained a continuous contact with and flow of information to Eleanor Roosevelt and of course to the President himself as a consequence.
3821937 Spanish Gold
Along the way, as he anticipated, the Boss managed to get his hands on the (788 tons of) Treasury gold of the Spanish Republic and Orlov managed its movement to the Mediterranean and loaded all of it on disguised Soviet ships. That money helped the industrialization drive in the USSR, immensely. When the gold arrived in Odessa with Orlov sitting on top of it, Orlov was called to Moscow by the Boss for a new assignment. An assignment to the USA which would affect the future of the entire world as it turned out. So, Stalin proved again, much as would Fidel Castro decades later, that the best laid plans of the smartest imperialist leaders can be defeated - time and time again.
Inside Snapshot
Strange Bedfellows
May 1, 1937
The war in Spain had turned their way, Madrid was safe. The Boss was waiting to walk onto Lenin's Mausoleum podium. The May 1st Parade beginning.
``Those double O men, Vlad, what caliber are they?'' Asked the Boss.
``Burgess says they are the best hitters M has.''
''I hate to say it but we may have to intervene just to be sure they don't succeed.''
``Yeah. I've been thinking the same thing since Philby radioed Himmler's conversation with him But it's going to be tricky.''
``These are the elements as I see them. We can't tell Hitler who spilled the beans about the Brit hitters in The Hague. If he were to confront Himmler that low-life would
remember his talk with Philby and that would be the end of Philby. This should come to Hitler as a favor from me. Those two hitters are in The Hague at Baldwin's order and this Hitler will find to be absolutely true. This should be done in such a way that Hitler will conclude it was that idiot (Admiral - Ed) Canaris. If this is done the right way Hitler could interpret this as a signal we will not make his regime our number one enemy in Europe - if he doesn't force us into such a posture - and we would like to continue our de facto German alliance we got with the Rapallo treaty.
Stalin Helping Himself, Rather Cleverly
``Otherwise, I am going to choke off all of our oil shipments to their Reich within seven days --- permanently --- then they can continue to negotiate with us over other economic decisions, but no more oil. Which is really what I want. They will not agree, you see, and that is what I want. But, they should think they brought this on themselves Vlad. You see? I need that oil now for our own coal-iron-steel complexes behind the Urals. About which they know nothing, and I don't want them to know anything, so this should be presented as a tit for tat.''
``Now that's a good idea. Turn the cap plot against them. Get a lot more resources for our behind the Urals industrialization, without them thinking it is anything but political. I just didn't anticipate we could do it by helping Hitler. Anyway, we can pepper the report with so much stuff that could only have come from the Red Orchestra Hitler will assume Canaris's office to be the source. Another one of our Red Orchestra spies about whom they are already over impressed.''
``Hitler should use his own personal SS detachment to check out the info about Stevens and Best in The Hague --- not the Gestapo or SD - and we can only hope he decides to have them killed. That should put an end to the Baldwin plot for 1937. Even if they escape. No matter what the outcome, this should discourage Baldwin from trying anything like constructing their London-Berlin-Rome axis again right away, at least in the same way. With Hitler on his guard the Brits will have to figure out something else. Whether this is a win, loss or a draw becomes irrelevant. We will have prevented an easy victory for them in this skirmish. Take care of it Vlad and keep me posted step by step. Use Beria and keep the Cheka out of it.''
``Consider it done.''
-And as an historical note Hitler did decide to eliminate the conspirators.
Inside Snapshot
June 10, 1937
Which Military Line? The Tukhachevsky Affair
``Have you decided?''
``Yes, unfortunately, the situation is really tight, but I have no choice. I have decided after all of these tests in Spain we have the financial and industrial resources to develop enough planes and tanks but only of a few types. Tukhachevsky and gang are wrong about the entire thing. The main thing we must have, that I need, are 20,000 aerial tanks and 20,000 land tanks, better than any the capitalists have or can build in the same time period. With this, and the right Army personnel, we can win the inevitable
world war about to begin. The rest of this stuff of theirs is way too complicated for an Army of the kind we can field at this time. But, they can't understand that. An example as you know is that they want to build a heavy bomber fleet for a first strike as the final strike capability in the air and only that, and right now, and that will not work. If the first strike were to fail what would we then do? We know from our own civil war experience what we need, close air-ground support fighter-bombers, and now from our detailed reports on our equipment in Spain I know exactly what we can do and thereby how we can win, in the upcoming fight. They are just as fucked up and unrealistic about the armor force.
``By the way I think this first fight may come in Mongolia based on what Sorge is telling me. I want my tanks and my planes ready for that fight or whichever comes first. It's time to force the military reorganization issue and then the military-industrial complex reorganization. Is Beria Ready?''
``He's ready. Will the Politburo authorize this?
``That's my job and I am going to do it now. As I said I don't want you there as I want it clear I respect all of my colleagues and am not trying to stack the deck with votes which we easily could. It is this information and cover letter from (Czechoslovak) President Benes about the Tukhachevsky plot that will carry the day or it will not. On top of all the data so far accumulated by SMERSH (Beria) I think they will agree and we will have prevailed without several votes they would have considered automatic for my side. Anyway, it is either or now. Wish me luck.''
The boss walked out of his Kremlin office to meet with the Politburo on the key question of the arrest of Marshall Tukhachevsky and fellow co-conspirators. On this meeting the history of the world would depend.
The Truth about Numbers Executed
One of the most important arrows in the capitalist (and Trotskyist) quiver of ``anti-Stalin'' projectiles is the one that Stalin was jealous and/or frightened of Red Army generals, like Tukhachevsky, and also being psychopathically paranoid he ordered the execution of some 40,000 Red Army officers! This is a complete and total lie invented from whole cloth by Trotsky in exile and picked up by the hack writers of the chief imperialist propagandists, including and especially, Robert Payne and Robert Conrad. Allowed to stand unchallenged this total lie then leads the same people to conclude that the reason the Nazi's did as well as they did in the first five months of the war in 1941 is because all the competent commanders had been executed by Stalin with some 40,000 having only been at their jobs for less than 4 years at most.
383The truth is the Nazi's did as well as they did between June 22 and December 5th 1941 because they moved first. They moved first with 3.5 million men! Aggressors always do best because whoever moves first has all the advantages and should succeed in initial objectives if they have any competence at all. The Germans were competent and efficient. This is why White is preferred to Black in chess.
We now have the records from official Russian sources which all historians, as far as I know, agree are authentic. What do these records have to say about the number of Red Army officers arrested, sentenced (including those shot) and rehabilitated in 1937-1938?
We know that in February of 1937 the Red Army officer corps numbered 206,000, for a total Red Army size of 1,100,000. In fact, 40,000 of this 206,000 total would have been 19.4 % of the total. If this is true how could it be if what they say is true, that on June 22, 1941, over 50 per cent of the Red Army officers had less than one years' experience on the job which is what they claim? Obviously this cannot be true. What was true is that the Red Army had a well-trained and tested officer corps on June 22, 1941 and nothing unusual had preceded the outbreak of war in terms of officers removed.
This 40,000 false figure was derived from 1954 statistics presented to the Party by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. His figure was derived from the 1937 figure for numbers of the Red Army dismissed which were 20,643 and the 1938 figure for numbers of the Red Army soldiery dismissed which were 16,118. A total of 36,761. Rounded off he got 40,000.
The problem lies not with the figures but with the assumptive definitions. For example, some men are dismissed for X others Y and still others Z reasons. Only a small fraction of those dismissed are dismissed by execution. The Trotskyist, Khrushchevist and other Imperialist propagandists (e.g., Payne and Conrad) made the completely unjustified assumption that dismissal was equivalent to execution! The truth is,
Of the 36,761 dismissed some 10,868 were arrested. Of those arrested only 1,654 were executed or died in prison prior to trial. Let's say it again: the so-called Stalin shooting purge of the military to the tune of 40,000 men turns out to be 1,654 executed. You cadre should take note of the gross lies our people have been taught and the utility of checking every single ``fact'' these ``historians'' try to palm off on you. Don't trust anyone. Check every single thing.
Understanding the Purges of the 1930's
Preventing a 5th Column against Proletarian Dictatorship
There had been purges in the Bolshevik Party literally from its inception. Purges are one form of ideological control over any political party and when one has a political movement as fractured from the beginning as the Russian Social Democracy movement was, it was inevitable that positions would solidify into different camps. Why, inevitable? Because factions within a movement or party represent different special sectors of society with inherently antagonistic interests. In the Epoch of Class Society (i.e., the Servitude Epoch of slavery, feudalism and capitalism) there is nothing but antagonistic contradictions between contending classes.
At any rate the Bolsheviks soon split with the Mensheviks so that by 1905 Spark (Iskra) had been ditched as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned (replaced with Forward which after one issue changed its name to Proletarian) reflecting the division of the social democratic movement into its two principal wings with a variety of hangers-on individualists such as Leon Trotsky with their own miniscule fractions. This was a reflection of the division of the antimonarchy front of workers into those wishing to fight directly for socialism and communism and those who were more than happy to settle for the role of capitalist overseers, with a lot of individualist opportunists in between. There were ongoing purges of former Leninists within the Bolshevik Party from 1905 through 1917.
384The Purges of 1937 - 1938
In power, after 1917, the Soviet Party confronted one crisis after another which resulted in the 1920's in the need to (a) recruit large numbers of new members, and then (b) not so long thereafter, to expel nearly as many, for one reason or another. The period we are primarily concerned with in this chapter when we speak of purges in the Soviet Party is the period of 1937-38 and in those years there were three main categories subjected to excision: (1) the biographical purge targets and the (2) farmer abuse bureaucrat targets, and (3) military and military-industrial bureaucrat targets.
You will note the reason we are discussing this matter at this point in the handbook is because the Spanish civil war is just beginning and Stalin has decided to intervene in Spain along the lines just reviewed. The first principal feature of the fascist army officers uprising in Spain had been mutiny, treason, and subversion of the legally elected democratic government of popular forces. Secret subversion in the Spanish Army; secret organization of military mutiny throughout the nation and the suborning of treason with cash everywhere.
As you have seen Stalin realized that Cheka Chief G. G. Yagoda was not up to the tasks now confronting the international working class movement and on September 26th, 1936, he was replaced by N.I. Yezhov.
The class structure in Soviet Russia was entirely different than the class structure of the same time period in Spain for reasons we have already discussed extensively in this Handbook. However, the danger of hidden enemies within the Soviet Union was just as great as the danger from hidden enemies inside the Spanish Republic. The Spanish fascists of Franco's newly adopted and controlled Falange Party were already using the term Fifth Column to describe their conspiratorial subversion inside the Republic.
As Franco's four columns took aim at Madrid, September 1936, he bragged of having a 5th column inside the Republic itself which would rise up when the word was given to subvert the Republic from within. It didn't work out that way (at least not for three more years) but not for lack of trying. The term was immediately understood and incorporated into the lexicon of Bolshevik terminology at the same time and Stalin launched a sophisticated program of negating a 5th column inside the working class bastion of the USSR. This began with the biographical purge. It continued through the Farmer Abuser purge and along the way featured judicial purges of enemies of Bolshevism in the Party, Government and State.
385The Biographical Purge
A 5th Column could be constructed from anti-Soviet elements of a variety of types. (1) The Cheka was always assembling lists of former Church officials, former Czarist army and navy officers, former land owners, and so forth. This was one component of class enemies and they were obviously to be rounded up, exiled, or shot.
Another (2) and far more dangerous sector of society were the former Communist Party members expelled for one reason or another. It was this second sector which comprised the primary targets of the purge of 1937-38.
(3) A third and just as dangerous element were the millions of former rich farmers (kulaks) deported to Siberia or Soviet Central Asia, some of who were returning after their five years of enforced exile.
(4) A fourth category consisted of the sons and daughters of these former rich farmers who were entitled to full citizenship rights upon application and approval and who also would be coming into the heartland of the Soviet Union for education and employment.
(5) A fifth category consisted of currently serving Party bosses in the collective farms.
The Cheka proceeded against these categories in different ways but in totality these were the targets of the biographical purges of 1937-38. Note that these targets were entirely separate from the,
Sixth category of specific individual targets of Party-Army leaders receiving the attention of the international cap press.
The Farmer Abusers
In 1917 nearly 100% of the feminine farmer population was illiterate and about 95% of the male component. By the 1930's nearly every farmer, male and female, could read and write thanks to the Bolshevik literacy campaign and every farmer family, had children who had been to school and could handle the family correspondence if necessary. Farmers had become inveterate letter writers. When pissed off, which was most of the time, they wrote letters.
Farmers wrote to everybody they thought might resolve their problems with local authorities including Comrade Stalin. All you had to do to get a letter to Stalin was to write his name on the envelope: Comrade Stalin, Moscow, would suffice. More interestingly is that all such addressed letters got to the Boss, immediately. Molotov got a lot as did President Kalinin and so forth. Stalin's Secretariat got countless bags of letters on a daily basis and amazingly every single one was read by someone and agents were immediately dispatched to resolve the problems of John Deere farmer and family. Furthermore if something really bad was being reported in these letters they were instantly forwarded to the Boss. God help the bureaucrat who failed in this regard.
Beginning in March 1937, Stalin ordered that the Politburo be informed of every development in legal actions being taken against farmer abusers. Trials of Party bureaucrats abusing peasants were undertaken and throughout 1937 and 1938 thousands of trials were conducted throughout the agricultural regions of the USSR featuring farmers brought to testify formally against their abusers. All of this was reported faithfully in the press of every locality. In the end one principal reason collectivization was successful was because Stalin oversaw a process of remedy for every farmer who felt he had been abused by his Collective Farm boss.
1938: The Mess in Spain Resolves Itself
In my frank opinion, in the end we were far better off not having this distraction (Spain) in the way, than we would have been with a permanent Government of Beggars in Madrid, which is what any Spanish Left Government would have ended up being. It
was almost 1939 and the time had come to get serious. Stalin confronted the probability of a two front war (one against Japan and another against Germany-England-France-Italy) and certainly did not need a third front in Spain. We had given Spain our best shot and we were insufficient. Probably just as well as it ended up in 1939. The ``out'' was provided by Hitler when he succeeded against Czechoslovakia and the Spanish Republicans asked us to leave.
International Brigades Withdrawn
It was clear - England and France were going all the way in selling out democracy in continental Europe when they signed the giveaway of Czechoslovakia to Hitler on September 30th, 1938. Both the British and French regimes were fully committed to urging Hitler to war against the USSR and would pull out all the stops.
Stalin decided the simultaneous position in 1938 of the Spanish Republican boobs to ask all foreign volunteers to leave Spain and throw the Republican cause onto the mercy of England and France was an excellent excuse to disengage Soviet and Comintern forces and he gave the order instantly the moment Chamberlain signed away Czechoslovakia September 30, 1938. One month later on October 29th, 1938, the Internationals made a farewell march through Barcelona and they were gone! As were Soviet tank crews and pilots.
Stalin had done his best to help every step of the way and even at the end, in January 1939, when they had no remaining credit, sent the Republican government over $100 million in arms. This even after he knew they would be defeated in 1939 (Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939.) An old revolutionary himself Stalin found it emotionally impossible to leave these incompetents to their own well deserved end without given them every possible option to win. The arms were shipped but most of the ships were stopped by the French before they could discharge their cargos. The British and French capitalist regimes decided to recognize the Franco insurgent government (then headquartered at Burgos) on February 27th, 1939, abandoning the last of the embattled continental European democracies to fascism. The US recognized Franco on April 1, 1939 sealing the deal and on that day Franco declared the Civil War over.
386The beginning of the long period of retribution authorized by Franco's First Law of Political Responsibilities got underway. This was the Gestapo type of authorization to search for and kill all those who had opposed Franco.
Hundreds of thousands of people ran for the French Border and political asylum in the USSR and Mexico. The only two countries to consistently support the Republic before and after its defeat (where in Mexico City, after the 1939 defeat, the Spanish Left and its Government in exile eventually concentrated. When I arrived in Mexico City, twenty three years later, at the end of August, 1962, I met many of the Republic's then remaining officials.)
Inside Snapshot
The Longest Shot: Orlov to FDR
August 21, 1938
``Koba, this is for you. Yezhov's hands were trembling when he handed it to me. He said `for your eyes only.' It's from Orlov.''
``If that fucking dwarf has fucked this up too, this will be his last day... Let me have it.''
The boss read the letter once, then again. Then a third time. Vyacheslav Molotov knew what this meant. The Boss wasn't yelling so Orlov must have sent some relatively good news.
Actually they had known for several weeks that their top spy-master for Western Europe, Leiba Lazaravich Feldbin, code named Alexander Orlov, had defected. But to whom and for what reward was still unknown. The Boss ``said'' he believed that Orlov would not defect ``all the way'', that he was just trying to protect himself from the murderous machinations of the secret police chief Yezhov.
Molotov already knew Yezhov was going to go the way of his predecessor Yagoda and his underlings. Koba had been extremely angry --- the only reason Yezhov was still alive, was because the Boss hadn't gotten to the bottom of the mess in Western European NKVD operations. Molotov knew that Joseph Stalin had been pinning great hopes on the intelligence he expected certain Cheka agents and their apparats to provide during the coming World War, now so close. Between Philby, the other Orlov spies in England, the Red Orchestra in Germany; especially Richard Sorge and his apparat of spies operating in Germany, China and Japan, the Boss had had all his bases covered until this. Until the Boss said the dwarf fucked everything up. Dwarf was Stalin's pejorative for Yezhov, head of NKVD domestic and foreign operations.
387``You can read it. Here.''
The Boss handed Molotov the letter written by Orlov in his own hand and delivered by special courier from New York via the Soviet embassy in Paris. They had been waiting for it since receiving a cable from Paris that it had arrived.
``In short, he says he is still with us ideologically and always will be and will go to the grave with his secrets if `I' leave him alone. Otherwise he will give everything he knows to the Americans and he has sent along a list of agents he ran in Europe for me to see and confirm with Yezhov. His lawyer has a copy and if anything happens to him it will all go to the FBI. Vlad, we will leave him alone, and hope for the best.''
``I don't believe a word of it Koba.''
``Why don't you believe it?''
``Orlov would drink lye before he would betray us. Betray you. You don't have to comment on this but I think you sent him on some mission.''
The Boss said nothing at first then continued as if Molotov had said nothing.
``Get Beria in here. It's time to put the new intelligence reorganization in place. That little cocksucker Yezhov has fucked me in the ass for the last time. This is his entire fault. Just like he has fucked-up the Bukharin trial. All he had to do was to get Bukharin to admit to what he has already admitted to Sergo, Klima and other comrade's years ago. But, no, he had to create more Trotskyite conspiracies and you know what happened. Not to mention the stupidity of even considering using Philby to kill Franco. I should have shot the Dwarf myself then. I must be getting soft.
``-And, Vlad, keep your thoughts to yourself.''
``What thoughts?''
Beria appeared instantly. ``Yes Koba?''
``This time Yezhov has to go. You know what to do. You're taking over.
``Thank you Koba.''
``You're welcome. Now look, many of our foreign operations have been all fucked-up since Felix died, what ten years ago, and gotten worse with each subsequent chief. Mezh did his best but he started out losing the MOCRists - not that I gave a shit as you know (laughing), but it was symptomatic of what was to come. First that asshole Yagoda and now Yezhov. I want you to put permanent order into Cheka abroad. Can you do that for me?
``Yes Koba I can and I will. I have been giving this a lot of thought. I know what to do and to begin with we need to put our European networks at ease. Orlov says Yezhov has scared the shit out of a lot of people and discouraged just about everybody else with his terrible personal attitudes. I'll take care of it and get this problem off of your shoulders.''
``You're a good man Beria. I know you can do this. I remember how well you ran our intelligence operations in the Trans-caucuses in the old days. ---And, last but certainly not least, you worked hand in glove with Orlov and his wife Maria Rodontslov, fighting the counter-revolutionaries in the Caucuses, what for two years?''
``Yes. I better go get Yezhov myself. Is there anything more?''
``No, that will do it. But, come to the Kremlin movie room tonight. Thank you Comrade.''
Yezhov was replaced. Beria did take over and stayed intelligence boss until Stalin's death. With Lavrenti Beria Stalin finally had his replacement for his good friend and reliable secret police Chief Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Orlov's demand appeared to be carefully honored. In fact, Orlov's old friend Beria (and new controller) was charged with sending him money and he maintained a highly secret radio contact with Orlov on a regular basis. To any Party person who might learn of the situation Stalin was simply committed to honoring a personal understanding. Yet, it was always a matter of historical record, Orlov never talked. (The ``understanding'' misunderstood abroad.)
Why?
Because as Molotov instantly guessed the Boss had sent Orlov on a mission. This time to bring the USA into the inevitable coming war on the right side. A mission so secret and so well-funded, originally only two men in the world knew about it. The Boss and Orlov. But if Orlov's true location were known then others could figure out the same thing; others like Nazi intelligence, Italian fascist intelligence, Japanese military intelligence, and so forth. Among communists and for many years, only Molotov and Beria were in on the secret
Understanding the Intelligence Reorganization in Western Europe
Within a year things would be back to normal in Western Europe as far as Red intelligence was concerned. But it would take Beria a year to do it. It would not be until after Hitler marched into Poland on the 1st of September 1939, and Britain and France declared war on the 3rd, (after much soul searching for they had spent the same year trying to be sure that the Baldwin-Chamberlain plot to form a London-Berlin-Rome axis was successful) that Stalin would feel comfortable
with the clean-up, ordering his new West European spy-master Pavel A. Sudoplatov to reactivate Orlov's agents. Subsequently, Sudoplatov has written his own history of these years (Special Tasks, 1994, Little Brown, London)
Meanwhile, Philby heard bits and pieces and gathered that Orlov had been reassigned but spent the year more-or-less on his own, building his ties in every conceivable way to MI6. Finally, thanks to his own efforts, and the efforts of always loyal and reliable, on the job, never discouraged, Guy Burgess, the MI6 contact came. (Philby had been recruited originally by Arnold Deutsch under Orlov, who took personal control of Philby in January 1935.)
Simultaneously his, to be, new (4th) Soviet controller A.V. Gorski, was selected in Moscow by the Boss, Molotov, Beria and Sudoplatov. Accordingly, Orlov's Moscow spy-master replacement, Sudoplatov, sent his top London Embassy agent (Gorski) to Philby et. al., once again. Stalin's decision a fortuitous, if perfectly timed, circumstance for Philby and for the Soviet Union.
It would be a half century before it was known to anyone other than the Boss and Molotov that the prodding for help from MI6 came from the top Soviet agent in MI5. This prodding from London was the immediate cause, the trigger if you will, that led to Sudoplatov re-establishing operational contact with Philby, et. al. This had been done at Sudoplatov's instruction, with Stalin's approval, because of this entirely separate recruit (from the Cheka). Namely, a ``China'' recruit of the Red Army's intelligence division, who had become a high ranking officer in Britain's internal security service (MI5). It was this recruit (Roger Hollis) who had warned Stalin earlier that Arnold Deutsch, the ``group controller'' under Orlov for the Cambridge 5 was under MI5 surveillance. Stalin told Orlov and Orlov took direct control of Philby, Burgess and Maclean in February of 1935.
388There were in reality two Soviet intelligence operators in Britain because Dzerzhinsky had decided, in order to prevent duplication and tripping over one another, this agent and his group having been originally recruited by Red Army G2, would be inserted into the other half of the British secret service (the internal Security Service) MI5. In other words, up until this time the sole operator had been the Cheka and its agents were in the ``licensed to kill'' foreign secret operations service MI6. Now, known only to Stalin and Red Army G2, there was a second operator and its agents were in MI5.
NKVD (Cheka) had known nothing of this Red Army G2 operation inside the British Security Service (MI5ÃÂÃÂÃÂïÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé [e.g. Cairncross and Hollis, not to mention the Duchess of Windsor.] The Cheka's operation was focused on SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, which is where they (the Cheka) operated Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Straight and Blunt].
These other spies (in Britain's internal Security Service or MI 5) had been recruited by Red Army G2 in China. Their number one was named Roger Hollis. Hollis was asking that what support could be roused from MI6, be so roused, and coordinated with his own work in MI5. The objective? Hunt down and kill Nazi spies operating in Great Britain with foreign controllers.
Keystone Cops, Charlie Chaplin and John Dillinger
Reflections on Felix Dzerzhinsky
The Boss had no life outside of the Party life he had chosen. So, for personal recreation he often relaxed with his closest friends and associates after midnight and before 5:00 a.m. Moscow Time, in the Kremlin movie room. (The Boss slept from 5:00 am to 10:00 am every day; as did, consequently, all of his generals and admirals.) This night Stalin and Beria were sitting next to each other because the Boss wanted to talk with him during the Intermission.
``Lav I laughed so hard at those Keystone Cops I thought I was going to have a heart attack.''
``I noticed. But, you need this Koba. I don't know how you do it. Thirty years now day and night and how often do you sleep? I know. Five hours a night. Otherwise you are at the job all day and night every day of the year. The people know it and the Party knows it. We admire you but worry about you. It's good to laugh and the American's do make the best movies and newsreels, no doubt about that.''
``I can't believe it. Chaplin makes fun of Hitler, the Keystone Cops illustrate the inadequacy of the American police, and John Dillinger makes an absolute ass of all of them.
``Anyway Lav I wanted to talk to you about this mess in the Cheka's foreign operations.''
``I have the situation in hand Koba, don't worry.''
``I know you do. As usual you are doing an absolutely superb job. But here is the point. This is my fault at-bottom. You see I should have paid the closest attention to the Cheka when Felix died but I did not. I assumed that the wonderful organization he had in place would simply evolve naturally as such bureaus always do and that his handpicked men would succeed him and do as he had done. But, in practice, it turns out that Mezh, for example, was good precisely because he was methodical not because he had Felix' unerring ability to find enemies and get his hands around their throats personally.
``What I did not sufficiently realize was that in fact the reason the Cheka worked so well is because Felix provided all the ideological drive necessary to kill our enemies and men like Mezh cleaned up the bureaucratic mess behind him.''
``You're right about Felix. He could not wait to actually get his hands around the throats of our enemies and he did a fucking good job at killing them --- all. I liked the meat in the stew test --- remember --- in the Civil War he told the Chekists to go into the kitchen of suspect farmers and check the stew. If there was meat in it, shoot them!
``Koba, I went with him to the Ukraine in 1918 to liquidate the Anarchist army. He was to get the Ukrainian Chekists to root out the hidden Black Hundreds which were everywhere in the Ukraine and Byelorussia as you know. The first day I finished early with the Army men and went to meet him so I heard his talk. Koba I never heard anything like it. He made my blood run cold. Me!
``He told them `you are here because you are Jews like me and you know what these evil creatures do. I saw them rape and murder my mother and my sisters and draw and quarter my father when I was ten years old. I picked the rest of you because you are from these parts of the old Empire and you know without me having to tell you what they are and what we owe to them. Besides we are also Bolsheviks and we need to liquidate them for that reason too. You are being given lists.
``Kill everyone on these lists and their families and round up and shoot their friends too, and their families, or if you are feeling exceptionally kindly send the latter to
prison. Do not even think of coming back here alive if you fail in any way to carry out your instructions because if you should have such audacity I will personally blow your fucking head off. Now do you understand me?''
``Amazingly Koba they stood and cheered. We never had to worry once we unleashed Felix on an enemy.''
``Lav, do you remember after Illych was shot (1918) and Felix took over all police work the crime rate went to fucking zero. He rounded up all those displaced kids and sent them to Army Komosomol camps. Many are now our leading cadre. So, anyway, guys like Yagoda made their way to the top after Mezh passed. Then this asshole Yezhov. I should have appointed you when Felix died. ---And, we are now paying the price for my mistake.
``What can we learn from this?''
``What do you think you have learned from this Koba?''
``Illych (Lenin) used to worry about this generation --- us Old Bolsheviks --- standing in the way of the new generation at precisely the time we need to admit we will need this generation and perhaps one or two more to do the job of getting the Soviet Republic ready to lead a global socialist revolution. I had hoped the Cheka would play a role in being sure that did not happen.
``Instead I let the Cheka fall under the direction of a new generation of opportunists. This is not a new generation of Bolsheviks but a new generation of evil, self-aggrandizing, under-cover capitalist agents. Yagoda and now Yezhov are examples. For the moment we will go back to Old Bolsheviks --- namely you --- but we need to be trying to create a new generation of fanatical true believing Bolshevik secret policemen. If we can't do that we will fail.''
``Thank you for your thoughts Koba. That's pretty deep. I need time to think about what you have said. Alright?''
``Of course. That's why these informal movie get-togethers are so important. Perhaps I am all fucked up on this. Let me know what you think when you are ready. Now it looks like they are ready for the Chaplain movie.''
Summing It Up
All that having been said, what if anything did we get out of that ``Spanish Shithole.'' Which is what David Alfaro Siqueiros (Commander of the Mexican and other Latin American volunteers) told me, the day he was released from prison in Mexico City, in 1965, as the phrase used by Comrade ``K'' (to him [Siqueiros] when he gave him the order to put the Latinos together and go back to Mexico.) Comrade K was Stalin's in-coming hand-picked chief of Cheka intelligence for Spain under Franco. Comrade K was a Polish comrade who entered Spain under the incoming Franco regime, as a businessman. I have code-named this agent as Comrade ``K'' ---And, I have kept the name secret because of his daughters who are still alive --- Ed. See Book 1 of my autobiographical series for the setting and details of these conversations.
389The answer is we got more than we expected to get given the disaster caused by ultra-leftism in Spain and its supporters around the globe. Namely, 788 tons of gold, Soviet troops transported to waiting ships disguised as trade freighters. It was Orlov's last critical task in Spain before being called for New York, and is a fascinating
story in and of itself. However our point is that with 788 tons of gold any world class financier (such as Joseph Stalin) could have built ten brand new steel factory complexes that would make Pittsburgh choke in amazement. Frankly, that in and of itself would have made our intervention in that chaotic fight worth it. (Note: Stalin did use it to finish the Soviet Steel industry which by 1941 was producing more than anyone else in the world!)
In addition we got invaluable training in regular and guerrilla warfare of every type, essential as time would prove, in many revolutionary struggles across the globe. (e.g., Tito used the men who survived the Spanish War he had channeled to Spain from Yugoslavia and East Europe to become his cadre in his National Liberation Army for Yugoslavia during World War II. One of these officers (Alberto Bayo), expert in guerilla warfare, Fidel Castro hired to teach guerilla warfare to his men in Mexico, before they departed to start the Revolutionary War in Cuba, December 1956. Che Guevara graduated number one in that course, despite the fact he was there as the 26th of July Movement's medic!)
390And continuing as a matter of interest to me as well is why Colonel Alberto Bayo Giraud, the Cuban originating trainer who fought Franco in Spain and Gringo stooge Anastasio Somoza later, had a falling out with Fidel, at some point before the Cubans departed Mexico to land in Cuba. My guess is that Bayo, like so many others, who would make the same mistake in the future, thought he knew better than Fidel about how to conduct the Cuban Revolution; and like so many after him, who failed to see Fidel's unerring accuracy as a commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolution, found they had parted ways. (Even Che Guevara said later his only mistake had been in not initially understanding Fidel Castro's perfect accuracy in determining the course of the Cuban Revolution. Something he corrected early on, he said, and was thereafter unswervingly loyal to the Commandante.)
391---And, finally, a small army (tens of thousands) of agents for the Cheka who could and would be used everywhere in the world where ``volunteers'' were needed by the Party and its Sword and Shield. (It was Lenin who first described the Cheka as the Sword and Shield of the Proletarian Revolution.) One of my favorites was a US pilot who flew for Galen in China and later for us, not only in Spain but in many other ``quiet'' wars. Another story for a book yet to come. Another, the Spanish veteran Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky, operating under the orders of the Cheka chief for the Western Hemisphere, Leonid Eitingon; a Chekist who has subsequently told all the details in his autobiography.
Note the Cheka's continued use of people such as Ramon Mercader who had personal experience reasons for hating the enemies the Bolsheviks confronted anywhere anytime. In this case the assassin was a Spanish veteran with a deep hatred of Trotsky because of the counter-revolutionary role he believed Trotsky's gang played in Spain, especially in their revolt in Barcelona during the critical battle for Madrid (November 1936 --- March 1937), which was very harmful in many ways.
Finally, for us specifically in the USA, the war in Spain helped the CPUSA immensely in propaganda terms. Party writers correctly squeezed every drop of Press ``goodness and heroism'' out of the actions of its fighters in Spain who were the overwhelming majority of the US contingent and the Party's membership expanded exponentially after 1936. North American communists had taken on a new and heroic
image in the minds of the masses because of their leading the fight in Spain.
In short, our intervention in Spain turned out quite well in every respect for us at home and many other revolutionary movements in other countries as well. Losing the war was the fault of the Republican government in Spain. A bigger bunch of incompetent boobs than the Spanish Republican Government probably never existed in 20th century Europe. Despite every imaginable attempt at creating an effective officer corps, and technical arm, even the self-sacrificing Internationalists could not save the Spanish Republicans from themselves.
Internationalism, Spain and Steve Nelson
Among the ``givens'' or fundamental premises of the Marxist theory of capitalism is that the capitalists always have the entire world as their market, and source of cheap labor, not just the nation(s) in which they exist and run their factories. This flows logically from the fact of assembly line production of standardized parts enabling the most ignorant untrained farmer to participate in manufacturing the most complex capitalist machinery and the concomitant that anyone, (any age, any sex), anywhere, will do. In this way Capitalism democratized labor and labor-power in the Servitude Epoch.
Accordingly, the working class response --- as a class --- is to confront the capitalists as a world-wide class. In practical terms this means workers in a fight in one country should be able to call upon workers in other countries to assist them since the fight of one is ultimately the fight of all. It is this (i) sharing of funds and other (ii) similar support (killing and maiming would-be scabs from continental origins) which brought the labor aristocrats of England and Germany together with Marx in the First International.
The capitalists were already organized with their Governments in place and most importantly with their State (military and police) in place. This was and is for that matter the basis of organization of all capitalist societies. Remember the golden rule: labor discipline not based on force in any class society is impossible. In short, their system of governance (whatever governing ``form'' that may have been or may be now or may be in the future) and their labor discipline has only one fundamental objective and that is forcing workers to accept wage slavery or suffer the consequences. These consequences being torture, prison, assassination, execution, isolation, deportation and every form of persecution imaginable in civil society.
Historically, our organized response as Bolsheviks began with the First International of Workingmen of which Karl Marx became the General Secretary. It was preceded by ``trade unionism'' in various forms including its most sophisticated political adventures such as British Chartism and various political parties of trade unions in the New Republic (USA from 1819 to 1861 --- see Part III below).
What Steve Taught Me
Steve Nelson taught me a great deal. In this subject matter (we are currently discussing), Steve put it to me the way I am recalling it as a lesson plan in the following several pages. In the retrospective view of five decades I can only say it is a worthwhile
approach, but not the only way of categorizing these years, even from our perspective. On the other hand what Steve taught me does deal with critical issues in an acceptable (believable) manner and is, therefore, worth your attention now.
The Practical Problem of the First Marxist United Front
The way Marx kicked off the First International, in a masterful handling of an incredible multitude of international political factions can be seen in his Inaugural Address of a month later. Some would-be participants had to be convinced that this was not their organization and volunteered to leave. Furthermore the English non-electoral-political labor aristocrats had to be convinced that the refusal of foreign comrades to allow ``scab'' specialist workers to be exported to London (and the ability of these foreign comrades to enforce this prohibition) was worth their paying lip service to the ``socialist idea'' of what society should be about. ---And, believe it or not, there were many even more vexing tactical problems. Marx had to resolve all of this and he did so in three points. You should take the time to read this nine page paper.
392The Practical Problem of Anarchism
Once the International got sorted out in terms of member organizations and why they were accepted as members (or not in some cases) anarchism became a danger in Europe. Why? Because, unlike the earlier ``utopian'' anarchists of the French leader Proudhon, these modern Bakunin anarchists insisted on enrolling the agricultural masses into our (industrial) working class organization (The [1st] International of Workingmen).
Even if these illiterate, and thus ignorant, European farmers had not been under the influence of ``organized anarchism'' and it fallacious doctrines (e.g., their total misunderstanding of the role of the ``state'' in sociocultural evolution), recruiting them would have been tricky enough. This was true precisely and only, because of their low level of educational achievement, beginning with their almost 100% illiteracy.
These degraded European slave-serf farmers were our genetic equals but certainly not our cultural (in this case intellectual) equals. That was the nature of the servitude system in which they had been born and forced to live. Therefore, the revolution for this new world sociocultural evolutionary stage --- we had and have to come to call Socialism - had begun this way it had. In fact it certainly would justify the coming existence of our Leninist party, and for that matter of ourselves! That was the problem. How to make these potentially capable potential workers be, jumped ahead several decades, so what they could be for themselves, and what they could contribute for our mutual benefit, in a very short period of time, could be made real!
As it was, our industrial workers stood to be overwhelmed by the masses of dehumanized continental farmer masses within our own organization. That could not be allowed to happen. We certainly did not need such non-proletarian masses demagogued into an anti-Marxist anarchist bloc in our organization. In the end, General Secretary Marx sent the First International Executive Committee to the USA, where all 19 sections of North American communists did as Marx bid and in 1876 dissolved it altogether, creating their own Workingmen's Party. (Go to Chapter 23 below to pick this up.)
Reign of Thieves
In power in Catalonia and Andalusia the Anarchist CNT began the wholesale introduction of its doctrine. Our Party leader in Spain Dolores Ibarruri (known in Spain as La Pasionaria for her passionate speeches in support of the Republic and against Fascism in the Republican Cortes [Parliament]) described the social order set up by the Anarchists in their part of Spain to be a ``reign of thieves.'' What did she mean?
Where the anarchist armed gangs could grab power they immediately redistributed all the wealth, giving that taken from the rich to the poor. But on day two they had no program. They abolished private property and abolished money (currency). Their military arrangements were just as primitive.
The problem they created was first in the alienation of everyone including workers and poor farmers who had a tiny bit of private property and wanted to hold onto it. The second was they eliminated money so how could exchange occur for any farmers small or large. The third was their idea of governing was a kind of rolling mass chaos.
We had a war to win and we needed to mobilize the entire progressive bourgeoisie behind a Marxist worker led movement. The anarchists with their silly radical programs were alienating large numbers of people the Republic needed on its side; without whom success in preserving democracy was seriously in doubt.
The Practical Problem of Revisionism
In 1888, a Second International was in the process of formation in Germany. Eventually it would become the biggest Party (German Social Democratic Party) of Marxists in Europe; which unfortunately went immediately off onto the wrong road. Ironically, this Party declared itself Marxist and, in fact, to be the model Marxist Workers Party for the rest of the advanced capitalist world. This had been on the table for a long time and the organizers had asked Karl Marx for his imprimatur (prior to his 1883 death.)
Marx however, had declined the offer to be official intellectual chief and denounced their program from the moment of its formation. Ironic, is it not, that the man they called the genius and scientific master, never considered any of the factions within German social democracy to be ``his.'' Let's say it again: Marx never considered any of the German factions to be Marxists (although he maintained friendly relations with many German socialists as individuals). Marx said to his daughter and son-in-law, about the ``revisionism'' of the German social democrats, to paraphrase, ``if what they are is Marxist then I am certainly no Marxist.''
Initially Marx lost out to these ``revisionists'' who managed to keep control of the political aspect of the labor movement, not only in Germany, but in most of Europe. Inevitably these revisionists entered into a de facto political alliance with European capitalists denouncing revolution and advocating evolutionary change toward socialism. In exchange they got seats in Parliament and a lot of cosmetic changes they wanted. What the capitalists got was a conforming labor movement at home and in support of its imperialist adventures abroad.
Marx was stunned by this development and had a great deal to say about revisionism in the movement claiming him as its ideological father (as in Critique of the
Gotha Program (1875) where he formalizes his break with emerging German Social Democracy. But published only years later, after his 1883 death; that is, in his struggle to educate the German's he preferred to give them time. Accordingly, Marxists did not publish this Gotha critique immediately and it would not see the light of day for sixteen years.
The Practical Problems of Orthodox Marxism
Other Marxists also did not buy the revisionist opportunist nonsense and kept on the right road. Most important among these was V. I. Lenin and his followers in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party which split between its own revisionists and the Leninists. The latter went on to create their own (Bolshevik) Party as we have seen. The point being when they (the revolutionaries; the Bolsheviks) had the opportunity they went altogether international again --- for the Third time --- and created the Third International (the Communist International or Comintern.)
The Russian empire included many nationalities and the Bolshevik Party naturally was led by men from a multiple group of nationalities other than Great Russian. So, the Russian Revolutions of 1905, February 1917 and most importantly October 1917 consisted of multiple national groups working together en masse and in their leadership. Furthermore as the counter-revolution launched the Civil War in the Russian Empire, troops were recruited by the Bolsheviks from a multitude of nationalities and sent to fight at fronts far from their homes.
Dzerzhinsky had the habit of sending Chekists originating from oppressed nationalities to areas in the Russian Civil War where their enemies were also the immediate enemies of the Red Army --- as in the Ukraine where Dzerzhinsky sent Jews to handle the reactionaries (largely pogromists of the Black Hundred anti-Semite variety) for the Cheka. Why? If it isn't obvious, it was because Dzerzhinsky knew he didn't have to tell these men and women of Jewish origin why these Black Hundreds and their allies had to be liquidated as a category, root and branch. He didn't have to worry about them getting ``soft'' on these class enemies of Bolshevism.
As the post-Civil War years set in, the Bolsheviks continued to build massive international support in the form of the rapidly expanding Third International and especially its secret arm. Within the Comintern the Cheka played the most important ( and secret) role.
Capitalism evolved into its fascist phase in Europe and country after country fell to one fascist conspiracy or another (Hungary under Admiral Horthy, Italy under Mussolini, Portugal under Dr. Salazar, Germany under Hitler). The Bolshevik Government in Russia (now the Soviet Union) responded with all sorts of internationalist interventions --- open and surreptitious as we have seen.
Back at the Spanish Hacienda
Spain presented the entire world however with a new specter. That of a bourgeoisie split in half and a working class split four ways. The fascist specter of Spain under Franco emerged by mid-1936 when the diminutive General from North Africa began his campaign to overthrow the liberal bourgeois government in Madrid. Around
the world, not only in Spain, the cause of anti-fascism (which is to say of bourgeois parliamentary democracy) finally got its much needed second wind. This time ready to help were the workers no matter under what leadership --- at least at first.
In Spain this resulted in a rickety alliance of liberal bourgeois and patriotic nationalist capitalist elements with Communists, ``independent'' Marxists, Anarchists and Trotskyists. Stalin's decision to avoid the red-baiting traps his enemies among the capitalists and Trotskyists were setting --- most dangerously would be sending the Red Army and Navy to defend the Spanish Republic --- sent instead International Brigades. This was a continuation of the policy of international working class action where the battle of one group of workers was also the battle of all of the workers of the world.
The Canadians and the US Americans who went to Spain were quickly publicized and popularized by the capitalist press as well as the Daily Worker (New York and London both had CP's with newspapers of that name) and indeed saved the Republic in the fascist first attempt to take Madrid in November of 1936 and thereafter stabilized all the Madrid fronts and it would not fall to Franco until after they were withdrawn October 30th, 1938. Among the North Americans was long time US Communist Steve Nelson who by most accounts became by far the best commander the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (XVth International Brigade) ever had.
Spain Reborn in Me
By the time I met Steve in 1963, the Civil War in Spain had been over for 24 years. In 1963 Steve Nelson was the Party boss for the Northwest districts in the USA (Washington and Idaho were one CPUSA district and Oregon another.) He was so quiet and behind the scenes that I did not realize for some months after joining the CPUSA in the Oregon district that our leaders Don Hammerquist and Susan Wheeler were actually under Steve's authority. But the point is over the next year Steve Nelson taught me as much as any human being, after Carlos Prieto, about the ins and outs of clandestine operations in hostile territory (which is where the Party is either outlawed or operating under more-or-less de facto ``illegal'' conditions.)
I realized in the time I knew Steve on a daily basis (he was living in Coos Bay, Oregon in these years) how important Spain had been. Not only for him but for the Party as a whole as a training ground for true lifelong revolutionaries. It was here they were often ``first blooded'' in class war and where they learned the meaning of discipline and devotion to the cause. Method and technique is a subject for another book at another time.
Lessons for Today
For our purposes and with regard to the possibility of a North American battalion being formed once more for action in Latin America to help revolutionary forces and governments I mention it here. Organizing a bunch of kids to inject a Party line into the mass demonstrations on the streets of Los Angeles today is all well and good if that is all you can do. It would be far better training if those willing were injected into the cauldron of real class war which always exists in battlefields such as that currently raging in Colombia and this is something you revolutionary cadre should consider. (Earlier editions
of this Handbook included Peru as a nation where one might get involved. However the June 5th, election of our candidate, former Army rebel commander, Ollanta Humala in 2011 as President, (taking over July 28th) presages a resolution of the civil war in that country in my opinion.) Our Party is aware of such undertakings in Colombia and wishes them well. (See the website ).
Reality Check: the Real World of 1939
The Eastern Front --- 1939 Japan Attacks
Back at the Mongolian ranch, in the national capital ``Red Flag'' (Ulan Bator) the Party bosses were worried. The spring had begun, and the Japanese continued their military testing of Mongolian frontiers with China, in one armed provocation after another.
The local Party leader was a personal friend of Comrade Stalin and he and the rest of the Mongolian Communist Party's Politburo had cabled Stalin asking for specific military commitments along the Khalkin-gol River frontier with China. You may recall, by this time the Japanese capitalists had occupied large sections of China, including all of Manchuria, large sections of which bordered on the People's Republic of Mongolia.
Then, only one month after Franco declared victory in April 1939 the Japanese capitalists had attacked Stalin's eastern frontier at a village along the Mongolian river Khalkin-gol that formed the Chinese-Mongolian border. The fighter planes perfected in the air war over Spain were in factory mass production and backed-up by still more planes being further perfected according to the doctrine of Deep Battle itself perfected in actual war time experience in Spain. The same was true for the armor corps which had been by far the best in Spain and was being further perfected back home in the Soviet Union when the Japs attacked.
The point is the affair in Spain was directly connected to the opening shots of the Second World War which happened to be fired in the East not the West and where it was Japan attacking first, not the long awaited English-French-German-Italian attack which had most worried Stalin. Stalin knew he had to avoid at all costs a two front war, which he well knew was the end-game strategy for the Western capitalists.
During the spring of that fateful year, 1939, while the attention of the West was riveted on Hitler and his next move, the Japanese capitalists prepared a massive attack on the Soviet Union and Mongolia. They began May 11th, initiating incursions into Soviet territory at the Chinese-Mongolian Khalkin-gol River border, launching its main phase July 3rd.
The Mongolian bosses were more worried perhaps than they should have been. The Boss had the situation well in hand.
Stalin's chief spy in Japan, Richard Sorge (embedded as an SS officer in the Nazi embassy in Tokyo), told him, via his secret radio system, that the Japanese were playing out a scenario at the highest level. One group of Japanese imperialists wanted to attack north and secure Siberia from Lake Baikal east, for Japan --- the other Nipponese imperialist leaders wanted to attack south, gaining more of China, as well as Indochina, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. The attack on Mongolia was the test that would determine which faction won out.
Stalin Pounds Japan's Invasion Force to Dust
Stalin believed, based on Sorge's intelligence, the Japanese did not have modern equipment and they relied upon suicidal troops to accomplish their missions. Accordingly he directed his hand-picked general George Zhukov to prepare a counter-offensive of a special type. Stalin gave Zhukov the most advanced tanks and ground attack fighter-bomber warplanes the USSR had --- including those straight out of ``prototype'' design phase --- shipped straight from their design institutes and manufacturing plants to the desert war zone. Zhukov was confident that this modern armament combined with infantry superiority would give Bolshevism victory.
In August, General Zhukov was ready. While building up for the counter-attack the Red Army had successfully kept the Japanese busy with a stall-and-retreat strategy. Now the time had come to kick some ass!
On the 20th of August, 1939, (only ten days before Hitler attacked Poland) Zhukov delivered a smashing rebuff to the Japanese invaders at the Khalkin-gol River, using advanced Soviet deep operations tactics (squares of tanks moving against the Japanese flanks and rear; supported by ground attack fighter-bombers) along with a massive infantry frontal attack (two to one, 60,000 to 30,000 men in the Soviet and Japanese Main Forces, went head to head).
The Japanese had no advanced warplanes of Soviet caliber, nor any advanced heavy tanks and worst of all no adequate anti-tank weaponry of any kind. In so doing Zhukov liquidated Japans entire main force including those who failed to surrender between the 27th and 31st, sending what was left of their total 80,000 man expeditionary force reeling back into Manchuria minus their armor, artillery and remnant air force.
The next day Hitler attacked Poland and accordingly the world ignored the fact that Japan had been wiped out in its adventure against the USSR. Of course none of the cap countries had any idea about what was going on in East Asia with no correspondents on the ground of any kind.
Japan's million man reserve, waiting to move into Siberia, witnessed deep battle first hand while waiting in Manchuria, and they sat dumb. They were not nearly as well equipped as their expeditionary spearhead that had just suffered Japan's first smashing defeat of World War II (although the Soviets would not be in the war with Japan until August, 1945.)
Pearl Harbor Now Inevitable
According to Sorge, the Japanese High Command was stunned by the Soviet counter-attack, concluding the readiness of the Red Army was of a far higher quality than they had imagined. The Japanese gave up once and for all on the northern strategy and decided to strike south against the USA, UK, France and the Dutch, in pursuit of all of their colonies and the rest of China.
Herein lay the inevitability of Pearl Harbor.
If Hitler had been paying attention he would have seen what was waiting for him in the Soviet West. But, he wasn't. So, while Stalin's ploy did not stop the Nazi assault (but along with their upcoming difficulties in their Balkan campaign, the Red Army's
shockingly effective assault on Japan's best forces came as an upset to Hitler's generals) it would help to delay it until the summer solstice of 1941. ---And, the Japanese were so badly mauled the Jap General Staff would never again consider getting into that conflict, even when the Germans appeared to be heading to victory.
Lenin's Far East Policy Succeeds
In the meantime, in China, Mao Zedong's hand-picked Communist Party General Lin Biao launched the 100 Regiments, Party-Army attack, that dealt death and destruction on the left flank of the Japanese army garrisoned in Manchuria as well as north-central China, the Chinese heartland. The Jap response was to launch the 3 All's campaign which massacred 22 million Chinese between 1941 and 1943. A holocaust nearly four times greater than what the Germans did to the Jews.
However, the expanded war in north China between the communists and the Japanese Army had the effect of securing Stalin's Siberian frontier, by tying down all of Japanese imperialism's armed forces. (China thereby fulfilling Lenin's hope for an eastern frontier ``nation'' allied with the Soviet Union against imperialism.) Also, the Japanese genocide against China fed huge numbers of volunteers into what was to become the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
Meanwhile the fascist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek continued its refusal to fight Japan. The Communists continuing as the only indigenous Chinese force fighting Japan's invasion.
The Western Front Revisited
German Attack on USSR Forestalled
The German capitalists, unified under the Nazi's, struck out at Britain and France, September 1, 1939, using the Polish war as the excuse. Even after Poland went under, and Britain and France were technically at war with Germany, they didn't do much of anything. Their ``phony war'' was in reality the last phase of their wishful thinking about Hitler. Still hoping not to provoke the Fuhrer; hoping that he would keep going to the East! But, in the Far East the Japanese capitalists sued for peace on September 16th.
Stalin made every possible effort to forge an alliance with Britain and France to contain Hitler but every effort was rebuffed. Including the one at the last minute (July and August of 1939) when Stalin made tremendous overtures to both the French and British regimes for a collective security agreement against Nazi Germany. Disappointingly, that initiative resulted in the London government sending a low ranking delegation by slow boat to Murmansk. -And, from France no response at all.
Stalin then directed Molotov to seek a non-aggression treaty with Germany. It succeeded and the USSR avoided war.
The greed and fanaticism of the British and French ruling classes had blinded them to the possibility - nay, certainty - that Hitler would strike against them first; finish the unfinished business of the First World War, simultaneously bringing both France and England into the Nazi orbit. Hitler almost succeeded.
Inside Snapshot
1939 - Tying Loose Ends before it gets cold - Katyn
Stalin turned the tables on the British and French capitalists with the Soviet-German Non-aggression Treaty. In September, 1939, Red Army forces moved into Poland and Eastern Europe and Soviet attack units moved closer to the new Soviet-German frontier.
Along the way there were other fascists to be dealt with. Some of the worst were in Poland, in the officer class of the feudal army. This class of parasitical blood suckers had reduced Polish workers to virtual slaves and committed every imaginable crime against the working people of Poland. Most importantly, they were our most lethal enemies in that part of the world and, we would have to fight them sooner or later. As it happened they fortuitously ended up in our hands and that was the end of them. It happened this way.
The Boss was meeting with Cheka chief Lavrenti Beria.
``Lavrenti. Our troops have occupied the agreed upon territory along the old Curzon line as you know. What you may only be learning about is the arrival of many thousands of fascist Polish officers on our territory running from the Krauts. These are our most deadly enemies in Poland and I want them dealt with as we did with similar elements in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania and most recently in Finland.''
``Deportation?''
``No. That's what I mean. Similar elements. Fascist infectious parasites. Deportation and the chance to start over the right way is fine for the normal bourgeois elements, especially the recalcitrant petty bourgeois farmers. But these fascist Polish army officers are deadly infectious germs. They are sworn to our destruction. There is no rehabilitation possible here. They are the leftovers of our defeat at Warsaw in 1920. We owe it to them. This is a special category of enemy equivalent to the Black Death. I have no intention of giving them any more of a break than they have given the millions of our fellow workers and farmers in Poland, who they have raised like farm animals except without as much kindness. Not to mention the fact that these are the ones who killed my wife.
``Besides as soon as the war with Germany starts they will be back on the side of reaction helping the Nazi's if we leave them alive now. We will just have to kill them later if we don't do it now, and they will take a lot of our men with them since they will have guns and be part of the fascist assault. Anyway, on the main point, revenge is often a dish best served cold. You know what to do.''
``Yes. I have already sent four divisions of NKVD troops to Katyn to take the situation in hand. These divisions are made up of hard core communists mostly of Jewish extraction. There are some 20,000 of those fascist mother fucking Poles there so far Koba.''
``Good thinking. Felix used to do the same thing in the Ukraine. We won't have to worry about those men and women getting soft on these Black Hundred type of scum. Just be sure their poor kids are sent directly to our orphanages --- if they aren't orphans yet they will be in a few days. Anyway, can you handle it?''
``Yes. It will take a couple of days.''
``Well get to it and step it up. My weather forecasters tell me permafrost is at most 48 hours away at Katyn. This should be completely over before the ground freezes. I
have meetings until midnight. Then join us in the Kremlin if you like. I've got a new Chaplain movie.''
``Thank you Koba. I'll see you then.''
1940
Then, in 1940, in a lighting strike, Hitler moved against Scandinavia, Benelux and into France. Using the plans provided to him by England's one-time King, the Duke of Windsor (a long time Nazi - See End Note 35 "the Nazi Duke" in my book THE BUCCANEER, 2003, Jason W. Smith, Writers Press, Boise 330pp), the Nazi spearhead circumvented the Maginot line; then found French commanders helpfully withdrawing - inviting the Nazi's to take their country. It was the typical (Fifth Column) betrayal the world had gotten used to seeing - by the big Capitalists and their bourgeois allies against their respective nations, hoping that the fascists would be good enough to liquidate their organized labor movement when they took over. Which of course they did.
393British troops could have been rolled-up by the Nazi's while they lay trapped in France at Dunkirk, but Hitler was absolutely certain that this last of the ``parliamentary'' regimes of Capitalist Europe would see reason and surrender to his forces. He stopped.
Then he got the big surprise. Britain's new PM Winston Churchill, with his perfect command of European history, and his worldliness that came from having been all over Africa and Asia in his youth as part of one military campaign or another {and a brief stint as a prisoner of war in an Afrikaner Camp (from which he escaped!)} was not afraid of Labour so much as he was of Hitler. A good anti-communist himself, he saw the Soviet Union as far less of a threat to Great Britain than the Nazi's. He had no intention of making a deal with the gutter snipe Hitler. {Churchill being the son of a Lord was quite class conscious and not at all likely to make a deal with a poor-White-trash nincompoop like Hitler to take over his realm. At the same time he was sufficiently worried about the communists to read the London Daily Worker every day.} Churchill rescued his Army in France and began a determined fight to save Britain and destroy Hitler.
394-And, so there things stood.
Comeuppance
Trotsky in Mexico, 1940
``I have one more thing Koba.'' Speaking was Lavrenti Beria.
``Go ahead.'' Responded the Boss.
``Siqueiros is going to be able to get to the Anti-Christ.''
``How is that?''
``Rivera's home was a perfect sanctuary for him. It is well guarded because of Diego and because President Cardenas wants him secure. But the scumbag (Trotsky) has had a sexual affair with the wife (Frida Kahlo) of his host (Diego Rivera). Thus, Trotsky and Rivera have had a falling out, which is currently assumed to be political, except among those in the household, where as you know we have an agent waiting. President Cardenas is disgusted and will stand aside.''
``It is much better for a Mexican of the caliber of Siqueiros to handle this if at all possible.'' Commented the Boss.
``Of course. I hope Siqueiros will, but you know what these guys are like big mouths, short on thinking and planning.''
``Well, if necessary pull out Ramon. We have to tie off all the loose ends, before this war starts. Is his mother with him?''
``Yes she is, working directly with (Leonid) Eitingon (who has subsequently written his own book --- Ed.) Koba, I just wanted you to know that Trotsky moved to another home in the Coyoacan locality, much easier for us to attack, which we will be able to handle. Either with this fumblebum Siqueiros or with our own agent. Anyway it's just a matter of days or a few weeks now.''
``What are the chances of getting Ramon out alive?''
``Not good. He thinks he may be able to kill Trotsky silently and make his escape but I suspect this is wishful thinking.''
``I hate to leave a great comrade like Ramon to that fate if there is any way to help him exit. No, I know you can't do anything more than you are doing. But you know what I mean.
``Keep me informed.''
``Of course. ---And, if there is nothing else?''
``No Lavrenti. As usual you are doing a superb job. Felix would be proud of you. As I am.''
``Thank you Koba. That's the nicest thing you ever said to me.''
``One of my worst failings lies in my failing to acknowledge great contributions. If I haven't said so before I apologize.
``Oh that's not necessary Koba. I better go.''
What had just happened passed into history for Stalin as an afterthought of a long day at work. But, for Beria it was the beginning of a new day. Koba never complimented people like that unless he really meant it.
Trotsky Dies
Trotsky did not have long to live. First Siqueiros tried to kill him with a squad of gunmen who poured roughly one hundred rounds into his bedroom window. Beria's fears proved accurate as Siqueiros and crew fucked-up what should have been a simple enough hit, and even with Eitingon escorting them to the gate (where an undercover agent opened the door). In the event Siqueiros proved to be no better in his home country than he had been in Spain. Trotsky managed to escape by hiding under the bed. The assassins failing to enter the bedroom to be sure they had done the job.
Consequently Beria pulled out his undercover agent Ramon Mercader who buried an ice pick in Trotsky's head. However, escape for Ramon was impossible as Trotsky let out a blood curdling shriek (Mercader later said he would never forget) and he was captured by Trotsky's bodyguards and turned over to the Mexican police who brought him to trial. His boss Leonid Eitingon was waiting outside in a car, along with Mercader's longtime associate and mother. Both had to beat a retreat. Mother Mercader made her way to Moscow and received a secret hero's welcome. She lived quietly in
Moscow on a Cheka pension and apartment consulting on Spain and Mexico until she died there before her son was able to finish his twenty year Mexican prison term.
Stalin must have found it amusingly ironic that Mercader killed Trotsky with a mountain climbing tool (ice pick) --- after decades of snide abuse from Trotsky who never failed to describe him as a ``mountain climber'', as if this athletic endeavor is all he was ever good for. Now Trotsky died by the mountain climbing ice pick. I don't know about Stalin but I would have found this cold revenge immensely satisfying. At any rate, the bullet holes and the blood on the floor from the ice-pick attack have been preserved along with the home itself for those wishing to visit this Coyoacan (Mexico City suburb) home, now a museum.
In the aftermath the Trotskyists tried to make a big deal out of the assassination by trying to prove Stalin had given the order. Not that there was any doubt in anyone's mind about who gave the order. But it was 1940; the imperialists were at war with each other in Europe. The Nazi's were preparing to attack the Soviet Union and were being actively encouraged to do so by the rotten British and French ruling capitalist oligarchy. Trotsky passed into history without very many caring very much.
In 1960, Mercader completed his twenty year Mexican sentence and was released. He flew first to Havana and then on to Moscow where Nikita Khrushchev personally greeted him and awarded him the medal Hero of the Soviet Union. He passed his remaining days in Moscow on a generous Cheka pension and a suitable apartment. Mercader had acquired considerable knowledge about Latin America from the unique perspective available only to political prisoners in a high security Mexican prison so he continued his Cheka (KGB) work as a contract consultant on Latin America until his death.
The Mexican Intelligentsia
I have often said that ``I never met any real intellectuals until I went to Mexico in 1962.'' I had certainly never met any in Idaho with the exception of Gideon Oppenheimer, Merle Wells and Frank Church. However, that may still be an exaggeration because I had met real intellectuals in London in 1961, but I was only there for one month (June --- I left London the day before the baby was born that became Princess Diana years later --- I have described that event under the subhead ``Lady X'' --- the closest friend of Mother Spencer --- in volume one of my autobiography The Buccaneer.)
So it was in Mexico City that I met intellectuals by the bushel, so to speak, via the good offices of the well-known Mexican playwright and communist Carlos Prieto. My experiences with these people changed my life because, for the first time, I realized I was not a part of a permanently inferior class (my intellectual predilection for Marxism) but part of the most advanced class of thinking people in the world. There had been no turning back for me anyway. I had chosen my side and nothing could dissuade me from my scientifically derived decision. But meeting hundreds of people who thought the same way I did, for the same reasons, was a wonderful change in the world as far as I was concerned.
Trotsky's Last Love
I mention this here because a very fine example of this class (the Mexican intelligentsia) and the general milieu of those times are shown in the 2002 movie Frida, (about the wife of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molino, and Geoffrey Rush.) This is the first time, in the bourgeois movie industry; of which I am aware, where Frida's sexual episode with Trotsky is explored, or at least exposed.
Left movie makers seem to have been allergic to describing Trotsky's simple human failing in this regard --- perhaps because these de facto Left Petty Bourgeois intellectuals found it natural to conclude it was this ``piggish-ness'' on Trotsky's part which led directly to his death.
I think this is extremely ungenerous. After all, after what he had been through, Trotsky had to be in fragile shape and perhaps Ms. Kahlo really helped him. The fact that Trotsky's wife was with him during this affair, in the same household, and we know he felt very bad about that, makes me think, even more so, that he was not emotionally stable by this time. I think history tells us why.
Stalin had left him alive but stripped of just about everything. His self-confidence and perhaps his manhood had to be in personal question and doubt. To me, Trotsky at this point in his life is a person to be pitied, not hated. Lenin, himself, after all had brought Trotsky on board initially. Lenin had had to see some good qualities in Trotsky. ---And, in fact, Trotsky did perform many useful services up and until he lost out on the succession altogether.
Stalin, a man who never forgot a slight, a man who never failed to remember a hurt, a man who was exceptionally sensitive to what others might have risen above (e.g., snide class background comments), however saw him as the author of all ``Trotskyite'' conspiracies, real and imagined. Trotsky had made himself into Stalin's nemesis. Accordingly, Trotsky had to die.
At any rate, the movie is based on the book by Ms. Hayden Herrera.
---And, the point is somehow the producers got everything in the production values exactly right. I would highly recommend this movie to get an idea of the cultural setting of the Mexican intelligentsia, which was still virtually unchanged when I arrived in Mexico City at the beginning of September in 1962. I have described some of this in The Buccaneer --- volume one of my autobiography ``Idaho Smith's'' Search for the Foundation!
Who Will Attack First?
The imperialist war against the Soviet Union could not be delayed forever. One could jockey only so long until it would be a reality. -And, Stalin had been doing his best to gain strategic advantage on his western borders, moving Soviet attack forces closer and closer to those borders, and demanding and getting territorial concessions. Stalin was preparing the option of striking the Nazi's first --- but in the beginning of 1941 he needed to wait one more year, or perhaps eighteen months, for the newest version (Spanish Civil War derived) T-34 land tanks and the Sturmovic aerial tanks to be produced in sufficient numbers.
The spring of 1941 turned to summer. The fascist regimes on Soviet borders, were told what to do or else. Bulgaria to provide access to its rivers and Romania was required to surrender certain adjacent territories to the Soviet Union. Other defensive steps had
been taken against Nazi supported fascist Finland, while the reactionary regimes in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were eliminated when Soviet troops occupied them in the fall of 1939. Germany continued to be tied up in combat in Greece and now Yugoslavia.
May 1, 1941
Stalin Orders ``Spoiling Attack''
``Vlad since we don't know what the Nazi's may be planning on our frontiers, and there is way too much movement too close to our western border, this possibility of launching a major Yugoslav offensive is of critical importance. Tell Tito to attack them now.''
Joseph Stalin's old friend Joseph Broz Tito came to the Boss's rescue in the spring of 1941 by launching a deadly counteroffensive against Nazi troops in Serbia and other parts of Yugoslavia. This delayed the German assault on the Soviet Union for five critical weeks.
You will recall Tito was last seen in this book in Paris where he guided the inflow of fighter volunteers (the Internationals) to the Republican camp at Albacete, Spain. In the interim Stalin had sent him home to Yugoslavia, to begin preparations for the liberation of that sorry country, still suffering under the jackboot of its own ruling class. Therefore, he was in place to organize and lead the attack on occupying Nazi troops in the spring of 1941 that delayed Hitler's assault on the USSR for these critical five weeks. (Before Tito's war against the Nazi's concluded in 1944, 1.4 million Yugoslavs, 10% of the Yugoslav population, would be murdered by the Master Race.)
Nazi Attack Finally Gets Underway
June 22, 1941
Then the Nazi's attacked the Soviet Union on the 22nd day of June, 1941. Hitler had been almost as good as his word. He just waited until he thought he had secured his western frontier before turning against the Bolsheviks, on his eastern one.
Along the way, Hitler took his European allies with him in this desperate adventure. The people of these countries would rue the day they allowed that decision and among their soldiers no more than a handful would return home alive. For example, Spanish fascist troops, victorious in Spain, would be liquidated in totality in Russia. Why? Because, Franco had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and sent several divisions of Spanish troops against the USSR in Hitler's surprise attack. All of whom would die and never see home again.
Contrary to imperialist propaganda, Stalin entered the war with the advantage. He had only to fight the great capitalist powers one Front at a time and in the meantime had neutralized the others. This was the final triumphant advantage as the decades long program of unified capitalist attack against the Soviet Union had been definitively destroyed by the equally decades long Leninist foreign policy of Rapallo (keeping the cap countries divided).
The Soviet ``Neo-Napoleonic'' Battle Plan
June 22, 1941 to December 5, 1941
Since 1917 the Soviet Union had been preparing for this capitalist assault against the homeland of the world socialist stage. As we have seen the Soviet policy had begun and continued for nineteen years (1922 -1941) around the Rapallo principle of keeping the imperialist (remember imperialist, in Marxist terminology, means the highest phase of the capitalist stage) countries divided, as far as a joint attack against the USSR was concerned. But it was inevitable that capitalism would attack eventually --- thus, the capitalist attack had to be made particulate.
That is to say, given our technological limitations, we wanted to fight the global capitalist stage one part at a time. One part of the world capitalist stage at a time, meant one capitalist country or bloc of countries at a time.
Stalin, for twenty years, had done everything humanly possible to prepare for the inevitable World War (II). Now it had come and the USSR had a war plan.
(1) That plan began with the strategic overview of being able to assume the eastern front against Japan and the USA would be neutralized.
(2) Then the USSR would have Option A to attack the Western alliance (meaning attack the Nazi's first), or, now that the war had begun with the German's making the first move, the Soviet Union had Option B, which was to absorb the Western attack. (Which meant, now in practice, to absorb the 3.5 million man German attack with military and civilian resistance, slowing down the aggressor, while the Soviet High Command detailed the defense tactics and prepared the counter strike.)
This second option (B) then put forward the responding Soviet Battle Plan under the title: the ``Neo-Napoleonic Battle Plan.'' This plan was known only to the higher echelons of the Party, the STAVKA (military high command) and the Cheka.
Option B: the Neo-Napoleonic Battle Plan
(3) In the event, the USSR would have to absorb the incoming 3.5 million Nazi and satellite troops while preparing a counterstrike at Moscow. Along the way it would have to fortify both the northern and southern elements of the Battle line which would extend from Leningrad (St. Petersburg; Petrograd) to the Caucuses (Batum and Baku).
(3) Every element of civil society as well as the military fronts would have to be involved. This meant the citizens of the great Soviet cities in the West would have to fight one way or another right alongside the Red Army. This was a modernized anti-Napoleon strategy, in that it would feature scorched earth from the Western frontier to the stabilized front running from Leningrad to Moscow and south to Baku and Batum.
(4) The German's were getting weaker by the day as they expanded into the Soviet Union. At least one million of the 3.5 million soldiers they sent against Socialism would die in the six months from June 22 to December 5th. Their machinery was destroyed, worn out, and ultimately frozen.
(5) Meanwhile the Soviets moved a great deal of the western industrial plant behind the Urals where it was literally inserted into the top secret military-industrial complex. All of this was done according to the neo-Napoleonic Battle Plan, Stalin and his generals had drawn up over the previous several years. Inherent to this plan was a modern ``people's war'', in that the civilian population would not be evacuated. Instead the Party
would have to see to it that the civilians fought too, whatever that meant --- even if it meant just being in place and having to be taken prisoner or killed.
(6) The Strategic Battle Plan was to be concluded by the movement of available Red Army elite units into position behind Moscow, in order to launch a counterstrike at the moment the Aryan's became most vulnerable. However, now in practice, Stalin had only about 30 of these elite divisions (some 300,000 men) available for the counterstrike which was not enough. To do the job and reverse the Nazi assault he needed to move another 40 elite divisions into position (some 400,000 men) from the anti-Japanese Mongolian front and put them together with the 30 elite divisions already near Moscow.
(7) In the end this Battle Plan worked perfectly, exactly as intended, and just as planned. But, the cost was indeed quite high for us as well as for the incoming scum.
This is how it happened.
Inside Snapshot
Stalin with Zhukov: July 25, 1941
Pacing in his Kremlin office, Marshall (Five Star US General rank - Ed) and now Supreme Commander of all Soviet Military Forces, Joseph Stalin walked to the door, being opened by Poskrebyshev, extending his good right hand to grasp that of One Star Brigadier General George Zhukov commander of the Far East Red Army District. The two men walked directly to the war map on the wall of the Stavka's Supreme Commander (Red Army High Command's Supreme Commander --- i.e., Joseph Stalin) and gradually made their way to the couch at the side of the room the Boss rarely used. Only with his closest friends or most important conversationalists of the moment.
``George, I made the decision to send you to the western frontier and then to move our attack vanguard forces to that frontier in the West in order to try and impress Hitler with the impossibility of launching a successful attack and get ready for a first strike as you know. Unfortunately our preparations didn't work. If anything they made Hitler think, correctly, if he was to have any chance at all, he had to attack us this year, and do so in such a way as to knock us out of the war by the onset of the Holiday Season this year. We lost 1800 aircraft on the ground on the first day George and it gets worse with each passing day after that. Fortunately, these attack vanguard forces we lost were the oldest and least important aircraft. So, we will recover.
``Although, it will take a year to get our aircraft and tank factories producing to maximum capability behind the Urals. The only good part of this is that the Nazi's made their main attack against our least important aircraft. The truth is our best new Spanish experience designed air attack force is already being developed and will be available next year. Between now and then, unless I can come up with military assistance from the United States, it will continue to be a massive GNP struggle to get re-equipped while the Red Army fights a defensive war of attrition and maneuver.
``What it comes down to is we can hold a line, here follow me, from Leningrad to Moscow and south to Batum. That is for this year, and probably next year, although the Germans are going to have to go for the oil sooner or later; at the moment that is not their primary target. For whatever reason they are coming straight for us here in Moscow. A half million of them at least I figure are left in Army Group Center.
``We could turn this against them if you were to be able to move your entire main force from Siberia to Moscow in time to do a Khalkin-gol envelopment. But, I can`t move you unless I know the Japs aren't coming for us.
``When will you know?''
``Probably tonight.''
``Do you mind me asking Koba, how do you know?''
``I have a spy on the Japanese General Staff. They are meeting right now on this question.''
``Jesus Christ! I mean whatever it should be these days. I had no idea. No wonder you had the Order of Battle for Khalkin-gol! Well, what do you think they will decide - to go for it or back off?''
``I think they will back off, but the pressure from Berlin is powerful. We are countering it as best we can but I am afraid we may lose our best agent if he keeps up what he is doing. I have asked him to risk it all in trying to convince the Japs not to go for German overtures to enter the war. His masters in Berlin SS could easily discover he is doing what he is doing and that will be the end of our asset there. At any rate, if we can move your forces how long will it take to get ready for an encirclement of the German Army Group Center?''
``I can be in place in twelve weeks. Meaning, specifically, 40 well trained fresh divisions (10,000 men per division --- ed.) at full TO&E including all of our aircraft. -And, Koba the troops are all pumped up. They just gave a humiliating whipping to the Japs, and they are very well provisioned and eager to get at this disgusting fascist enemy hand-to-hand. They know they can be the saviors of the country and I have never seen morale so high. Even back in the Civil War Koba.
``At any rate, in twelve weeks, we will have these forty divisions within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of Moscow in front of the Urals, where hopefully the Nazi forward air recon will not be able to reach. So it will be winter, or nearly so, when we launch the counterattack and we will be better prepared for that than they will be. Furthermore, our Army Group will be moving forward to combat, directly in front of Moscow, without further preparation. Going off the march, in winter mind you will be part of the direct attack in the offensive, in other words, and this will be an additional 400,000 troops on our side the Krauts don't know about and will not be expecting. They will be forced onto a defensive posture immediately and you know we won't let them dig in.''
``I don't expect to win the war here George but I need to know if we can hold Moscow. I want you to always tell me the truth on this one point. I know the call may change from day to day. I want you to tell me about such changes in your view day to day. Do you understand?''
``Yes Comrade Stalin I understand. You can count on one thing.''
``-And that would be?''
``If you bring my Army Group to Moscow we will stop these cabbage-eating cocksuckers cold! ---And give them an ass whipping that will make what we did to the Japs look like a Sunday School picnic!''
Orlov and FDR = Harry Hopkins to Moscow
Meanwhile, Stalin's long planned need for Orlov to enter the picture in a decisive
event changing way, succeeded. Orlov used his existing route to FDR to assure the US President the Soviet Union under its chief Comrade Marshall Stalin would never agree to anything other than total destruction of Hitler and his entire Nazi gang no matter what the cost or consequences! FDR then decided to send his most trusted representative to Moscow --- Harry Hopkins --- to see what the situation really was, and what if anything FDR could do to help. (See the movie World War II, When Lions Roared, starring John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins as Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.)
Moscow under Siege
On October 16, 1941, Stalin decided to evacuate the Government to Kuibyshev (formerly Samara where critical civil war battles were fought in 1918) while the highest Party leader for the most part would stay in Moscow and run the war. On October 28th, the Nazi bombing of Moscow drove Stalin and the others underground to the Metro where they had an emergency bunker headquarters.
Inside Snapshot
Stalin November 7, 1941 at Red Square and in the Moscow Subway
Stalin also insisted that the annual Revolution Day (November 7 new style) parade through Red Square continue as planned. The symbolism of the Boss and the Comintern's Number One, George Dimitrov, standing side by side atop the Lenin mausoleum was of inestimable value as the climactic battle thus far in World War II, between capitalism and socialism approached. Tanks, artillery, airplanes and soldiers paraded through Red Square and then went straight to the front now only a few miles from Moscow. Stalin spoke to them from atop Lenin's Mausoleum for 30 minutes:
``Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, citizens and comrades, I speak to you today as we prepare to meet the fascist menace now so near to our dear working class revolutionary capital. I want to assure you that the mighty Red Army is fully deployed to deal with the threat. Furthermore, I want you to realize when this battle is concluded the Nazi spearhead against our country and our just cause will have been liquidated.
``Despite the propaganda of the Nazi world-wide capitalist press conspiracy against us the fact is the Germans have suffered grievous losses. We know they have suffered over one million dead soldiers since their June invasion. Their military machine is grinding to a halt thanks to the heroic resistance of our Great Red Army and the sudden appearance of our best ally, Old Man Winter. Hitler must have been rather ill-educated to have forgotten what happened to Napoleon in the winter.
``We have a new and powerful ally in the form of the United States of America and I have already agreed with its President to conduct a common war against Hitlerism and the Mussolini gang.
``Now let each and every one of us march from here to the front. Again as at Kronstadt! Let it be so again. Everything for the Front!''
Smashing the Nazi's: The Battle of Moscow
The Japanese capitalists resisted the strong pressure from Berlin to enter the war, and even though they had just discovered Beria's spy Richard Sorge, operating from
inside the Nazi Embassy in Tokyo, in the fall of 1941, it was too late to undo the work he had done for the Soviets. The Japanese had been burned so badly at Khalkin-gol two years earlier (thanks to Sorge's intelligence and Stalin's sending of Zhukov's super-force to Mongolia) that they opted not to get involved. Stalin, his confidence in Sorge reinforced (after Sorge had correctly predicted the Nazi attack down to the day,) transferred crack Red Army divisions from the eastern frontier where they had been confronting Jap forces in Manchuria, to his western one --- specifically, right in front of Moscow.
Payback
On the 5th of December, 1941, the Nazi offensive ground to a halt and the next day, December 6, 1941, (one day before the USA came into the War, because of the 7 December attack on Pearl Harbor) Stalin launched the counterattack that almost ended the war in Europe. That Japanese attack on the USA could just as easily have been a Japanese attack against the USSR and would have been, had Stalin not launched the totally successful counter-attack against the Japs along the Khalkin-gol River in Mongolia two and a half years earlier.
Now, Stalin, knowing the Japanese were not going to enter the war on Germany's behalf, was able to send a seemingly limitless number of fresh Siberian troops from the east, and they hit the Nazi's like a tornado in a cornfield, dealing them death and destruction in front of Moscow. Stalin had placed his Siberian Warrior Chieftain General Zhukov in charge of the Red counterattack at Moscow; he did on a much larger scale to the Germans what he had done to the Japanese a little over two years earlier. At battles-end the Red Army had smashed the German Army Group Center and thrown them back one hundred miles!
Immediately thereafter Zhukov left for Leningrad where he and the Party Boss for Leningrad Andrei Zhdanov restored order and established a permanent defense for Leningrad against Army Group North. After six months of war 1.5 million German and satellite soldiers lay dead. With a little more expertise and experience in dealing with such large military forces, the Red Army would have been in Berlin in May of 1942, instead of May, 1945.
January 1, 1942
Inside Snapshot: STAVKA Hq Moscow
``I'm sorry Comrade Stalin, they ran beyond our reach and we won't be able to complete the envelopment.''
``You have done magnificently George. You and the entire STAVKA. The Moscow Front is nearly two hundred kilometers further west, and the capital is permanently secure. You see our intelligence system is working as well if not better than ever. Half of these cocksuckers that came at us are dead. You killed at least 350,000 of them! They don't have the strength in men to come at us again on this Army Group Center front. ---And, most of their materiel is useless, because of lack of maintenance and weathering and wear and tear. They will not be able to move against us here and now I want you to go to Leningrad and take charge of the defense there. Zhdanov is our Party Boss for Leningrad. He has been in charge there for seven years now ever since the
395assassination of Kirov. He is one of our top four secretaries, best historians, and theoreticians, and has a solid grip on every aspect of life there. As a result he has the civil situation in hand but he needs you to build a permanent military bulwark against Army Group North. So, their only remaining offensive possibility is with their Army Group South.
``So, while you are stabilizing our Leningrad front, in the meantime, we will see how Hitler will move in the spring. Our foreign intelligence networks indicate he is raising half a million more men, some fifty divisions, from satellite countries to fill out the losses in Army Group South. I presume they will head for the oil at Baku and Batum. Which is not good for us.
``We won't be able to get a situation like Moscow again unless he turns his spearhead against some city to the east of the current front in the South. For us, the spring and summer campaigns will have to be ones of stall and retreat, attrition and behind-the-lines sabotage.
``However, I want you to know and whomever you need to tell at STAVKA that by October 1 this year (1942) we will be back to pre-war production rates in all key military industries from coal to steel and machine tools for heavy industry and the heavy industrial and tank and aviation factories behind the Urals. We may have to burn the oilfields at Baku and Batum but we have plenty of oil in storage in Siberia and as much more as we need by train from Vladivostok thanks to our American friends. Our weapons stockpiles are being rebuilt as we speak and we will have ten thousand T-34 tanks by November and five thousand Sturmovics (ground attack aircraft called air tanks and tank busters). So, we have to wait anyway while you stabilize the northern front.
396``Perhaps we can launch some spoiling offensives soon. But only those strong enough to indicate that these are the best we can do. But get Leningrad secure first and then we will see what we can see.''
What are you planning?
``You don't think they would be dumb enough to walk into it again do you?'' Zhukov asked the Boss.
``George, I didn't think Hitler would be stupid enough to attack us to begin with. So, I don't want to make a decision based on what the intelligent thing to do would be. Logic says go for the oil and he has little choice. Their industrial machine has only weeks to go before it grinds to a halt for lack of oil.
``Yet, they don't need two million men to go for rural Caucuses. I think Hitler wants a major world-wide known ``communist'' city. What better city than the one named after me, which is after all one of our ``show'' cities?
``George, I have instructed both the Cheka and G2 to keep the idea of an easy success at Stalingrad, and what a great victory for Nazism it would be, in front of Hitler and his General Staff and especially in the fanatical elements of the Nazi Party. George if you can come up with some ways to indicate to the German code breakers that (1) we have no strategic reserves left, and (2) we have no tactical strength in the south to defend the Volga at all, (3) what an easy and highly valuable target and acquisition Stalingrad would be, and (4) everything else our agents are doing, then George, perhaps we can entice the Little Corporal one more time.''
``I'll get right on it. I know we can plant all of that shit through our combat intelligence feed to Wehrmacht wireless spies now that we have the enigma thanks to Philby. That's a stroke of genius Koba. I don't know why I didn't think of that.''
``So, I will talk to you on the telephone as soon as you get to Leningrad. I need to know today what the situation looks like.''
August 1942 - January 1943
Wiping Out One Quarter of the Nazi Army: The Battle of Stalingrad
It was left to be played out once again, in the winter of 1942-1943, at Stalingrad. The battle actually began six months later, in August, 1942, and concluded with our total victory which would come eleven months later in January, 1943.
While 20,000 US Marines were being dropped (and left stranded) at Guadalcanal, in that late summer month (August 1942), the Nazi reinforced 6th Army (Army Group South (b) with about 300,000 Germans and about 500,000 satellite troops) reached the outskirts of Stalin's city. {What had been Tsaritsyn before the Bolshevik Revolution.}Defending was only General Chuikov with 20,000 men!
However, at the last minute, another division (13th Red Army elite Guards) arrived in September, when the Kraut 6th Army was losing 20,000 soldiers per week at Stalingrad. The majority of their mercenary allies from Spain, Italy, Hungary and Romania not to mention the White Russian traitor forces, had run to the sidelines, nominally holding the north and south extremes of the Volga front. Now the Red Army had only to grind down Krauts.
Then, after the Nazi's, and their European allies, had pushed well into the city, and three months of house to house, cellar to cellar, hand-to-hand combat, (See the movie Enemy at the Gates) the Red Army launched a massive counter attack (on November 19, 1942) and 1.2 million fresh communist troops drove pincers behind the German forces to surround and trap 300,000 of them in that great city along with 200,000 puppet troops (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian). Very few Kraut invaders survived. (Perhaps one hundred lived to return to Germany! None of the others were heard of again.)
-And, Hitler lost 25% or more of Germany's total Army TO&E (i.e., one quarter of the Germany Army's entire equipment inventory) Stalingrad was the end of Germany. Only 18 months after the Nazi's had rolled the dice risking it all in their 3.5 million man surprise attack against us June 1941, their total strength had been reduced by 50% and their Kraut Sixth Army and its foreign allies totally liquidated!
Humiliating End of Hitler's Forces Underway
The Battle of the Kursk Salient kicks off July 5, 1943
After the destruction of the German forces in Stalingrad, which was completed in January of 1943, it was all over for Hitler except the fighting. All over for the Germans except the dying. ---And, the dying they now had to accept.
Especially at Kursk in mid-summer 1943, when the remaining Nazi cream was ground into hamburger and their tanks into junk. The Krauts never stopped running until they were dead or encircled in Berlin, and all of Eastern Europe was liberated along the
1943: Espionage is Critical at Kursk
Stalingrad had broken the back of the Kraut military machine and the battle at Kursk in July 1943, had destroyed the better part of Hitler's European armor force as Panzers and the most modern Tiger tanks, and a multitude of armored attack vehicles, got chewed up by the thousands. (Tigers were German 88 artillery pieces armored and motorized --- but they did not have slanted protective armor, which made them susceptible to attack by Soviet T-34's which were much faster and armed with heavier cannon.)
One reason the Soviet strategy worked so well at Kursk is because the British had broken the German military cipher using their machine code-named ``enigma'' and the project resulting code-named Ultra. (You will recall from Chapter thirteen an Enigma-Ultra machine had been captured by the Poles from the Germans and the British got one from them) which by the time of World War II provided a clear insight into German wireless communications.
No, the British did not give the German Order of Battle at Kursk to the Russians. Stalin got it from Kim Philby who was on the ``double cross'' XX (20) Committee that handled ultra (enigma) source intelligence. This I note here because the British should have told Stalin everything they knew about the Nazi Order of Battle and they did not. Without Philby's input the outcome at Kursk might not have been as wonderful as it was.
Furthermore, although it would not be known to our imperialist allies (the US and UK) until forty years later, Philby had given every detail he could get about how the enigma decoder worked directly to Stalin as soon as he found out about them. These details he picked up quickly as the newest MI6 member of the XX committee and forwarded them all to the Boss, so at Kursk the Soviet military intelligence command was directly breaking German military communications on the spot because they now knew the enigma machine and the allies `Ultra' secret.
Then just before the battle, against one million fascist troops (70 heavily reinforced Kraut and satellite divisions), the Red Orchestra came through with the detailed jumping off and daily order of battle for these troops, as planned by the Nazi high command.
Penetrating the Manhattan Project
The Atom Bomb --- February 1943
``So Lavrenti, how hard is this new Uranium weapons program going to be to duplicate?'' Asked the Boss of his intelligence chief, Comrade Beria.
``The Americans are just getting started, so whatever we do now should be two pronged in my view. I have spoken personally with all our knowledgeable scientists. I have had to go back to school myself --- literally --- under their direction I signed up for the appropriate physics courses at Moscow University. ---And, they will be the best tutors I could have. This is essential because you and I have to know the details of how this weaponry is developed and is to perform and for that one of us at least has to become expert in atomic physics.
``Anyway, what it comes down to is we have to duplicate the initial experiments done in Berlin, and now in Chicago, to split the atom. With the data thus recovered the Anglo-American think-tank will be able to calculate how much explosive potential can be generated from a Uranium bomb. How they are to acquire sufficient Uranium of the right kind and then ignite it are problems they have not yet addressed.
``What we know now is that the American atomic scientists have told President Roosevelt there are five ways to get the necessary fissionable Uranium in theory. They don't really have any idea which will work, if any. He has told them to proceed with all five varieties of producing the right kind of Uranium and these projects are in five different States! But the brains of the operation and apparently the central most important atomic weapons base is in the US State of New Mexico. We have complete penetration on the chief of this project; a gentleman named Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer via a parallel* (type) espionage operation being run by Comrade Steve Nelson in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, at the moment we think New Mexico is the main place to control from an intelligence perspective.
397*****
*In ``parallel'' espionage operations a network is run alongside the target persons. This is a network of experienced, or most importantly, fanatically loyal Party cadre, who happen to be ``friends'' of ``friends'' of the targets. So our agent would never interview J. Robert Oppenheimer but would daily debrief his ``friends'', ``friends.'' Jane Edgar Hoover never figured out this simple standard operating procedure of intelligence agencies around the world, historically, and thus her anti-espionage anti-red searches did little or no good. The FBI was doing backgrounds on persons not in any way associated with the Soviet espionage program. End of Story. After that it was just standard tradecraft.
*****
``The point is, Koba, if we launch a program against this industrial project along the same lines as we did for years, nearly two decades, against the industrial potential of Germany and Italy for example, then we could supplement our own research with the results of theirs. In this way overcome the handicap of our already overtaxed industrial base.
``In short, what I think is we need Lev (Orlov) to do for us in North America what he did for us in Europe. Fortunately he is in place. The problem is he is there for his special mission. But, Koba, getting him involved in this would certainly compromise his original mission if Roosevelt were to learn of this new activity of his, somewhere down the road.''
``That's a risk I am willing to take now. After Stalingrad, we can win this war without any foreign assistance if need be. Should we pull Lev back first or send someone to him.''
``I take it you are prepared to allow me to proceed with an industrial espionage program against this Uranium Bomb? It is undoubtedly going to be the most expensive we have ever mounted.''
``Yes.''
``Koba, I have examined the travel situation and we could send him and bring him back via Alaska. Take a train to and from Vladivostok and then fly to and from the
Americans who could assist in bringing him from Alaska to regular transportation. Without knowing why, of course. But, it's a long trip and I don't advise it. Lev is not as young as he was twenty years ago in the civil war. I think we should send our best agent to him. Lev can guide him and be training his replacement at the same time. I am sure he would prefer that.
``Did you ask him?''
``Yes.''
`That's fine with me if that's the way you comrades want to handle it. Frankly, I like your idea of Lev developing this program. He has done it several times before and against much more competent counter-espionage programs than anything the clowns in the FBI could put up against him. Where will he be stationed now and how about the little girl?''
``He says Roosevelt has lived up to his word and he is not being followed at all. He believes only Harry Hopkins is aware of his presence and his role. However, that may be, he wants to go to the state of New Mexico in order to be able to run operations at close hand personally. He says his daughter's rheumatic fever aftermath has not been what they had hoped and some doctor thinks they should move to the southwest US for this reason.''
``I'm sorry to hear she is not much better hopefully no worse. You know she got that while her parents were fighting those Muslim crackpots in the Caucuses for us. Anyway, New Mexico is one of those Border States is it not?
``Yes Koba.''
``Well, if memory serves me, didn't we start Borodin somewhere in Mexico out there in 1918?''
``Nothing wrong with your memory Koba. I had forgotten about that until recently when I had to go through our North American file in complete detail. Yes Borodin worked in and out of Mexico through El Paso which is in Texas but at the Texas-New Mexico state border.
``Christ Lav we have run more shit in and out of the US since then, through that door, than Simon has Kopecks.''
``Yes. I think this thing is going to go very smoothly. -And, I have several candidates to work directly under Lev, for you to review, but this one (handing him the file) is the only trained nuclear scientist and NKVD school graduate we have. Comrade Alexander Feklasov. He could enter under normal diplomatic cover.''
Beria handed the Top Secret file to Stalin as if to conclude what he had had to say.
``Proceed. Keep me informed, of course.''
``Of course, Koba. -And, if there is nothing else, I have an appointment with the American Steve Nelson now. He will provide the on-the-ground troops to enable this expanded project I am now calling `Operation Orlov and Son's' program. In English, that will be OOS in code which will confuse the shit out of them. If they ever run across it they are thinking OSS.''
``Yes, I see what you mean OSS and OOS sound suspiciously alike in code breaking. Anyway. Yes, I know Steve. One of our best in Spain as I recall. If he has time bring him in to say hello.''
``Consider it done Koba.''
With his nearly trademark concluding comment the secret police boss was out the door, thinking Nelson would be happy knowing the Boss asked to see him again personally if he has the time. His boss was smiling too; Stalin thinking to himself that ``Felix (Dzerzhinsky) would be proud. Beria may have personal problems but he is the best cop I've had since you left us so early, and without permission'' The Boss returned to his desk and buried himself in a mound of War Five Year Plan stats he had to review.
Stalin Rescues His Allies: Battle of the Bulge
Stavka Hq Moscow
Christmas 1944
``Well, George, What can we do to help?''
``Fucking Pathetic. They waited four years to start their second front, and until we had won the war for them, and then they fucked it up completely. How is this possible? Any fucking Moron would have spotted that Kraut concentration long before it got underway. What the fuck are they doing out there?''
``I think they are settling in for Christmas and New Year's vacations. A lot of their troops are on holiday in Paris and the Riviera. George they don't have the slightest fucking idea what war is all about and this is what happens. Anyway, I can't ignore Roosevelt and Eisenhower. FDR was speaking directly through Harriman to me, and while he is just another imperialist, he is like Jesus Christ compared to Churchill and Hitler. If we don't save them now, they would remember later, and this could then be the first shot in the next war Churchill is trying to rope the Americans into as we speak.''
``Philby again?''
``Of course. Churchill can't have a bowel movement without Philby calling it in. Right Vlad?''
``Unfortunately yes, Koba.''
``But George the truth is we have more spies in London than a dog has fleas. There are so many we have to keep the Army G2 and the Cheka from following each other around Westminster. We get the same message across the board.
``Anyway, I want to tell Roosevelt that despite the horrible weather and everything else we will attack several weeks earlier than planned and attack the Nazi's with roughly 120 armored and mechanized divisions (~1.2 million men, 24,500 tanks, 25,000 artillery pieces and 11,736 Sturmovic tank buster warplanes) within 24 hours, along a 900 mile front from the Baltic to the Balkans. That should do the job.''
``Oh yeah, that will do the job. If they still are willing to fight some Germans. We can't do everything for them.''
``You have no objections George?''
``No. What choice do we have but to save these incompetent boobs from themselves?''
The End in Europe 1944-1945
Stalin's Operation Bagration which expelled the Germans from Soviet territory and liberated east and east central Europe is sometimes considered by military experts to be the greatest successful military endeavor in history! It climaxed with the May 1, 1945, encirclement and storming of Berlin and the Fuhrer's Bunker and the Reichstag
taken and immortalized in film.
Inside Snapshot Stavka HQ Moscow
April 16, 1945
``George I'm concerned that Churchill may prevail and order Eisenhower to the western frontier of Berlin in order to try and squeeze in on the victory. You know what that weasel Churchill is like. He would treat that as a recon-in-force, looking for a way to sneak their way into a cheap alleyway to Hitler's bunker, after it costs us a quarter of a million dead and who knows how much of our resources.''
``I'm worried too, Koba. We could easily stop them but that might kick off the next anti-imperialist war before we are ready.''
``Exactly. -And, that is what Churchill is really trying to do. So we will double our effort. You asked me for command of the Battle of Berlin and I owe it to you George. You can have it. You will use Chuikov of course to lead the actual assault and entry to the Reichstag. That will put the Red Flag over Fascism by May 1st. But, do you agree we should give Ivan (Koniev) responsibility for the defense of the Western entry and also simultaneously send him against Berlin?
``Absolutely. Of course, for a capitalist general it might be personally and career-wise more satisfying to have sole command, but you know Koba I am a communist first and before all else. You're right. This is the safe thing to do for communism and we can't take any chances on those shit-eating Limeys getting in on this --- or the Yanks for that matter.
``Besides the troops will like it. It will be a contest, and my troops, and Ivan's, will be enthusiastic about which Army can kill the most Nazi's and get to that piece-of-shit before the other. It worked for us at Khalkin-gol, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and countless times in Bagration. It will work here.''
``Now, George I know you want to go, and I want you to go and take charge personally of the end of that piece-of-shit.''
``Yes sir. I'm on my way.''
Stalin and Zhukov prevailed as usual and the Red Army did plant the Red Flag on the Reichstag by May 1 (1945) seizing Hitler's bunker, where the Kraut leader had already pulled his own plug. Almost four years exactly since the long awaited fascist assault against Socialism had begun; it now ended dismally for the capitalists and triumphantly for us! It remained to mop up the Japs and that would take the Red Army only a matter of days.
The Eastern Front Revisited
1945 The End for Japan
The Chinese People's Liberation Army and the Soviet Red Army invaded Manchuria in August 1945, as per prior agreement (at the Tehran and later Yalta Conferences, Roosevelt asked Stalin to provide this essential help to the US - Stalin had agreed) and forced the immediate surrender of the Japanese multi-million man occupation force there. (Where the Japanese learned what Deep Battle was all about, as the Germans had learned confronting Operation Bagration in Europe.)
With the captured weapons of the Japanese, the Chinese Reds would be able to finish off the corrupt fascist regime of Chiang Kai-shek in 1945-49. (Plus all the US weaponry sold
to the communists by Chiang or captured by them.)
Despite the atomic bombing of Japan the Nipponese imperialist General Staff planned on continuing the fight. But with Red Army troops invading Japan's northernmost islands and half way through the Korean Peninsula the Emperor decided in favor of surrendering to the Americans. He knew what would happen to him and his class if the Stalinist forces arrived in Tokyo! The outcome: One Front - the USSR vs. USA Globally
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 17: U.S. Establishes Hegemony over the Capitalist WorldThe Lansky Kansas City flunkey, Harry Truman, assumed the Presidency with Roosevelt's death in April, 1945. Truman had been run by Meyer Lansky virtually all his life via the Tom Pendergast gang operation that controlled Kansas City; the way Big-eared Du controlled Shanghai. In fact, when Truman was first elected as a US Senator for Missouri, his Senate colleagues referred to him as ``the Senator from Pendergast.'' Truman quickly became a favorite of the right wing of the Democratic Party, and with Lansky's help replaced progressive capitalist, and US Vice-President, Henry A. Wallace (Iowa), as the Vice-Presidential running mate of FDR in 1944 (Go 4th to Win the War! Was FDR's 1944 campaign slogan; this time the irrelevant VP spot was taken by a national non-entity Harry Truman, Democratic Senator from Missouri). Upon ascending to the Presidency, Truman did as his fascist bosses bid, and reversed FDR's entire foreign policy, within about two weeks (See D.F. Fleming on the speed of the reversal in The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960, 1961, Doubleday, Garden City, New York.) A similar out-of-nowhere non-entity would be used by Russian capitalists to reverse existing Soviet strategy in the USSR itself --- Mikhail Gorbachev.
398Truman would see to making the destruction of the Soviet Union his number one objective. What made this wild fantasy seem possible was the idea that the Gringo Regime had a monopoly on the atomic bomb. -And, although the US was only able to make about one bomb a month by 1947, the US ruling families thought that would do the job. (Stalin knew the US A-bomb production rate; the Japanese did not and had been fooled by Truman's bragging after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about having many more A-bombs to drop on Japan when in fact he had no more A-bombs to drop at all. As a matter of continuing interest, the USA and USSR atom bomb production rate had increased to about one per month on both sides by 1949, with the possible superiority of the USSR in this rate.)
399 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/2011/ABCC999/20110726/499.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ from .docx from author (see ABCs.el) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nilHenry Wallace tried to stop the fascistization of the US Democratic Party and the war-drive of the Truman Administration as Presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in 1948. (Idaho Democratic Senator Glen Taylor was Wallace's running mate) Wallace and Taylor failed, but their candidacy which united New Dealers with Communists (the CPUSA was instrumental in creating this Progressive Party) and Negro's (as Africans were then called; Wallace and Taylor campaigned against segregation in the Apartheid South) did put the brakes on much of what Lansky, Truman, et. al. we're trying to do --- in many ways it was the Progressive Party alliance of progressive and Left forces which necessitated the US ruling families bringing out nutball Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to terrorize the liberals in North America into silence. But by the time this reign of terror against the American people was fully
400extant the Soviet Union was out from under the danger of a first US atomic attack, as they had more than enough nuclear weaponry of their own.
To begin with, Stalin surprised the new US bosses in 1949 with the Soviet Atomic Bomb! Already Stalin had created a buffer zone of Peoples Democracies in East Europe (by 1948.) Then, Red China became The Peoples Republic in the fall of 1949. Even if the gringos had enough bombs they couldn't get close enough to the industrial might of the USSR to use them. By 1950, Stalin was surrounded by friends! -And, he had his own bombs and the means to deliver them (intercontinental rockets.)
Nevertheless, having picked up the gauntlet dropped by the Nazi's, the Gringo reactionaries thought they could still get the upper hand because they had more bombs than the Communists. Korea taught them that they were not going anywhere.
Stalin backed the Korean Communists with the Soviet nuclear umbrella, as he had earlier protected the Chinese Communists by distracting the US imperialists via Berlin, threatening Atomic War in Europe. {At that time in 1949, Truman was threatening to use A-bombs against Mao's advancing armies}. This time, in 1950, British Prime Minister Clement Atlee balked, when Truman said he was going to use five A-bombs on the Korean Communist forces, Atlee saying ``...if you do, you're on your own!'' (The bomb itself had been a joint US-UK undertaking and the British had to be consulted.) When I was in the US intelligence service in Europe (1960-1961) I became personally familiar with all of this history, as part of my work in Great Britain, as I have recounted in my book The Buccaneer.
401Stalin seemed to be prepared to trade A-bomb for A-bomb in the event the Americans used theirs. The Chinese communists continued unfazed and along the road of national liberation --- the first task before they could get on to national reconstruction.
We know now the Soviet Union's production rate of A-bombs had matched in 1949 the USA rate and probably surpassed that of the USA (See the Russian Academy of Sciences 1996 Report: American and Soviet H-bomb development programmes: historical background. [In Physics - Uspekhi 39 (10) 1022 --- 1044 (1996)] As a matter of interest today both the USA and Russia produce 4 new warheads per day.
Having dealt with the Japanese imperialists the Chinese Communists turned their attention to the regime of the fascist Chiang Kai-shek and his new sponsors, the U.S, imperialists; the would-be puppet masters replacing the Japanese. However, there are puppets and there are puppets.
The Green Gang, of which Chiang was still just one member among the elite bosses of this Shanghai crime commission, saw an opportunity to make even more money with the disappearance of their major ally (Japan) and leached themselves onto the US imperialists. Now they really made some money.
Harry Truman would later estimate that Chiang stole at least 22 billion dollars directly from the US Government between 1945 and 1950. Far more than Chiang and the Green Gang had ever made with the Japs. All they had to do was to put up some kind of show for the Yanquis and the trough was open, and did they help themselves! Remember this is when a billion dollars was a billion dollars. A legitimate question could be who
was the puppet --- the comprador regime of Chiang and the Green gang, or the USA?
Chiang bought California Republican U.S. Senator William Knowland (Senate majority leader) for a hitherto unheard of exorbitant amount of cash. With their `bought and paid for' ``China Lobby'' in the US Senate the Green Gang soaked Ma and Pa Kettle for all that cash, and much more down the road. The dumb gringos lived up to their reputation; rubes like my parents kept forking over the cash for ```never give a sucker an even break' Chiang,'' so that Big-eared Du, and his gangster pals in Shanghai could score again, like never before.
From the standpoint of Bolshevism, Chiang was less and less of a problem because he was so busy stealing from the stupid and naïve Americans that he had less and less time to spend fighting communism. Spending most of his spare time looting his own country and shipping the loot and the cash to Taiwan, the Philippines, Switzerland and so forth, Chiang was less and less of an obstacle to the liberation of the country. Thus, as the peace negotiations with the Communists failed (Chiang had to keep a war going to keep soaking the dumb gringos) the People's Liberation Army advanced steadily, freeing province after province, until Chiang (and the Green Gang including, of course, Du) finally had to give up the Golden Goose, and flee for good, to safety behind Yanqui ships, establishing himself (and themselves) on Taiwan, where they proceeded to establish the same type of fascism they had used to rule Shanghai and the rest of China they could get their hands on.
402As we have seen Mao had the weapons of the Japanese that had been captured in 1945, and Stalin's support, and could mobilize the Chinese masses in the millions, so it had always been just a matter of time until the Reds wrapped up the fascist forces in China and established a broad national front government. They did so, in the form of the People's Republic of China, in October, 1949.
In the Countryside
Now the challenge for the Communists would really begin, because China was technologically far more backward in 1949 than Russia had been on the eve of the First World War in 1914. Mao and the Chinese Party politburo understood, even given the great historical task they had just accomplished, in terms of world socialism they were now right back where they would have been in 1927 if things had gone their way then, instead of the way they did go. In other words, the time had come when they would have to face the question of China's technological backwardness and what to do about it.
While the US press went crazy inventing stories about the evils of Chinese communism, because the US bosses now thought they understood, even though the communists were moving in a broad national front way, in the end they would take China along a road similar to that of the Soviet Union. However, the truth was far different. China was as far from socialism of the Soviet type as it was from communism.
Mao and his associates had had decades now to think about Lenin's initial analysis. They were in agreement with it then, and continued to be throughout the Civil War, and now in power it was their task to act on that initial assessment. For the technological situation had not changed for the better, with the possible exception of certain parts of China having been further equipped with constant capital (Japanese industrial plants exported to Manchuria and elsewhere to utilize cheap Chinese labor; the very reason for Japan's invasion of China to begin with.)
Now, the entire agricultural population had to be freed from the Feudal-Fascist regimen it had been living under (outside the Red liberated areas); a 3 stage process that would take them until about 1958. Thus first, a massive agrarian reform was undertaken to eliminate gentry-capitalist owned agriculture, followed quickly (secondly) by collectivization and then finally (thirdly) a super-collective; one we would come to know as the People's Communes. Then, or simultaneously, China would have to industrialize.
In the Cities
Starting from scratch the Chinese communists would have no choice but to begin industrialization in the cities. They knew to start with, that even when successful, 90% of the country would still be in an agrarian setting, (unless the transformation of the countryside, which was underway and much smoother than it had been in Russia, should help in not only mechanizing the countryside, but in the freeing of hundreds of millions for wage-labor in the country towns as well as the cities) and the resulting situation would probably be unrealistically unbalanced. That is, full of inherent antagonistic contradictions among the working population.
Trying to spread industrialization throughout the country was a task that would take 30 years before it would successfully get underway. China's struggle to modernize would take up the remaining part of the 20th century and was all along terribly complicated by attempts of its own New Class to go the route of the Soviet Revisionist bosses. The latter taking control of the USSR, in a slow and sneaking way, the minute Stalin died in 1953. Further complicated because the reality of New Class takeover of the Soviet Union (see Chapter 18) did not become fully apparent until perhaps 1958 to 1960; at least to Mao and associates, who had no previous experience to draw upon. Like the Russian Bolsheviks in 1921 they would have to improvise.
403In the end, the Chinese Communist Party would succeed in finding a new way to speed up industrialization. ``New'' compared to what Stalin had had to do in the Soviet Union, anyway. But only after experimenting with the Great Leap Forward, and then the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, would they find their way. This ``new'' way was initially just the NEP of Soviet times but would be allowed by history time to develop fully. A process which began under the leadership of China's ``Old Bolshevik'' cadre led by Deng Xiaoping. These are other stories for another time and book, although we will pursue it in summary in Chapter 18. In the end the Chinese solved the problem.
The process of completing the industrialization and modernization of the Chinese nation would get underway once again under new CP leadership in the post-1975 (and Mao's death) period and would be headed by Deng Xiaoping. This would amount to a ``return'' to the NEP of the pre-1928 years in the USSR. This time the strength of the socialist world camp would be sufficient to offset the threat of imperialist intervention, giving time for a mixed economy to develop and prosper. Pick this up in Chapter 18.
Stalin Has the First H-Bomb!
As if to allow history a brief respite, Stalin was told on New Year's Day 1953 that he would soon have the world's first militarily useable hydrogen bomb. Stalin died that spring, but the process he had set in motion to make the USSR the nuclear and now thermonuclear, equal to the USA came to fruition over these coming months. This is not
widely known to North Americans who get little more than a daily diet of propaganda, but the American Hydrogen Bomb explosion, November 1, 1952, in the South Pacific was the size of skyscraper and weighed 70 tons! On August 12, 1953, nine months later, the Soviet's triggered their first one, air-dropping the first militarily deliverable H-bomb from an airplane 27 months after that! The Yanks, already checkmated in Korea and aware of Stalin's H-bomb progress, gave up on the strategy for a pre-emptive strike against Socialism.
Eisenhower officially withdrew the US from the Korean War on June 8 1953, only two months before the first Soviet successful H-bomb test (three months after Stalin's death), and a policy of belligerent containment was adopted toward World Socialism. In the US, with the pressure for containing the American people off, for the moment, McCarthy was ``retired'' and a more ``traditional'' form of thought control resumed prominence in US political life.
The 1957 launching of the two Soviet space satellites (Sputnik I and II in October and November) confirmed what the Pentagon thought it knew: the Soviets did have the rocket lifting and aiming capability to launch hydrogen bombs against US targets without ever having to launch a single bomber! I remember this so clearly as we teen-agers in the Boise, Idaho, Astronomy Club, gathered nightly to view the Soviet satellite from the offices of one of our members father's, who had installed a telescope, which he allowed us to use, to witness the rapid, night-time, trans-skyline flight of the Sputnik.
While all this had been going on in the international political and military arena the US ruling families consolidated their mechanisms for economic hegemony via financial engineering of the post-War global monetary system. For example:
``The United States came out of the Second World War as the major and with the exception of Switzerland, the only creditor nation. For the first time since the rise of capitalism, all of the world's trade relied on a single currency and was financed from a single epicenter. Recognizing this remarkable opportunity to achieve unhindered dominance (and to challenge the Soviet Union; a non-capitalist entity which, at the time, the best western economists thought of as a miracle-in-the-making), the United States took upon itself the role of reconstructing the capitalist world. The grandiose project soon acquired two strands.
First, American policy makers were keen to end the dollar's monopoly as the world's single convertible currency. This monopoly was undesirable because a world trade system relying on a single currency (supported by a single real economy which is only a subset of the global economy) is inherently unstable and prone to major upheavals during the unsavory parts of the business cycle. Initially, they toyed with the idea of propping up the pound sterling and using it as a potential shock absorber for the dollar zone. However, with sterling's collapse in 1947, U.S. officials gave up on the idea.
Instead they favored, supported and cajoled the rise of two important supporting pillars for the dollar: one in Europe (the deutschmark) and one in Japan (the yen). The architects were three men: Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Secretary of State James Byrnes and George Keenan. In their eyes, extending credit to Europe and Japan was to become a crucial component of U.S. policy as it would enable these two zones to buy technology and energy products, fundamentally oil, as well as to attract and utilize (often) migrant labor.
404The choice of Germany and Japan seemed entirely logical. Both countries had been rendered dependable (thanks to the overwhelming presence of the U.S. military), both featured solid industrial bases (with ample human capital), and both offered considerable geostrategic benefits in relation to the Soviet Union.
Secondly, the creation of two non-dollar currency zones was to be underpinned by political measures to ensure the parallel creation of free-trade areas within these zones so as to carve out crucial vital space for real economies growing around the new currencies.'' (From, the Global Minotaur, by Joseph
Halevi and Yanis Varoufakis in Monthly Review, Vol. 55 No. 3, July-August 2003.)
Our Problems
Still, a central problem with which we are concerned is the same one that existed when the first worker's government came into existence in 1917. That is, how long will it be necessary to have this highly regimented, constantly prepared, forever alert, rapidly building, military force in the hands of a working class dictatorship. Because, there is no substitute for keeping state power in one's hands, nor for assuring the most rapid continuing industrial and scientific growth, regardless of the political, social and economic sacrifices required to do so; and consequences, once having done so.
Probably workers of the early 20th century, from anywhere in Europe or North America, had never had any choice but to go the Stalinist Socialist route. I mean, specifically, even if workers of the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy or Japan, had been able to seize political power, the level of development of the productive forces in those countries was still far from sufficiently advanced to provide the technological component of the Socialist Mode of Production. That seems clear now. Certainly the capitalist countries then had not advanced enough to create the economy that could produce ``from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.''
I suspect this was not understood in the early years of the century by any of the sincere leaders. We know none of the Bolsheviks prior to October, 1917, would have subscribed to any view other than the one that said (to paraphrase) ``...once workers have state power in their hands and the evils of capitalism are part of history, people will create a paradise on Earth in this country (whatever country.)'' At the most some of them (like the Russians) would have admitted ``...the necessity of linking up with the advanced capitalist countries for technical assistance from workers in those countries, who like us, will have seized political power, and be anxious to help.''
But, the lessons of the 19 teens and the 19 twenties combined with the pre-October real life experiences of Bolshevik leaders like Stalin (and many others who had gone to prison and fought in the Civil War) prepared them to see the world in a less naive, more sophisticated, indeed objective, way. When they did, the Bolshevik leaders realized they had to create the industrial infrastructure needed to support autochthonous Socialism: ``Socialism in one country.'' They had no choice.
Many of the Bolshevik bosses had realized by 1924, perhaps unconsciously, that even if they hadn't had ``no choice but to go it alone'', it was going to take a lot longer than any of them had thought to change the ideological nature of people, suffering from a mental template of selfishness and sadism, raised in poverty, scarcity and oppression for many millennia. Particularly as poverty and scarcity would continue as Worker's Governments poured money into industrialization and defense. No other route than the one that Stalin (and indeed earlier, Trotsky) had proposed for massive industrialization and agricultural collectivization, was available.
-And, when it is all said and done, if Stalin had not done what he did within Russia, the course of history would quite possibly have led all of us into World Nazism. -And, from that the working people might never have recovered. We never should forget that we are free agents; free to win and free to lose.
Our Lesson: The Evil Imprinting of the Servitude Epoch
This by the way is the weak point for almost all contemporary schismatic Marxist
theoreticians. An exception would be Herbert Aptheker in the USA, who recognized the evil nature of the world as currently constructed and in the last years of his life he said so to his Communist Party USA colleagues. The autobiography of his daughter (Bettina) tells us that Aptheker had his own culturally imposed demons which presumably helped him come to this correct conclusion. That is, the failure of schismatic Marxists, to recognize the at-bottom evil nature of contemporary mental imprinting that affects ALL classes not just the oppressing classes.
People are not born with a blank slate --- at least not for long. Imprinting begins with birth and proceeds rapidly apace so that by the time a child is a few years old it is well set in. It is for this reason that attempts to jump into the social organization of communism have failed. That is, first or simultaneously, we need to have the fully accomplished technological gains of the Capitalist Stage firmly in hand.
The founders were right, as usual. Modern communism requires the fully modernized industrial base of the capitalist stage. You either inherit it or you build it. There is no short cut. We know. We have tried. We found out the hard way. It is not our intention to return to primitive communism. From our theoretical standpoint we would be better off sticking with capitalism which is far more advanced in sociocultural evolution, as you have seen in this book. Until the time arrives when we have a fully developed technological base for a communist society we will continue to see all sorts of (historically) left over crimes and injustices in everyday social life. This is not an excuse for what was done to Bettina Aptheker, because there can be no excuse, but it is an explanation.
405US Imperialism on the Rampage
Meanwhile, the gringo capitalists had established a kind of 20th century helotry over Europe. A phrase used by MP Michael Foot to me in the British House of Commons over dinner in June, 1961. (For the details of that conversation see the first volume of my autobiography, The Buccaneer). They confronted communists everywhere with extreme aggression; had no compunction about instituting fascism in their own image throughout the world. Along these lines an entertaining movie entitled Fade to Black was made in 2006 (Christopher Walken, Danny Huston and Paz Vega) about our fellow citizen Orson Welles's 1948 moviemaking trip to Italy. Along the way he became involved in opposing the unholy cabal of the US Embassy, the mafia (Charlie Luciano himself) and resurgent Italian fascists in sabotaging the Italian elections that year. Welles never again could bring himself to live in the USA. The same thing happened in France.
406Running wild and virtually unopposed by the other capitalist classes and countries, the Gringo imperialists' wreaked havoc throughout the 1950's on the people of the world, especially in what they considered their own ``backyard'' --- Latin America. ---And, here they badly stumbled. Perhaps most importantly in Guatemala where E. Howard Hunt, (later of Bay of Pigs, and then Watergate, fame) masterminded the overthrow of Guatemala's first democratically elected government on behalf of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and his own bosses at the CIA, in 1954.
The Cuban Revolution: New Year's Day 1959
It was shortly thereafter that I walked onto the stage of history. I have told that story in the context of a history of the Cuban brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, Che
Guevara and the pantheon of Cuban heroes who learned from the ``success'' of US fascist intervention in Guatemala and prevented the same thing from happening once again in Cuba. (See the first volume of my autobiographical series ``Idaho Smith's'' Search for the Foundation, entitled The Buccaneer, 2003, Jason W. Smith, Writers Press, Boise, 330 pp. The series is available in University libraries across the US and Canada, or can be purchased directly from Foundation Press). Suffice it to say for our purposes that the Cuban Revolution put the brakes on US imperialism, once and for all, ``South of the Border,'' and to a degree in Africa as well.
(Note the dialectical conundrum in practice experienced by the US imperialists: their ``success'' in Guatemala insured their ``failure'' in Cuba --- which in turn led to their defeat over broad swathes of this planet and the current wave of anti-Gringo regimes in Latin America!)
Confronted with the success of the Cuban Revolution, the permanence of Socialism in China, and a Soviet Party leadership rejuvenated, if temporarily, the richest US oligarchs could not decide upon a common strategy for a ``final solution.'' ---And, the Soviet bosses would have to do what they had previously absolutely not wanted to do, namely, stand-up to US imperialism.
As we have seen in my autobiography the US ruling billionaire families would not finally resolve their attitude toward Socialism, among themselves, until they played one last hand. That of the Indochina War. -And, with the rather quick demise of that strategy in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it was all over for the camp that advocated a violent solution to the problem of Bolshevism - at least for the moment.
The Vietnamese Revolution
Ho Chi-minh had been an early member of the Communist movement. Joining the Communist Party of France while in Paris in 1920, as a founding member, and then becoming closely associated with the Comintern, he had welded together a Party and a fighting force that fought the Japanese and established their own government in Hanoi with the end of World War II. Only, of course, to run into French imperialism (supported financially and militarily by the US) that reinvaded Vietnam in 1946 after a successful landing of troops in Hanoi; the French imperialists fighting to win back the colony they had had prior to their expulsion by the Japanese imperialists in 1941. For the moment they succeeded.
However, with the Chinese Communists now butted up against their northern frontier, the Vietnamese communists were able to obtain all the supplies and advisors they could use. The French were defeated by the Vietnamese revolutionary army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, expelled from Indochina, and Ho re-established his revolutionary Government in Hanoi. Big Power talks brokered the French exit and provided for free elections to reunify the country.
The Americans knew Ho would win a free election, so they prevented elections in 1956, after establishing their own puppet regime in Saigon; it would take another twenty years to militarily defeat US imperialism and liberate the entire nation. But the Vietnamese did so, with the help of the entire Socialist Camp and the international communist and working class movement, as we all know.
Consequences of the Defeat of US Imperialism in Indochina
After the ignominious defeat of the vaunted US military forces under the fascist grouping in command of Washington DC by the communists, the not-so-fascist Rockefeller brothers resumed command of the US Government and military, and sent their flunkeys Kissinger and Nixon to make peace with the leader of the World Stalinist Socialist Stage, Mao Zedong, in 1972. The Vietnamese army put paid to the gringos unwilling to get out, in April, 1975, and their silly puppet government in Saigon!
The New World Order as envisioned by the Rockefeller led US oligarchy featured a retreat from the policy of total war against Bolshevism, and an acceptance of what was now reality. Bolshevism on a world basis was here to stay --- Socialism as a distinct system was one which the capitalists of the West, under the hegemony of the US bosses, recognized as irreversible.
For the Americans, without a revolutionary Party with a strong base in organized labor and the working class movement, a retreat from the advances in political consciousness that had occurred during the massive US Anti-War movement (always under the leadership of one or another of the Left parties in the USA --- CPUSA, PLP, SWP, etc.) was inevitable. The Anti-War movement had been fueled by the youth of the nation revolting against forced conscription (the draft) to fight the imperialist war. With the war gone the cannon-fodder was gone too. The revolutionary tide in North America ebbed as the Rockefellers knew it would, and the American people were reduced once again to decades of exploitation by their own ruling class.
However, after 1975, with the pressure off, Socialism in China was able to advance into its Second Stage. The Chinese Communist Party led China into an Advanced Socialist Stage featuring the devotion of its resources to industrialization and the modernization of every aspect of the Chinese economy, in an NEP (Soviet Union 1921-1928) fashion
Meanwhile, although the Soviet leaders still mouthed socialist ideas, they set about doing the opposite. Their ultimate, if temporary, success in 1989-1991, in this regard was simply the end of long program of de facto capitalist restoration that began with the death of Stalin in 1953 and really got underway after 1975.
Other than the liberation of Vietnam and much of Indochina these were the three major consequences of the Great Anti-Imperialist War of the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian Communist Parties. That is to say, revolutionary stagnation in the USA, tremendous advances in Socialist construction in China, the final, if temporary, defeat of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union by the modern revisionists of post-Stalin CPSU variety (e.g. Khrushchev et al.)
We shall return below to a discussion of the current Second Socialist Stage and what comes next. For now let us recap the position of the class struggle for Socialism on a global context in terms of the phase periodization of the Stalinist Socialist Stage.
1917 - 1920 Strategic offensive
1921 - 1943 Strategic defensive
1943 - 1949 Strategic offensive
1950 - 1975 Strategic stalemate Part 1
1976 - 1990 Strategic stalemate Part 2
1991 - 2011 Strategic Imbalance
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 18: (A) The Collapse of Revisionism (c. 1990), (B) U.S. Hegemony (c. 2004) And (C) Global Capitalism (c. 2008)Abstract
The betrayal of socialism in the USSR and its East European dependencies did not begin with the Gorbachev gang or even with the rise of the Mafia. It was wholly a product of modern revisionism and its beginning occurred within weeks of the death of Joseph V. Stalin in March 1953. Without the three decades of preparation between 1953 and 1983 by the modern revisionist leaders of the CPSU it could not and would not have happened.
Mao Zedong warned the international communist movement of what was happening in the Soviet Union in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Exactly what he predicted came to pass as modern revisionism strengthened its hold in the USSR and it those parties it controlled abroad (including the CPUSA under the Khrushchev stooge Gus Hall and gang.) This was brand new territory for the CPC and the international working class movement and the Cultural Revolution in China could accomplish its objectives. But it did buy us time. The Deng solution beginning in 1975 has proven that in backward countries the best way is to keep the new capitalist elements of the social equation above board and open so they can be legally regulated. By keeping the always present second economy open, legal and above board, the level of technological development Marx and Engels required for the transition from the capitalist stage to the communist stage can be achieved, as the Chinese Communist Party has proved. Denying the existence of classes and capitalism in the USSR and Eastern Europe worked against us, not for us, and the opposite has been proven true in China.
407This is not really relevant in the USA and Canada as we have achieved, in our capitalist stage, the necessary technological foundations that the founders of our science required. Here we will be able to move directly to communism through a very brief transitional period (a short period of socialism which will be more of an introductory phase to the Communist stage and the Era of Freedom.) This is science and not speculation nor is it wishful thinking and if you wish to be the scientists involved you need to understand chapters 1 through 13 and that means perfected understanding. Read and study this Handbook carefully.
The actual final destruction of what was achieved under Lenin and Stalin (1917 --- 1953) by the Mafia in Russia and its candidate Mikhail Gorbachev is instructive and constitutes the final part of this discussion on the Collapse of Soviet Socialism c. 1989-1991. In short modern revisionism was the gun and the trigger was pulled by the organized crime elements of Soviet society.
The Story Unfolds
The Collapse of the Revisionist Regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe left in its wake an extraordinary imbalance in the global positioning of class forces. From the standpoint of Bolshevism, getting rid of the labor-fakir institutionalization of revisionism in those countries was a tremendous positive. There is no credibility whatsoever to the idea that the presence of sabotaged forms of industry and agriculture under the revisionist control of what had become reactionary de facto anti-communist New Class dictatorships in the USSR, Eastern Europe and Mongolia, made them worth defending, and now commiserating over. It is not only the organizational form of the economy which determines whether it is ``socialist'' but the intentions of those in command, and the classes upon which they depend. To the degree that Stalinist first economy socialist organizational forms remained by 1985 they were being swamped by de facto second economy capitalism with all the programmatic and ideological and organizational corruption this implied. What was left was just the name Communist. Just the name ``communist'' usurped by Stalin's Russian-East European successors, due to historical happenstance, does not mean they really were communist. Mao discovered this to his chagrin in the 1950's and the not well read or educated Euro-American Left should have learned that lesson long ago as well. The Russians learned it the hard way under the Great Traitor Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 --- 1991 as you will learn below in section A.
408On the other hand, the simple fact that the revisionists were fakirs had often required them to play a positive role in the global class struggle; many times after 1953 (and Stalin's death.) As for example in the defense of the Cuban Revolution. It is this simple fact that makes the less educated Left in the West think (or feel) they have lost something worth having.
We Bolsheviks are far better off with the Putin-Medvedev New Class leaders in power with their open capitalist system at work than we were with that whimpering traitor Gorbachev and his gang of labor-fakirs parading around calling themselves communists. The current New Class government is standing up to US imperialism because they have realized we were right all along and there is no living with imperialism forever. In fact we should expect to see the newly reformed and reorganized Communist Party of the Soviet Union to enter the historical scene once again. No one knows exactly how this is going to happen but mark my words a Second Bolshevik Revolution is on the historical agenda. Perhaps the honest and open New Class leaders, Putin and Medvedev, will enter into a formal alliance with the ``new and improved'' CPSU. That would be the easiest thing for us and we should certainly consider this as the next step forward in that part of the world. Then the CPSU can deal with the second economy according to the Chinese style of the last thirty years and lead the reconstituted USSR (and it will be reconstituted in proper Leninist form no matter what the US imperialists or European imperialists say about that).
409What has Chinese Communism proven is the best way to handle the danger of capitalist restoration in countries trying to build socialism with an inadequate capitalist technological preparation? We will deal with that now in the following thirty odd pages.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European People's Democracies is also the final and definitive collapse of modern revisionism in the international working class movement. It has been followed by the reintroduction of capitalism in a new and even more hellish form in all these countries. Exactly, this was predicted by Chinese Party Chairman Mao Zedong in a series of papers issued during the early 1960's and widely disseminated to the international communist movement via a variety of publications. Those of us in the USA followed Peking Review (now Beijing Review) with avid attention in those years.
Now, some twenty plus years, a full generation, since the collapse of Soviet/East European Socialism (and Mongolia), has passed, we can look back with some confidence that the analysis which follows is correct. With this historical perspective we can reconstruct why the collapse happened in those countries. ---And, why it did not happen in the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Korea. In this section of your Handbook we will divide the discussion of the Collapse of Revisionism into three parts:
Guanlong Capitalism
Tyrannosaur Capitalism
Coup de Grace
Let's get started.
The Soviet New Class
Guanlong Capitalism 1953 --- 1975:
The Classless Intelligentsia in Transformation: Phase I
This is a critical part of the history of the Stalinist Socialist Stage. Understanding what begins to occur with the death of Joseph Stalin and how the New Class evolved, explains the collapse of the Soviet Union. I have approached this matter in three parts reflecting (A) the mild predation form of the post-Stalin (post-1953) New Class in the USS the East European People's Democracies and Mongolia, and (B) the monster form which devoured all the accomplishments of Soviet Socialism after about 1975. (C) The final coup de grace delivered to Soviet Socialism by Mikhail Gorbachev using the CPSU to do the job that all the Whites, foreign capitalist interventionists, Hitlerites and gringo imperialists had failed to do. We will begin with the years of the first predatory New Class phase (~1953 --- 1975).
410First of all, why this particular labeling: Guanlong and Tyrannosaur? The answer: because the monster we all have come to know as the 7 ton Tyrannosaurus rex of Cretaceous times actually began as a fairly small (~150 pound) cougar-sized carnivorous predator in the Triassic period some 100 million years earlier. We call this original little fellow Guanlong after the fossil locality in China's Gobi Desert where it was found. I
think this is a useful analogy, for in this sociocultural case, the relatively powerless New Class Stalin created, and named ``the classless intelligentsia'', (that had been essential to the construction of Socialism in the backward conditions of the USSR, and which he kept in check during his lifetime), began to grow into something monstrous. In other words with Stalin's death the New Class went from being a potentially dangerous small scale predator to something much more fierce. We can distinguish two growing forms of the monstrous New Class: (1) the early small-to-medium sized predator Guanlong form and (2) the truly monster form of its post-Stalin final manifestation.
In summary, the Czarist Russian (technocrat) New Class itself had been the product of long and intricate evolution from the earliest days of class society (as was the case globally in all centers of the origin of civilization as we have reviewed in chapters 1 through 10) and which began some 6000 years earlier. (1) Under Stalin's leadership the Soviet (technocrat) New Class emerged in its ``classless intelligentsia'' phase of early Soviet history. Then (2) it morphed into what at first was a relatively mild predation form. At the end, (3) it transformed into a monster. This final New Class Tyrannosaur form was a lethal all-consuming carnivore of all that was good and righteous in the USSR.
Today, New Class ruled Russia is coming to grips with the inherent contradictions which, as history proves, all class societies must eventually confront and resolve. The way forward for the shattered remnants of the old Soviet Union is being worked out. Mr. Putin, echoing the comment of others, calls the collapse of the old Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and he may well be right. As a KGB career officer he knows what you will know, once reading these sections on the New Class and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In my opinion, our side will require their (the people and Party of the former Soviet Union) internalizing of this scientific account of what happened. As such, the study and understanding of the facts of history is preparatory, to a second Bolshevik Revolution for them, and this time one that prevents this capitalist restoration event from occurring once again in those former Soviet Republics and East European nations. It is also preparatory for you in pursuing your historical task of bringing Communism to the USA and Canada.
411
Learning from the Past, Application in the Present, Hope for the Future
One critical lesson you will see emerge from this analysis is, that the path of bringing the hidden capitalist class of the Guanlong-Tyrannosaur form out of hiding and into the open as the Chinese Communist Party has done since Deng (1975), allows our Party and its State and Government in the PRC to clearly identify the capitalist elements in the nation and regulate them. Something which was impossible in the old Soviet
Union, that is to say, because the transforming New Class was largely hidden from view, denied to exist, it could not be confronted and defeated under the system then extant in the USSR. A brief cursory glance at the multiple English language Chinese periodical internet publications shows us that a constant muckraking of Chinese capitalist and socialist sectors is ongoing alongside a constant rectification movement in the form of teaching and studying Marxism-Leninism and Mao's and Deng's thinking (Collected Works of both are online and available in English.)
Now on to the details of how the New Class underwent its transformation from the rather mild form it had taken when it was very largely avocational and one had his or her day job in the bureaucracy, educational facility, factory or collective farm.
Origins
We have seen how the original New Class of technocrats in the Soviet Republic (and after 1924 the Soviet Union) had two principle components and why. In that review you have seen simultaneously how the New Class emerged in part from the old New Class of Technocrats under the Czarist Capitalist-Feudalist Regime. But, these bourgeois specialists left over from the pre-Revolutionary period, even being supplemented by those finishing college and technical schools in the first five years of Soviet power, were joined immediately by Communist Party generated technocrats (or often wannabe technocrats) who wanted the technocratic positions for their own employment. This was especially true for the three hundred thousand officers and Non-Coms who had served in the 5 ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂý million man Red Army. The latter (Party originating) candidates for technocratic employment won out over the former during the period of the Five Year Plans (beginning in August 1928). In the coming decade they were supplemented by millions more from the new Soviet Universities and Technical Institutes who had proper proletarian or poor and middle farmer backgrounds. By 1938 there were about ten million of them. The old petty bourgeoisie specialists had been swamped out of the picture.
412There was always a capitalist economy even in these years but it was relatively small. Some of it was legal but much was not. The multitude of small forms of exchange and functions of a small-scale economic nature had also to be fulfilled. These functions could best be handled in the second economy (shadow economy, black-market economy) way, and in fact in practical terms could be handled in no other way. For reasons of expediency and efficiency, as long as this secondary capitalist economy was not threatening rule by the Party, Stalin and his (e.g., Molotov's) Government(s) allowed it to continue.
The Doctor's Plot
Toward the latter part of Stalin's reign as General Secretary he received a letter from a citizen (you will recall anyone could, and millions did, write to the Boss whenever they were pissed off. A very large staff read them all and certain types of letters were routinely taken to the Boss for his personal examination and reply) claiming that corrupt medical doctors were doing a series of illegal things. These included charging unlawful fees in order for citizens to obtain medical care, medicines, hospital admittance, and other things of this nature. Stalin investigating via Beria found this complainant's allegations to be true, common practice, and furthermore began to see that the second economy --- the capitalist sector previously small and non-threatening --- was growing by leaps and bounds. There were a variety of reasons for this but for purposes of this Handbook suffice to say the Boss decided to fully investigate the growth of this second economy (a de facto secret capitalist economy) and to conduct a thorough purge of the entire phenomenon. This would have involved a massive press campaign against this sub-rosa corruption as had characterized the thousands of trials of local agricultural tyrants in the 1930's and a complete public expose of the entire second (capitalist) economy phenomenon. Stalin died before he could get this anti-capitalist campaign underway.
413Trotskyist and other imperialist historians have made a mountain out of this fact ever since calling it ``the Doctor's Plot'' implying another irrational and paranoid adventure was in the making by Stalin, just before his death, such as the irrational and paranoid plots they claimed the Boss had made against them in the 1930s. We have already reviewed the truth about the purges of the 1930's (chapters 15 and 16) and won't rehash old ground here.
Guanlong Capitalism Grows by Leaps and Bounds
An excellent summary of this secret capitalist ``second economy'' is provided by the historians Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny in their book Socialism Betrayed, Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 2004, International Publishers, New York, 230 pp. I recommend you read it especially beginning with Chapter 3. Let me simplify some of the terminology.
To begin with there are numerous ways this second economy is referred to in scholarly works (black market economy, private economy, illegal economy, shadow economy, and a half dozen others) but for our analysis it is best to refer to the second economy for what it was scientifically, which is to say a capitalist economy. In the USSR it always had two components: a legal component and an illegal component. However, since the entire legal economy is where virtually everyone worked --- that is, the first economy --- what inevitably had to happen was that everyone with any kind of private
enterprise was taking things from their job for usage in the capitalist second economy whether the activity was legal or illegal. Illegality was therefore inherent in the way in which the capitalist economy in the Soviet Union worked. This illegality was always there and grew and grew, mostly unchecked, in the 37 years from 1953 to 1990.
Khrushchev and his crew enabled the capitalist economy to undergo this rapid expansion in a variety of ways but the point is that with the death of Stalin, and the removal of Beria as Boss of the Cheka, the entire campaign to isolate and liquidate the capitalist second economy was itself isolated and liquidated. The showdown came June 18 --- 21, 1957 when the Politburo (named at this time the Presidium, voted 7 to 3 and one abstention [neutral]) voted to kick Khrushchev out and his policies. The fat boy managed to get a full Central Committee meeting called immediately thereafter with just enough Moscow Party bosses and allies present (Khrushchev had been Party Boss for Moscow before being elevated to Chair of the Politburo) to reverse that decision! Instead they kicked out the key anti-Khrushchev Politburo (Presidium) members, including the leaders of that seven man group, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, labeling them the ``anti-Party group''. Khrushchev held on another seven years until even the compromised bureaucrat (second economy advocate) members of the Central Committee had had enough of his bullshit and threw him out. (His failure to counteract US imperialism over the Bay of Tonkin incident being the straw that broke the fat camel's back.)
414
The Party Disarmed
This was not the last time the Soviet Party had a chance to correct the capitalist course the nation was on but it is symptomatic of a fundamental change in power at the top of the Communist Party. In a little over thirty years after Khrushchev's consolidation of power capitalism would be fully restored. Note that the major reason this secret restoration policy was successful was because the Party denied that there were classes in the Soviet Union and that capitalism in any form even existed in the USSR. If you don't recognize a growing dinosaur about to devour your system you can't fight it. The Party had permanently disarmed itself. The true anti-Party New Class leadership had succeeded in reversing Stalin's entire domestic policy in only four years. (On the other hand as D. F. Fleming pointed out in 1962 (in The Cold War and its Origins, Doubleday, New York), it had only taken the most fascist reactionary section of the US ruling class two weeks under Truman to reverse FDR's entire foreign policy.)
415Let us look at some important statistics.
Guanlong Capitalism Unleashed
The backbone of Russian capitalism and the primary demographic of the Soviet Republic and early Union had been the farming classes. In 1926 theses classes constituted 83 percent of the Soviet population. By 1975 the total farming population had been reduced to 20 percent of the population. Furthermore almost all of that 20% were devoted first to their collective farms for regular paychecks and only secondly to their private plots (3/4 of an acre). Simultaneously, the industrial working class and those workers involved in the construction and transportation industries had grown from a total of 5 million persons in 1926 to 62 million by 1975. Of the latter some were involved in private market legal selling, service providing and exchange but this was clearly the type of income we have come to call ``supplemental'' to their regular paychecks. Truly illegal private capitalist activity existed by 1953 but had been closely watched, regulated (policed) and even utilized (MOCR style) --- (all this aside from the fact we have stipulated; namely, that legal capitalist activity always implied some degree of illegal (theft) activity as persons involved took from the public teat for private benefit at least some of their tools and/or resources. In a manner similar to the way secretaries in North America take from their day job employment, office supplies, for their home businesses.)
416Soviet law allowed certain forms of hiring of labor (household domestic staff for example) and certain kinds of private entrepreneurial activity. In this latter case the boundary between legal and illegal was arbitrary by nature and not difficult to get around. Persons employed in agriculture (collective farmers) were allowed to cultivate up to ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂþ of an acre for private gain. Certain other non-farming elements were accorded the same privilege. By 1974, only 17 years after the Khrushchev Central Committee victory 1/3 of collective farmer work-time was spent on these plots (ten percent of national GDP work-time.) One can see that in the case of agriculture this system invited corruption inherently in the form of obtaining (stealing) seeds, fertilizer, equipment, cattle feed, water and of course transportation. You can't really blame the farmers because where else could they turn to get what they needed since all of this was publically owned as part of the first economy. They did not have the option of going to WalMart or Home Depot to get these things.
417Contrary to capitalist propaganda personal property was never endangered by the socialist order. Included in the category of personal property was housing --- or at least if you had a house before the revolution (and were not a class enemy) or built one with your own hands after the revolution it was your legal personal property. Thus, housing became another source of growth potential for the second (capitalist) economy. By 1975 ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂü of the Soviet city population lived in such private housing. Inevitably this led to corruption in the form of renting rooms (charging rent was illegal) as was common place in Cuba when I visited eight years ago; hiring illegal construction activity by underground firms (such as the illegal Mexican labor component in the California housing industry, without which that industry as currently constructed could not function). Keep in mind that the Home
418Depot option being non-existent meant that `building materials' had to be stolen from public resources.
In mining, and in the oilfield, individual entrepreneurs could mine and drill provided they sold to the Government (similar to the way in which all gold mined by prospectors in States like Idaho had to be sold to the US Government until recent years.)
Note that bribery of regulatory officials and policemen was an inherent function of all of this second economy activity as one could easily declare any specific act a crime otherwise.
Doctors, teachers, craftsmen, tutors, dentists, veterinarians and virtually any professional could legally sell his or her services, within certain constraints --- easily avoided or evaded.
Any person could sell their personal private property and who was to say how a used item had been originally obtained?
Even so all of this legal capitalist activity did not grow in and of itself into its Tyrannosaur form under Socialism. In fact, it declined from about 22% of the total economy in 1950 to about 10% in 1979. (At least, that is until Gorbachev began wholesale introduction of capitalist economics in 1985.) The overall size of the second economy grew because the first economy by which we measure the percentages just quoted was growing massively, so the second economy while percentile smaller was much larger in gross terms. Yet even this would have made the second economy no more than a significant portion of economic activity. No. We must look elsewhere to see how the New Class of the First Economy expanded their economic and political power beyond their utilization of petty bourgeois entrepreneurial activity. We don't have to look very far. What did grow was the illegal criminal component of the second (capitalist) economy!
419
Mafia! The Rise of Organized Crime
With the death of Stalin and removal of Beria in 1953 ``illegal money-making presented a much greater problem than legal activity. Illegal activity eventually assumed an astounding array of forms, eventually penetrating all aspects of Soviet life, and was limited only by the boundaries of human ingenuity. The most common form of criminal economic activity took the form of stealing from the state, that is, from the work places and public organizations.'' (Keeran & Kerry, 2004:55-56)
In addition to the petty theft we have already mentioned wholesale theft began to occur. True wholesale activity in which large scale systematic thefts on docks and from
air and land transport cargo warehouses, ships, planes and trucks became common place. These required retail outlets. Criminal swag organizations exactly as in the USA and Western Europe emerged. These activities required law enforcement (police, judges, and so forth) functions to be suborned and disciplined to mafia type operations.
Four Curses of the Modern World
Communist historians not to mention historians in general remained blissfully unaware of all of this --- both in capitalist countries and most especially in socialist ones. At bottom this is why when we list the four deadly curses of the modern world we must include naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé as the number two curse. For those of you with an interest in these sorts of things I have included in the modern world's four curses, and in the 1980's in this order of importance: (1) modern revisionism, (2) naive ultra-leftism, (3) Trotskyism and (4) anarchism. Think of the eight curses of Ancient Egypt as the analog.
{Today (2012) modern revisionism has shot its bolt and its treason in the USSR and Eastern Europe has completely discredited it so that it only threatens parties out of power or in coalition (and then from the sidelines as a kind of joke.) As a consequence I have moved it back to third position and this leaves moving up (1) naïve ultra-leftism (2) Trotskyism (3) modern revisionism and (4) us usual the syphilitic lesions of anarchism on the working class body politic here and there.}
Institutionalizing Criminal Illegality
Managers in the Soviet Union had a long history of bad acts and we reviewed many of these early ones in Chapter 15. Then at least the bad acts (e.g., managers not reporting but hoarding supplies) had been part of paving a road of good intentions. No longer. Now these bad acts were pure criminal endeavors aimed at lining ones pocket to the max, including: black market selling of large quantities of goods reported as spoilage, or lost; lay-away plans for the well-to-do buyers of the best merchandise (goods, food) and to hell with the public (these buyers paid special tips to those so engaged); putting goods on ``waiting lists'' invited the practice of selling list positions to highest bidders who paid to go to the top of said list. Speculation was invited when higher income persons could buy more than what they required for personal consumption for purposes of selling at a later date at a much higher price. Organizing of the repairs and services for houses, cars, sewing and tailoring, moving furniture and transporting household contents, became major sources of illegal profit making.
420
It was not long until large scale tract-housing construction operations were organized by the Russian mafia so that personal home construction, always legal for an individual worker, now was transformed into the completely illegal capitalist spec-housing construction business, almost identical to the way it was and is conducted in the USA! Large scale bribery of police and judges was essential here. Nor was this large-scale production restricted to housing.
By 1975, tens of thousands of illegal factories had been built nationwide on the QT. Every conceivable type of commodity began to be produced in these illegal factories after 1953, including clothes, shoes, household appliances, and a variety of small items such as sunglasses, handbags and gloves, knick-knacks. Such large scale underground illegal production could not happen in a cottage industry way and had to take place through the back door of legal above ground factories. These factories meant workers were hired and exploited for their labor-power exactly as in the USA. Capital was accumulated through a variety of typical capitalist investment house practices, and as in New York City every cop on the beat and every judge on the bench were suborned.
421A bourgeois class structure emerged in the Soviet Union, with New York 5 Family style super millionaire Russian criminal family clans at the top. Big bourgeois Soprano style boss families as middle level management and your basic hood and one man (or one-woman as in house-hooking) house-based criminal enterprise at the bottom.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union played the role of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in New York's Italian boroughs. Going on as if everything were fine except for a few persons who had lost their way.
Needless to say a simple Stalinist police operation would have prevented all of this and or reversed it once underway. But, that is precisely why the anti-Stalinist Khrushchev government was so absolutely essential to the rise of the secondary economy in general and organized crime in particular. All of the Khrushchev bullshit about Stalin's crimes and violations of socialist legality was nothing more than an invented cover for this counter-revolutionary process of restoring capitalism. They started out with the elaboration of Trotsky's lies and then took on a life all of their own as in the fat man's, last hour, ``secret speech'' to the Party Congress in 1956. All of the rewarding of mentally challenged authors, and a variety of Russian misanthropic iconoclastic malcontents, by the Western cap press, was nothing more than encouragement of this on-going criminal activity. (In 1985 Gorbachev turned the Soviet press over to this worst-of-all-persons crowd). All that was required was to reach a ``critical mass'' and have the right mafia man in the right place to give socialism in its proper form the coup de grace. It came in the form of the assassinations of Andropov and Chernenko and the subsequent rise of Gorbachev. However, we are getting way ahead of ourselves.
422
We will continue this story in Part II Tyrannosaur Capitalism 1976 --- 1990: the Classless Intelligentsia in Transformation: Phase II (below and in Chapter 27)
The Soviet New Class
Tyrannosaur Capitalism 1976 --- 1990
The New Class in Transformation: Phase II
We have reviewed some details about Guanlong Capitalism, but we have also seen in its mildly predacious form it did not seem to be a clear and present danger. We should have seen that it was. Andropov believed it was, and as KGB chief he had led a fight against it, not only in the Party but in many government institutions in Russia and especially in the Trans-caucuses. Unfortunately, try as he did in the short time he had, he could not make the other Party leaders as sure of the inherent danger it posed to the very socialist nature of Soviet society. In other words, it was not yet inevitable that the great Soviet experiment would succumb to capitalism. Yet, because the Party failed to recognize the growing class structure based around the second economy the great tragedy of the 20th century did unfold. It came in the form of the monster of Tyrannosaur Capitalism.
423I cannot over emphasize the importance of your grasping the equally great historical irony that our side had withstood incredibly bad odds from Day One. In this Handbook you have seen how we defeated the Whites and their foreign capitalist interventionist allies; how we defeated all of the plots of the foreign capitalist regimes against us in the 1920's and 1930's. You have seen how the USSR led the fight worldwide for the destruction of Hitlerism by transforming Rapallo from a German-Soviet alliance into an English-speaking-World-Soviet alliance, and then withstood the assault of gringo hegemonized world capital when the US picked up the gauntlet dropped by world fascism. The USSR not only withstood that imperialist assault it took the lead in every scientific and engineering area. All of this accomplishment of the first economy however was to be subverted by the newly emerging bourgeoisie within our own, (socialism's own), homeland, via the second economy.
424As I say, in 1976 it would not yet have been too late to reverse the trajectory toward capitalist restoration except for three things. In the event (the 14 years, 1976-1990) these three factors weighed decisively against the ability of reformers (Andropov, et. al.) in the Soviet leadership to be able to get the USSR back onto the correct road.
First of all the capitalist second economy was largely denied by the very Party, (its Government and State) that would be required to excise it. Try as he did Yuri Andropov could not convince the Party that the second economy was a clear and present danger to the very Soviet experiment they were leading. Perhaps the reformers didn't try hard enough. Perhaps the enemy had grown simply too all-pervasive in class structure and was just better organized. But the lesson is that the Party must get capitalist economics out of the shadows and into the open world if it is to be contained.
The PRC has led the way in this regard. Perhaps, therefore, what happened in the USSR was necessary in order to teach all of us this critical lesson. It did give China the time it needed to prevent the capitalist sector of their economy from duplicating its success in the PRC. Even a cursory glance at the many English language pages from Chinese publications on the internet will show any observer that China has a complete and total grip on the capitalist sector. Furthermore that the positive aspects of emerging capitalism have been harnessed to the needs of the proletarian Party and the classes it represents.
Second, back to Russia and the Republics, the small exchange and service supply functions which had justified leaving the second economy in place all along continued to be important and it would require some approach to the organization or at least control of small exchange we had not yet seen, if the second economy as constituted was to be replaced. This was still the pre-computer era and the option of computerized total planning and centralization in government large-scale planning was just being born in the most advanced capitalist countries. (For example, in the work of H. Ross Perot, and EDS, in Dallas.)
Thirdly, throughout the USSR, the mafia component of the second (capitalist) economy was prepared to push their plan through, and in fact did so. To counter our state apparatus they used their gangster tactics to eliminate opponents; that is to say those who indicated they might be prepared to take steps to liquidate the second economy.
The Mafia Doctor's Plot: the Assassination of Yuri Andropov
Taking the last point first, the most dramatic example of mafia power came in the form of the case of General Secretary Andropov. The assassination of Andropov is the case in point.
Yuri Andropov was by this time an Old Bolshevik, and following Brezhnev's death in 1982 he was elevated to the General Secretaryship of the CPSU. There can no longer be any doubt but that his sudden illness (within three months of assuming his new position) was organized by the mafia. The medical plot worked and played out over the
coming year like a spy movie thriller. The bottom line was that the plot reduced Andropov's fifteen month tenure to one of constant illness before he finally succumbed. Thus history, in the event, records the ``Andropov Year'' (1982-1983) as the last chance the Soviet Party had to rectify the otherwise inevitable course of capitalist restoration the Soviet Union was unwittingly following. After that it was all over for Socialism as it had come to be known in the USSR, at least for the time being.
Why was Yuri Andropov (1914 --- 1983) so dangerous to the Mafia and the entire second economy class? (1) First because he was a highly prestigious Old Bolshevik. Although he had joined the Party nearly a generation after the October Revolution he had been mentored by some of Lenin's top men beginning with Otto Kuusinen. (2) Second because Andropov embodied all the personal traits admired by the Party: austere living, dedication to work (a Stalin-like workaholic personality), constant self-education, and he had (3) an impressive history of having dealt successfully with the most difficult assignments the Party had to offer, including the 1956 mess in Hungary. (4) Fourth, because he had a proven record of policing effectively against the Second Economy as KGB chief over the previous fifteen years (1967-1982), and (5) most importantly as a danger to the mafia, and because he had proposed the complete and final uprooting and liquidation of the entire second economy. As General Secretary he would have the power to do just that. Accordingly, as far as the Mafia was concerned, he had to die!
425Note (1) that the Cheka (called KGB by this time), of which Andropov was boss for the preceding fifteen years, was the structural equivalent in the Communist Party of the Jesuit Order in the Catholic Church. Also, note (2) Andropov's close association with the theoretical purists of the Party from the date of his joining the Bolshevik Party in 1936. From these earliest days he had the good fortune to be directly mentored by the Old Bolshevik Otto Kuusinen, and his association with this group continued over the following fateful years, especially with Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov. (3) He had an absolute personal hatred of the criminal element in the Soviet Republics and an outstanding record in breaking it up, in and out of the Party, in his years as KGB boss. Finally, (4) he was one of the few highly placed Politburo leaders who admitted, and in fact emphasized, the existence of the Mafia and the scope of its activities (meaning the entire second economy.)
426`` as head of the KGB, Andropov took responsibility for the crackdown on dissident intellectuals, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Andropov's willingness to defend these actions openly and to withstand the criticism of Western commentators and such Soviet intellectuals as Yevgeny Yevushenko, strongly suggested that Andropov would have avoided Gorbachev's blunder of turning the media over to anti-socialist elements. (Emphasis added, Ed.) As head of the KGB, Andropov also showed courage and conviction by investigating corruption in high places. On his KGB watch, the entire Presidium (Politburo, ed.) and government of Azerbaijan were dismissed for corruption,
bribery and embezzlement. Moreover, in 1981, Andropov's deputy exposed and arrested some of the `black market-ridden la dolce vita crowd'' that included Brezhnev's daughter and son-in-law. Even investigating crime in the General Secretary's family did not daunt Andropov.''' (Socialism Betrayed, Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, International Publishers, New York, 230 pp. this citation pg. 40).
Leading to the decision to elevate Andropov to the position of General Secretary had been the fact that the Politburo (Presidium) and the entire Party had been impressed with his theoretical preparation for tackling the problems of constructing Socialism in the USSR, which included liquidating the second economy. Belatedly many in the Party from the leadership on down were beginning to see the entire second economy phenomenon as a serious threat to Soviet socialism (or at least some of them had.) Those Politburo and Central Committee members who did not yet see the second economy as a clear and present danger still thought Andropov's analysis of the problems of the first economy was correct, and that he could set things straight there. Andropov led the way in his call to reform the first and second economies in the following theoretical way:
427(1) There were the internal discussions among the High Priests of Soviet Socialism, to which Andropov had added:
(2) Three papers also delivered as speeches in
(i) November 22, 1982 (``The Better We Work the Better We Will Live'');
(ii) December 21, 1982 (again on the same topic); and
(iii) On June 15, 1983 (``Analysis of the Existing Situation and Landmarks for the Future''). ---And,
(3) A longer treatise on the matter also in 1983 (``Karl Marx's Teaching and some of the Problems of Building Socialism in the USSR''), the latter marking the Centennial of Marx's death in 1883.)
The Mafia read these papers and listened to these speeches and if they had had any doubts, they now knew that their future depended on killing the man who proposed to do away with them (the organized crime element) and the very conditions they required (the second economy) to continue operating as the bosses of this real economy, now becoming bigger than the first economy as we shall see in a few statistics below. I recommend that serious students of this Handbook read the thorough summary discussion of Andropov's analysis in pages 41 --- 46 in Keeran and Kenny (2004).
The Assassination of Konstantin Chernenko
The Mafia had its candidate to be the new boss of the USSR. But first there was Konstantin Chernenko, a poorly educated and rather stupid person, to be gotten out of the way. Having acquired some considerable expertise in murdering a top Party leader without leaving obvious footprints the Russian Mafia saw to it that a man they could not stop becoming General Secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, also passed rather quickly (thirteen months, 1984-85). Getting rid of Chernenko was done so smoothly that it seems to me identical to the way the conspirators in the USA got rid of Bobby Kennedy after the sloppy mess in Dallas assassinating JFK.
Then the evil genius himself was in position to do the final job of liquidating socialism (Mikhail Gorbachev 1985-1990). After all a system that had withstood all of international capitalism's plots so far (1917 --- 1985) required that a coup de grace that could only be administered by the CPSU itself. At long last the Mafia had a Government as an equal partner as Hyman Roth (Meyer Lansky) would have said (Godfather 2)
Last Man Standing: Gorbachev 1987-1991
The final turn toward capitalist restoration began in January of 1987 and within four years it was completed. You should know by now if you have read this book as a cadre should be reading it, that this takeover of a Government, by a Mafia, is not a new thing in the 20th century. Capitalism had been saved in many countries precisely by the illegal section of the capitalist class taking command of the bourgeois cause at precisely the right moment to prevent the proletarian cause from succeeding.
Exactly this had happened in Spain as you should recall from Chapter 15. Exactly this had happened in China, as you should remember from Chapter 14. These are just two examples but they are examples which directly affected the proletarian global cause and were noteworthy herein for that reason. Exactly the same thing was now happening in the USSR. In each of these cases the specifics were different but in all these cases the underlying class realities were identical. In all cases the cause of the bourgeoisie was at a crossroads. Existing strategies of bourgeois leaders had left capitalism's future in doubt. Only a dramatic takeover by competent (mafia) capitalists could save the day.
The New Class in Jurassic Park: 1985-1991
Now let us look at the statistics relevant to the emergence of the New Class in its new Tyrannosaur form under, Brezhnev, Chernenko and Gorbachev. Note that with the
death of the chief reformer (Andropov) not everything went immediately straight to hell. I would take five years.
The institutionalization of study of the second economy was a continuing fact and one of its many forms was the Economic Research Institute of the USSR State Planning Commission. In her 1990 monograph ``The Shadow Economy in the USSR'', a leading expert on the second economy Tatiana Koriagina, compared the total amounts of legal earned income to the total amount of money being expended (spent and/or saved.)
The Growth of the Monthly Salary of Workers Compared with the Growth of the Total Size of Money Spent on Goods and Services and Saved in the Savings Banks (S/S) in Billions of Rubles Monthly
1960 1970 1975 1980 1985 1988
Salary 80.6 122 145.8 168.9 190.1 219.8
% 1960 152 180 210 236 273
Total S/S 103.2 223.2 329.9 464.6 590 718.4
% 1960 216 320 450 572 696
Overall Koriagina said that statistics for the entire economy showed that the second economy was growing at a much more rapid rate than the first economy, and faster than these selected area statistics indicated. The second economy had grown by a factor of 18 while the first economy had grown by only a factor of 4 or 5. The 1988 total of money spent and saved was nearly seven times greater than the total amount of money earned, in the first economy. How could that be?
Obviously what Brezhnev had said ``none of us live on wages alone'' was true. That excessive amount spent and saved had come from the only place it could come from and that is the second economy: legal and increasingly illegal. Class power, and thus political power, was shifting dramatically. The question of legality was now an academic one. Clearly the present was full of danger for capitalist restoration. By 1985 only the most determined Party police and propaganda assault could have saved the USSR. Instead the Soviet Union got the great traitor Mikhail Gorbachev who enabled the New Class form of capitalism we witnessed emerge in 1990 and himself was followed by another traitor (Boris Yeltsin) who outlawed the Communist Party itself!
``Taken together, a variety of monographs provided a kaleidoscopic view of the second economy during the Brezhnev years. Private food vendors sold goods valued at 35.5 billion rubles a year (21). Soviet barbers in state owned barbershops customarily collected ``very high'' tips ``in effect transporting the transaction into the SE [second economy] (22). The home production of grape and fruit wine and beer, the illegal resale of state beverages, and the sale of stolen ethanol, accounted for as much as 2.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 1979. (23) By the late 1970's, the black market sale of gasoline by drivers of state-owned cars and trucks allegedly accounted for between 33 and 65 percent of all gasoline sales in urban areas (24). Privately rented housing brought illegal landlords an estimated 1.5 billion rubles in 1977 (25). Tips, bribes and payments for private services (such as religious ceremonies) associated with funerals involved more than four times the amount of money spent on official funerals. (26) Prostitution and illegal drug sales constituted another part of the second economy. (27)'' (Keeran and Kenny, 2004:57)
428Part of the changing nature of the class structure was the concomitantly changing nature of technology and the social organizational system extant. Even the perhaps 30% (1989) percentage of the population with income derived primarily from the second economy still had first economy jobs. The rest of the population (70%) whose primary income was from the first economy still participated at one level or another in the second economy, if in no other way with what Western capitalist economists call ``disposable income.'' (Of course, many persons within that 70% also operated small second economy businesses from home.)
Back to the Founding Fathers
In this sense the operation of the second economy brought ongoing stability to the Soviet Regime. As late as 1989 some 96% of the national population (the Party was constantly polling) were all in favor of the Soviet system. The most common comment being, to paraphrase, ``what we have is the best system in the world despite all its problems and we could solve these if we went back to the founding fathers'' (in this case meaning Lenin and Stalin.) Sound familiar?
Seduction Enabled and Promoted
The second economy had always provided those consumer items the first economy could not provide (given the Party's emphasis on heavy industry, steel, aluminum, electricity, etc., and then on light industry devoted to increasing overall production --- e.g., trucks and tractors.) Furthermore the increasingly prosperous Soviet
citizenry had more and more disposable income to get the second economy things it wanted. Why? Because the first economy guaranteed them a cradle-to-grave annual income, covered all medical and educational as well as communication and transportation expenses. What they had monthly was largely expendable (disposable) income! ---And, as Gorbachev turned the press and media over to the most reactionary elements in the country the citizenry was being enticed with knowledge about consumer items many had never even heard of before. They had the money to get these things and anything one wanted could be obtained in the second economy after 1985, if not before.
The Party Succumbs to Corruption
The statistics prove that the Party was inundated with every conceivable form of bribery, extortion, subornation, and as a result its high moral character was not only reduced but it was largely destroyed. ``Believer's'' in the doctrine of Communism as developed by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, and Joseph Stalin were reduced to kids and Old Bolsheviks, much as Christianity had been reduced to children and old women in the cap countries. This affected the CPSU from the bottom to the very top as the corruption of General Secretary Brezhnev's own family proved. Once the Party was thoroughly corrupted by the Tyrannosaur second economy it was only a hop skip and a jump until it could be used to pull the trigger in assassinating the Soviet Republic. That is exactly what happened in 1989-1990.
429
Coup de Grace
Finance is the gun in class politics. Politics is knowing when and how to pull the trigger. In the case of the assassination of Socialism in the USSR the financial (class) basis was the complete transformation of the Second Economy from an adjunct of the first into its driving component. The end of socialism (the first economy) was guaranteed when the now corrupt Party (CPSU) and its corrupted mode of production in the Soviet Union, as the gun, was placed in the hands of the ``pistolero'' Mikhail Gorbachev who fired the shots that did away with the last enemy Soviet capitalist mafia bosses confronted --- i.e., the Soviet state and government itself. In so doing, Gorbachev did what Hitler had failed to do. In the meantime, for better or for worse, the lessons of the second economy and the traitors it spawned in and out of the Party, and how it and they succeeded in transforming socialism backwards into capitalism of an even more hellish form than had existed before Bolshevism would have to be learned elsewhere.
430
The International Learns from the Soviet Tragedy
These lessons were not lost on the Chinese Party. In fact the Soviet collapse only confirmed the correctness of the policy of controlling capitalism which the CPC had adopted after the failure of Madame Mao and her group to get production moving in China once again. The CPC had embarked upon a totally new road with regard to how to deal with the second economy in its own country ten years before Gorbachev took power in March of 1985. What had happened in the USSR because of the failure to face up to the fact of a de facto capitalist growing sector of Soviet society was proof in the minds of the Chinese Party leaders that the road they had pioneered was the correct road. Rather, ironic in a way, that Lenin's idea of protecting Socialism (i.e. the Soviet Republic and later Union) via a Chinese buffer had proven correct in the end --- except that China had now become the homeland of the World Socialist Stage.
431The Vietnamese, being as well led as they were, soon followed China's lead. The Cuban's in a much more dangerous geographical position vis a vis US imperialism had to take a slower road and only in 2011 did they make the big jump to the Chinese model and avoided the terrible mistakes in the Soviet Union by proceeding very carefully. Korea was stuck in an increasingly dangerous stagnation as its own internal structure delayed its transition to the Chinese model even longer than the Cubans but as of this writing they seem to be about to make that move.
To the Soviet Party, and to the International Communist Movement, Gorbachev's March 1985 assumption of power as General Secretary gave the initial outward appearance of ``everything is going to be alright after all.'' How wrong that assumption turned out.
The Trojan horse: Mikhail Gorbachev 1985-1986
The Mafia had not assassinated Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko because they were playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette. Big time capitalists of the New York Five Family variety, which is exactly what we had at the top of the second economy by 1980 in the USSR, don't take chances and act recklessly when their entire family structure and the class behind them, their lives and their way of making a living, are on the line. Furthermore, the Russian Mafia bosses were far better educated and thus made much more intelligent decisions than their Italian counterparts in New York had ever done. ---And the Russian Mafia bosses had Ph.D. consigliore not trigger men as advisors and numbers one and two. No, the Russian bosses did what they did because they had a Trojan horse waiting in the wings. ---And his name was Mikhail Gorbachev. The removal in rapid succession of these two General Secretaries (Andropov and Chernenko), after Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev had however unwittingly
432cleared the way, by putting the First Economy into a tailspin of stagnation, and this was no accident. The Mafia high command (equivalent to the US national crime commission) was confident in their Trojan horse because they had had their man under their wing virtually all of his life. The only time Gorbachev was not physically under their direct influence was when he was in college in Moscow. They knew their man and he knew what he was to do.
Mikhail Gorbachev was born in the year 1931, in a farming village named Privolnoye about 124 miles from the city of Stavropol, in the Stavropol Region of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. This part of the trans-caucuses was where so many Bolshevik leaders had begun their careers. The city of Stavropol was an early example of Soviet industrial success and wheat farming supplemented by sunflower cultivation was the agricultural mainstay. The Stavropol area had undergone collectivization along with the rest of the Soviet Union beginning in 1928, so that was the only social organizational form of agriculture Gorbachev had ever known. Gorbachev lived through the German occupation too young to participate in the war as a soldier (ten to fourteen years old) but not too young to observe all the suffering of his people and he witnessed directly or indirectly the deaths of at least seven of his relatives as the Germans raped the countryside and the city of Stavropol.
433In 1950, five years after wars end, he graduated from High School, and a collective farm stint as a tractor station employee. He had earned the preparatory degree and as a consequence of his outstanding work running a combine in the fields he received the award of the Red Banner of Labor. With these recommendations in hand he was accepted into the Lomonosov State University in Moscow. At LSU he received his degree in Law but was never a practicing lawyer, and instead went into professional Party political work upon graduation. Working his way to the top he would become the first All-Union top Party boss (now called General Secretary) since Lenin (who had different titles but not General Secretary) with a college degree.
Gorbachev's Party career was centered for the 23 years after college graduation in Moscow, in Stavropol, where he obtained a second college degree (in agronomy) and specialized in leading the Party effort at mechanizing agriculture and developing the industrial infrastructure, building vacationing resorts, as well as overseeing many of the rest of the Government tasks of his Soviet Region. In 1970, at the age of 39, he was elevated to First Secretary of the Stavropol region which encompassed about 2.4 million people at that time. Simultaneously he was elected to the Supreme Soviet (the federal Congress). In 1971 Gorbachev was co-opted onto the Central Committee of the CPSU, a big step up for a 40 year old person. Seven years later (1978) he was appointed chief of the Agricultural Department of the Central Committee and had become a protÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂégÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé of Yuri Andropov who was also originally from the Stavropol region. This latter relationship gave him the authenticity of having been directly mentored by the Old Bolshevik
434generation even though he was of the ``classless intelligentsia'' New Class. In 1979 he was elevated to the Party's highest authority, the Politburo. Within ten years he would oversee the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the outlawing of the CPSU. It all began along these lines in 1985 after as I say, the deaths in quick succession of Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko.
Nothing in Gorbachev's public Party and Government career could have made his colleagues suspect disaffection from Marxism-Leninism or a tendency toward social democratic thinking. Nothing other than the fact he had traveled widely in Europe and was influenced by Czech and Italian Communist Party thinking. This experience was not uncommon trait among this new class generation of Bolshevik leaders. What he did have, which unappreciated until it was too late, was a lot of exposure to the second economy and its privileged de facto capitalist classes. This Stavropol part of the RSFSR second economy was bigger than the second economy was in any other part of the USSR with the exception of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic which the Stavropol Region bordered. Outwardly, Gorbachev gave every expected sign of being as orthodox as Andropov, and far more bureaucratically capable than hacks like Brezhnev and Chernenko.
435Upon taking the helm Gorbachev started out by referring to Andropov's initial November 22, 1982 speech on the economic problems in the USSR, and apparently taking it as the keystone for his own administration. He gave the impression of wanting to begin again where his mentor had left off. Nothing could have been further from the truth as the disastrous next five years played out.
External Causation (Conditioning Causality in Practice)
Within the arena of international affairs at precisely the moment the Carter-Reagan offensive against the Socialist system was at its high point Gorbachev began making a series of concessions which only weakened the Soviet position. Under these two capitalist regimes the die-hard US ruling class strategy of rolling back Soviet socialism at any cost required a Stalin-like class struggle attitude --- tit for tat --- massive reinvestment in heavy industry and defense industry. Gorbachev did exactly the opposite. Let us look at what the capitalists did to subvert the Soviet Union.
(1) As we will see in the chapters on US imperialism (23 through 28) the North American colossus had complete and total control over Saudi Arabia after World War II and this meant over most of the Arab World's oil which also meant most of OPEC's oil. Working with that tool in hand US imperialism drove down the world price of oil (being sure that the Saudi oil spigot was turned on at full production meaning low prices.) Overnight this cut Soviet foreign currency reserves by 50%. In hard dollar terms this meant that the 20+
billion dollars in annual foreign currency accumulated in the USSR was reduced by 10 billion.
(2) Simultaneously the US imperialists picked up the gauntlet against Poland (with the CIA AFL-CIO Solidarity front organization) and Afghanistan (creating the Al-Qaida Jihadist movement it directed against the most progressive government Afghanistan had ever had or would ever have for generations to come) which required another ten billion US dollars or so equivalent in rubles to be sent to both of these countries. Suddenly the USSR was back in pre-collectivization (pre-1928) levels of financial capability. (See Chapter 15)
(3) Also, simultaneously, the US ruling trillionaire oligarchy continued its policy of making relative peace with the PRC as the price of breaking up socialist solidarity with the USSR on its eastern front. The Chinese had no objection to being left alone. Undoubtedly they saw the gringo approach as a temporary rapprochement in pursuit of the Rockefeller et al overarching objective which was their decision to first bring down the Socialist country most competitive with them for global domination (as it had been since the end of World War II effectively preventing gringo imperialism from achieving its principal international objective of total global hegemony.) So, while China was no military or financial threat to the revisionist leaders of the USSR it was of no assistance either. The imperialists had succeeded in dividing the socialist camp in half with the majority of its population (the Chinese) unengaged.
436(4) During all of this the international communist movement not to mention the even broader international working class movement went into stagnation, confusion, misdirection, as years of revisionist control resulted in a Party membership uneducated, unknowledgeable, with dishonest leadership, self-interested pandering bureaucrats for leaders. (The CPUSA being an archetype example of all of this. The contending parties such as Progressive Labor and the RCP confused and uneducated also went immediately off onto the naïve ultra-left path which initially took Madame Mao as their leader. Everywhere else the communist movement splintered into multiple parties so that Italy with what had been the largest West European party split into three parties. Again and again world-wide the same was true.)
437(5) Economic direct sabotage of the USSR's industrial plant by the US imperialists went on with the long, intricate and stupid naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé of the Soviet's Gorbachev leadership.
(i) US imperialists purposely sold defective computer chips to the Soviets to sabotage everything those chips were to be inserted into.
(ii) Faulty industrial equipment was purposely created and shipped to the USSR as part of the gringo collaboration in ``opening up'' the Soviet Union via ``trade.''
(iii) Sabotaged blueprints for gas turbines were created by the imperialists (using the CIA) and sold to the Russians.
Primary (Internal Causation): Gorbachev Proves not to be
What He Appeared To Be
Gorbachev initiated a series of economic policies which quickly showed an antithetical approach to what had been outlined by the great theoretician Andropov. What he called restructuring (perestroika) took the factor of centralization as the key problem facing the Government and his programs began dismantling what was in fact the most successful part of the Soviet system. Using anti-corruption measures as a cover (and some of the initial assaults on Party and Government bosses were correct and had been initiated by the Cheka under Andropov) to dismantle key bureaucratic institutions such as the Ministry of Instruments (where Gorbachev fired 1000 technical workers), fired 50,000 industrial managers, fired one third (50+) of the first and regional and district secretaries, fired 14 of the 25 Central Committee department heads along with their staffs and often obliterated their functions. 40% of the USSR's ambassadors were fired. Over half of the Politburo's full and candidate members were dismissed. Gorbachev had both disarmed his opponents and dismantled the Party and Government structure in his first three months.
438Simultaneously, Gorbachev began to turn the media over to the worst enemies socialism could imagine within its own borders. Contrary to his history of ideological orthodoxy he now turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Everything was wrong here not the least being the almost overnight introduction of capitalist concepts of ``the good life'' which most Soviet citizens were only vaguely aware of. This precisely at the time that the US imperialists had stepped up the massive radio broadcasting into the USSR encouraging all sorts of sedition, spreading all sorts of envy creating jealousy about living standards. Then Gorbachev enabled the entire US radio propaganda campaign by stopping the jamming! Hitler in Moscow could not have been worse.
Theory and Method I: Causality and Process
It is time to review our theory and method. ---And, in doing so we should always begin with dialectical materialist epistemology (the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism) and the first principle therein is that primary causation must always be sought internally not externally. That is to say, for example, while an environmental change may trigger a specific event, the way in which the phenomenon involved
subsequently evolves, (that is the locus of the primary causation) is determined first by whatever a phenomenon's internal structure may be. Of course, the internal structure (and changes within it) may have triggered the event change in question; it is the internal structure of the phenomenon in question which determines how the processual interaction is going to play out. In other words, environmental causes (in this case the international social environment is as much of the environment as the Earthly natural environment) can only be secondarily or conditionally causal. In real world terms the reaction of hunting and gathering advanced palaeolithic Bands to the environmental change at the end of the Pleistocene was often migration during part or all of the year from the areas drying out (e.g., the Great Basin USA). The reaction to a heat wave of a modern capitalist society in the same area (e.g., Las Vegas, Nevada) is to turn on the air conditioning and continue as usual. It is critical for you cadre to first of all get this epistemological scaffolding in place so that your construction of the social process is itself correct. Unlike bourgeois historians and social scientists that have never started correctly you must always start correctly.
439The next step is to get our general theory into the reconstruction. Our general theory is that of historical materialism. We know that humanity unlike previous biological forms adapts to its environment culturally. Culture being the buffer between biology and the environment. Here is where we depart from all the other (all incorrect) views of society and its culture and their history. Archaeology in particular and anthropology in general has proven that humanity has socially and biologically evolved through a series of cultural Stages. At the moment the globe is evolving from capitalism and transitional socialist Stages to the Stage of Communism. This is scientific fact written into stone as certain as Darwin's proof that biological forms evolve as a consequence of natural (one form of which is sexual, another climatic) selection acting on variation within species. Variation itself established by errors (i.e., what we call mutations) in the replication of DNA which carry all hereditary data in all living things on Earth.
440As I say in the case of human social and cultural (sociocultural) evolution the phenomenon being studied is culture. Culture is the totality of learned behavior which in its general manifestation is always structurally composed of (1) the mode of production and (2) its superstructure. In specific anthropological terms that means changes in the (1a) relationship between the forces and (1b) relations of production (i.e., technology and social organization) are always accompanied by an effected change in (2) the superstructure (i.e., ideology) and/or vice versa. That is what culture is. It is the evolution of culture and not the evolution of genetic biology which defines humans and their development. Biology in humans is the hardware and culture is the software. Over the course of many millions of years the latter changed the former so that our species has evolved through three distinct biological (species) stages --- we reviewed these in the first few chapters of this Handbook. But through all of these biological forms from Homo
441Australopithecus through Homo erectus and finally to our current Homo sapiens culture has evolved just as certainly through its own distinct stages and according to its own internal laws of causality and process. This is basic Marxism but one can never get too basic in science to remind us to review the elementary building blocks of our science. This is especially true when we are trying to reconstruct sociocultural evolution in process as we are when we examine the events of the last two decades in the evolution of the transitional stages of Socialism.
Application
As I say the foregoing is elementary Marxism, and it is all the more important at this point, because to understand the collapse what happened in the USSR and its East European dependencies (People's Democracies) established in Joseph Stalin's cookie-cutter way (Chapter 13), we don't want to be all over the page. We must begin not by looking to external (environmental factors such as US led capitalist aggression against the USSR, that can only be conditionally causal epistemologically), as important as they were, but instead we must look first to internal factors. We must analyze the collapse process first at the general level of the evolution of the three components of culture (technology and social organization and ideology) ---And then we must have a specific theory of collapse. That must be a theory based on class analysis. Why class analysis? Because we know from our general theory that in the Servitude Epoch it is class struggle which is the primary internal source of causation (the prime mover; the primary cause; the internal essence of the mode of production; the originator of the superstructure (ideology) extant.) It was the growth of the second economy and the capitalist classes behind it which doomed the USSR.
442In other words, in this case it was the Soviet Union's primary internal structure of class division --- the third stage New Class itself --- which was the prime mover --- that is, the locus of primary causality. The first source of failure to prevent socialist collapse was in failing to admit that the Soviet Republic (and from 1924 forward the Soviet Union) always had an internal class structure. The final source of failure to prevent socialist collapse was in always failing in this regard and its counterpoint which was the false assertion (when it was made) that classes and class struggle in the USSR had ceased to exist --- whereas in reality class division evolved and deepened throughout the history of the Soviet Union.
We can divide the history of that class struggle into two parts. ---And, in fact, we have reviewed the emerging Soviet Union in historical terms sufficient for the task at hand in chapters 13 through16. Chapter 17 prepared us for this discussion by taking us through the Post-World War II years of USA/USSR jockeying for global supremacy
(capitalist/Stalinist socialist jockeying) and in chapters 23 through 28 below you can follows the details of the evolution of class struggle within the USA itself. For now I shall summarize the outlines of the evolution of the class struggle within the Soviet Union.
The First 36 Years of Soviet Power (1917 --- 1953)
The Mode of Production (Technology and Social Organization)
To begin with, in the history of the mode of production in the Soviet system you will recall that the Bolshevik Revolution was a proletarian revolution in intent (and led by the proletarian Party) but in practice as Lenin pointed out all along, our revolution was a bourgeois revolution of the farming masses at the beginning. He means that the farmers being petty bourgeois (small capitalist farmers) in the main and all bourgeois, if we include the large capitalist farmers (middle and big), then the agrarian bourgeoisie were the bulk of Bolshevik support at the beginning and this made it a bourgeois revolution. It is for this reason the Bolsheviks were successful as Lenin points out (that is the Bolsheviks marched in Lenin's words with the mass of the Russian population). The Revolution liquidated the Feudal Parasite nobility and city magnate land-owners, and in the aftermath of Bolshevik seizure when state power was in our hands we saw the liquidation of the Rich capitalist farmers. This left by 1922 only small and very small capitalist farmers.
443To continue with the agricultural setting, we had a situation in 1922 in which 90% or more of the Soviet population existed in capitalist agriculture; some of the middle farmers became rich farmers once more, and as we saw they were given their old name of Kulaks (Fists). These kulaks were liquidated as a class beginning in 1928 in that as a class they were rounded-up and sent to Soviet Central Asia or Siberia to begin again as common farmers and not allowed to return for five years. If and when they and/or their offspring did come back they were specifically excluded from participating in the collective farms and this meant after 1928 excluded from farming. Upon return they would have to find another way of earning a living which under Bolshevik economics meant the Government would have to find some non-farming place for them to work or get a higher education. Otherwise they might as well stay where they had taken new roots.
444Simultaneously, within the urban population there were the true proletarians, now employed by the Government, and we reviewed the growth of NEP and its subsequent transformation into all Government enterprises under the Five Year Plans in Chapter 15. However, simultaneous to this growing urban proletarianization via Government
employment in all key industries of the first economy, there was also a growing urban second economy.
The latter began as largely a black market economy under War Communism. Then huge sections of the second economy became legal under NEP. At the same time as (a) a legal second economy capitalism was allowed and in fact encouraged to thrive there was a (b) necessary second economy in the shadows. However, the line between the two was rather arbitrary in that they both handled all forms of small exchange that backward Soviet Russia and associated Soviet Republics could not possibly handle as part of the First economy. For that reason this (b) second economy shadow portion was allowed to exist by the Party and its Government and State (police).
In the 1920's there was warfare between the old bourgeois specialist managers and the new Old Bolshevik wannabe managers that was finally resolved in favor of the latter by the edition of millions of new college and technical school graduates absorbed into the managerial ``classless intelligentsia'' New Class. This swamped out the old bourgeois specialists and created a vested interest New Class in the Soviet System that initially made the system very stable. Simultaneously, however, there was this growing shadow second economy class with a distinct traditional petty bourgeois mentality (exactly as characterizes the petty bourgeoisie in capitalist countries).
The growth of this petty bourgeois shadow second economy class was kept in check by (1) the Stalinist police and by (2) the reality that there was very little disposable income available to the working stiffs and their managers in the first economy. Without money to spend on things in the shadow economy, that economy was very restricted in size and scope, by objective financial reality, in a way analogous to the way a ``governor'' restricts rotation in machinery. Scarcity acted as a sociocultural economic ``governor'' under Stalinist socialism.
The Superstructure and the Ideological Class War
But throughout all of this Soviet history there were distinct social classes because there were distinct differences whole classes of people had in their relationship to the means of production and the subsequent articles of production in distribution. The class war is always fought out in the ideological arena as fiercely if not more so than in the industrial arena. In the Soviet Union the first feature of the ideological class war was that the Party constantly exhorted the nation toward classless society. Sometimes the overzealous Party intellectuals insisted that the Soviet Union's legal structure had actually eliminated classes, and to the degree this latter absurdity was actually believed, this was self-delusion of the worst type and certainly not Marxist nor Leninist. This is the
445origin of the denial of classes and class struggle which would eventually be the death knell tolling of the bell for the Soviet system.
The reason for this fatal attraction to the line that ``the ideal'' was ``the objective reality'' goes back to the beginning of Bolshevik power. Regardless of its utility at the beginning it became the drug of wishful thinking. A drug that surely as morphine can go from a wonderful pain reliever in an emergency to a lethal addiction. An ideological drug that dulled our Party's senses to what an objective observer from another planet might have considered an obvious path to self-destruction.
Why? What do I mean by that? How mechanically did it actually come to pass?
In the beginning (after October 24-26 1917) there was little the Bolshevik Party could do beyond keeping campaign promises about land to the farmers and abolishing ranks in the Army, except cosmetic things. For example names were changed of just about everything. Ministries became Commissariats. Officer ranks were democratized in title --- meaning rank names such as the traditional lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, brigadier, major general, general etc. became platoon commander, company commander, battalion commander, regimental commander, divisional commander, army commander and so forth. This was a democratization of titles from individual ranks which carried in Czarist times many social privileges to descriptive job titles. Capitalist press slogans were proletarianized. But cosmetic changes were about all a working class government could do if the objective reality of a highly industrialized capitalist substrate with the corresponding mass proletarian population did not exist. Art form over substantive reality was the core of the ideological war and conducted by Bolshevik propaganda.
446You may recall that from Day One of Soviet Power Petrograd State Radio was broadcasting 24 hours a day the new laws and declarations of the Soviet Government. Yet, even the radio producers looked at the entire edifice they were constructing over the radio as a ``model to be copied by a successful worker's state in the future.'' In other words, they did not expect they would be able to hold onto state power. They thought of themselves as latter day (Paris) communards leaving behind a much more advanced model of what a worker's government would be like than the one left behind by the Paris Commune after its liquidation.
Everywhere the ideal was propagandized throughout 1918 as the civil war raged. That propaganda was very visible in the form of art and graffiti which the Party managed to put everywhere by mobilizing the art communities of the country and wannabe artists from the youth of the Republic. Red flags decorated everything from government buildings to railroad trains as often did portraits of the Revolution's leaders.
But, as far as serious social change was concerned there was not that much that could be done beyond propagandizing the ideal. Consequently as Marx speaks of in Chapter One of Volume One of Capital, in Servitude systems such as capitalism ``the material relations among people appear as social relations between things.'' In the transitional period under Bolshevism what happened occurred in the most common delusional way. In other words, the desired material relations among people were pictured in the apparent social relations between artistic things. Propaganda substituted for reality. Not in all minds of course but in too many of them.
Throughout the nation the ideal was propagandized, as it should have been and had to be for the Party to hold power based on its moral high ground. But the objective reality behind the ideal was much different.
Note: We want to recognize that the nation changed rather quickly from a geographically small Republic about the size of the original Russ (landed estates of a feudal oligarchy of Lords and Ladies within a few hundred miles of a center which became Moscow) to the entire breadth and scope of the Czarist Empire. The Bolsheviks destroyed and dismantled the latter and we now reassembled it in our own image. All of that within about seven years (1917 through 1924).
War Communism created a few model communities in the territory under Soviet power but they did not amount to much more that Owenite social communities such as had emerged during the 1800's in the USA. They were not much different than 20th century hippie communes. The mass of the population, albeit the subject of a constant literacy campaign that was quite effective, still plowed the land with wooden implements behind oxen, horses and people and lived in a not much more advanced way than a Neolithic community of 10,000 years earlier. Yes the landlords were gone but beyond that not much had changed except for the constant propaganda urging the masses toward the socialist ideal. Only after the collectivization and five year plans got under way in August 1928 did anything resembling a future socialist society begin to form on the land.
447In the cities while workers now owned the factories small exchange continued in exactly the same fashion as before (except that petty bourgeois activity was now largely illegal and thus part of a second, officially unrecognized but very real economy). The Government now owned all the stores where people could legally buy things, if they had the money or the ration coupons, but these stores were terribly inadequate in that they never had enough of anything, both under NEP and under the Five Year Plans (if for different reasons).
The schools made the most determined departure from capitalist culture as did the arts (which now included motion pictures --- Lenin described movies as the greatest art form in human history.) This was true because it was here the Party could actually do
some very material things in terms of instruction, textbooks, audio-visual aids, literary works, posters and movie making.
The point you 21st century cadre want to take from this exposition is that the ideal was so sought after by the Party that its honest members tended to delude themselves into thinking that the ideal was the reality. Much the same as honest church going Christians may delude themselves into thinking that the ideal they ascribe to Biblical teachings is in fact the way in which people in their community relate to one another. Cynical members of the community however notice that no matter what the petty bourgeoisie says on Sundays their day to day business Monday through Saturday features the exploitation of man by man, the lowest forms of chiseling out a penny or a kopeck, and is the mirror opposite of Sunday school fairy-tales. The Eagle Scouts, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, meet the Bloods and Crips.
448Certainly Karl Marx and Frederick Engels took this as their starting point and it is for this reason they concluded that as long as mankind lived in a system of Servitude relations (slavery, feudalism and capitalism) that freedom was impossible except for the very few at the top of the heap. That is why they referred to all previous forms of society as comprising The Era of Necessity. The great promise of the last stage of the Servitude Epoch (capitalism) was that it unleashed truly great productive powers. So great that people could imagine a day when their technology would have advanced to the point where all things could be provided to all citizens according to their needs regardless of their ability to make a contribution. But mankind could not advance to the next stage (modern communism) without this technological foundation of capitalism having been passed on. Once it existed then and only then would it be possible to restore the ancient order of primitive communism in social life (true egalitarianism) --- this time on the advanced technological mode of production created in the Servitude Epoch and especially in the final stage of that epoch --- i.e., capitalism. Then it would be possible for humanity to enter The Era of Freedom.
449This keystone scientific discovery is the first great discovery Marx and Engels made --- it is the entire basis of what we call historical materialism --- and it is the recognition of this truth which separates us from all other social thinkers (all of whom take one or another incorrect departure when they fail to begin from this fundamental and elementary scientific truth.) No real Marxists have ever disagreed with this fundamental discovery, although many have tried to make up for the lack of technological preparation in some social organizational way. For example all of us Bolsheviks tried to make up for the lack of technological preparation in Russia and its associated Soviet Republics and in Red China with proletarian dictatorship via our Party and its State (police and army) while we proceeded to build the industrial foundations we should have inherited, if we had moved lock step from advanced mature capitalism into socialism, via the use of state power (police and army) to enforce our will. We did not inherit what we needed
450anywhere and to this day we have not yet inherited what we need from capitalism. Everywhere we have seized state power the industrial and mechanized agricultural infrastructure has been far from adequate --- in fact desperately primitive. This is why we have always said that one cannot build communism without having first on hand (or at least well on its way to completion) the industrial and mechanized agricultural advanced mode of production built in the capitalist stage (or in practice built by us under the Party's dictatorship over society in a transitional ``socialist'' stage.) This is elementary Marxism that cannot be avoided or evaded and which must be taken as the starting point in any serious discussion of building communism.
The Soviet Union did not have this in its first 36 years. Rather for us under Soviet power it was a constant struggle to get the minimal technological preparation on hand to allow our armed forces to conduct successful wars of defense and offense, (e.g., concluding the First World War; the civil war in the Czarist Empire; wars of jockeying for position between 1922 and 1941 such as that in Spain and China; the Second World War; the continuing war with the capitalist world under US hegemony after 1945). When Joseph Stalin died the Socialist World Camp was completing its first transitional Stage. That is, the stage of Stalinist Socialism which as we have seen is a transitional stage. Specifically a transitional stage between the Servitude Epoch and modern communism equivalent to the Stage of Simple Chiefdoms in the transition from primitive communism to the Servitude Epoch.
451
The Second 36 Years of Soviet Power (1953 --- 1989)
The Mode of Production (Technology and Social Organization)
The death of Joseph Stalin marks the approximate beginning of the end of the first transitional period between the Servitude Epoch and modern communism (at least one more distinct sociocultural stage would yet be required.) It also signaled the end of Leninist-Stalinist Old Bolshevism. The actors were old and dying. And along with the end of this stage (or at least of the initial phase of this first transitional stage) also came an end to the second economy in its initial shadow phase.
Coming out of the shadows, the second economy now began to grow and in the succeeding three plus decades it grew and grew and with it so did a New Class with a distinct petty bourgeois mentality. This New Class growth of a petty bourgeoisie engaged in the same kind of petty bourgeois activity it engages in in capitalist countries, also occurred alongside the evolution of the Stalinist ``Classless Intelligentsia'' New Class. The latter having been purposefully created by the Party to fulfill the necessary management functions inherent in having to do what we had expected (in theory) to inherit from capitalism. This ``classless intelligentsia'' New Class continued to evolve in
the second 36 years of Soviet power from its primordial form of minimal privilege in the first economy, to join with and intermarry with the true petty bourgeois second economy class (and their adjunct utility in handling the multitude of small exchange needs of the first economy workers and their managers could not handle or had not handled) into something quite different. That is a third stage New Class.
This newly emerging Third Stage New Class was comprised of the First Economy classless intelligentsia and the simultaneously growing shadow new class of petty bourgeoisie. In the process the newly emerging far richer petty bourgeois components (and now often middle and big bourgeois) second economy principle earners began to emerge as the dominant partners because they had most of the money.
There is a rapidly growing academic literature on this entire phenomenon and Keeran and Kenny have done an excellent job in citing that literature which is why I have recommended their book (Socialism Betrayed, Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union) to you as your next essential reading on the New Class after Stalin. This will help you cadre learn how the second economy and the class behind it managed to change both the mode of production and the ideology arising away from a socialist and into a capitalist direction.
Notes for the Less than Naïve Working Class Leaders in North America
I have not mentioned in this section the role of organized crime in the capitalist countries in staging similar coups in the latter part of the 20th century, and in a book of this nature I shall not except to say that the less naïve among you should already have taken note of the FBI-Mafia combine that formed under Jane Edgar Hoover and Meyer Lansky. I have discussed this in Volume One of this series and I refer you to that book The Buccaneer. The assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK in the early to middle 1960's should appear to even the most naïve among you as suspicious and to those of us who have spent a lifetime in the secret world are dammingly obvious. Many observers believe that the latter were a de facto coup d etat. Only the complete and total failure of gringo imperialism's attempt to subdue Vietnam led to an unraveling of the whole thing.
452You should also reflect upon the fact that Richard M. Nixon's assent to power was organized crime's idea and the only real way to carry on the Vietnam War given the failure of their boy LBJ to do it his way. The removal of Nixon over Watergate was not because of two cub reporters from the Washington Post, as admirable as their muckraking turned out, but because the ruling oligarchy had lost control of their man. When they decided to chuck the war after the Tet Offensive they ran into opposition from the very criminal Lansky gang that had pushed it and still hoped to regain everything they had lost in Cuba and elsewhere, and now much more than that. Meyers's men were men who did
not see the setback in Vietnam as anything more dangerous than the military fool Westmoreland believed it to be (who still believes he won the Tet battles and would have won the war had he been allowed to do so.) An epoch struggle for control of the US government got underway and involved now far more than Cuban rub joints. By now it involved the entire military-industrial war profiteering complex which had become the very center of US capitalist profit making. What came out of Watergate was a strategic realignment within the US ruling class with the Mafia in a distinctly second place and a wiser if somewhat chagrined Rockefeller-Mellon-Morgan-DuPont leadership determined to keep them ``always second to us, if we allow them to continue to exist at all.''
453I mention the USA because this is a book for North American cadre. But similar things happened subsequently throughout the capitalist world of West Europe and Asia (Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines.) When the time came to stage what in earlier decades would have been a Mafia type operation over 9/11 the gringo oligarchy no longer needed the Mafia. The Bush gang had proved they could handle it, and in the event they did an acceptable job of pulling it off. (Albeit many questions have been and are being asked but if they could get away with the Dallas assassination more or less than they could get away with just about anything.-And, they have, over 9/11, at least so far.)
My Experience with the Russian Mafia
Furthermore, the gringo oligarchs had handled the USSR via support to the Russian Mafia, who they gave complete access to the USA, beginning with the acceptance of the Russian's running-at-large members into the States and resettling them in appropriate parts of New York, New Jersey and associated postage-stamp states of New England and especially in the West Hollywood-Encino locale in Los Angeles. When they got too far out of line in southern California a few federal court cases, such as the Smushkevich-Jovavich medical fraud case below and then the gasoline tax cases got the Russian mafia in the USA back into line (refocusing them in the 1990's on petty fraud and large scale subprime mortgage fraud).
In April of 1990 I met Michael Smushkevich in MDC LA (Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles) where I was being held on a phony Federal securities case (SEC and Postal Inspectors) against me and Jason Smith Petroleum Corporation, filed for political reasons. On May 14, I scored a rare and substantial personal victory in court over my enemies and was on the way out the door when I agreed to help Smushkevich in his medical fraud case. For the next year and a half I designed and carried out the private investigation arm of the defense of both Smushkevich and his partner Bogie Jovavich from my home in Huntington Harbour.
You will notice that this was occurring during the very end of the Soviet period so I had a good chance to observe the Russian Mafia (which was almost exclusively Russian Jewish mafia) during this period in Los Angeles and across the USA and in the process to tangentially view their operations in the disintegrating Soviet camp and across Europe. This is far beyond the scope of a Handbook for young communist cadre but it has given me a rather unique, among communists, insight into the issues herein (especially in this Chapter.)
The Russian Mafia sabotages Chernobyl, 1986
On April 26, 1986, the Russian mafia hacked into the computer system at Chernobyl and overrode (shut down) the ``fail-safe'' protocols. They then sent the electronic computer orders to do a series of things to the reactor core which led to its meltdown and the subsequent first true world nuclear disaster (if we exclude Three Mile Island.)
What was the purpose? Well it wasn't just to get their hands on incredibly valuable land in the vicinity, which they did. No, the real purpose was to strike a fatal blow at the confidence of the Soviet people in their government. Because, people of all walks of life and of both the first and second economy had always concluded, at the end of the day, that ``what we have is better than anywhere else in the world''. Sound familiar? ---And, as aware as they were of all of the failings of modern revisionism which had made Soviet socialism simply a farcical caricature of true socialism (in anyone's book) it was at least a government which had won World War II, defeated all of the Soviet Union's enemies and established the most progressive welfare state in the world (and in world history.) The failure at Chernobyl was designed to inflict, as I say, a final fatal blow to that confidence. It worked.
454Finally, the Chernobyl disaster cost the USSR 18 billion rubles at a time its economy was already reeling because of Gorbachev's financial sabotage of the first economy. It was a knock-out punch following the hard left to Soviet confidence.
It didn't work out so well for the mafia in Los Angeles
Note: That the Smushkevich-Jovavich case would have concluded successfully for them in its first phase had Michael Smushkevich not lost his nerve and plead guilty. Worse, he and the Feds hammered Jovavich into doing the same thing. Within days both of them tried to withdraw the plea. I knew the Judge (Hatter) in this case and knew he never would agree to that and he did not.
These gentlemen had experience in ripping-off the Soviet and East European governments which were much more difficult to handle than the US Feds. They had a series of the most modern medical clinics in the entire USA and they used them to run scans of roughly $10,000 on every patient who entered, with insurance, for any ailment (such as a common cold.) They fed an incredible number of people in southern California into these clinics and actually did perform the services. The feed done by telemarketing.
My defense was designed on the principle that this is exactly what was done routinely for wealthy people in the USA but when it came to common every day folk the government was not interested. This would have been a winning combination in court. What jury (properly selected) would say that what was good for the rich was not good for the middle class? Defense counsel would tell the jury if you want your health care needs determined by the Post Office why don't you just go straight down there the next time you are sick? (The postal inspectors were the cops in this US Attorney for LA's case).
The case came to the Feds attention when large numbers of persons on the lifetime public teat (e.g., military families from Los Angeles to San Diego) who have insurance provided by a Government insurance company swamped that company with claims. By the time the US Attorney's office for LA pulled off a TV designed spectacular arrest sealing off Smushkevich's home with troops, SWAT, helicopters and TV cameras, and the US Attorney got on TV claiming a $1,000,000,000 (one billion dollar) medical fraud case which he said was the biggest in history (you know how they stage these so-called news conferences, like a James Bond Hollywood premier for their own political purposes) the two defendants had collected about $70,000,000 (seventy million dollars) of a billing substantially larger.
455Cutting to the chase, in the end Smushkevich turned rat on his partners in the US and Russia (and Lithuania and others in Europe --- it was from a Lithuanian bank I got my money in the years I worked for him by wire transfer.) He got out. His partner had too much self-respect and would still be inside except for his daughter (the actress Mila Jovavich) who made a lot of money with Bruce Willis (the movie Fifth Element) and spent a million of it at the 9th circuit to get her father a new trial. The Feds had lost interest by that time and accepted the inevitable so Bogie got to enter a plea to a lesser charge (rather than put himself and the Feds to the trouble of a second trial) and got ``time served'' (about 7 years) as his sentence. Today he lives happily at a location I will not divulge.
456So the world turns. With one final comment. These Russian Mafioso's are very well educated and much smarter than any other mafia in the world with who I have had experience. They make the Italians look like a sorry joke when it comes to organized crime. The world has not seen the last of them yet and will not for a long time to come.
The Russian Mafia Shakes Down Thatcher and Reagan for 20 Billion Cash
But it was Reagan's successful backing of the Russian Mafia ploy via his pressuring of Soviet finances and financing Gorbachev's (Russian Mafia) demand for a 20 billion dollar cash payment (made to Margaret Thatcher by the Trojan Horse himself on his December 1984 visit to London) which was not just the final victory for the Russian mafia but the real proof that Reagan and his road (more appropriately the Rockefeller management team's road) which cinched the new gangland bosses reign (that is the US military-industrial henchman both official and mercenary reign) which did in the US mafia as far as ever taking a leadership position in the North American system ever again (at least within the foreseeable future of one or two generations.)
Within hours of Gorbachev's exit from London in December 1984 Thatcher was on a top secret flight to Washington. In Washington she flew immediately to Camp David and was closeted with Ronald Reagan the entire time. She returned to London immediately and the trip was not disclosed to the press for some rather long time. Even today in every biography in the US cap press of Gorbachev I have seen this Thatcher flight is ignored (and in fact in the US cap press in general --- for what should be obvious reasons). However, in her autobiography (The Downing Street Years, Mrs. Thatcher admits to the trip and says she wanted to talk to Reagan right away about what Gorbachev had to say about SDI.) Why would ``Star Wars'' suddenly be of such importance to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to jump on a jet fly immediately to Washington? It doesn't make sense.
457What was all this about?
At the time I learned of the visit almost immediately but did not attach the significance to it I should have. It was obvious that she had come to tell Reagan something that could not be communicated in any other way and that it had to be something that came out of her visit with Gorbachev who was angling to be the next General Secretary.
We could not have known over here that the Russian Mafia was planning an actual takeover of the Soviet Union and that Gorbachev was their stalking ``Trojan'' horse. (In her book Mrs. Thatcher says she knew she was the stalking horse for Gorbachev's upcoming visit with Ronald Reagan.) As the years passed it became common knowledge in secret intelligence circles in the Socialist countries, and then even in the always intelligence challenged gringo NSC, that Gorbachev had told Thatcher he needed 20 billion in cash (a slush fund) at his disposal if his campaign to overturn Soviet socialism were to be guaranteed success.
Thatcher didn't have the money but she knew where to get it. Thus, the flight to see Ronald Reagan.
Republicans had a lot of experience with secret slush funds by this time. The discovery of the most famous of these in 1952 had nearly resulted in the removal of Richard M. Nixon on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike gave Nixon a chance to save himself by throwing the decision to the Republican National Committee and Nixon pulled his own rabbit out of a hat with his famous ``Checkers'' speech. My own parents were Republican politicians and were so taken in that they sent a telegram to the RNC asking that Nixon be kept on the ticket. (Dad later changed his mind when Nixon snubbed him at the Boise airport but that is another story.) Nixon was brought down because of his secret slush fund during the Watergate affair.
Now let us return to the USSR and the victory of the Russian Mafia led takeover of the old Soviet Union.
The Superstructure: The Ideological Arena
Gorbachev's Sebastopol background had placed him for over two decades in the midst of the strongest second economy sector in the entire nation. Consequently, his career had been amongst the intellectuals least attracted to Marxism and having the strongest petty bourgeois and fully bourgeois orientation in the entire USSR. This was reflected within the first three months of his administration by the appointment of openly anti-Marxist advisors in the ideological arena such as Alexander Tsipko and openly pro-capitalist intellectuals in the economic arena with their ideological tracts now being circulated such as Tatiana Azslavskaya and Abel Aganbegyan. Right off the bat Gorbachev began to speak openly in praise of Georgian revisionist leader Edward Shevardnadze which had a second economy second only to the one in Sevastopol.
458Rather than encouraging internal Party dissent aimed at strengthening the Party and the Government's most important ideological institutions Gorbachev began advocating that anti-Party (outside the Party) voices be given equal play in the press. He encouraged writers to become what he called the ``loyal opposition'' to CPSU policies and programs. He began changing the definition of the term ``restructuring'' (perestroika) and ``openness'' (glasnost) from the definitions provided by their originator (General Secretary Andropov) with his own definitions which in every case were aimed at enabling outside the Party, anti-communist, voices. Gorbachev by the second year of his administration had placed all of the media in the hands of anti-communists.
The most dangerous sign for loyal communists should have been read in the appointment of a de facto anti-communist as head of the Party's propaganda and agitation
work (the Central Committee's Agitation and Propaganda Department) in the person of Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev became Gorbachev's chief consigliore and henchman in the destruction of the Soviet Party and its Government and State.
Coup de Grace Part 2: January 1987 --- June 1988
Resistance within the Party to the course being followed by Gorbachev and his gang was rising at every level. There was no way out for them now except to go all out in restoring the capitalist world system in the USSR and in the eighteen months beginning with the Full Central Committee meeting at the beginning (January) of 1987 they laid our an entirely counter-revolutionary course they called ``radical reform of the political economy of the USSR.'' This amounted to an all-out attack on the leading role of the CPSU, called for an end to central planning, indeed to all government planning, abolition of the role of public property, and transferring ownership of public institutions to private hands, and an end to the federal relationship between the Republics.
Modern Revisionism Enabled Capitalist Restoration
One wonders perhaps in retrospect why the Party didn't stand up and throw out the traitors then and there. How could any real Marxist let alone Leninist go along with all of this obvious counter-revolutionary nonsense? The answer is that modern revisionism had paved the way by negating all of the basic Marxist and Leninist laws and had done so for more than 35 years. Everything that Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist leadership had denounced as the ultimate reality and course being followed by the Khrushchev gang in the years from 1958 forward had come to pass. But, to two generations of persons subjected to the constant revision of the findings of our science these steps of Gorbachev and Gang did not seem as obviously wrong as they do to us in retrospect. In short, modern revisionism enabled capitalist restoration and with or without a second economy the capitalist world order would never have finalized its comeback in the USSR and for that matter would never have gotten off the ground in the first place if it had not been for the successful implanting of clearly stupid revisionist hypothesis as accepted fact. Thus modern revisionism exposed itself as the gravediggers of transitional socialism of the type we have identified as the Stalinist Socialist Stage in the USSR and its East European dependencies.
459Nowhere else in the Socialist Camp had the modern revisionists been successful albeit not for the lack of trying. In China, Chairman Mao and successors had succeeded in derailing the same attempts via (1) the Cultural Revolution and later (2) in liquidated the petty bourgeois uprising in Tiananmen Square. But it would take years for the CPC to
see if one could control the second economy in the PRC. In the end, so far, it has worked out; namely by fessing up to the reality of ``Two Systems, One Country'' as a necessary starting point. This same step could have saved the Soviet Union had it been invented there, and given time to work, but steps in that direction had been cut short by the Russian mafia takeover of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev.
Naive and Theoretically Anesthetized the USSR Succumbs to Two Faces
Back at the ranch although the Trojan horse was advocating obvious anti-Leninist principles he spoke as if he were a Communist and as if he were trying to advance the cause of Socialism. The Gorbachev leadership would have been sacked in these years instantly had they exposed themselves as anti-Communists bent on destroying Socialism. That is if they had used these words. But Gorbachev and gang had learned under the tutelage of Khrushchev and Brezhnev that as long as one mouthed Marxism and Leninism in words one could get away with fooling some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time --- that was good enough. Gorbachev proved to be the master of deceit in the way of being what is called the Janus (two faced) pose in Greek mythology. George Orwell would have been proud, as day was pronounced night, right was called wrong, good was actually evil, capitalism was actually socialism, bourgeois dictatorship was freedom.
460With a massive second economy now under Mafia leadership as the mass base for this new version of what had gone before, with the press in anti-communist hands, with the government having been brigandized and replaced by the brigands, it was now only a matter of time.
Catholic Popes long ago learned that as long as they went through the rituals of Catholic mysticism and the verbiage of Christianity that they could get away with just about anything in the lands where they had police and military power and this is identical to what the modern revisionists had done in the USSR. Party members responded to the symbolism of Soviet power and not the reality of theoretical statements and practical measures. End of Story.
Troy Victorious
Collapse: June 1988 to November 1, 1991
The depressing details of how the collapse of the Soviet Union played out in the three years from June of 88 through November 1, 1991, when the Gorbachev-Yeltsin gang finally outlawed the CPSU and fully restored the capitalist world system are beyond
the scope of this Handbook. However, we shall review a few of the highlights. Next in your reading on this subject should be some of the accounts by our own writers of what in fact did play out. Chief among these studies is Socialism Betrayed, Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, 2004, International Publishers, New York, 230pp.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Gorbachev embarked in 1987 on a series of incredibly destructive adventures. Each of them ended in disaster and instead of taking responsibility Gorbachev declared that the disaster was actually a great victory. Gorbachev began to resemble Walt Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice as his sweeping broom created more and more messes until it overwhelmed his Fantasia. Among these incredible measures were:
(1) Beginning January 1, 1987 the Gorbachev gang began dismantling the Nomenklatura system (Where the Party center in Moscow assembles lists of persons to be promoted in a way similar to the way US military officer lists are assembled in the Pentagon at Bupers etc.)
(2) December 1987 --- Gorbachev deals fatal sabotage to the public First economy by slashing Government orders to factories by 50%. This threw half of all the USSR's industrial base onto the mercy of the private (second) economy. It prepared the practical economic way to make the second economy a part of the first economy.
(3) June 1988 - The 19th Party Conference Gorbachev succeeded in getting the Conference to order the separation of Party, State and Government thus sabotaging Lenin's entire system of governing.
(4) September of 1988 - Gorbachev dismantles the entire central Governing apparatus by abolishing 1064 All Union Departments, 465 divisions within the Union Republics, wiping out 44% of Party, Government and State departments at the Federal and Republic levels.
(5) October of 1988 Capitalism was legalized as a First Economy the with a series of laws about private enterprises in the form of cooperatives as a cover for the private leasing of what had been public property.
(6) Gorbachev simultaneously began a series of betrayals of the international communist movement, as in Afghanistan, and then the betrayal of national liberation movements as in Namibia. The details of these betrayals are beyond the scope of this Handbook but you cadre will have no trouble in following our writers exposes of the
treason's involved. In the end the Gorbachev gang established an open alliance with US imperialism.
The end result of all of this disaster described as success by the Gorbachev gang was by 1988 massive cynicism among the public and a plummeting personal popularity rating for Gorbachev throughout the Soviet Union. Just as it seemed the obvious traitor would be overthrown by someone, the political game was changed a la the way it is changed regularly in the USA. When one wing of the capitalist party that rules Gringolandia is disgraced and finished in popularity (for the moment) another wing of the capitalist party emerges and takes command. The Gringos never seem to learn as they bounce back and forth from disaster to disaster via bouncing back and forth from Republicans to Democrats. Then Gorbachev pulled another rabbit out of the Mad Hatters hat with the emergence of their own equivalent in the form of Boris Yeltsin and his ``Democrat'' Party.
461
Tweedel Dee Tweedel Dum
There seemed no end to new innovations in deceit and debauched trickery on the part of the gang of second economy mafia leaders. In 1987 Gorbachev had literally kicked Boris Yeltsin off the Politburo. But, before one could say good bye Yeltsin emerged as the leader of a new Party bent on taking control of the Russian Republic which he did in 1990. The RSFSR was by far the biggest and single most important republic in the Soviet Union. By 1990 this left Yeltsin as President of the RSFSR and Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union. It was as false a dichotomy as the difference between the Republicans and Democrats in Gringolandia but it sufficed to bring about a total chaos in place of the political unity that had characterized Lenin's system for seventy years. The difference between Yeltsin and Gorbachev politically was the difference between Tweedel Dee and Tweedle Dum.
462Now let us look at how US hegemony over the capitalist world next collapsed. Ironic in so many ways is it not, that the evil oligarchy behind the gringo regime, which had the entire world at its disposal, in a few short years managed to throw it all away at the turn of the coming century in a serious of incredible colossal blunders equivalent for the world bourgeoisie to what had happened to the world proletariat with the disappearance of the Soviet half of the global Stalinist Socialist Stage. As of this writing the gringo leadership and its pathetic remnant regime under Mr. Obama have lost it all.
The world capitalist system itself then disintegrated. Again, this was because of the almost unbelievably incompetent administration of that system by its USA leadership. Consequently,
The New World Order
A new world order is emerging featuring restructuring world capitalism on the one hand and a new kind of socialist camp on the other. In the latter case we have a hard-core of Marxist-Leninist led nations at the center, following the PRC example, and an outer core of nations with no inherent interest in capitalism as personified in US and European imperialism (BRICS) part of which is congealing as a regional core in Latin America (ALBA). This new socialist world order is composed at the center of Advanced Socialist Stage countries (PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos) in alliance with joint class ruled countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, South Africa, Brazil) bent on a new anti-imperialist sometimes socialist course where capitalist countries such as India find more affinity than they do with traditional capitalist nations of Europe, Asia or North America. Now let us move on to The Collapse of US Hegemony over the Capitalist World.
463Meanwhile in the US, among the bosses in command of hegemonized world Capital (the US Ruling billionaire families and trillionaire families) the Right Wing (so-called Neo-cons; who would more appropriately be called neo-Nazi) thought they saw an opportunity to act on their most basic motivations (insatiable greed) by seizing control of the world's strategic economic inputs. That is, the pricing, supply and most importantly, financing, of such things as oil, natural gas and precious metals (to name only three.) In so doing they would not only get personally rich, but they presented the US ruling families with the spectacle of global stability in the supply and pricing of such fundamental inputs (again, e.g. Oil and Gas.) As importantly, all of this would be financed through gringo financial centers in New York and Chicago (and secondarily, London.)
464This financing is a matter of life and death to the US ruling families, who must somehow offset the imbalance in the flow of dollars out of the USA and the flow of dollars into the USA. In the world trade economy they created (which features US capitalist exploitation of foreign cheap Labor - but requires the US consumers buy all the stuff being created abroad) the Achilles Heel is the balance of payments deficit and budget deficit the US Regime runs which requires a minimum, right now, of two billion dollars a day to come into the US from foreign investors (Buyers of US T Bills, and /or other things listed below.) ---And, the increasingly larger federal budgetary deficit means it soon it will be three billion a day that is required. In fact, there is no end in sight to the accelerating demands of the USA rulers for foreign money, obtained in any way! Then they were unable to borrow at all (mid-2008) and were forced to rely on the ultimate last-step of printing (not even printing now just writing numbers down electronically --- technically this is what we call money on account) trillions of dollars overnight! This has never happened before in the history of capitalism or in the history of the world for that matter. Inflationary printing in Germany after World War I is famous everywhere
465because pictures of it found their way into US school textbooks. But this was nothing at all compared to the absolute disregard for any kind of monetary integrity with the mass creation of paper and electronic money! Two and a half trillion dollars were jacked onto this public debt by the imperialist bosses in the three months November, December and January 2008-09! The resulting monetary crisis has not even begun. When it does set in the next general collapse will get underway.
All of this began when the greed of the US rulers and their stupid neo-con advisors decided to impose their own brand of fascism on the post-Soviet Camp world. In proposing to stabilize (prop-up) the extraordinarily shaky US economy in this way (via the dream of a "Pax Americana") the US fascist right arose once again like an Alien Phoenix. (The post-1929 period in the USA has been one featuring a see-saw, up and down, now in - now out, struggle between the fascist right and the not-so-fascist remainder of the US ruling class, over foreign as well as domestic policy.)
In the event, under Bush II, the US "neo-con" were given the helm, and given a chance to put their crackpot plans into effect. Why crackpot? Because nothing they proposed in the 90's or currently propose (e.g., in 2010) was or is possible - not in the slightest were these policies of world domination possible then, nor are they now! Except, of course, in the fevered imagination of men and women too ignorant of reality and history to see the world for what it is. -And, the fact that the, often more sober, US ruling families went along with these stupid proposals shows how those families have degenerated from the relatively balanced objectivity of the old Rockefeller leadership in the years following Vietnam. Finally, their total ignorance of world reality was reflected domestically as they ran the economy straight to hell in their greed to maximize their profits.
466But now, as 2010 closes, it is too late for them. The 2000 families in the world who own the US regime may agree to bail it out in the end but I doubt it. The US capitalist system is tottering now and it won't take a lot to push it over. Humpty Dumpty won't get back together this time because the mass movement is going to create a real communist party in the USA. In fact, it is forming today as the Communist Party, USA (Foundation). When history moves as quickly as it is now our Party can get big fast, and all it will need is a clear strategy and the ability to make that strategy clear tactically to the working people of North America.
What is happening?
The US ruling nutballs were not the only ones acting in an atmosphere of ignorance. One must remember that the North American people have now for four generations been lied to every day, 24 hours a day, about world history, about the US place in it (past, present and future) and about the nature of our economy and the social structure of the few ruling the overwhelming many. Today we hear on the news educated retired people saying things like ``we don't understand what is happening.'' Of course they don't understand what is going on because they have been lied to constantly in all the cap media since the end of World War II and like the workers of 1914, who were tricked and forced into the capitalist imperialist war designed to enrich the cap classes and to liquidate the working classes of Europe and North America, they will pay the price of their ignorance despite their innocence. There are two main theaters of war against working people at the moment: (1) the US War against Arabia and the Muslim World
467(Europe, Russia and China too) and (2) the collapse of the US economy and the global capitalist economy linked to it. Let us begin with the former and work our way into the latter.
But first this is a place you can start
The US has been at war or in a state of forward international military deployment constantly since 1945. Yet in that sixty five year period the US has not won a war --- unless banana republic invasions (Granada, Panama, Dominican Republic, etc.) qualify. Of course they do not account for the trillions upon trillions of dollars spent on the war contracting. Could it be the real reason for the constant wars and international deployments has to do with the war contracting? What? You say? The reason was not victory, honor and peace in a just cause?
You can start here at this point in conversations with fellow civilians. The question the US oligarchs have put off for so long is now front and center: the actual cost of the war in a context of cost analysis of health care, bank bailouts, mortgage relief, credit card relief, etc. Try to get to the point of replacing capitalism as a system --- all the data and arguments you will need are in this book --- and make a convert.
Back to Iraq
As I wrote in the winter of 2006 - 2007, the US adventure in Iraq has turned into exactly the disaster predicted in the previous editions of this Handbook. Worse, for US imperialism is that the world has seen for itself that US supposed military superiority is in fact just a ``paper tiger.'' The US ruling families stumbled fatally this time when they allowed the Nazi fringe of their class the accession to power they had fought for, and stole two elections for and now cannot produce for. Remember that the capitalists as a world-wide class are just a wolf pack, and like wolves they turn on the weak (old and young) and consume them too. The US fascist would-be bosses are being consumed by Rockefeller-like new bosses, for the worst thing the US imperialists could have done, they have done, and to themselves! Namely,
468(1) to have shown that they are so inherently weak that a group of what they considered to be rag-headed, camel-driving, Arabs, without international support (as we provided to the Vietnamese for example) could reduce the great scary ``Juggernaut'' to a helpless Gringo Gulliver, truly a giant captive, flailing around in its death-throws; Iraqi Lilliputians using the simple expedients of hand grenades, dynamite and shaped-charges, to accomplish this embarrassing ignominious defeat of US imperialism. Munitions available on the shelf everywhere and anywhere in the world! The lesson has been learned and there is no putting that genie back into the bottle.
(2) As I said in this book in the 2007 and 2008 editions: ``Mark my words it is not the US Left which is going to drive out the crackpot neo-Nazi Bush II regime but the ``responsible'' imperialist leaders of the US ruling families. The Wolfowitz-Perle-Rumsfeld gang has been consumed by their rival class leaders (perhaps the Bush family will yet go down too, despite their current desperate attempt to avoid and evade responsibility, who knows.)'' The way the responsible leaders did it (e.g., Eagle Scout Gates as War Minister, his words), was to buy off some of their strongest enemies with cash and made promises to the others (Sunni and Shia forces respectively) to get out as fast as possible. What do they get for this cash and this promise? They are being allowed
469to exit out the barroom back door rather than being chased out. Although they are still being forced to back out of that barroom back-to-back. I am rather sure they are praying that something doesn't happen that will make their ignominious defeat even worse than it is. All of the massive bombings in Baghdad at the end of 2009 are a lot like, getting slammed in the ass multiple times, by that back room door on their way out, once again. Still the picture most iconic and fitting will always be Bush getting the Bum's Rush from a local Iraqi reporter. At any rate what has happened to them is the best they could do and the only thing left for them to do. Not that you won't still hear rather comical references to the ``success'' of the ``surge'' and the overall war blah, blah.
470The Great Iraqi Oil Robbery
``This is the essence of the Wolfowitz doctrine, first articulated in the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance document for 1994-1999, first leaked to the press in February 1992. This document calls for proactive U.S. military intervention to deter and prevent the rise of a contending peer (or equal) competitor, (for global strategic economic inputs), and asserts that the United States must use any and all means necessary to prevent that from happening.
this doctrine(is) re-emerging as the official global military policy of the Bush II administration. It has now been incorporated as the core principal of the document known as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002), available for download from the White House website. This document states explicitly that the ultimate purpose of American power is to prevent the rise of a competing great power, and that the United States shall use any means necessary to prevent that from happening, including preventive military force when needed, but also through spending so much money on defense that no other peer competitor can ever arise.'' (pg 53)
471The war against Iraq was intended to provide the United States with a dominant position in the Persian Gulf region, and to serve as a spring-board for further conquests and assertion of power in the region. It was aimed as much, if not more, at China, Russia, and Europe as at Syria or Iran. It is part of a larger process of asserting dominant U.S. power in south-central Eurasia, in the very heartland of this mega-continent.
But why specifically the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea area, and why now? In part, this is so because this is where most of the world's remaining oil is located-approximately 70 percent of known petroleum reserves. And you have to think of oil not just as a source of fuel-although that's very important-but as a source of power. As U.S. strategists see it, whoever controls Persian Gulf oil controls the world economy and, therefore, has the ultimate lever over all competing powers. (pg 55)
(The New Geopolitics, by Michael Klare, in Monthly Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, July-August 2003.)
(3) The idea that the US had military forces (men and materiel) up to the task of world conquest shows just how out of touch the US neo-con bosses were from reality (it reminds me of the way the same types of foolish men thought that the US Army I had just been in from 1959-1962, was going to do the job they had in mind for it in Vietnam!) However, as bad as Dr. Kissinger's Vietnam strategy advice turned-out to be, he was at least intelligent. The Wolfowitz-Perle-Rumsfeld gang demonstrated by the way they fucked-up their Iraqi campaign what a group of moronic ignoramuses they really were and were consequently undone.
(4) However, as true as all of this is, the at-bottom reason for imperialist expansion against the Arab and Muslim world and the inherent implied threat to Capitalist Europe, New Class Russia, and Socialist China, is the absolute need for the imperialists to find some way to offset the costs of foreign oil resulting in shipping huge quantities of money outside the borders of the US economy. The Saudi example is what they wanted to duplicate. We will discuss this in detail in Part III (Chapter 27); that is, the way in which US imperialism expanded in the 20th century, and how it featured the Gringo rulers
engineering, a post-World War II, true sweetheart comprador deal with the Saud family which gave the Saud family ownership of the money paid to them for their oil but featured the requirement that they spend all of it in the USA! All of it minus of course their multi-million dollar a day lifestyles and its other requirements (in other countries.) The same agreement they reached with the Al-Saba family for Kuwait (where they earn a minimum admitted of 280 million dollars a day.) The same agreement reached with the Bahrain monarchy. Their caveat to this was to have in place in Iraq a US style capitalist government rather than a monarchy. In this they have failed absolutely as we see with the opening of 2010.
(5) You see at-bottom the general crisis of capitalism also forced the imperialists to send more and more money abroad to utilize the cheap labor available in foreign lands on generation after next generation of new and improved machinery to produce commodities at lower and lower costs. But, how to offset it? If you send all your money outside the boundaries of the USA how will the domestic economy function? In other words, our economy cannot function without money present and available for normal capitalist exchange. In reality the gringo ruling trillionaire and centi-billionaire families confronted an insoluble problem! For decades they printed money against incoming investment capital from foreign central banks and foreign trillionaire and billionaire families. But that came to an end in 2008 and led to the greatest crisis since 1929 for the capitalist rulers.
472(6) In short, the US politico's stumbled terribly. For us Bolsheviks this has been some incredibly, almost unbelievably, good luck! To begin with the failures encompassed by the Gringo regime's Iraq War include:
A) The US rulers losing their command position over all of the capitalist classes outside the English-speaking World (and as 2010 opens they have lost their hegemony over the English-speaking countries as well);
B) The Gringo command having accelerated the process of realigning the worlds industrial powers to put the People's Republic of China in a position no one of us could have realistically hoped for in 2001, including putting Communist China in the position of a responsible equal leader with other responsible states (of the capitalist persuasion) internationally! Remember how the Bush fascists started out so provocatively against China? Now the Chinese leadership has stepped-up to the plate in ways they never would have done eight years ago --- because the imbeciles in Washington dropped their sheep's clothing and exposed their plans for naked aggression;
(C) The US leaders in their arrogance proceeded to alienate the 1.2 billion people of the globe committed to the Islamic Religion. In so doing they have gone head to head with the radical fundamentalist wing (they had previously trained and used against us in Afghanistan) in a death struggle. Otherwise it would have been our task to liquidate the Islamic crackpots - in fact, some of you may remember that in 2000 I wrote that the Islamic fundamentalists would be our most difficult competitor in the 21st century, and I had thought they would play on a global stage the role they played as imperialism's cat's paw in Afghanistan. Instead our most deadly current enemy, US imperialism, has tasked itself with their destruction. Again, incredibly good luck!
473(D) The blatant obviousness of the Gringo Regime's strategic planning for world domination has forced the Chinese Communist Party's leadership to do something it had not wanted to do; that is to take the lead in forming a de facto Global Socialist Alliance
of China, Cuba, Vietnam-Laos and progressive countries like Venezuela, Brazil, and even Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. ---And now, China has fielded a strategic nuclear tipped ICBM carrying submarine fleet, far earlier than they would have done had Washington not exposed their plans for world conquest. Finally,
(E) Washington has scared the living daylights out of those who had thrown in their lot with their would-be "puppet masters" such as the Uribe trafficker-industrialist clique in BogotÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂá, Colombia. -And, these types, are back treading as quickly as they can from their ill thought out earlier commitments. The August, 2010, transfer of power to a new capitalist President in Colombia opens the possibility that the US long delayed negotiations between Colombia and Venezuela may get underway once again with better prospects for the future than any we have seen for over a half century.
Uribe had been on the DEA's ``most wanted'' list until he was suborned by the CIA in a deal where he was to be used against all the guerilla forces in the Americas. But, now, in power, and potentially somewhat independent of his imperialist sponsors, he has struck out in an ``independent'' way that will make his ``base'', the Colombian big bourgeoisie (including the world's richest drug traffickers --- some of whom I have known for many years --- see my books, Shining Path, the Peruvian Revolution, Rivers of Blood and High Finance, South American Style!), the accomplices of Washington's new ultimate nemesis Hugo Chavez. Caracas has more money to give Uribe than does Washington and Venezuela's money comes from ``honest'' sources (e.g. contracts for building an oil pipeline across Colombia where oil can be shipped directly to China from a Pacific port.) However, at the moment the ultra-right section of Uribe's base is firmly in the saddle with, of course, backing from the most reactionary sections of the gringo capitalist government and state. This unholy conglomeration of evil forces may yet succeed in triggering a general war in northern South America. This is their program and will involve Venezuela and Ecuador and Peru as well as Colombia before it is over. We shall see how the August 2010 transfer of Presidential power in Colombia plays out.
474(F) With Bush II, U.S. Imperialism immediately embarked upon a program of seizing defeat from the jaws of the victory they could have had. At the very least they could have maintained their hegemony over the capitalist world for several decades into the 21st century. Instead they threw it away in two short years. This is a historic defeat for them of catastrophic proportions; a defeat from which they shall never recover. For them, as for Hitler seventy years ago, all that remains is the running, and dying. For us, whatever short-term advantages some of the timid among us may have thought we might have lost with the disappearance of the Soviet Revisionist Ruling Clique from the historical stage, the stupidity and ignorance of the US hegemonists has more than offset.
475
(G) At the moment, there is great
instability in the global class struggle and all of you revolutionary
cadre need to continue to study and observe, the past and the
present, in order to deal the telling blows needed to remove the
Gringo ruling families from the scene, liquidate their State and
Government establishment, and then proceed to the construction of the
(transitional) Socialist World Order in the USA. You should begin by
getting involved in organizing working people so that the next time
there is a mass spontaneous outpouring into the streets (as conducted
by Hispanics in 2006)
you will be doing far more than handing out leaflets --- which at any
rate were full of inaccuracies and profound errors, so typical of the
historically ignorant US Left. The US ruling families are prepared to
lock-up militant White workers
alongside those of the African, Hispanic and Asian origin when the inevitable collapse comes --- we must be at least as ready to lead those workers in an armed struggle for the overthrow of the fascist regime in Washington and to substitute working class power in its stead. WE have to build a real communist party and we have to send our cadre into the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and into the local, state and federal police forces so we will be in a position to deny the US rulers the use of these forces --- or at least deny them all of these forces --- as we move inexorably to revolution.
(7) Moving again to the domestic crisis I want to bring to your attention, as I have in each edition of this book since 2005, the fact that the true Achilles Heel of the Gringo Regime and the billionaire-trillionaire families that own it is its desperate financial and monetary situation. Until the present moment Washington has depended upon an inflow of two to three and soon four billion dollars a day from the following sources to offset the flow of cash out of the country to their cheap labor production centers and for critical inputs. These have been:
A. European Central Bank purchase of US paper (e.g. T Bills)
B. Foreign comprador money sent for safe-keeping and/or investment in more US paper.
C. Payments from foreign governments to support U.S. military forces stationed in these countries.
D. Debt service payments on the great debt the US has intentionally heaped on 3rd world countries.
E. Sales of high-tech armaments
F. US Corporations repatriating profits
G. New York (and satellite London) financing of everything but especially strategic inputs such as petroleum.
As these sources of income are drying-up, the resulting devastation will make the revolutionary end of capitalism the only logical way forward. In so doing the way will be cleared for the final battle between socialism and capitalism and simultaneously prepare thereby the objective conditions for armed insurrection.
Finally, why did the imperialists spin the so-called subprime mortgage crisis? Was this just greed and stupidity? Of course it was both because that is the nature of capitalism. But, what specifically did they do to create the current mess. What was the way in which the current collapse came about?
What Caused the Current Crisis?
It is not my intention to jump into the daily news lies of the cap media in the USA with regard to the current global capitalist collapse and the place of the US within that context. However, I have been asked daily for continuing input, as my columns over the last five years have been predicting the imminence of the current collapse and explaining why said collapse was imminent. I suspect the least I can be expected to do now is to give whatever my commentary may be worth for the benefit of those who are sufficiently educated to understand what the science of political economy has to say on these matters.
Accordingly, I will begin a series of weekly updates of the financial advisory type, as reluctant as I am to do so, as whatever contribution I can make or have been able to make, is simply a product of studying the masters (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels) and their successors, in analyzing the evolution of capitalism in its final imperialist phase.
Let us begin with the beginning. What has caused this collapse we are currently witnessing? The answer is the General Crisis of Capitalism. As you learned in Chapter 12 this general crisis is caused by the articulation of the need of capitalists to produce ``commodities'' at competitive prices with the costs of implanting new and next generations of machinery with cheap labor. A commodity in this context means those articles of production coming into existence as a product of labor-power applied to machinery. An individual capitalist always must produce a given commodity (it is an analytical given that outside influence is limited to being unregulated free enterprise) at a price equal to or lower than his competitors. He must, therefore, reduce the cost of labor-power input (wages) or increase the productivity of his machinery. Or both.
477Now the point is how specifically did this continuing general crisis of the capitalist stage trigger the immediate (no longer imminent) capitalist collapse? Noting for the record that this is just one more depression in the capitalist cycle of boom and bust (See Part III below).
As to the immediate cause of the immediate crisis what? The answer is that in their struggle to find new sources of cheap labor to apply to their newest generations of machinery, the capitalists sent huge quantities of money to foreign cheap labor centers to set up their factories and then they had to buy the stuff being created in them. In other words imperialism always sent capital abroad --- that is the definition of imperialism. But this time they had to send money abroad also to buy all the stuff being created abroad. This created an insoluble crisis for them! Because they were so greedy they just kept doing it. If you are making a billion dollars a day then every day you keep up what you are doing you are getting richer. The capitalist bosses knew what they were doing would someday lead to a terrible collapse. But they could not resist their own greed.
478What is different about this situation is that the cash outflow did not stop with the construction of factories as it used to. What they called ``globalization'' required, in practice that US consumers buy all the stuff being created by cheap labor power in other parts of the world. The consequence in the USA of this shipment of cash outside the US to implant the machinery and then to bring these commodities back to the USA in order to sell them, is what we are now confronting.
As the decades passed the US rulers confronted a continuing budgetary deficit within their own country because of reasons of policy. Then on top of this they began to see a continuing imbalance of payments --- meaning, more money going out of the country than coming in. The latter because of the fact of having to buy in this country a heavy percentage of what was being created in the cheap labor factories abroad --- and --- the cost of oil and gas imported from abroad.
We will deal with the policy matters separately.
As to the point at hand, the result in sending more and more money outside the economic (essentially the political) boundaries of the USA required new sources of money to be found somewhere outside the USA that could be shifted back into the USA. There are several ways in which this has been done. Including those listed in each previous edition of this book Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. I can't say this often enough so let's say it once again: the US ruling families have relied on sources no longer available to them for the cash they needed to offset their crazy international capitalist system, to wit:
A. European Central Bank purchase of US paper (e.g. T Bills)
B. Foreign comprador money sent for safe-keeping and/or investment in more US paper.
C. Payments from foreign governments to support U.S. military forces stationed in these countries.
D. Debt service payments on the great debt the US has intentionally heaped on 3rd world countries.
E. Sales of high-tech armaments
F. US Corporations repatriating profits
G. New York (and satellite London) financing of everything but especially strategic inputs such as petroleum.
So, now what we have is a situation where the struggle of US financial engineers to maintain the dollar inflow from outside the US to match or at least decently counterbalance outflow, has failed. (The ruling capitalist families offered promises about the safety of the US economy for which the capitalist engineers offered a variety of what they claimed were undeniable reasons; for decades they got away with this, until it was accepted by all concerned as sustainable ad infinitum). In reality their justifications were nonsense and they knew it and they were taking increasingly risky adventures in finance. They took these risks they knew would result in a crash some day because of their greed. To be sure they had a well-oiled working theft machine; they paid incredible salaries and bonuses to sales people running into many billions of dollars. That's it. Quite simple actually. What precisely did they really do to offset this outflow that has created the current crisis?
479They had the foregoing sources of cash. They planned on adding to them with certain measures aimed at dramatically reducing the outflow such as the use of sweetheart deals with ruling kings and queens in Arabia which gave these monarchs title to the cash being paid for ``their' oil as long as they agreed to spend all of this money in the USA (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain). This was implemented by having all of the spending being done by these Arabian ruling families being done via US contractors (e.g., the Bush family).
When that was insufficient because they needed even more oil they embarked upon their Iraqi war convincing themselves that with that conquest they could put into place a gringo style capitalist government which they foolishly believed would provide them with some insurance against what must eventually happen to the monarchies of Arabia (their eventual inevitable overthrow and dissolution was as obvious to the capitalists as it is to us.) Their (US) military defeat in Arabia (Iraq) and alienation from the entire
Muslim world was the actual result of their military adventure and for that they had no answer. It was their Stalingrad. The turning point in the World War of US imperialism against the rest of the world.
Remember our point. The underlying cause of the current crisis is the General Crisis of Capitalism --- which is to say the antagonistic articulation of the need to implant new generations of machinery to cheap labor sources, all of which had to be found outside the political boundaries of the USA, with the inevitable consequence. Namely, the resulting need to send huge quantities of cash outside those boundaries to pay for the commodities thus produced. (Again let me say at this point you must read chapters 12, 18 and Part III of this book: Fundamentals of Historical Materialism.)
To offset the traditional ways of counterbalancing this dollar outflow as listed above something new had to be supplemented. What was that? Subprime mortgages done in ``industrial'' size, then packaged as new securities and resold all over the world as if they were as ``good as US Government T-Bills, full faith and credit.''
Subprime refers to the credit rating of the person asking for a home loan. In my day we would drop to 300 on the FICO scale (where 720 is now considered the beginning of prime loans.) Furthermore the offer was sweetened by offering 1% rates for several years before resetting to more proper norms and/or sold as a ``choice'' where each month you could select one of four payments ranging from 1% to 8%. The pitch being this way you could adjust your monthly real estate payment to what serves your interests best. No one ever mentioned that you could only make 20% of the total number of payments at the lowest (1%) choice. After that you were confronted with three high payment choices none of which were really within the realm of possibility for you. If the buyer was told this he or she was also told ``don't worry you will never pay the higher rates because in two or three years we will refinance you. When the economy collapsed in 2008 they were not around do this. Thus the subprime mortgage holders confronted foreclosure and homelessness. These people were fucked by capitalism on purpose, not by accident. We need to educate them as to this simple fact. Once people know how and why they have been fucked in the ass without Vaseline they often know what to do about it.
480In other words in the event, the way they did that was to create huge quantities of ``derivative'' securities based on US house mortgages. Another way of saying it is that they found ways to make North American homeowners put up their homes as guarantees of cash flow which they packaged and sold all over the world like used car sales hucksters. As I have pointed out all kinds of tricks were used to get these mortgages and after they were in hand, in the tens of millions, they were packaged together and sold as supposedly ``good as gold'' US government backed securities. The plot worked. Bankers all over the world got fucked by one of the oldest cons in financial history. But this time on a far grander scale than Barnum and Bailey could ever have imagined. It turned out that the supposedly good as gold US government guarantee that went with Fannie May and Freddie Mac
481mortgage-based derivative securities were not guaranteed by the US Government at all! The scope of this con against international capitalist bankers by the US trillionaire centi-billionaire banking families is so vast that a run-of-the-mill con man like Bernie Madoff can make off with fifty odd billion dollars and still be considered small potatoes by these same big ruling families. If this were just bankers fucking other bankers, capitalists fucking other capitalists, I doubt if anyone would care. But, I think you can see the scope of their plot against the other international capitalist bankers is also having terrible consequences for the American people and global humanity. By the way these ``securitized'' mortgage packages were obtained by issuing mortgages in virtually any way (no money no problem. No income no problem. Just sign here. I know because I worked in the industry.) Some fifteen percent turned out to be worthless; perhaps fifty percent troubled.
482That is enough for the moment. Just remember, the at-bottom cause of the current crisis is capitalism as a system itself. Capitalism's need to constantly lower the cost of producing commodities (the dog eat dog of capitalist against capitalist) led to the insoluble crisis of too much money flowing out of the USA and too little coming in. The US capitalist's desperate financial engineering attempts at offsetting this fatal imbalance (you can't run a domestic economy if all the money that should be there isn't) coming ultimately in the form of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and their simultaneous military failure to obtain offsetting sources of cheap foreign oil. (Iraq not only did not produce the sweetheart deal on its oil but has so far cost nearly a trillion dollars in direct spending and since they borrowed this money there is another trillion in interest on top of that!)
483Finally, the US ruling families knew what they were doing --- at the outset, all along and from the beginning. In effect they resorted to the ``card mechanic's'' ultimate trick --- kicking over the table. Because they knew accounting rules would eventually require the mortgage-based securities to be written down to zero; simultaneously, home prices marked-to-market value collapsed.
That collapse occurred because banks would no longer refinance homes except when the credit of the person buying is what it should have been all along. Thus, all the people who had been told ``don't worry; you will never pay this higher rate because in two or three years we will refinance you'' ended up getting fucked too. Now, when the time came, refinancing could no longer be done for people with subprime credit. Thus, the number of potential buyers of California real estate (for example) dropped dramatically. Thus market value dropped and new value calculations on surrounding homes decreased equivalently.
The Gringo Capitalists Fucked Their Class Brothers Internationally On Purpose
You can't assess value of an entity with uncertain or even unknown composition and no protection against default, especially when default at a high statistical level is already in process. By loading the other capitalist countries with these poison-pills they would effectively destroy these competitors. In the resulting world the Gringo ruling families given their
greater financial and military resources would stand to stay at the front of the capitalist pack in the global dog fight that has to emerge after the most recent capitalist collapse. These are the real and only reasons for the current crisis. ---And, the elite trillionaire-billionaire bosses were right. They are emerging on top of the world capitalist wolf pack as 2009 begins to unfold under responsible leadership. However, the rest of the world will not be happy in the emerging Camp Sunshine. Nor, will the North American people be happy. Workers never really recover from a depression. They just live through it; their conditions deteriorate over a larger number of people, as in the Auto industry over the last half century. Some workers will survive and prosper for the moment but they too will inevitably face this fate capitalism has in store for them unless we solve this problem once and for all.
484To solve the problem once and for all you have to get rid of capitalism and put people in conscious command of their own daily lives --- i.e., socialism. ---And, what kind of socialism? Look at China with its mixed economy. Then think of what we could do with all of our modernization and without having to overcome the backwardness which remains China's greatest curse.
Nationalization
The next critical battle we confront as a people will be to see that the current Bush gang program of socializing risk and privatizing profit is grabbed hold of and gutted. It's interesting once again that people who call themselves communists failed to demand on our part the immediate nationalization of the banks, commanding heights of capitalism in the form of money market funds, insurance companies and so forth, not to mention failing to demand on our behalf the immediate nationalization of the oil and gas monopolies. Properly undertaken both banking and oil can provide the US people with far more income annually than the federal income tax as currently constructed.
In fact, it was as I say George Bush and his financial gang who immediately moved to nationalize banking and finance. But, their plan is to use your money to save themselves and then once we have stabilized the economy they plan on getting their government in Washington to give them back their banks, money market financing and insurance companies. We have to be sure that they do not get these properties back but that they remain public.
It wouldn't hurt for Left parties to start asking the question as to whether their leaders represent change we can believe in or just the same old stale and factually challenged politics. Politics completely wrong theoretically and thus practically. It's not as if there were not alternatives to this kind of leadership which this book among many publications represents.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 19: Comparative Analysis: The Simple Chiefdom Stage and the Stage of Stalinist SocialismWe can climb the height of Mt. Olympus and look back over all of human history - now that we have the completed prehistoric and historic periodization of that history - which I have summarized foregoing. When we do scale the heights to the Gods, as would
Jason have done in his Search for the Golden Fleece, we see that entire panorama, and so much now becomes clear.
For those of you who have read this book carefully, and who now understand the fundamentals of causality and process in human sociocultural evolution - that is, those of you who have now become expert in Fundamentals of Historical Materialism, the time has come. The time for what? To consider "revolution" as a serious near term objective in the USA. Looking to a short transitional period; building rapidly into true communism. We have the technological ability. We are Leninists and we will win. We will fight through to absolute victory or there will be no Americans left alive to carry the guns! We should say as Thomas Jefferson said with regard to the First American Revolution (to paraphrase) ``better that there be just one man and one woman left in each country of the world than that things should continue as they have.''
485First we must impose clarity on ourselves --- again, this Handbook. Then act accordingly.
Now, we can see where we are, at this historical moment - where, in fact, we are in the Second Transitional Period. We are between two Sociocultural Epochs (The Servitude Epoch and the Second Egalitarian Epoch). -And, in looking back over our history, we can contrast contemporary diagnostics with the key diagnostic features of the First Transitional Period between Epochs. This was what we started out to achieve. What you wanted to achieve when you picked up this book. What I wanted to achieve when I struck out on my Search for the Foundation of Sociocultural Evolution, some forty odd years ago. (The title of my eight volume autobiographical series.) Click on ``find in a library'' in your browser to see the nearest library with copies. You're looking for the WorldCat website.)
486The General Contradictions
Now, remember in the first Egalitarian Epoch, the General Contradiction was expressed in the prime directive for production to be limited to Value needed, day to day (avoiding surplus social product) even though the productive potential of both Hunting-and-Gathering Bands and Tribes, and Agricultural Bands and Tribes was far greater than what was required to produce the fundamental needs of life. In the Servitude Epoch, the General Contradiction is expressed in the prime directive that production of Surplus Value be maximized regardless of the fact that the more produced the worse the working and living conditions of the producers become.
Therefore, in the First Transitional Period between these two Epochs we should expect to see both of these General Contradictions fighting their way out in both of the two Stages of the transition.
Comparing and Contrasting Typical Features
For purposes of comparison let us contrast some typical features of any sociocultural Stage - beginning with, say, the feature of population size, and seek some diagnostic aspect. What do we see in the Stage of Tribal Agriculture (the last Stage of the 1st Egalitarian Epoch) and in the succeeding Stage of Simple Chiefdoms (the first Stage of the 1st Transitional Period) in terms of the factor of population size? What we see is an initial imperative favoring additional mouths where the additional mouths helped to absorb trouble creating surplus social product. But, more hands allowed simultaneously
the ability to easily create sufficient surplus product to feed many more mouths, and not coincidentally many professional specialist mouths. The more professional specialization of labor there is in a Simple Chiefdom the more effective and efficient production of all articles from food to pottery. Population that exploded to consume surplus social product has now become essential in maintaining the increased rate of production of social product which is no longer just surplus, but often essential (needed produce) to maintain all the professional non-farming specialists. There has been a fundamental at-bottom change in the nature of population size.
In other words, in the Agricultural Tribes, surplus social product was unavoidable, and said surplus was gathered by the Tribal Council for storage (and later redistribution as needed). One way that surplus level was kept ``institutionally lower'' was with the additional mouths to feed that come from being able to sustain population levels higher that 20 to 60 persons (the norm for Hunting and Gathering Bands) with sedentary village life. So, in a sense, there was a new factor favoring higher levels of production, even if it could not be said to be pressure to maximize, at least to a degree, agricultural production.
Later, in the Simple Chiefdoms, with professional specialists always in need of farming products, the pressure to maximize production increased. In both cases one result was rapid population explosion. In the first case consumption was used to level the social differences caused by production, and only tangentially resulted in increased overall production. In the second case demand for increased over-all production escalated and in turn determined that an increase in population numbers would have to happen to insure the now extant higher levels of production. In that way the Simple Chiefdom rise in population assured that more production would result.
In both cases population exploded, but it requires surgically precise logic, based on accurate General Theory, to see the true significance of population increase in both of these Stages. Nothing here, is simply apparently or obviously true. If it were, there would be no need for science - would there? -And, in a nutshell, that is what comparative cross-cultural Anthropological Economics is all about.
With regard to another feature: that of labor-time utilization, we see that in the Stage of Tribal Agriculture people dumped as much labor-time as possible in such things as moving-on, starting over, slash-and-burn, precisely to limit the amount of surplus being produced. In the Simple Chiefdoms people stayed in place, intensified the professional specialization of labor-power and intensified the economic infrastructure for the precisely opposite reason - or, in other words - to maximize the production of surplus.
Comparing and Contrasting Key Features
Now let us turn to Capitalism in its latter days, up and through 1917, and compare key features of its General Contradiction with that of Stalinist Socialism which is the first Stage of the 2nd Transitional Period.
The General Contradiction of Capitalism, like that of all three Stages of the Servitude Epoch, is to produce Surplus Value at any cost. The motive force is the drive of the ruling class (or in the case of the USA, the ruling trillionaire oligarchy) to maximize profits. On the other hand the General Contradiction of the Second Egalitarian Epoch lies in its drive to maximize production for the benefit of people as a whole. This is a sociocultural evolutionary Stage we have never seen and so we don't yet
have it on hand. We must hypothetically project what we shall expect to see in our STAR TREK future in perhaps the 22nd century.
Therefore, when we see on the surface of things that more and more surplus value of Stalinist Socialism is going into capital {in the economic category sense "capital" means, constant capital; i.e., machinery} the fact is that there is an amazing apparent similarity with what went before in the Capitalist Stage. But said "similarity" is only "apparent." Remember that one iron law of capitalism is that constant capital (e.g., machinery) often is the only real market for the dumping of all the surplus value being created. (People can't eat iron, only the machinery, steel, and construction industries can use it - because of the ``form'' in which this surplus value comes.) -And, so it was in the Stalinist Stage of Socialism.
487However, it was not for the (private ownership) PROFIT sub-column (competing with NGM) that Soviet Russia's surplus value was being directed, as it would have been in a capitalist system, when sold by one capitalist to another. No, in Stalinist Socialist systems surplus value capital is being absorbed by NGM, but, for the sake of satisfying, at some point down the road, all the needs of the working and productive people, according to policies and programs of the CP in charge - and, in the meantime, also going into militarily oriented constant capital, in order to supply the military requirements of the working class garrison state apparatus. The working class dictatorship must be constantly on guard - consistently better and better armed, in order to defend itself against the non-stop attacks of the world's capitalist classes. Lenin said it best when he said to paraphrase ``we are socialist because we say we are building socialism.''
488If the New Class gets more of the GNP than others, or if there is a wage differential throughout society (as there was and is in Socialist societies), in technologically backward countries, the question is not ``should this be the case'' but ``since where we have power under these conditions of backwardness, it has to be the case, how do we prevent differential reward from spiraling into New Class control and conversion of the proletarian party into their own Party.'' China is trying to answer that question. Can we answer that question and succeed here in the USA and the advanced capitalist countries? That is the question that communists in the capitalist countries should be asking.
The superficial resemblance in the destination of capital, and labor-time being paid at minimal Value, should not be allowed to overshadow and obscure the fact that the drawdown is never for profit of one or some group of capitalists in a First (Stalinist) Socialist Stage country, but is always for the improvement of the constant capital (industrial) base upon which the survival of the Stage is absolutely dependent, and according to a program developed by the Marxist-Leninist Party in command.
(Note: Of course, if revisionism has succeeded and the Socialist country in question is not socialist but already under the control of the New Class absolutely then this would not apply, and we would have to say that yes indeed the absorption of capital, whatever its specific destination, is part of a de facto capitalist system. However, these are two distinct categories. You should not confuse the one with the other. Admittedly this is difficult when we are as close to the forests of socialism as we are and we find the viewing of individual trees to require surgically precise observation.)
However, speaking of Stalinist Socialism as a distinct (and unsullied) Stage we see that it has featured the demand for more and more production at any cost. Yet this
was because there was no choice if Socialism were to survive. This has meant, and may again mean, that generations of working people will have to sacrifice everything in the way of consumer goods. This creates unrest and necessitates stronger state responses at home. This dampens the enthusiasm of working classes in the more advanced capitalist countries for adopting the Stalinist Stage system. -And, that is understandable.
Thus, we can see why the working classes in Europe, after the recovery of the 1950's (supervised by the US occupiers, who sabotaged elections and strikes in Italy and France respectively, for example) were not unanimously in support of a Stalinist Stage system in their countries. Nor, in North America which was living off the fat of the world. Then the gringo ruling class had much more in the way of crumbs to drop from their fat cat table as a result of the centralization and concentration of private capital behind the Rockefeller led oligarchy. One can understand that, in both cases, giving that up, what labor thought it had, in favor of the sacrifice that seemed inherent in Stalinist Socialism found little support in their movements. All this aside from the persistent attacks of the US rulers on the revolutionary parties in organized working class activities. In the US this was an especially virulent attack that came to a peak in the late 1940's with the expulsion of the communists from most of the unions and a de facto alliance between the FBI and organized crime as its framework. (The bedding of Jane Edgar Hoover on a weekly basis by Meyer Lansky's top boss Frank Costello didn't hurt the program a bit, either. (For an inside snapshot of Hoover's live-in lover Clyde Tolson, watch the recent Johnnie Depp movie Public Enemies, and the earlier Oliver Stone film Nixon.) For the inside story of Hoover's homosexual love affair with Costello see my book The Buccaneer.}
489Comparing underlying motivation in the prime moving forces of the
Simple Chiefdom Stage and the Stalinist Socialist Stage.
In the Simple Chiefdoms there were the sincere ``front people'' who took leadership and there were the less than sincere Chiefs. In both cases there would have been the consigliore, from the clans and/or sodalities, who had their own agendas. We have seen that within the Simple Chiefdoms it only took one person to advocate for increasing professional specialization to maximize production, with an ulterior motive, (getting thereby in a better ``position'' in the complex economy to improve said person's welfare at the expense of the others) to make the general trajectory begin to move in a new and completely different direction. ---And because the agricultural revolution (Neolithic/Formative archaeological stages in Old and New World prehistory, respectively) had created de facto objective inequality among family farms, the idea of greater personal prosperity via acquisition of things (property) now existed for the first time in human history, in among at least some individuals.
490The Origin of Modern ``Property'' Concepts
Thus, invisibly, inexorably, if gradually, society was on the road to abandoning the millions of years old societal policy of ``sharing for the common benefit'' all that was produced, which had been, until now, eliminating envy, jealousy and coveting, and their socially dissolutional centrifugal effects, from said society. The new direction would have been impossible to see at the time, if the advocates, were good at hiding their true motivation; it was nevertheless, a move toward a society where differential reward was
best supported by the maximization of surplus value in an increasingly professionally specialized Stone Age economy, and this was the point in time of the origin of modern property concepts.
What About the Restoration of Property Concepts
In the First Socialist Stage?
Is this what we see in Stalinist Socialism?
Yes and No.
It can go either way, and in the Soviet Union it could have gone either way, although what had to be overcome in order to stay on the road to Communism - or even to stay within the primitive constraints of Stalinist Socialism - would have taken a lot of luck and even better leadership than Joseph Stalin was able to provide. For, in the last analysis the achievements of the 1930's and the victory in the Second World War, and even stopping the drive of the US rulers for world domination after 1945 to his credit, Stalin did fail to properly prepare the succession. In doing so, the ``classless intelligentsia'' of his creation asserted themselves and in a little under four decades they restored capitalism in the new and even more hellish form we see in Russia and the former constituent Republics today.
491In the 1930's, the decade of the "new class" of so-called ``classless intelligentsia,'' there were persons who had the motivation of getting a bigger cut of the pie for themselves, via the route of administering the publicly owned means of production. However, the Bolshevik leadership knew this, and if the political leadership (e.g., Stalin and Mao) had no intention of letting that happen (the New Class get away with separating themselves), and did what Lenin had said someone would have to do (protect the workers from the workers state), then (and only then) could Stalinist Socialism be kept on the right path. Which is to say, upwards and onwards to Advanced Socialism, Communism, etc. Here Stalin ultimately failed. Then Mao Zedong stepped forward to accept the challenge. Preventing such "new class separation" was the task that Mao set himself when he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
492The Cultural Revolution
The Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-1975 certainly did one thing no one would deny. What could that be? It made every person in China and billions around the world aware of the idea that New Class existence and separation was the key issue facing the international working class movement when in power.
---And, this concern had not started then and there, but had and has a long history. After all, regardless of other factors, Trotsky had made Stalin's bureaucracy the butt of his attacks on Stalinism --- essentially accusing these bureaucrats of becoming a New Class and hijacking the revolution. Stalin himself was constantly on guard against what he perceived as attempts of his underlings to lead the USSR along a capitalist road. Mao, throughout the Chinese Party's history after he became boss, conducted non-stop ``rectification'' campaigns (e.g., 1940-1941) to prevent ``new class'' kinds of ideology arising among Party members; and, the Great Leap Forward in China (1955-1959) had been based in part on the idea that the Party bureaucracy was hindering the people in their demand to jump far ahead in a very short time in the industrialization of the nation.
493In the end the Cultural Revolution failed because it failed to deal with the New
Class in any kind of final definitive ''theoretical'' way. Following the failure of the Cultural Revolution leaders to step up production, China's Party leaders turned to a New Economic Policy (Lenin's 1921 NEP) path. This time everyone was aware of the potential danger of the New Class becoming a ruling class by transforming the Communist Party itself. Accepting the challenge, the Party embarked courageously on the path of fulfilling capitalism's historical task while retaining state power. Exactly as Lenin et. al., had done in 1921.
Wanting and Having are Two Different Categories
Over the next three decades the Chinese leadership would come up with a ``theoretical'' solution, which is consistent with what I have presented herein. However, having a solution and explaining it internationally are often two different things.
Perhaps because superficial consistence is not the same as fundamental at-bottom philosophical agreement. In short, I have not heard from the CPC on their agreement or lack thereof with what is presented herein.
Furthermore, and however that may be, the Left in the West has always had an ultra-left component that wants communism NOW. But, as Lenin was forced to admit in 1921, wanting communism and being able to have communism are two distinctly different things. Emotion is not enough. One has to accept what Marx and Engels discovered, and that is the mode of production for Communism requires an extremely modern technological component. Until you have it you cannot have modern communism. ---And, we don't want primitive communism.
If it comes to that we will be far better off having to fight our way through the current transitional period, even if it means, as it has, we have to create the capitalist industrial infrastructure ourselves from scratch. It's better to live in poverty standing up and building a common future than to submit to wage slavery and every indignity that insures.
During the 20th century we Bolsheviks learned from practice that there is no short cut. We have tried relying principally on the ideological and social organizational components of culture, in lieu of technological advance, and in all instances these attempts have ultimately failed. Without an extremely advanced industry and agriculture communism is not possible in the post-Servitude way anyway. ---And, it is not our intention to return to the living conditions of ``primitive communism'' (the Stages of Hunting and Gathering and primitive agriculture) in order ``to share the poverty'' (as ultimately was the real social program of Madame Mao and associates). Those who wish to follow that road now, after the experiments of the 20th century, are free to do so but they are not communists nor Marxists nor Leninists --- rather a modern form of the old utopian socialists that Marx and Engels first confronted, exposed and defeated. Living in a ``commune'' in the forests of Oregon is fine for those who wish to do so but it is not what we communists have in mind. Having read this book you know exactly what it is we have in mind --- Star Trek levels of advanced technology with the living standards and conditions for everyone that go along with it.
494I believe that the CPC has done everything it can do over the last three decades to see that controlled capitalism does not lead to counter-revolution They had to finally deal with the problem that was recognized as early as 1922 by Lenin and the Bolshevik Politburo --- namely China's extreme backwardness --- the fact that it had barely entered the
Capitalist Stage (This would be a good time to re-read Chapter 14). This time around they have placed the bourgeoisie at least partially outside the Party, by encouraging them in ``business'' pursuits where they are clearly identified and identifiable. As importantly, over the last thirty years the People's Republic of China has truly pioneered a new path forward which simply put: ``allows the fullest technological potential of the capitalist stage to be achieved while using the full resources of the socialist state (police-army) to insure that the working class Party remains in power and constructs all those facets of the Socialist Stage it can --- both nationally and internationally --- as circumstances allow.'' This partial restoration of Capitalism in China comes about by necessity as it did in the Soviet Republic when Lenin restored Capitalism in 1921. Namely, the necessity of getting production up to the levels required to build the future we have in mind. That is a future NOT ``to share the poverty'' but ``to share the wealth.'' The great, limitless wealth it is within our power to create globally right now! ---And it comes about in China in an extremely sophisticated form where the Party is constantly experimenting, testing, and examining the results of a broad-spectrum of sociocultural initiatives, great and small, within both the capitalist and socialist sectors.
495The human cost of either road is high --- that is, the road pursued by Stalin or the road being pursued currently by the Chinese Party. But, we have had no choice and we have no choice now. That is, we Marxists have no choice, because we are the social scientists and not just opportunist ideologues.
Why don't we have a choice?
Because, correctly, our every effort since 1917, has been to get to the point of advanced technological development Marx and Engels had assumed as a ``given'' before they knew society could proceed to Communism. Our job is to get to Communism. There is no ``prescription'' as to how that is to be done, and we have learned from experience that Stalinist forms of public property are no guarantee against capitalist restoration. So, we might as well deal with the problem of the New Class, and the Bourgeoisie in general, in the most expeditious way we can. For China, we have seen the course that seems to be working for them. For us, the matter is entirely different; we have that capitalist advanced industry and agriculture in hand and we should be able to move to Communism within a short period of time. ---And, do so while protecting and gradually evolving working people's private property rights over a period suitable to them and to us.
496What Does the Outcome of the Cultural Revolution Mean to Us?
Whether these initial struggles will suffice for China is yet to be determined. So far, following the analysis in this book, the CPC has stayed on the right road. This is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. There is only one guarantee of that and that is a fully educated communist cadre that knows what it is doing and why.
But one thing we do know is that NOW, it is YOUR TASK to see that this new class does not succeed in separating itself once again, once we have power in North America. Because the New Class will be with us make no mistake about it. In other words, the political leadership of the working classes, with state power in its hands, has free will. Now, especially after the 20th century experiments, you should be able to see that things keep going forward on course. Precisely in order to achieve the ideal theoretical objective of true Socialism, Communism and Humanist society, somewhere
down the road. You know what to look for, in other words. ---And, finally, it is time for North American communists to break their pattern of adhering to the gringo curse of de facto illiteracy. By which I mean the self-imposed refusal to ``read'' which characterizes so much of the USA including its supposedly educated members. Ignorance is often the preferred mode of preparation for bourgeois politicians but our leaders and representatives need to be educated and continually so.
---And, this is far more important than carping about what the CPC is doing in China. Before U.S. would-be communists say anything more they should bring about a revolution HERE! The Chinese have done and are doing their part. It's time for us to do our part --- a part which the founders expected us to have already played!
Now, let us turn to the question of whether the class struggle carries on in the Socialist Stages. Obviously, the class struggle does carry on - very intensively - in these Socialist Stages. (Remember our definitions: we don't want to confuse the term ``Socialism'' with ``Communism'' - these are two different things and we have come to define Socialism as the transitional period of proletarian dictatorship. The Second Transitional Period in this presentation.) Every piece of historical evidence shows us that in the societies in the Second Transitional Period there is ongoing class struggle. Over-night capitalist restoration in the USSR proves it. The necessity to launch the cultural revolution in China to prevent capitalist restoration of the Soviet variety is another proof.
497(Note: there is a big difference between (a) the sneaking subterfuge approach to capitalist restoration as pursued by the Soviet revisionists after the death of Stalin and (b) the conscious decision of honest Party leaders such as Lenin, or the post-Mao leadership in China, to openly restore capitalism as a controlled portion of the national economy, for their own good reasons.)
Finally, one should not confuse Chairman Mao and his thinking with that of his wife. Mao himself has serious doubts about the course the Cultural Revolution was following under her leadership and died before making any final judgment.
Compare and Contrast
In the case of Simple Chiefdoms the class struggle was incipient - since there were no classes there could be no class struggle - (as in subatomic physics ultra-dense objects without atoms cannot undergo fusion because there are no nucleons to fuse.) What we have in Simple Chiefdoms are special interest groups and ranks of differing privilege which will eventually separate into classes, but which have their origins in the simple part-time avocations of shaman or sodality leader.
In Stalinist Stage Socialism we have special interest groups and sectors of society, indeed ranks of differing privilege, which might separate into classes or which might not. ---And, their origin is in having been part of an expanding class for six millennia! It's a struggle. That is what class struggle is all about; although these Stalinist Socialist special interest groups are not classes strictly speaking, some of them want to be, historically they have been, and therefore the character of the struggle to prevent class separation is a form of class struggle.
As I have said, it was always chancy that things would succeed in Russia, or after October, the Soviet Union, under the best of circumstances. Russia and the Soviet Union rarely had the ``best of circumstances.''
You should go on examining feature after feature, comparing and contrasting
features, between these two transitional Periods. The point has been made.
In the final analysis it is always true that history is unfolding as it should. Therefore, it is proven that the Stage of Stalinist Socialism was exactly what Marx and Engels and Lenin knew it would be - in terms of being a dictatorship of indefinite length. {Because no one could predict ahead of time the specific historical circumstances and therefore the length of time it would take to secure Socialism as Stage(s) on the surface of the planet Earth.} This is obviously true, besides being necessarily true (in theory,) that the class struggle continued and will continue, within the lands of Socialism both in its first Stalinist Stage form and in its current more Advanced Second Stage form.
Remember; do not confuse ``Socialism'' with public ownership of the means of production. The first diagnostic of a Socialist Stage is that a ``Communist Party'' (Marxist-Leninist Party) has political (state) power in its hands. -And, this should always be the critical, most important single, defining, thus diagnostic, characteristic of the existence of the Second Transitional Period in any country. Whether it is the CP in command of a ``capitalist'' sector economy and/or a ``public'' sector economy, to a greater or lesser degree, has nothing to do with the country in question being in The Second Transitional Period. That is a determination based upon whether a working class vanguard Party has state power in its hands. It is this fact of life which makes it possible to have a capitalist sector economy within a working class dominated society --- and it always has been this way. Whether it was Lenin restoring Capitalism in 1921 or the contemporary Chinese leadership doing so after 1975, what makes it possible is that we have the military and the secret police in our hands.
498This should be obvious and I shouldn't have to explain this to some of you. However, Trotsky made his argument against Stalin theoretically contingent on the premise that what existed in the Soviet Union was economically socialist except for the ``deformed'' political structure. The idea still infects many would-be revolutionaries. It is this profound error we have to set aside. Regardless of its political utility in Trotsky's personal fight with Stalin, the concept never had a shred of scientific substance because there was never any socialist economic structure in Russia or the other Republics other than the demand by the Party that working people be given the highest priority when possible in the allocation of national resources. Remember that War Communism turned out to be an expedient ending as quickly as the Civil War and was followed by the introduction of capitalism in the form of a market economy of private owners of industry and agriculture in 1921, with governmental enterprise pushed ahead where possible. Stalin created new forms of management of national resources in both industry and agriculture by introducing the Five Year Plans and forced collectivization of farming much later --- seven years later. What made ``socialism'' authentic had always been and continues to be the program and intention of the vanguard Party to build as soon as it could a truly ``socialist'' (transitional) and then ``communist'' society; in this transition however ``anything goes'' or at least is permissible if it gets us further down the road to where we want to go.
499 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/2011/ABCC999/20110726/599.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ from .docx from author (see ABCs.el) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nilThus, today we have a restructured Socialist Camp which includes authentic First (Stalinist) and Second Socialist Stage countries to wit, and respectively: Cuba, China, Vietnam and Laos. (As for the situation in Korea it is impossible for me to determine from what little information I have about the situation in that country, if this is anything more than a degenerated First Socialist Stage society. Frankly, I see very little there
admirable. At least not any more. Meaning that Kim Il Sung's socialist economic program served its purpose at one time but does it anymore? I don't know because we have so little reliable data and must exclude Washington's fascist propaganda which is why it is difficult for me to tell what is going on.) ---And the Koreans have not been helpful in explaining to us (at least in languages other than their own) what it is that they may be doing we don't understand.
The General Crisis of Stalinist Socialism
Stalinist Socialism has a general crisis too and it is specifically the product of, which is to say caused by, the backwardness of those societies in which workers first seized power. Marx and Engels had required the full development of capitalism's productive potential, as they understood it, in then contemporary England, Germany, France, Italy and the USA for example. It didn't happen that way. Workers in the Soviet Republic (later Soviet Union) were too few, too poorly prepared, and with totally inadequate industrial plants at their disposal, to do without the assistance of a de facto New Class of bureaucrats with its own inherent special interests, its own special privileges. No amount of talk (ideological propaganda about egalitarianism, the communist philosophy, sharing the poverty, etc.) would serve to offset this New Class's basic interests as its members understood them. Thus, inherently Stalinist societies were on a short fuse (historically speaking) where backwardness would either be overcome, the working classes expanded and fully educated to take control, or the New Class would separate itself becoming a new ruling class in a new kind of Servitude society which would be essentially capitalist. It turned out to be the latter.
500lp + t = V1, V2 + Surplus Value
NGM / New Class
NGM = investment in next generations of machinery
New Class = Need for New Class vs. Danger of Class Society reappearing (locus of the general crisis)
This is what happened eventually in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and in a totally different way in the People's Republic of China. In the latter case Mao attempted to stop New Class takeover (especially in his last attempt --- the Cultural Revolution.) ---And, indirectly, via his successors, who understood everything I have explained so far about this process, he may have found a road around backwardness, using the New Class, while simultaneously preventing it from separating as a new ruling class. Thus the Stalinist Socialist Stage prepared the way for China to enter the Advanced Socialist Stage using a formula similar to the NEP formula Lenin devised to get the Soviet Republic out of trouble in 1921.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ Chapter 20: The Stage of Advanced SocialismAs it turned out, the post-1975 world became extraordinarily complex. The post-1975 turn of the Chinese Party and the post-Soviet-East European collapse of c.1990 left foreign (to the Socialist Camp) communists totally confused as to what was going on
precisely because no one had offered an acceptable (that is to say a ``Marxist'' or ``Historical Materialist'') theoretical explanation of what had occurred. Hopefully, what I have explained in this regard now satisfies that crying need, at least for you cadre who have a use for this handbook. ---And you, who will lead North American workers and veterans, are the important ones in history now --- even if our enemies don't know it --- even if the established ``Left'' party leaders don't understand it.
As for our enemies, the post-1975 world was not one in which the USA ruling oligarchs could act with impunity. They could not direct world affairs as they wished. For US traditional imperialism (with the gringo ruling families placing themselves in the locomotive engine of the historical train they had formed with the other capitalist classes in tow), the Soviet revisionists had their post-Vietnam policy too. It had been written for them by George Orwell. He had called it, 1984. For 15 years the US and Soviet rulers played the Orwellian Game of World Chessmanship where the struggles of the class forces in Africa, Asia and Latin America often were played out in some kind of way reflective of the interests of their sponsors.
501In 1975, the Soviet New Czars were committed to the Big Lie idea because it had worked so well for them for over two decades. I mean by this, the ``sheep's clothing'' approach to converting public property into their own private property. It took them fifteen years to get over that idea and to stand naked before their own people and the world for what they really were (c. 1990.)
However, after 1975, neither the Gringo capitalists nor the Soviet-lining ``revisionist'' capitalists, were preparing to attack Socialist China. That had been the diagnostic environmental criteria that created and necessitated Stalinist Socialism in the first place. That is to say, the absolute determination of the global capitalist classes to liquidate by war the first world Socialist Stage. In other words, with the Rockefeller (Nixon-Kissinger) initiative to "normalize" relations with China, the foreign pressure was off.
Cuba's position wasn't nearly as secure. The Gringo giant is right next door and without Soviet rockets and finances... As a consequence it has been impossible for Cuba to move as quickly into the Advanced Socialist Stage a la the People's Republic of China. Cuban reorganization away from Soviet guidelines did not really get under way until after 1990, and then had to be done virtually overnight. Cuba has had to be guarded in the way it deviates from established security patterns of proletarian dictatorship given the rapacious nature and determination of the US oligarchs and their flunkey politicos to reverse the Revolution - now 50 years old. Especially, careful of the Gusano garbage in Miami, and its strong influence within the gringo ruling circles.
502China, Cuba, and Vietnam, are examples of nations moving nevertheless into the Second Socialist Stage {what I am calling the Stage of Advanced Socialism.}
There are the countries that collapsed altogether such as the USSR and Eastern Europe with varying opportunities to recover, since the time when their corrupt revisionist leadership gave up the charades. By January 2005, the elderly in Russia had revolted against the evils of the emergent capitalist system there. Soon Russians across the nation found the very essentials of life were beyond their ability to obtain. Collapsing oil prices have run Putin out of time. The opportunity is now at hand there for a Second Bolshevik Revolution. Will the Communists of the Soviet Union be up to the task? Can they bring over the necessary military units to overthrow the Putin Regime and re-
establish Soviet authority? Or, will perhaps, Putin decide to throw in his and the New Class's lot with us? Only time will tell.
There is the peculiar case of Democratic Korea where a perverse form of the old Stalinist Stage Socialist system is in place and it is quite uncertain what if anything the leadership is prepared to do differently in the future. We might call this regressionist stagnation.
Three outcomes to Stalinist Socialism as a global Stage. Nothing more, Nothing less. So history has proven what three roads may come from the way the Stage developed here on Earth. Were there other possible outcomes?
I think so. If the Red Army had taken Berlin in 1920 instead of 1945 and all of Europe had gone Red over the next couple of years. That's one hypothetical one. It would have changed the entire century. I didn't happen so that's that.
China's New Economic Policy; Three Systems One Country
The Soviet Union had to leave the leisurely pace of NEP behind in 1928, because it had to get serious about building an industrial base second to none. {At least as far as being able to produce armaments for the inevitable coming world war with capitalism. That Second World War would be a GNP war.} We have reviewed the cost and the success of that new Five Year Plan road. The Russian peasantry that had taken the Bolsheviks in hand in 1921 had, in turn, been taken in hand itself. The backbone of Russian capitalism had been in agriculture and now that back had been broken.
The same sequence of agrarian reform would be followed in China where first the bourgeois capitalist landlord-gentry system was liquidated and then mass collectivization undertaken so that a new form of agricultural social organization supportive of the central government could be established. After collectivization in China came the communes and those lasted more or less as the basis of Chinese agriculture until after the 1978 new road forward began to take shape.
China was able to move into its own NEP after 1975. First of all because the pressure from international imperialism was off. Nixon's visit to China, on behalf of his bosses the Rockefeller brothers, prepared the way for China's leaders to move from a defensive posture to a national modernization and development posture. Secondly, somehow production had to be stepped up and accelerated on a continuing basis in China. For thirty years the new Chinese Party leadership has been struggling to do what they had to do --- fully develop the capitalist stage industrial and agricultural systems and yet keep state power in their hands while they build the emerging Socialist Stage as best they can. -And a quarter century later the results can only be said to be incredible. China will be one of the most modern industrial countries in the world by AD 2050!
503Initially, this Chinese NEP was called Two Systems, One Country. I think what our theory shows is that there are actually three systems. One is capitalism; the other is Stalinist Socialism; the third is the germinal of Communism. Together these constitute the Stage of Advanced Socialism in China.
We in the USA, Canada or the other advanced capitalist countries will not have to do the same thing; we won't face the same problems in any way, since capitalism and its productive forces are already fully developed here. Yet there are lessons to be learned by the Soviet and Chinese experiences with regard to the level of development of the productive forces and what must be done to bring social relations into conformity. It's
time to review the essential features of China's three economic systems in formulae (for the same systems will be present in the advanced capitalist countries at first --- although it will be far easier to build down the capitalist component while building up the Socialist and Communist components in our societies.)
Finally, if communists in the USA or elsewhere are unhappy that China has had to take a road of modernization which as it did in Russia, requires a period of capitalist enterprise alongside other institutions, under the proletarian dictatorship, then let them make a revolution now in the USA and get on with their task.
[1] Capitalism (from the past but modified to fit contemporary circumstances)
lp + t --> V1, V2 + SV
profit/NGM
lp = human labor-power
t = automated machinofacture
V1 = wages
V2 = repair and maintenance of factory machinery
SV = surplus value
NGM = investment in the next generation of machinery
Profit = appropriated by capitalist (one half of the loci of the general crisis)
[2] Stalinist Socialism (established in China in 1949 and continuing)
lp + t --> V1, V2 + SV
state/NGM/WI
New Classes
lp = human labor-power
t = automated machinofacture
V1 = wages
V2 = cost of repair and maintenance of machinery
SV = surplus value
state = military, police
NGM = cost of investment in next generation of machinery
WI = expenditures in raising human potential (workers interests)
New Classes = the old Stalinist bureaucracy and the new NEP type capitalists
(the other half of the loci of the general crisis.)
[3] Communism (and future STAR TREK stage)
lp + rlp + t --> V1, V2 + SV
lp = human labor-power
rlp = robot labor-power
t = Star Trek level of technology
V1 = to each as needed
V2 = unlimited repair potential
SV = unlimited surplus value (for practical purposes) thus no sub-column crisis
The General Crisis of Advanced Socialism
The general crisis of Advanced Socialism is essentially the same as the general crisis of Feudalism. That is, the balancing act that the new ruling class of proletarians must perform in order to keep the New Class from separating itself; simultaneously preventing the new bourgeoisie from the capitalist sector from asserting itself (over state power) and building up the specter of communism in production while maintaining Stalinist socialist public property institutions along the way. This is a new stage and to understand it we have to closely analyze the details of China's reforms since 1976 --- that is, the past 30 years of an increasingly complex and detailed balancing act, and is beyond the scope of this handbook.
More on Transcending the General Crisis of Capitalism
The General Crisis of Capitalism was specifically caused by the irreversible absolute decline in the rate of profit. That means, unless labor-power was introduced on a one to one ratio with the introduction of the next generation of machinery the sheer output of those machines would be greater but the RATE of profit production would be less. Because, the decline in the labor-power input makes it so. For the capitalist to overcome this decline in the rate of profit he would have to hire more labor-power. This is self-defeating. He bought the new machines to stay competitive; to reduce the amount of labor-power he had to buy per unit of commodity output. Furthermore, this decline in the rate of profit is exacerbated simply by the sheer investment in the sub-column (under Surplus Value) we call the next generation of machinery (NGM), for that investment will take surplus value that might otherwise have gone into the profit sub-column.
504These facts Marx proved many years ago. Thereby unlocking the secrets of Capitalist production in a never-ending series of crises. When Frederick Engels said at Marx's (1883) London funeral, that Marx had ``discovered the laws of history and unlocked the secrets of capitalist production,'' the latter claim was in reference to this discovery of the inherent General Crisis of Capitalism being caused by the absolute decline in the rate of profit.
There is a superficial similarity with Stalinist Socialism in this regard, as in the latter Stage, NGM also absorbed surplus value as quickly as it was created. But, the end-use was altogether different.
The end-use was not ``profit'' (nor NGM for the ultimate [equipment installed] goal of more profit) but the satisfaction of the diagnostics of the ``stage'' which fundamentally are always the advancement of the interests of Working People. If this had not been so, the New Class in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, would not have had to throw off its sheep's clothing and grab as grab can.
It was this fact of proletarian dictatorship in Russia which changed what might have been state capitalism in Germany, England, France, Italy, or America, into a capitalist sector in a backward society undergoing socialist transformation by Bolshevism. Bukharin pointed this out in his 1922 official article Economic
Organization in Soviet Russia, which was the succinct ideological presentation of Lenin's position on the reintroduction of capitalism in the Soviet Republic, made on behalf of the Russian Politburo and the Comintern (where he was number two after Zinoviev by the time of NEP).
At bottom, the economic "category" source of all this trouble is that element of the equation that involves labor-power. To transcend this problem one must at least supplement human labor power, and eventually replace human labor-power, with robot labor-power, so that labor-power can be introduced on a one-to-one, unit-by-unit, basis with the introduction of new machinery.
So, what are we looking for in China or anywhere in the Socialist world? What changes in the equation allow us Bolsheviks to transcend the General Crisis of Capitalism?
Robot labor-power
In the science and technology sense robot labor-power is simply an elaboration of a component of constant capital {fancier machinery.} But, in a strictly economic sense, it is an entirely different category altogether. Since we see artificially intelligent computerized robotics at work today in virtually every advanced industrial factory, we must conclude that robot labor-power as a new category, separate from human labor-power, is practical. In fact it is already a critical component of machinofacture is it not? Even if not yet fully in existence we can see the future as one where robots will create robots, fix and maintain them, without human input.
In the technological (e.g., science fictional, ''Foundation'') sense, when labor-power of the robotic type is extant, then we have a truly new kind of mode of production. One in which there is no end to the amount of social product that can be produced and distributed. In the political sense, we are building our way into the Era of Freedom. Robot labor-power may well be essential, to Communist and/or Truly Human Society. It has been the genius of Gene Roddenberry, and his followers (writers) that have shown us the future. Which is to say the technology and the social relations of the STAR TREK series of great episodic adventures in the Mode of Production of future humanist societies.
The Mode of Production and the Evolution of Capital
It must be assumed, as a given, that the Workers Party will keep a firm grip on State power (the military and the police) as the three systems evolve. -And, that the class struggle within the Second Socialist Stage will have a conclusion that is not in doubt. With those assumptions as the condition of the evolutionary sequence in process let us turn to the key questions of capital, value and superstructure in the Socialist countries.
Variable Capital: the working classes in the factories and on the land need to have their educational levels raised as quickly and as steadily as possible. Along the way we need not expect the great sacrifice of several generations with regard to the creature comforts of life because the pressure from without has been normalized.
{At least as long as imperialism is on the defensive, as it has been since the US ruling families stumbled in Vietnam, stumbling again in Iraq and putting themselves at war with the World Islamic billion-plus people. An unexpected windfall of good luck for us Bolsheviks, ironically making up in many ways for the temporary disadvantages we accrued from the collapse of modern revisionism. In recruiting their ``Dogs of War'' to
overthrow the best government Afghanistan ever had the Gringo bosses, dialectically, brought themselves to the brink of destruction.
Constant Capital: investment from surplus value in the next generation of machinery will come (as it is coming) from three sources. The savings of the Chinese people (and others as they enter this Stage) that constitute a significant section of the GNP. From foreign industrial and manufacturing capitalist direct investment. From international finance capital. The consequences are clear. Speedy modernization of all of the industrial and agricultural technology to the most advanced possible levels as quickly as possible.
Finance Capital: The deepening General Crisis of Capitalism has produced an enormous amount of liquid finance capital looking for a home. It is a matter of historical fact that at this moment only the People's Republic of China can absorb one trillion US dollars a year of this money, let alone greater amounts.
As the few hundred richest families on the globe search for a place to put their annual income {they have as much cash as the annual income of 2.5 billion people on this planet} it requires only astute financial engineering to give them both security (PRC guarantees on capital invested) and high returns (from a combination of reinvestment tiers on interest paid. For a discussion of how I began in this kind of work in the late 1970's I refer interested readers to High Finance, South American Style! 2003, Jason W. Smith, Writers Press, Boise 300 pp.)
The Mode of Production and the Evolution of Value
The way Value is being produced in China, as it is currently being produced (via 3 systems or 3 different productive formulas), tells us exactly what must be done in the 21st century, in similarly situated countries. Even in the advanced capitalist countries, when revolution comes to them. The formula of the future must gradually replace the formula of the past. Which is to say the productive relations of communism must gradually replace the productive relations of capitalism. Although in places like Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan the transition will be much faster.
There is a strictly technological frontier that will fall down and disappear in the phases of the reinvention of the means of production, year by year, decade after decade. Along the way, the formula of Stalinist Socialism with its government and state owned (publicly owned) means of production in industry, and on the land, will also take on new forms more appropriate to the Communist Stage of the future.
In practice, one large-scale way of doing this is already afoot. That is the total roboticization of automated factories, to produce both heavy and light industrial goods. But, this is only one way forward. Its drawback is that these early applications of robot labor-power still require human administrators. This is a structural guarantee for a New Class of ``classless intellectuals'' once again. So, it is essential that the roboticized factories eventually be run, by completely independent artificially intelligent machines and that ``eventually'' comes at the earliest possible moment. So, that rather than building a growing New Class, we should see the point come when we will be building that class - down. Out of existence.
Along the way there is no reason why these professional bureaucrats should not be phased out by computer assisted workers who administer on a part-time basis. Ideally
these will be workers who take on an increasingly large supervisory scope of administration, as their skills and their computer assisted work places, improve. The ideal would be that people who have a multitude of other life goals and activities take on these administrative tasks more-or-less voluntarily. Perhaps doing their volunteer community administrative work from computer terminals at home. People whose interest is in the public welfare which, they see in everyday life, means their own personal welfare.
People working at home and interfacing with each other in socially recreational ways, can be people working at home and interfacing with each other in economically supervisory ways, controlling the dominating heights of economy and ruling over a massive base of robot labor-power ``manned'' by cybernetically organized, modernized machinofacture and STAR TREK level technological installations.
In this way Value and Surplus Value are produced without a Capitalist General Crisis, and in never ending amounts, so that the wishes of any one and indeed all, of the citizens, for whatever material things, can be instantly satisfied. The Era of Freedom will be here when the slogan of communism becomes a reality.
From each according to her ability; to each according to her wishes and needs. When that day arrives the Era of Necessity will be over.
The Evolution of the Superstructure
Basal imprinting of infants and children will change as the mode of production changes. As scarcity is eliminated and the social relations of production reflect an increasingly egalitarian attitude. Yet this is going to take at least the five generations of the 21st century.
This means that the Workers Party must keep a firm grip on the state. Using the police and the military to suppress those elements who do not welcome the rebirth of the egalitarian altruism of the ancient gens in modern cybernetic production forms. Until such times as classes have become an anachronism this ``state'' apparatus will be at the core of Worker's Party Governments.
One of the tasks of Party and State must be to see that the official ideology of the future is as clearly spelled out and understood as possible. In a word, success will be heavily dependent on "education." In the last analysis the consciously internalized and understood philosophy of science is the next best guardian (after the state apparatus itself) of the future, and humanity's ability to get there. I think of such a future as being both exciting and well worth striving to achieve. We have Mr. Roddenberry to thank for showing us what everyday life should be like. In his work we have a popularized model of a future Communist society, so you cadre should not hesitate to call upon that model in explaining what it is we want to achieve to the masses. By contrast, what the capitalists visualize for the future is a return to chattel slavery of a new and technically more hellish type, as illustrated by the society of the Borg. A nice, easily understood, contrast for everyday agitation purposes.
505Workers as well as farmers were often held in servitude in the English-speaking world of Old England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, often of a de facto slave type. -And, this situation lasted until at least the early 1800's. An entertaining novel set in Scotland and the US, where mine workers suffered these circumstances, is worth your attention entitled A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett.
So the fact that the overwhelming percentage of New England's population was or had been unfree (~75%) by the time of the Revolutionary War (1775 --- 1881) did not change the general perception both at home and abroad, that ``freedom'' was extant in North America as it had never been in historical Europe. ---And, in fact, it was.
Primarily this was because White's who came in as temporary slaves (so-called indentured servants) eventually were freed or escaped servitude as part of the deteriorating ability of their feudal colonial masters in Old England to control the destiny of a land so far from home; which at any rate was being torn apart itself in a series of Civil Wars and revolutions.
The initial wave of 1600's immigrants was religious and of the Cromwell variety --- which is to say protestant of the Independent, Congregationalist, Puritan type; (remember the English Revolution, the English Republic and the English Civil Wars of 1640 --- 1660 we discussed in Chapter 12 on Capitalism.) It featured those whose objective was to work in some way for a living, as well as those who planned on living off of them, as they had, in the Old World. Such hopes were usually extinguished rather soon for the latter, but among the former some of our White ancestors survived in their North American toeholds; despite hostile environments (both natural and cultural). Unlike the warm climates and already domesticated masses of ``Latin'' America awaiting the Spanish ronin who colonized them, the North Americans seemed to have picked the ``hardest'' way to go.
506This English Revolution period, 1640-1660, witnessed the emergence of a true ``New'' England; one where the Cromwellian Puritans, Congregationalists and Independents of a variety of Church affiliations finally turned their beachhead settlements into true colonial towns. Their most distinguishing characteristic, vis a vis their Spanish counterparts to the south, was their addiction to self-help ``work'' as the source of their wealth, as opposed to living off the work of those being held in servitude. This was a new and completely different ``social value'' than that characterizing the feudalist occupation of New Spain. The protestant ethic had found a safe haven, and so had these protestant colonists --- soon to be joined by Christians of the old and ``official'' (i.e., Roman Catholic) Church variety, many temporarily out of Papal favor in Europe.
507As importantly, as Adam Smith reported in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, the American's had proven that free labor in the end was cheaper than labor held in servitude. Free labor could be dismissed when no longer needed, while slave labor
(both temporary and permanent) had to be fed, clothed, and housed all year round.
America is Labor Short
Nothing had plagued New England more in the 1600's and 1700's than the shortage of ``hands.'' So, it was not long before ``temporary'' slaves were imported --- usually but not always White. As we have seen they were called ``indentured servants'', and were ostensibly under contract to work for a certain person for two to seven years to pay the cost of their passage, at which time they would join their ``free'' (if impoverished) brethren, not yet truly petty bourgeoisie, on the land or in the towns. Recruiters sold these ``packages'' of temporary slavery with all the skill of modern used car sales hucksters offering many enticements (e.g., learn a trade; be all you can be; see the world; find a mate; become a ``free'' farmer, etc.) Yet an apple that turns out to be a lemon often leads to consumer rejection. ---And, the reality the temporary slaves found awaiting them was far more severe than they had imagined; so the struggle to end being ``unfree'' often began as soon as the immigrants arrived in the New England colonies. The newcomers determined to make lemonade, and move on.
508Yet, there is a big difference between being conscious of the unjust nature of feudal society and being class conscious of the proletarian variety. It would take the introduction of true capitalism, with all its technological diagnostic criteria in hand, before a true ``proletarian'' consciousness could emerge. In other words, one must have proletarians before one can have proletarian consciousness.
The Struggle to End being Unfree
Fundamentally, these de facto temporary slaves (at least the Whites) when abused or otherwise having become disaffected, could always run away and hide while farming in the western forests, or work as some kind of laborer, apprentice, or specialist guildsman in the large towns of the North (Boston, New York, Newark, and Philadelphia.) Africans could often do this as well since a great many of them had come to New England as ``freemen'' or as ``temporary slaves'' in the 1600's and 1700's and had settled as ``citizens'' in the Northern Colonies. ``Running away'' had, of course, happened in Europe also, but was a far more effective ``open door'' to freedom in New England, with its de facto unlimited western frontier.
Once arriving in cities, those with the idea of being free laborers soon discovered workers could not legally band together and refuse to work, except at a certain wage and for a certain number of hours. All this was explicitly outlawed in New England as it had been in Old England. As, for that matter, was paying and/or receiving a wage higher than prescribed by the bourgeois bosses of the colonies This was the first challenge the immigrants confronted.
Unity vs. Collaboration
In the struggle for adequate wages or fees, working people learned only by combining to achieve some degree of unity could they earn a decent wage or fee for their labor Thus, the first half of the foundation for social progress was learning to achieve unity of purpose and action.
However, their economic struggles with the bourgeoisie were compromised by the necessity of letting the bosses run the progressive movement to replace feudalism
with democracy of the capitalist sort (where the bourgeoisie rule, in other words, and settle their business among themselves politically in a ``democratic'' fashion). The bourgeois elements had the meeting places, the press, the elected offices held, the Church, and who else could lead. At any rate, this was the predominate ideological framework of that time (as it had been since the days of Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution). So, workers were always deeply involved politically alongside their bourgeois brothers --- as younger brothers. Not as an independent class with its own inherent interests. Furthermore, many of these working people were also petty bourgeois or wanted to be (guildsmen working for fees; small craftsmen operating shops; small farmers.) Therefore, it wasn't hard to convince them their political objectives should be the same as those of their employers and the more prosperous farmers (often called planters.) In practice if working conditions and wages were not blatantly unfair working people were willing to set aside economic demands in favor of political unity with their more prosperous neighbors. Under these conditions workers were willing to collaborate with the well-to-do.
509Capitalist Technological Foundations Illegal
-And, there were good material reasons for proto-proletarian mechanics, artisans and apprentices, to think of the colonial burgeoning bourgeoisie as being like class brothers. At least on the surface. For example, the technological foundations of what was then ``modern'' manufacture were specifically prohibited by British colonial law from being exported to New England. Not that the North American bourgeoisie didn't import them anyway --- but, it made every aspect of their manufacturing endeavors illegal from the get go.
For example, blast furnaces and the know how to make them, were equipment and knowledge, carefully policed in British ports. US smugglers like John Adams and John Hancock were forced to assist in the disguising of mechanics and others with technical knowledge in order to get them aboard their ships and often their equipment had to be left behind. The hope being that these men could remember how the furnaces were built and maintained, so they could reconstruct them once safely in America.
It was illegal to produce wrought iron in the colonies. Illegal to bring in artisan mechanics. Illegal to make machinery. Illegal to export anything that didn't first go through British ports on British ships. The entire Anglo-American enterprise was an exercise in illegal trafficking.
North American capitalists had to start out as criminals, and continue that way as a normal part of everyday business once they might get production underway. ---And, finally, their sales activities at home and abroad were a further and equally serious criminal infraction. Working people saw that feudalist oppression was as hard if not harder on the well-to-do than it was on them!
The arrival of the Flying Shuttle (1755), the Spinning Jenny ((1760), and the Steam Engine c.1765, were great criminal, as well as technological, accomplishments and would have earned their importers the hangman's noose had they been caught. In fact, it was the deep woods of North America which often had to be the locale for the construction of these furnaces and proto-factories, and in this the bourgeois importers naturally required the day to day assistance of the proto-proletarian and small capitalist farming, masses.
So, the material foundations of a united front were strong, constant, and overpowering.
In Conflict
However, where the antagonistic articulation between the bourgeoisie and the mechanics, artisans, apprentices and would be proletarians, in this new Less-than-Eden, were often too sharp to allow for class collaboration, Whites and Blacks could also take up arms and revolt. They did this often, and many times, together.
True chattel slaves in the Southern colonies mostly Black, often did revolt. ---And, in turn either escaped to sanctuaries such as Florida or Mexico or were slaughtered by thugs employed by their overseers. Thus, this second half of the foundation for social progress was learning to be willing to engage in armed revolt. Something White poor people were also learning.
A united front with the bourgeoisie was de facto the way history unfolded. ---And, while the struggle of Black chattel slaves and White temporary slaves were two distinctly different things, what this means for us, is that from this point forward in our studies we want to study two distinct trends in US working class consciousness formation. American White and free workers would have to contend with two tendencies. That is (1) unity with the bourgeoisie to achieve political success and (2) a willingness to fight the bourgeoisie and the slavocrats for economic success. Black slaves could not collaborate in any real way other than to submit to slavery and they had to learn to fight or flee.
{Note: today it is labor unity, and the willingness to fight back in open revolt, that constitutes the foundation for progress of all wage earning people in North America. It is for that reason the US Rulers spend so much effort and resources controlling all the media of communications (newspapers, books, and TV and Radio news and school textbooks.) Whatever happens the ruling oligarchy aims to (1) divide the people (destroy their unity) and (2) discourage ``violence'' on their part to redress their grievances.-And, with their Government apparatus in the States as well as Federally they pass endless legislation aimed at ``atomizing'' if you will the American people, turning one group against another, in the hope that constant and growing divisions among the masses will prevent unity from being achieved on their part. Today the fact we still need to get the right to organize a union through Congress shows us nothing has changed.)
510With this background in mind let us turn to the situation with regard to wage earners in the period immediately preceding the Revolutionary War. When we do, we see among the Whites, these two general trends had begun to take precedence in the social and political struggles of the North Americans by 1765. (The point in time we have defined ``Capitalism as a Stage'' to have emerged --- I suggest at this point you reread chapter 12).
Politically, first and foremost, was the demand of the immigrants for ``democracy''; the second was the demand of the immigrants for ``freedom'' from British aristocratic economic oppression. Let us review them in that order.
The Struggles for Political Democracy and Economic Freedom
The initial wave of immigrants featured egalitarian ideas so common among the religionists of the puritanical-independent-Congregationalist Cromwellian variety in the 1600's, and all of the New England toe-hold colonists could vote. By the 1700's
however, the poor had often been stripped of that right, and only the ``landed'' (property owning) or otherwise wealthy, citizens were allowed to vote (of course neither the temporary or permanent chattel slaves could vote; nor, the poor and wage- or fee-earning working people.) There were exceptions, or soon would be, in places like Philadelphia where persons renting apartments could vote (and this included many working people.) However, none of this anti-democratic movement in the colonies occurred without generating massive dissatisfaction, and as we have seen in Pennsylvania, workers sometimes won.
As you might imagine the tiny English-speaking world of that time was always affected in one part, when something happened in another part. We have seen that the word ``all'', when talking about the English-speaking world, meant only the United Kingdom and Ireland, the New England colonies and some Caribbean colonies. Thus, as Old England went, so went New England, eventually (albeit with its new indigenous democratic inclinations.)
Cromwell had his most serious and final pre-English civil war debate (c.1640) with himself. He was trying to decide whether to make the attempt at bringing his version of Christian political and economic life to Old England, or chucking the whole thing, to join his fellow co-religionists in their pilgrimage to the New World. ---And, this tendency continued for the next two centuries. Which is to say, this Old World vs. New World choice, awaited young English men and women, for over two centuries. The time it took to traverse the distance involved continued to shrink, so it was not surprising that revolutionary developments (or counter-revolutionary ones) in Old England continued to have reflections in the New World and vice versa.
In the midst of the Old English civil war (which led to the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords), in 1646, the American Nathaniel Bacon led a White revolt against the feudal parasitocracy headed up by the slave-owning planters (slavocrats) in the Virginia Colony. The slavocrats were able to defeat Bacon's forces (largely White and of course poor) by drowning the revolt in blood (Bacon inconveniently died during the armed struggle.) But, before the rulers could finish their work the commoners had regained some of their rights. White men without property regained their right to vote for their political representatives, and the right to vote in the selection of officials of their church as well, at least temporarily.
Nearly half a century later, and one year after the Anti-restoration Revolution of 1688 in London, a follower of Bacon named Jacob Leisler led another armed struggle in New York City, in 1689, against the local aristocracy. This time the reactionary forces did not succeed in reversing the gains of the uprising. As you can see, in both cases the American revolts, while indigenous responses to local conditions, took their triggering cue from Old England, which in both cases was in the throes of bourgeois revolution. Also, in both cases there were two primary classes involved in insurrection. The small holding capitalist farmers of the countryside (about 90% of the White population in the American colonies) and the artisans-mechanics of the cities. The latter being the precursors to true proletarian status.
511British Capitalism Faces First Colonialist Financial Crisis
Tea Party in Boston
It's important for you to recognize at this point one critical factor in the emerging
post-War (1856-1863) situation in Britain. Yes they won the war against France but they did so at the cost of about 60 million pounds! Parliament took various taxing measures including requiring the North American colonies to pay part of the bill - at least the ongoing part of supporting British troops and other British Government functions in the Atlantic colonies. This was an abrogation of the long ago won, full civic rights in colonial Assemblies, due to rich White Yankee Gentry, in the North American system of rule by White Male Wealthy ``common'' men. The Stamp Act and other taxing pieces of legislation culminated in the Boston Tea Party and led directly to the North American Revolutionary War (1775-1781.) The ultimate cause having been the British capitalist's greed to seize French and other possessions on a global basis, which had led directly to the loss of the North American colonies altogether.
512Technically this is more of a colonial war than an imperialist war in that the British and French capitalists were not trying to export capital at any important rate. That is, factories and the machinery within them were not being sent here and there and sold to anyone anywhere. Just the opposite actually as you have seen in this juxtaposition of British Imperialism versus North American colonists. But it was symptomatic in every way of what capitalism portended for the 19th century.
The Origin of American Proletarians
It's important here to note that Capitalism, for a century and a half after New England's colonization, did not yet quite exist - in either Old or New England. Which is to say, that workers hired, and paid for their labor-power (wages), then placed at the factory bench, were not yet quite in existence --- or, where in some large American cities, some small shops of this type did exist, they were limited by British colonial law, which allowed no would-be capitalist to hire more than ten such persons per shop. -And, of course, the New Englanders were still over half a century away from steam engines and machinery, as late as 1700. Yet, despite all these deficiencies it is clear that the American class from which true proletarians (factory workers) will emerge is the class of the guildsmen, mechanics, and artisans, of the pre-Revolutionary War period.
513Secret Revolutionary Societies
When not religious, it would be secular revolutionary bodies, which served as the organizational forms around which the bourgeoisie organized its resistance to feudal authority in the American colonies. The latter were necessarily ``secret'' societies devoted to one or another aspect of the struggle against British rule. None was more important than The Sons of Liberty. These were capitalist organizations at-bottom, but the mixing up of working class and bourgeois politics as a consequence of the primitive condition of pre-capitalist development in the English colonies led the first truly working-class ``union'' type of organizations to embed themselves in these bourgeois secret societies. Among the first to do so were the Seamen's association of New York City, who created their own branch of the Sons of Liberty they called the ``Sons of Neptune.'' These men led the strikes in New York against British imports, against British maritime policy, and in general against everything ``British.''
514Often, the small capitalist farmers in the American countryside allied with their city brethren or at least wanted to. ---And, women organized as a separate and distinct group in the ``Daughters of Liberty.''
In Ireland, and even in Old England, affiliate supporters of the Sons of Liberty were organized and active --- seeing in their American brothers and sisters true allies against British ruling aristocratic oppression. After the Battle of Concord in 1775 these Irish and English supporters sent money to the widows and children of the American men who had fallen in combat. In 1778 there were riots in Dublin and London in support of the American cause which gave General Washington and his compatriot's great solace, that the path they had chosen was indeed the right one. As Thomas Jefferson wrote about the violence of the North American revolutionary civil war, to paraphrase, ``it would be better that there were no more than one man and one woman left in every country in the world than that things should go on as they have.''
515Workers Take the Point
The most sophisticated American workers organized independently of the bourgeoisie by 1773 (two years before the fighting began) setting up in New York the Committee of Mechanics, making it their own branch of the Sons of Liberty, while the bourgeois elements operated through their ``Committee of Fifty One''. The militants took over the revolutionary movement, sending money to the poor in Boston who suffered under British oppression (the British had closed Boston's port); enforced a non-importation rule on shop-owners (forbidden to sell British goods by the Sons of Liberty); establishing contact with like-minded organizations in the other colonies (``Committees of Correspondence''); organized and enforced the decision not to allow any American workers to build for the British Army (barracks, forts, etc,); and enforcing their own declaration that American merchants could not transport, supply or in any way support British troops.
516Note: Sixty years ago in 1947, Philip S. Foner began the publication of his outstanding History of the Labor Movement in the United States (International Publishers [publishing house of the US Communist Party] 1947, New York) This series would run to eleven volumes by the time Foner was finished with it. I mention it at this point because I want those of you with a serious interest in the subject to turn to his books next in your studies. Remember the idea that a study or book has to be brand new to be most accurate is actually a silly idea associated with the bourgeois means of production. In science (and history is a science to us) we always build on the past.
From this point forward it is my task to focus on key turning points in the history of the North American working class movement; not to present a complete history which is at any rate a task beyond the one I have set myself in this volume, namely, your introduction to the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. But for intermediate and advanced studies this should be your next task.
American Revolutionaries Seize State Power: The War Begins
At any rate, as we have seen, for the most part the proto-proletarians and the native bourgeoisie of the New England colonies and their like-minded semi-capitalist {and even some slavocrat) planters of the southern colonies had forged, out of the material conditions of their lives, a de facto united front against British feudalism cum capitalism. The fighting began in April, 1775, in Massachusetts.
Only days after the Sons of Liberty had inflicted 300 dead upon the British at Concord their agents arrived in New York and their correspondents there seized state
power in that great city. Revolutionaries seized power in Newark, New Jersey and Savannah, Georgia, shortly thereafter.
Within months, leaders of the Military Association of Philadelphia (mechanics and bourgeois elements) put together a conference of working and farming people. This body was a highly democratic ``constitutional convention'' which seizing state power declared a new ``government'' to be in existence in Pennsylvania. It's assured ``freedoms'' included many if not all of those later to be incorporated in the ``Bill of Rights'' to the victor's Constitution in 1790. ---And, new armed forces were recruited to join the fight triggered by the people of Massachusetts.
Thomas Paine's book Common Sense was published at this time. Paine was a commoner and proud of it. His propagandizing on the part of the emerging revolution was one of the great ideological victories of that time and recognized as such by all of the democratically inclined North American leaders. Note that in this book Paine demanded that workers should have the right to withhold their labor if they wished and not be required by law to submit to any set level of wages; nor employers penalized for going along if they wished to do so. Washington and Jefferson endorsed Paine, his book, and thus, indirectly, the call for workers to be freed to organize.
By the Spring of 1776, nine of the thirteen colonies had revolutionary governments ---either new, as a product of seizure, or older bodies converted to revolution. By the summer of 1776, all of the colonies had voted for war and revolution.
A Continental Congress was formed in Philadelphia in 1776 and to it had streamed delegates from far and wide. Although conservative elements were present most of the delegates had been instructed to vote for war and revolution and so they did.
The war itself lasted until Red Coat General Cornwallis was finally cornered by the Continental Army and the French Fleet at Yorktown, in 1781. Mel Gibson's movie The Patriot provides the best motion picture account, I have yet seen, of the struggle from a southern semi-capitalist planter's standpoint; and it demonstrates in its characters the various small farmer, working class, unfree and slave components of the Continental Army. I shall not pursue the matter here except to say, to paraphrase, with the victory at Yorktown ``everything had changed.''
Perhaps that is an overstatement since slavery and various other forms of oppression existed almost everywhere in the fledgling nation, but a first step had been taken forward, into the future. A step as important to the international bourgeoisie and the emerging Capitalist Stage as Lenin's step forward with the Russian Revolution and Civil War would be for the international working class movement, and the Stalinist Socialist Stage, 136 years later.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 22: Capitalism Unchained: 1781 - 1861Great struggles between newly distinct, and now newly contending, class forces in North America had been unleashed with the successful conclusion of the revolutionary war. These struggles would intensify over the next four generations, even though, initially some bourgeois leaders like Thomas Jefferson succeeded in welding the masses
of mechanics and poor but capitalist farmers together behind himself and other liberal big bourgeois elements in continuing class collaboration; specifically, for the purpose of taking control of the federal government. (The period of the Republican-Democratic Clubs of Jefferson that went on to support Andrew Jackson in his near civil war on behalf of the North American small business and capitalist farmer alliance he would inherit from Jefferson.) Fundamentally, however, the simple fact was that capitalism as a productive system, with its inherited form of parliamentary government, had finally been unchained in North America.
From our perspective it is this unleashing of the productive power of capitalism that is now our foremost concern. So we shall turn to the rise of machinofacture and supportive infrastructure in North America --- and, with it of course, the rise of a true proletarian class. Looking first at the technological foundations and then the interacting social organizational consequences.
Primitive Capital Accumulation
In this context ``capital accumulation'' does not refer simply to the amassing of money (finance capital --- for the purpose of investment in next generations of machinery) but equally to the construction of the infrastructure for capitalist machinofacture as the predominate economic enterprise in the new nation. Not that you can do one without the other.
Money capital must come from somewhere; that is ultimately always from someone's labor, and as we have seen comes initially in the form of surplus value. Now that labor would come from workers, farmers, and slave labor. In terms of capitalism's core --- machinofacture --- money capital was sweated out of the 16 hour a day (six days a week) work schedule so common in the early 1800's. With that money capital (derived as surplus value) American capitalists continued their investment in machinery and its factory installation and undertook the construction of the infrastructural pillars needed to support further machinofacture. This is the process of industrialization.
The process had begun in England and parts of the adjacent European continent and set the pace. It continued to be the way the ``advanced industrial'' countries became both ``advanced'' and ``industrial'' in Europe (supplemented by imperialism and its exploitation of colonial cheap labor after 1850) (Note: for that matter it continued to be the way Socialists of our Lenin variety would have to acquire capital in the Soviet Union and later China.) The eighty years from Yorktown (1781) to the Civil War (1861) were the period of primitive capital accumulation in the United States.
Off to a Great Start!
Prohibited by British colonial law from building a factory, Oliver Evans had to wait for Washington's revolutionary victory to get his automated flour mill underway. He didn't waste any time after Yorktown, and the next year (1782) began the final engineering that led to the completion of his factory in 1790, utilizing an advanced Watt steam engine, perfected only two years before, as the power source. That same year immigrant Samuel Slater and American David Wilkinson built the first Arkwright spinning machine factory in Pawtucket. Their first employees were children under 12 and teen-age women.
This spinning machine had been patented in England in 1769 but of course the
Americans were prohibited from owning them, seeing them, having plans for them, and certainly from importing any immigrants familiar with them. Slater himself had to be smuggled into the New Republic so closely guarded was this capitalist textile technology.
Evans completely automated factory is a wonderful proof of how advanced the North American technological potential had become and his immediate post-revolutionary factory undertaking an excellent example of where unchained North American capitalism was headed. We know Evan's licensed over 100 different millers to construct his fully automated flour mill and this further illustrates the potential of the new nation for basing itself on machinofacture. The rapid and safe (not to mention now legal) adoption (even when stolen) of the most advanced British technology now that the American bourgeoisie had state power, was inevitable as Slater's smuggling and Wilkinson's blacksmithing of the Arkwright spinning machine proved.
All of this is truly undeniable proof of where the Americans were going. Even though the reality was that the American nation was still overwhelmingly based on small capitalist farming.
Standardization of Parts and Assembly Line Manufacture
Interchangeability of parts in machinery was a great step forward and was pioneered in the new American nation by Eli Whitney. Whitney had acquired some fame for his invention of the cotton gin (which revolutionized cotton planting by turning the entire thing into a cotton growing industry, with the money capital sweated out of slaves) and was able to convince the US Government in 1798 to give him a contract for the mass production of muskets consisting of interchangeable parts. To begin with he divided his labor force into sections so that unskilled labor specializing only in the production of some specific part could be employed rather than the traditional (long and educationally expensive) vocational way traditionally employed, where one craftsmen made all the parts of a musket taking long periods of time to finish the gun. This was an assembly line. An entirely new way of going about manufacture. The same thing had been done in Britain earlier with regard to the production of blocks for naval vessels. You can see, I suspect, that in these two processes (the interchangeability of parts and the assembly line) the US industrial proletariat was emerging. Together these processes became known as the ``American System.''
517The American System of Mass Production
Thomas Jefferson acting as Washington's Ambassador to France in 1785 saw firsthand how a French Gunsmith named Le Blanc had created a new system of manufacturing, featuring individual parts so accurately machined that they were de facto interchangeable. Before Le Blanc could convince the French Old Regime of the utility of the new system Jefferson had convinced his government of the importance of mass production by way of interchangeable parts and a contract was issued to Eli Whitney for $800,000.
Interchangeability was possible because machine tools had advanced by leaps and bounds, allowing the perfection of manufacture of each part down to tiny measurements (tolerances). Now pouring into the New Republic were advanced lathes and other iron and steel working machines that could do a variety of highly specialized tasks (shaping, slotting and planning, milling, gear-cutting, boring and grinding, screw
cutting, and many more) with equal perfection. ---And, because the secret of training previously unskilled persons to be sufficiently skilled do just one specific job --- along the entire spectrum of machining of parts, each could be made into a job --- allowed rapid manufacture of each part of a weapon. After which, the parts so perfectly made could be fitted together by still other workers to form the finished product. In short, highly accurate tolerances in machining combined with dividing the totality of work involved into a multitude of easily learned tasks, was the basis for the ``American System'' of mass production.
However before all this potential could even begin to be realized, the infrastructure of roads and waterways would have to be developed --- and, hand in hand, with the introduction of advanced technology, it was developed.
Waterways, Steamships and Unions
General Washington went right back to work after Yorktown. (Not that winning the war hadn't been work!) One of the first things he and his Army did was to authorize the construction of new canals to link up raw material sources to manufacturing and consuming cities, towns and ports. (During the 1780's the US was under a loose Articles of Confederation as far as the civilian ``government'' was concerned and de facto Washington was ruling through the Army.) In 1784 he gave the go ahead to multiple plans for linking the eastern seaboard with the nation's interior, including the construction of a canal from the Potomac to the Ohio River; another canal connecting Lake Champlain and the Hudson River and two more in Pennsylvania. .
The following year, 1785, a project was launched to improve river transport from Richmond, Virginia, to Buchanan, and this new navigable river way included the first ``locks'' in the USA, the entire project ready by 1789. Finally, Washington pioneered the Intracoastal Waterway system that would allow the Americans great security from hostile states and pirates. The first construction phase was completed by 1805. Many new river and canal improvements were under construction in the South to support the emerging industrialized (with slave labor) cotton industry of the interior, beginning in 1785 with the Columbia-Charleston canal so that by 1820 there were a dozen lateral canals connecting with it, delivering cotton to the South's greatest port city.
518New York's Legislature in 1792 authorized the construction of a navigable river and canal system to link Lake Oneida and the Oneida River, and simultaneously authorized improving the Hudson to fully navigable standards all the way to Lake Oneida. New York's progressivism came to a new climax in 1817 with the order to build the Erie Canal which became a great success, opening New England to the Mid-West of the continent.
The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers began to be linked from Pittsburgh as early as 1805. This would soon connect the northern US with New Orleans, opening up vast new swathes of territory to citizens of the emerging Great Republic.
In 1786 John Fitch began experimenting on American river craft with steam. This culminated in 1802 with William Symington's paddle-wheel boat, driven by a steam engine mounted astern and traversing several canals. Robert Fulton mounted his steam engine driven paddle-wheels on the sides of his first ship on New York canals as early as 1807. By 1825 steam engine driven paddle-wheelers were running all over American rivers and canals.
In the second decade following the victory at Yorktown, US workers began to organize trade unions. Beginning in Philadelphia in 1792. Journeymen shoemakers there were a power to be reckoned with by 1794, and by 1805 the New York shoemakers were a force to be listened to in that State. Right away these workers and their unions tackled the first obstacle; that was the long tradition of laws making union organizing illegal, with increasing success.
The General Crisis: The Depressions of 1819 and 1829
There had been previous economic dislocations in the New Republic. The decision of Jefferson to forbid trade with either Napoleonic Continental Europe or the British Empire had caused one such downturn. However, capitalism's General Crisis, as the sole precipitator of economic panic, depression and dislocation, featured its first true appearance in the USA in 1819 as tens of thousands of workers were sent to the street, unemployed, in New York, Philadelphia and other cities of New England and the mid-Atlantic coast. Small capitalists were swallowed by big capitalists.
Workers still with jobs had to work longer hours for less money under terrible conditions. The majority of these workers by far were women and children under 12 years of age.
Naturally, resistance spread, trade unions were formed and labor began to act on its own behalf as a class, for the first time. Nevertheless the general crisis of capitalism continued to throw up new mass waves of unemployment in the cities as occurred seven years later in 1829
Workers had other options than starvation. Some fled on the new canals to other locations seeking employment. Others opted for new lives as capitalist farmers in the mid-West and northern Mexico (what is now the western half of the USA). Still others found employment at next to slave-labor wages as laborers in the construction of canals and railroads.
The Railroads, Iron and Coal, Unions
Americans both benefited from, and immediately improved upon, the British advances in steam-driven rail-riding locomotives. The first completely-steam locomotive-traversed railway, was in operation by 1830: the South Carolina Railroad. Within three years it had 136 miles of track in operation. In 1831, the British built John Bull locomotive was sold to, and in operation by, the New Jersey Camden & Amboy Railroad. The first US built (bogie) locomotive went into operation the following year (1832) and shortly thereafter (by 1833) British capitalists began exporting the same type of locomotive to American buyers.
Politically, class-conscious workers often supported the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party of the progressive capitalists. This continued the long tradition of class collaboration which overall had had good results. But, at the same time their most sophisticated elements were beginning by 1827, and the establishment of the country's first Central Labor Council in Philadelphia, to see that they had to establish themselves independently as a class and political force. The General Crisis of Capitalism, and its constant, never-ending, introduction of new and improved generations of machinery, was forcing this conclusion to the forefront.
The General Crisis: The Depression of 1837
There would be a series of ``depressions'' in the capitalist business cycle after the Depression of 1829-1831, and they became increasingly devastating with each successive ``recovery'' until in 1837 the industrial collapse confronted workers with the absolute necessity (just to survive) of building on their experience to form permanent unions; permanent central labor union councils and permanent political programs.
The fight had generated unions with a worker's program featuring two essential demands: (1) a ten hour working day and (2) publicly paid universal education for children.
The capitalists on the other hand continued their massive expansion in production with their most recent next generation of machinery. For example, previously dependent on British capitalists for their iron rails, American capitalists began rolling their own, with their newest Next Generation of Machinery, in 1844, as the recovery from the last round of mass layoffs and swallowing of competitors (as a result of the 1837 depression) was completed.
Origin of the US Labor Aristocracy
We have seen the emergence of capitalist factories in North America featured heavy reliance on women and children less than 12 years of age as their workforce. This kind of exploitation does not lend itself to the steady employment of family supporting workers which are the kind of workers that one must have to form a union with members capable of paying union dues on a regular basis. This is the definition of labor aristocracy.
The invention of Morse code in 1844 opened an entire new profession for someone to enter, as the system of telegraphy quickly spread throughout the nation and shortly thereafter the emergence of the railroad telegraphers union. These workers along with the permanent staff needed to run the locomotives, and man the trains both freight and passenger, constitute the origin of the railroad brotherhoods (railroad unions). These workers were militant about getting paid for the work they did and their position in the railroad industry gave them a powerful position from which to strike or slow down or in some other way affect their bosses. These workers were able to raise families successfully on wages secured by their craft unions. Thus US Labor was divided early on between the most oppressed section (largely women and children) in factories and others in the industrial process that had ``good'' jobs, meaning they could live on their wages and do so successfully raising families over extended periods of time. On non-Trade Union issues however these workers tended to be conservative in social outlook and were suffering always from petty bourgeois illusions. Two castes within the US working class had arisen and this social structural fact would continue as the central reality of working class political organization in the future.
519We will discuss the division of the US labor movement along these lines in the following chapters. The unionized railroad workers (Brotherhoods or Unions) would form the mass base for the organization of labor by the most conservative elements of the working class movement after the US Civil War. In the meantime you should see them as the embryonic form from which this caste (labor aristocracy) will emerge in the AFL as
we shall discuss below.
Personal Experience with the Labor Aristocracy
These railroad brotherhood craft unions were the road out of wage slavery and into the petty bourgeoisie for millions of workers. In fact, my paternal grandfather's road out of the world of poor white trash was as a member of the telegrapher's union where he made enough money to put four children through college --- all out of the work he did at a railroad stop-in-the-wall called Davey just north of Lincoln, Nebraska. This during the Great Depression in the 1930's, yet he had a job thanks to his union in this toughest of all environments. Accordingly, all of his life he was the strongest union man and with his illusions of becoming bourgeois (always tracking how his stocks were doing) he was simultaneously an arch-type right wing Gompers sort of anti-communist.
520This vignette says everything that needs to be said about understanding the split in organized labor here and everywhere in the capitalist world. Successful revolutionaries have to learn how to live with and utilize the reality of working class division in such a way, so as to accomplish our objectives.
The General Crisis: The Depressions of 1854 and 1857
During the 1850's there was as much expansion of the railroad system as the finance capital capacity of the time would allow. In 1851 the telegraph was employed for signaling arrival and departure schedules to trains running on this system for the first time. By 1860 there were 30,000 miles of railroad in the USA.
To supply the iron needs of farmers and industry including the railroads American iron production had grown from 50,000 tons in 1810 to nearly one million tons in 1860. Correspondingly coal had replaced wood in iron manufacture and coal mining jumped from next to nothing in 1810 to over 14.3 million tons in 1860.
As always the surplus value to finance all of this expansion was sweated by the capitalists out of the largely child and teen-age women work force to which were being added an increasing number of men. The depression of 1854 discharged 200,000 workers onto the streets and in so doing smashed their union organizations for the most part. 1855 saw a revival of worker enthusiasm for unions as more and more returned to the factory (albeit factories with new owners). This time they built relief funds for future strike actions to protect themselves and their gains and when the depression of 1857 again wiped out many unions there were a striking number that survived precisely because they had amassed sufficient funds for strike relief (of themselves and brother workers in other cities and States.)
521As importantly, workers managed to set things straight with regard to their ideas about living today and tomorrow. Meaning they got rid of the utopians and began to concentrate on hours, wages, working conditions, building strike relief funds, worker controlled apprentice programs, the right to organize unions (without being simultaneously prosecuted with felony conspiracy charges being launched against them,) laws against company-store exploitation, and for mechanics liens. ---And, for the first time many attempts were made to form ``national'' unions.
The American Factory System Transforms the Country
Progressive British capitalists had come to accept the reality that American capitalism was here to stay, so that in 1810 they allowed Francis Lowell the honor and privilege of studying their system of cotton manufacture at first hand. Returning home, with some of their money, and more gathered here as investment capital, Lowell established the first true all-process inclusive US cotton factory in 1815. His factory produced cloth, spun from start on machine looms and then woven into the final product. These products were being offered as commodities the following year. Machinofactured woolens were not far behind. By 1860 there was hardly a shoe or finished clothing product that wasn't being manufactured, in whole or in part, in these factories. Young women workers supplied two thirds of the labor and surplus value was sweated out of them from 12 to 16 hours a day six days a week. Primitive capital accumulation was in full swing.
522From 1840 to 1860 American manufacture had jumped from half a billion dollars to two nearly two billion, and workers employed increased about 70%. Factory cotton spindles jumped from 1.3 to 5.2 million. In 1860 woolen products jumped per annum to 70 million dollars compared to 21 million in 1840. Farm tools and machinery doubled in the same period from $10 to $20 million.
The American population tripled in size from 10 to 31 million people between 1820 and 1860 (two generations.) Only 5% of this 1860 population were factory workers but, after farmers, they had become the most important productive class. Most of them lived in cities over 100,000 in size (whose populations now made up about 8.5% of the country.)
US Labor on the Eve of the Civil War
From 1827 forward American workers had fought for political rights, the ten hour day, public universal education and the right to organize unions, and they had struck employers time and time again, virtually everywhere, in pursuit of these goals. They had to overcome a series of ideological barriers as well. For example, they had confronted (1) the utopian socialists, and reformers of the Owens, Fourier, and Evans type; (2) the tendency to always tail-end the progressive capitalists of the Jefferson and then Jackson variety; and of course (3) the racist ideologists of slavery (and anti-immigrant yellow journalism a la Lou Dobbs, in the Free States.) Also, (4) the North American bosses were cleverer than their European counterparts and engaged in wholesale propaganda about the joys of the 14 to 16 hour work day. An example, would be the Lowell factory owners who produced, with literary contributions from working young women, their own nonsensical journal (political nonsense; the girls contributions were actually quite good.) The young Lowell women quickly organized their own counter publication.
523Nevertheless, workers were finding their way forward as an independent class with its own inherent interests, and from time to time they formed their own Labor Parties (the first formed in Philadelphia in 1829, the second in New York, later that same year --- The New York Working Men's Party), fought for and secured universal public education, and institutionalized mechanics liens to insure payment for work provided.
The Utopian Socialists Retard American Labor
Several different schools of thought arose among bourgeois intellectuals in Europe and North America after the French Revolution of 1789 and the attempted feudalist restoration in Europe of 1815. In the USA, these persons known as ``utopians'' for their belief that they could create a new perfect society to replace capitalism simply by winning over workers to one or another of their pie-in-the-sky plans and winning over progressive capitalists to go along, had in real world effect, the tendency to retard North American workers in their need to accomplish immediate needs. Such needs as unity, higher wages, standardized wages, better living conditions, public education, and a myriad of other immediate needs and concerns. In fact, it is this tendency to confuse ultimate goals with immediate concerns which continued to plague the world-wide working class movement for many decades. ---And, for that matter continued to plague international communism in the 20th and even now in the 21st century. It is the Achilles heel of the ultra-left. The ultra-left, in other words, is not communist, despite pretensions of some of them to the contrary --- but a kind of bourgeois infantile disorder (as Lenin later called it and them.)
524Bourgeois elements were not anxious to participate in the strikes and other militant worker actions needed to accomplish these immediate goals. At the same time they were correct in asserting that within the framework of the capitalist system the workers would always be wage-slaves and subjected to the ``shit end of the stick.'' For that reason workers sometimes were confused --- but not for long. It didn't take long for them to realize that the core of the utopian reform movements always consisted in the self-delusion that capitalists could be called upon to help the workers. That the State or Federal governments could be made to serve labor as well as the big bourgeoisie and slavocrats who owned these governments.
The real world was where workers had to live at the moment. The struggle for decent hours, wages and working conditions had to be successful NOW. Furthermore, the total reorganization of society along non-capitalist lines was something that could not happen in the near future anyway. ---And, would never happen without first disarming and removing the bourgeoisie from state and political power.
It took a while to get rid of these utopian socialists and replace them with leaders who understood the need to accomplish immediate goals on the part of workers while simultaneously laying plans for reorganizing society down the road as the opportunity to do so became apparent. Most importantly, to figure out what this new society should actually look like. Marx and Engels discovered the laws of history, as society evolving from one sociocultural stage to the next, and thus, what the new society should look like based on these scientific deductions. Namely, those workers would have to seize state power and use it to reorganize society putting the marvels of science and technology at the service of humanity rather than the exploiters.
The struggle against Utopianism reached its conclusion when both the right wing socialists such as Samuel Gompers and the Left Wing socialists such as the newly arriving communists agreed that any belief that capitalist governments could be used by workers was an illusion no matter how put. Instead workers should fight for their rights to being paid properly directly with the capitalists involved. Along the way they could reward or punish capitalist politicians said the rightists and the leftists hoped that a new world would be created somehow by workers taking matters into their own hands. A
shaky kind of unity because the theoretical foundation was shaky, and required surgically precise logic in order to keep both the Left and Right together. But, in the end utopianism was buried.
Marxism Arrives
As we have seen developments in Europe immediately affected North America and vice versa. Thus, the defeat of the European working class revolutionary activity of 1848-1850 resulted in the quick arrival of thousands of politically sophisticated workers who knew Karl Marx and Frederick Engels personally as well as having become familiar with their work. The Communist Manifesto that appeared at the very beginning of these revolts in Europe (January, 1848) was not the only example of such work. In fact, Marx and Engels had been circulating their initial ``Critique'' of capitalist production and their outline of Historical Materialism for some six years prior to the January Revolution of 1848. During the two years of revolution (1848-1850) Marx and Engels came to know most of the revolutionary leaders first hand.
525Among their followers who fled to America was Joseph Wedemeyer. Wedemeyer escaped persecution in Germany and upon arrival in the New World (1851) when he was only 33 years old, he quickly proved to be the first competent Marxist theoretician in the Great Republic. Writing in a German-American publication he created in January of 1852, Die Revolution, he listed Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, along with himself and several others as the editors. In fact, he along with Marx and Engels had already been collaborating as editors in a revolutionary journal in Europe at that time. Thus within four years of the appearance of The Communist Manifesto in London, Marxism had officially arrived in New York; as had Marx and Engels (via surrogates.). (As a matter of interest, following Marx's 1883 death, Engels would visit the US while completing his study of Lewis Henry Morgan's research, however, Morgan died only days before Engels could get to him.)
526In 1857, five years later, and just four years before the Great War between the Free and Slave States, several men formed the Communist Club in New York City. They also were followers of Karl Marx whom they knew well because of his work during the European Revolutions of 1848-1850, and his subsequent publications (e.g., the 1848 Communist Manifesto) including his contributions as the London correspondent of the New York Herald. Wedemeyer was a key participant.
Wedemeyer took the point in defeating the utopians and their various crack-pot plans, in demonstrating the need for combining temporary economic and political struggles for less than final objectives. By 1860 the utopians were pretty well finished off and Marxism had become the predominate ideological formation among North American working class intellectuals.
Also, by 1860, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, workers and their organizations had earned a leading place in American life. They would play a decisive role in Lincoln's war victory over the Slavocrats. Chief among them would be the American followers of Karl Marx's International Workingmen's Association.
Dawn of Massive Capital Accumulation
Primitive capital accumulation had come to an end, and in its stead came a new massive capital accumulation process of a never before seen kind. The kind that created the greatest industrial plant in the world by 1865, to support the largest machinery supported army the world had ever known.
Fighting tooth and nail every step of the way for minimal rights to decent working hours, wages, and conditions, organized labor had played a critically important role in getting Capital to this stage in its development. By 1860 the average working day in the US Free States had been reduced from 13 to 11 1/2 hours and in the strongest working class States (e.g., Massachusetts and New York) the 10 hour day for mechanics and artisans had become the norm, and 11 ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂý for factory workers. This, of course, meant, as you have seen, that the Next Generation of capitalist Machinery had to take up the ``slack'' (i.e., the difference from what had gone before and the new lower hours of labor-power input).
-And, what would have been the norm (sending more workers to the street) was offset by the onset of war and the massive demand of the Federal US government and the State governments for War Materiel (munitions, clothing, boots and shoes, weaponry, food.) As workers disappeared into the Federal Army (over half of it would be composed of working men and the other half by capitalist farmers at War's end in1865) more machinery was introduced and more unskilled feminine and child labor absorbed into the factories.
Full employment and the constant escalating demand for new and better next generations of capitalist industrial machinery were the dual foundation for Massive Capital Accumulation of an entirely new sort.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 23: Capitalism Unfettered: 1861 --- 1877Unchained by success in Revolutionary War, US capitalists now faced the next enemy --- namely, the fetters attached inherently to their new economy by the Slavocrats of the South. The Southern super-rich oligarchy of planters, a numerically tiny group, had negated the entire Bill of Rights for the Slave States. Freedom of the press meant only freedom of the slavocrat press and others were routinely murdered (shades of the KKK reign of terror against the South that was yet to come.) Unions simply could not be organized because thugs of the slavocrats immediately murdered organizers and any foolish enough to join up. So political democracy was extinct in the South except for the handful of propertied slave owners.
As importantly, the entire Slave South, was removed from the capitalist market place as slaves had no money and could buy nothing. Competing with slaves poor Whites had virtually no money and could not buy anything either! (Advancing Union Army troops consisting of White workers and farmers were truly stunned to find that White people in the south lived like ``poor White trash''.)
For capitalism to develop beyond the stage of primitive accumulation in the Free States both workers and Northern capitalists would have to see it in their interest to destroy the Slavocrat economy. Finally, through an amazing series of collaborative compromises the Republican Party was formed and placed in position to benefit from the
support of voting White workers and farmers to replace Slavery altogether --- the sooner the better. This was the mass base of support for the Union during the coming Civil War.
The shackles and fetters of Slavery had to go. The way had to be cleared for the final battle between Capitalism and Slavery. ---And, it was so cleared in the election of 1860.
John Brown
As the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act spread throughout the North (and in the South where increasing numbers of slaves were taking to the ankle express as they headed south and north to Florida, Mexico and Canada) armed struggle broke out. Kansas and Nebraska were the scene of the most violent confrontations between free soilers and slavers. Leading the fight were men such as the abolitionist preacher John Brown.
Brown was ready to start the US Civil War right now (1859) and over the issue of slavery. He and his group prepared an attack on the Harpers Ferry US Armory. This military action was to support the political objective of initiating civil war by arousing the slave population to take up the now available arms at Harpers Ferry. In the event the Army was able to defeat the insurrectionists and killed them. But the fact the civil war did start immediately thereafter made John Brown a hero in legend and in music (John Brown's Body Lies Smoldering in the Grave'' and ``Battle Hymn of the Republic''.) It would be four more years until Abraham Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation. But, be there no doubt, John Brown's insurrection against slavery and the Government that enforced it was the first shot fired in the US Civil War.
527The Civil War Accelerates Industrialization and Agricultural Mechanization
Cyrus McCormick began manufacturing the ``reaper'' for harvesting cereals in 1834. The Civil War and its demand for bread and flour for the Army exploded the demand for these crops, and in turn a demand from many farmers to own and utilize automatic harvesters. Factories in the North were busy.
Equally dramatic increases in the Union Army's demand for shoes and clothing brought about the complete factory-installed machinery production of these commodities in the North. Thousands of new machines were invented and brought on line in the years 1861-1865. Truly unskilled labor was placed in large numbers at the factory bench and a teen-age (13 year old) girl with only hours or, at most, two days of training, could produce at these machines, more than a skilled journeyman of many years practice in his trade.
The railroads became the key to military operations and accordingly the manufacture of iron rails and the iron-horse locomotives also skyrocketed. As, necessarily, did the number of men now employed in what had become ``war industries.'' It was the US Civil War which brought the Great Republic not only freedom from slavery, but to the brink of equality with the advanced capitalist producers of Europe.
The most advanced workers, which is to say those with unions, had begun organizing to support the Union against the Slavocrats during the Lincoln campaign culminating in his November, 1860, victory, and they got off to a big start in January of 1861. As the year progressed and the war got underway, organized labor in all of the industrial cities of the North and the Border States issued declarations in support of Lincoln and the Union; organized ``volunteer'' units for the Federal Army, and voluntarily
subordinated wage and hours demands with employers having federal Army contracts.
Before this was all over US workers made up half of the Federal Army. This, of course, meant that more and more women and children would be employed in war industries.
The Invention of Oil Drilling
In 1854 Professor Benjamin Silliman Jr. was hired by New York attorney George Bissell and New Haven Bank President James Townsend to determine if Petroleum (rock oil) could be used as an illuminant and as a lubricant in the place of other oils and especially coal oil. Silliman had to fight for his $500+ fee (about $5000.00 in 1990 dollars according to oil scholar Daniel Yergin) but in writing the report and becoming a share holder in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company he succeeded in triggering the modern oil and gas industry.
The banker James Townsend lived in the same New Haven hotel as Edwin L. Drake. Drake was unemployed but persuasive, and Townsend recruited Drake to go to Titusville Pennsylvania and drill for oil in 1857. Drake (by now having assumed the title of Colonel) hit oil in August 1859, at a depth of 69.5 feet. Drake used what were then standard water-well drilling techniques and the water-well drilling crew to go with it.
Prior to Drakes use of drilling techniques all the world's oil had been produced by standard ``mining'' techniques: in other words, by ``digging'' for oil. Pits had been dug in places where oil was literally seeping from the ground, such as Galicia and Romania. As a matter of interest near the Black Hills (the Wyoming-South Dakota border) Native Americans were extracting oil by mining as were incoming White pioneers. By 1859 some 36,000 barrels of oil were produced annually in Europe mostly from these near surface pits dug by farmers in their spare time.
At this point the major consumer product to be obtained from raw or ``crude'' oil was kerosene for illumination. Just before Drake struck it big at Titusville, the Americans had imported the Austrian invented kerosene burning glass chimney lamp. This had eliminated the problem of uneven burning of kerosene which produced both smoke and an offensive odor in lamps hitherto in use in North America. A contemporary Coleman lamp is a rather exact equivalent and such lamps, and small stoves, are still used widely in so-called Third World countries.
In addition, oil was needed as a lubricant in all of the new capitalist machinery that had become commonplace in the US and Europe in the eighty years from 1781 and 1861 (from Yorktown to the Civil War.) Gasoline had very limited usage and was virtually a waste product of the primitive refining system used to separate kerosene (invented to refine coal oil into kerosene) and lubricating oils from crude oil. For the most part natural gas was simply vented and burned although in a few cases people had learned to use it as a fuel. (Wherever you have oil you have natural gas and vice versa. This is a basic Law of petroleum geology.)
The State of Pennsylvania was about to experience the California Gold Rush, but this time, the object was not gold but oil.
Dawn of the Petroleum Industry
As we have seen, the first oil well in the United States was drilled in 1859. This well was drilled; that is it was not a ``pit'' where near surface oil was ``mined.'' The technique was what was called water-well cable drilling not the rotary drilling that
would come several decades later; nevertheless it was a drilled well. It happened at Titusville, Pennsylvania, and was the beginning of the oil age. (Some of this technology you will see in the movie There Will Be Blood.)
The Civil War had dried up the Southern supply of Turpentine which had been widely used in the northern States for lamp illumination. As we have seen, kerosene had just been proven to be an effective illuminant far superior to turpentine, coal oil, or whale oil. Thus a substantial market existed already in the North. In cable drilling a bit is lifted and dropped in a hole and each time it is dropped it digs out a little bit more of the dirt. In rotary drilling the drill bit is on the bottom end of a drill-stem of hollow steel pipe that is itself turned by a diesel powered rotary grip at the floor of the drilling rig and this drill stem (drill pipe screwed together with each pipe segment being about 30 feet in length) is allowed to lower itself under the influence of gravity (its own weight). For over a century all oil well drilling has been done by the rotary method (which began at Spindletop near Beaumont Texas.) In both cases the bit is lubricated and the incoming pressure of oil and gas offset by a drilling fluid. Today this drilling fluid technology is a science in itself but in those days it was just water. In time drillers would want three stands of drill pipe available before they had to switch out one drill stem section (having already worked its way down, to a maximum extent) with another three pipe stand of drill-pipe. That is why you see such tall drilling rig towers (derricks) --- that is, to hold three stands of pipe screwed together (each pipe being about 30 feet in length, a three stand of pipe would be roughly 90 feet. Thus the need for a tower (derrick) to hold multiple (90 foot) stands. The Civil War had dried up the Southern supply of turpentine for the North. Turpentine had been widely used in the northern States for lamp illumination. As we have seen, kerosene had proven to be an effective illuminant far superior to turpentine, coal oil or whale oil. Thus a substantial market for illuminant fuel already existed in the North. Now it could be replaced by kerosene from Pennsylvania crude oil (which was the only oil producing State in the Union. Also, Lincoln was fighting the first industrialized war and all that northern machinery needed lubricating oils. Again, it was Pennsylvania crude that provided the answer.
528Three months before the Civil War ended at Appomattox in 1865, John D. Rockefeller bought out his partner in one of Cleveland's most successful refineries. Rockefeller had what he called ``Our Plan''. Namely, a plan to put order into the chaos of the oilfields and the refining and distributing system via monopoly. Over the next five years he established a monopoly on refining virtually all of the oil coming out of Pennsylvania which was the only US producing State. Rockefeller had become a specter haunting, indeed terrifying, Pennsylvania oil men --- who were after all the only oil men in the USA.
Inventing the Standard Oil Trust
Producers were not the only capitalists frightened by Standard. Virtually the entire remaining capitalist class was in fear. As a consequence of the failure of oil capitalists to control Rockefeller and the elimination of any remaining competitive ways to cut him down to size, other sections of the US capitalist community began to use the State governments, which they still held firmly in their hands, at least in most States, in a series of legal initiatives against Standard Oil and against John D. Rockefeller personally. In State after State the capitalist press turned against Standard and important people in the
capitalist class of each of these States introduced legislation in the State Legislatures and in the State and even Federal courts lawsuits aimed at taking down both Standard and Rockefeller.
To make a long story short Rockefeller and his new and closest friend and business collaborator Henry Flagler came up with a way to immunize themselves and their joint endeavor from these assaults. It was called the Trust.
US law at the time did not allow one company to own and control other companies. Furthermore, even if it had, that would not provide Rockefeller with any real immunity from these attacks --- in fact, it would have just the opposite effect as a legal challenge in the Legislatures or in the Courts against one company would affect all the others in its portfolio. To get around this, Rockefeller had for a number of years, placed his subsidiary companies in the hands of his individual shareholders. The Trust institutionalized this system by putting the value of all of the Rockefeller companies --- hundreds if not thousands of them --- into the form of shares in a Trust which was directed by a Board and the shares held by the Trustees. Rockefeller and Flagler owned 25% of 700,000 shares and the remaining bulk of shares were largely in the hands of seven more Directors. The rest were doled out to many persons who had previously owned substantial portions of the stock of each of these individual Rockefeller companies. Thus, legal and legislative challenges were effectively negated as far as legislation and court decisions against any one company were concerned. How could you sue a Trust for the actions of a company whose only relationship to the Trust was the ownership of shares in the Trust by persons who operated or had previously owned some unrelated legal entity (company)? Well in this country anyone can sue anyone for any reason but whether the challenge will survive initial filing in the court in question is another matter. The nature of the law being what it was the Trust was an effective block to legal and in fact legislative originating regulation.
529Actual operations of the constituent parts of the now unified oil industry owned by the Trust were undertaken by Committees. These committees were appointed by the directors of the Trust, chief among who were, of course, Rockefeller and Flagler.
Science at the Service of Capital
Rockefeller had a healthy appreciation for science; perhaps because of his own strong background in mathematics. However that may have been, he had been hiring geologists and chemists for some time before the Standard Trust was created. Certainly after the establishment of the Standard Trust Committee system, the presence of advising scientists acted as a buffer, if nothing else, against reprisal from stockholders in case something went wrong, Now the scientists began to pay off. First and most importantly in the discovery that oil with high concentrations of Sulfur could be made useable for conventional marketing by using copper oxide as a catalyst. Much the same as the world's iron ores had been made universally useable by lining blast furnaces with dolomite rock (magnesium carbonate) to remove the Phosphorous so prevalent in so many of the world's iron ores. Chemical engineering was to become critically important for the Pennsylvania crude was about to be supplemented by a new US source where an evil smelling sulfur content rendered the crude unpalatable for kerosene lighting.
530Moving to Control Production
The remaining Achilles Heel to be mended or entirely replaced was the uncertainty of the supply of the raw material, crude oil. After all there are objective as well as subjective aspects to every venture and as masterful as Rockefeller and Flagler had been in controlling their subjective roles they still had to face the fact that all of the oil they controlled had come from one State. If the oil ran out, as many experts believed was inevitable, the entire monster they had created would die like the Giant in the Jack and the Beanstalk fable. Then they got a break. In 1884 large pools of oil were discovered on the Ohio-Indiana border. Shortly, a third of US production would come from these. As we have seen, Rockefeller's chemists found a way to remove the sulfur and suddenly a new world of source material opened up.
531As much as he hated to get involved with the mining-camp style chaos of oilfield production, Rockefeller knew he had little choice if he was to secure an ongoing source of crude. How to do it?
He decided to start buying every lease in the Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana oil districts he could get his hands on. Standard's initial strategy to avoid crude oil depletion was to get on with the purchase of every drop of oil it could get its hands on. Leasing was the key because before you could drill you had to have a right to the subsurface mineral rights and that was the land-leasing right. US capitalist farmers had long since secured their absolute land rights including the subsoil rights so one had to play the game within that constraint.
By 1891 Rockefeller had gone from being a non-player to owning 25% of US producing leases. Standard was now vertically integrated. Starting with the oil producing lease and the drilling itself, Rockefeller oil went into the Standard pipeline and storage tank system. Then the oil headed for Standard refining via transportation by Standard pipelines or railroad (all of these railroads were in Standards pocket via the use of ``rebates'' we will discuss later) and then wholesale in Standard tins to the major consuming termini, where the retail sale directly to the consumer of a broad-spectrum of oil products, especially kerosene and lubricating oil, finally occurred.
Although by the last decade of the 1800's Standard had some 80 to 85 percent of the US oil business there were still the other small potatoes to worry about. In fact, there were major competitors at home about to emerge, and still more abroad.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 24: Capitalism Unleashed: 1878 --- 1920The Revolution had unchained capitalism; the civil war had removed its fetters. Now, the time had come for Capitalism to be truly unleashed. It was at Appomattox, Virginia, that history was served so well (as it had been 80 years earlier at Yorktown.)
The (1) entire previously non-capitalist, (and in fact anti-capitalist) economy of the South had been abolished. The Southern States now joined the capitalist economic system. (2) Capital itself now could concern itself with just one thing --- expansion --- super expansion --- super fast. In other words, the productive potential of capitalism, after a century of struggle, was finally unleashed. Now, it would show what it could do when the political circumstances were finally perfect.
Yet the great political victory for humanity represented by Lincoln, the Republicans, and the working class/farmer victory over the slavocrats in the Civil War, could not change the laws of operation of the Capitalist System. The ``boom and bust''
cycle would continue (to the present day) and nothing could be done about that. (In fact we are in another bust right now.) It would be another 68 years before US citizens would be able to force Capital to accept compromises capitalists had hitherto refused (with the election of FDR in 1932). Along the way, however, North American labor struck out on its own, as a true class with its own interests, and became increasingly politically sophisticated. The most advanced elements of the US union movement would accept Marxism and proceed to experiment with various forms of overthrowing capitalism altogether.
Innovation in High Gear
One after another the technological barriers confronted by industry were overcome during the post-Civil War period. The demand for wrought iron was constant and growing. What was needed was a cheaper process to make larger quantities. Several processes were invented beginning with the Bessemer process (patented in 1856 but not perfected until 1879) for blowing cold air through molten iron thus producing not simply cheaper and more plentiful wrought iron but a new form of the metal we now call mild steel. This was the beginning of the steel age and with it all of the technical problems associated with the earlier more highly carburized forms of iron became a thing of the past.
You will recall from our discussion of the Capitalist Stage (Chapter 12) that the key problem with iron was the carbon content. The cold air of the Bessemer process provided the oxygen for the carbon to combine with, raising the temperature in the ``converters'' rapidly and leaving behind a properly carburized iron (wrought iron or mild steel). Once the converters were lined with dolomite limestone (magnesium carbonate) the phosphorous present in so many ores was removed simultaneously (to be ejected with the slag) and virtually any ore in the world could be employed to produce wrought iron and mild steel (the Thomas process). This latter modification of Bessemer's cold blown air process allowed both phosphoric and non-phosphoric ores to be utilized. By 1879 all the worlds iron ores were now at the service of the industry.
532Iron and Steel became cheaper simultaneously because of the Siemens-Martin process where the discharged hot gases from the furnaces were recycled as fuel for the process eliminating the need to spend as much fuel as had been used to maintain the high temperatures in the furnaces. In fact, the savings in glass blowing ran between 70 and 80%. Furthermore, the Siemens-Thomas process took 12 hours as opposed to 30 minutes with straight forward Bessemer mild steel. This was an advantage because it allowed workers to control the composition of the steel in the Siemens-Thomas system and thus to satisfy special needs of different clients in terms of hardness and ductility.
Alloyed steels for special purposes had begun to appear in 1868. Tungsten and then magnesium were used as the alloys which would keep this new iron from softening during working (accelerated temperatures) so that by 1887 virtually all tasks could be accomplished by alloyed steel for which earlier forms of wrought iron were unfit.
Reverse rolling of rail iron while hot became the chief process by which railroad rails and other industrial products were made. These advances occurred first in England and were quickly copied in the US.
It would take time for all the rails needed in the US and Canada to be produced of tougher iron than that easily available during the Civil War so American trains grew
larger and longer with more wheels to spread the weight over the light rails. Between 1868 and 1871 George Westinghouse invented and perfected the air brake for these huge and heavy trains.
The internal combustion engine fueled by coal-gas had been invented in France in 1860. Twelve years later (1872) the first liquid fuel internal combustion engine was invented in Boston. ---And electricity was advancing by leaps and bounds so that by 1872 it was widely understood that electricity generators worked just as well as motors. One such electrical motor was demonstrated in Vienna the following year.
The Labor Movement in 1866 and the struggle for the eight hour day
Capital was organizing in every way with the end of the Civil War and in response the most advanced leaders of the US labor movement (William Sylvis, William Harding, and Jonathan Fincher --- chiefs of the International Molders Union, Coach Makers International Union, Machinists and Blacksmith's Union, respectively) met in Philadelphia during February of the following year (1866). Their objective being the formation of a unified Congress of national labor unions and all other unions too.
Accordingly, in August 1866, 60,000 workers were represented by the 59 delegations in attendance at the founding American Workers Congress, in Baltimore. Simultaneously in Europe the International Workingmen's Association held a Congress in Vienna. The resulting proclamations were nearly identical, demonstrating the theoretical sophistication that had been achieved by workers on both continents. From these congresses grew the demand for the eight hour day.
Review and Recap
Labor from the Communist Manifesto and European Revolutions of 1848 --- 1852 to the First International, and the split with Anarchism and Revisionism
The International and the Working Men's Party, 1876
Acknowledging that the Anarchist problem in Europe was so great that it was best to start all over again, at least in America, the First International dissolved itself in Philadelphia in July, 1876. Karl Marx had sent the Executive Council of the First International to the United States precisely to prevent its corruption by anarchism (the European equivalent to the various utopian and other crack-pot schemes so prevalent in the USA.) Accordingly, all 19 sections of the First International in the United States came together during that summer of 1876 to bury the first ``form'' of international working class action following the correct principles of the historical materialist theory as outlined by Marx and Engels. Then, declaring it time to reorganize, the Americans proceeded to create the Working Men's Party of the United States.
533The Depression of 1873
Rapid advances in technology reviewed above, required the purchase and installation of much new factory equipment in all key industries. Competition among the
capitalists required that they adopt the new machinery. Rather than looking to their own pocketbooks to pay the cost, the capitalists looked to the wallets of the working class. Wage cuts, longer hours, and massive unemployment were the result for workers still employed and those sent to the street, respectively.
This depression turned out to be quite possibly worse than any of its predecessors if for no other reason than North American workers were now a true proletariat without other means of support (as for example many had had when they could return to their farms.) It led to the great national strike movement of 1877.
The First Soviet Was Formed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1877
You will recall the Russian word for ``council'' is ``soviet'' and the first workers council to take power into its own hands was formed as a result of the massive national U.S. strike movement in the summer of 1877. The national strike wave had begun in Pennsylvania and Maryland and spread quickly to Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.
The capitalists counter-attacked with federal troops firing on unarmed workers, men, women and children in Baltimore. However, even when they broke the strike in Maryland all they had really done was to help spread the strike to New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri and California!
One reason for the success of the workers was the massive support they received from farmers, small business people, professionals, and miners. Everyone, it seemed, hated the railroads and the other big capitalist enterprises. The railroads had been engendering mass resistance, ranging from the fight led by Jesse James in Missouri all the way to a variety of buccaneers in California, because of their blatant disregard of people impacted by their greedy expansion. The railroads got huge grants of land adjacent to their tracks as part of the licensing of those days and they used their power to ``condemn'' via eminent domain, just about any land they wished to claim. See the movie American Outlaws for a vivid depiction of that struggle. The movie Bandidas gives a flavor for what these railroad company gangsters, and their banks, did in Mexico.
534The tide began to turn against the capitalists when troops refused to fire on the strikers in Pittsburgh in late July 1876. State power, by definition (army and police), had begun to waver. In New York, at Buffalo, troops again refused to fire on strikers and sympathy for the strikers was widely reported by all observers throughout the State. Should the ``state'' switch allegiance, then workers would have their first chance at building a new society where the state was loyal to them. The ``cap press'' (i.e., capitalist press) was panic stricken and hysterical. For example, on the 25th of July (1877) the New York Times ran a headline ``The City in Possession of Communists'', referring to what was happening in St. Louis. Indeed the communists were active. The newly formed Workingmen's Party of the United States had jumped into the fight and provided continuous guidance and support to all strikers and unions involved.
535On July 22nd, 1877, workers began a massive strike action --- a general strike --- in St. Louis and East St. Louis and formed an Executive Committee (of the United Workingmen of St. Louis) and took over all City functions as the new City Council. Ten days later Pinkertons, Federal troops, and others attacked and destroyed the worker's would-be Paris Commune (1870-71) (the direct inspiration for their actions). But the
lesson had been learned by all concerned and that genie could not be easily crammed back into its bottle.
Samuel Gompers: Prince of the Pie-cards (1881)
Perhaps no one single leader of American and Canadian workers had had a better exposure to Marxism than Samuel Gompers. The part of the Marxist position (and for example the program of the Workingmen's Party) Gompers internalized best was the part that emphasized concentrating on the NOW needs of workers as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky crackpot plans of so many of the non-Marxists.
In November of 1881 Gompers became chief of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, which became in 1886 the American Federation of Labor (AFL). However, before all this was over Gompers would become a champion anti-Bolshevik of the US labor movement.
Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party (1890)
De Leon took from Marxism the part he understood best and that was the part that made independent working class economic and political activity the core of Labor's Program for North America. De Leon, a former university professor, and now leader of the Socialist Labor Party, took the SLP along a highly ultra-left sectarian path that resulted in innumerable negatives as far as building a broad national united front was concerned.
Spindletop at Beaumont Texas
The Invention of Rotary Drilling
It would have been obvious to a properly educated scientist that there would be oil everywhere and anywhere in the world where you had (a) trapping geological formations and (b) oil and gas generating formations in conjunction. ---And, there were many geologists turning their attention to the fact that the Pennsylvania monopoly on oil was no longer a reality. First it had been Ohio and Indiana that joined the ranks of oil producing States and internationally the Russians were producing nearly as much as the North Americans. In addition there were proven and producing oil wells in Indonesia and apparently adjacent parts of Indochina. Romania had been producing oil for decades. So, it was not as surprising as one might have thought to find oil in the west of the United States and Texas in the last decade of the 1800's. Texas was about as far west as most eastern Americans knew about..
536To make a long story short the greatest oil strike so far in US history occurred on a salt dome hill outside the town of Beaumont in the State of Texas, on January 10, 1902. It was a classic blow-out of drillpipe (as would later be common place in movies) and gushed initially at 75,000 barrels a day! It was also the first successful well drilled by ``rotary drilling'' as opposed to one or another version of ``cable drilling.'' The development of rotary drilling would prove to be far more important in the long run than the strike at Spindletop but for the moment it was this new and incredibly large successful oilfield venture which held the world's attention.
Many men and women, many new companies, and many countries would find their destinies entwined over the next several decades as a result of what had happened at Spindletop. Most important among these for our purposes were the formation of two new permanent competitors to the Standard Trust (Texaco and Gulf) and the emergence of the families which owned them as members of the US oligarchy within the US ruling class.
Texaco
Texaco was the brand name of the Texas Oil Company's gasoline and was the 1906 creation of Joseph Cullinan and Howard Hughes Sr. Both of these men had extensive experience in oil infrastructure ranging from engineering and pipeline construction to drilling and drill-bit manufacture, respectively. Hughes Sr. invented the tri-cone drilling bit which became the industry standard and made him one of the wealthiest men in the country. It also provided the funds for the adventures of his son, the famous Howard Hughes (Jr.), in movies and aviation. But for the moment (the first decade of the 20th century) these two were able take advantage of the ongoing war between New York and Chicago finance capital to secure as permanent a base of monetary support as was possible in those days.
537Armed with plenty of cash they proceeded to buy and develop leases around Beaumont Texas and the Glen Pool in Oklahoma. Constructing their own pipelines and having a permanent buyer in the form of the British Navy these two confronted Standard with a permanent domestic competitor which Standard could not destroy, buy out or shut down.
Gulf
In 1907 the finance capital Mellon family succeeded in becoming the next permanent domestic challenger to the Rockefeller's when they created the Gulf Oil Corporation. Gulf was never a serious challenge to Standard even after the 1911 dissolution of the Trust into the new (previously constituent parts of the Standard Trust) companies. But as US imperialism entered its post-World War I phase the US demanded its part of the world-wide settlement among the victors, and gained access for the first time to Arabian oil at Bahrain Island off the Saudi coast. There Gulf would become a major player.
Electricity
The rapid arrival of electric lighting doomed the kerosene industry and for a moment it seemed as if the oil business was about to head south. Kerosene was at least half of the end product inventory and by 1885 there were over a quarter of a million light bulbs in use which meant a quarter of a million kerosene lamps were headed for the junk yard or at best the second hand rural market. In 1902 there were 18 million electric light bulbs in operation in the US alone and that meant 18 million kerosene lamps ceased to be lit.
The story was the same in London and Berlin (called Elektropolis in the popular press for the brilliance and uniformity of its massive electric lighting system.)
The Internal Combustion Engine
Everything changed with the advent of the automobile and the airplane. No longer was kerosene the most important consideration. It was the previously nearly valueless gasoline fraction of the crude oil which was now in demand. In fact, demand was not the word for it. There was an insatiable requirement for gasoline in every industrialized capitalist country and in those just entering the capitalist stage as in Latin America.
In the US automobile production jumped from a few thousand to nearly a million on the road in the first decade! All these cars had to have gasoline. ---And in that first decade of the 20th century (1903) Standard agents supplied the gasoline and lubricating oil for the Wright Brother's first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
So, as electricity did away with the market for kerosene the planes and automobiles were building a market for the gasoline fraction. The latter would provide massive capital accumulation for oilmen replacing the primitive capital accumulation kerosene had provided.
Gasoline Comes of Age with the Invention of Thermal Cracking
In 1909 an American scientist, employed by John D. Rockefeller, named William Burton, acting on his own, without authorization, knowledge or support from Rockefeller and his henchmen conducted a series of experiments which put oil under high temperatures and pressures! Burton found that his fancy still, cooking crude oil to 650 degrees Fahrenheit in pressure-cooker conditions would produce a gasoline fraction running to 45% of the total. This ``thermal cracking'' of the long carbon chained molecules of crude oil into short gasoline length molecules made gasoline available to use in all of the new internal combustion engines that demanded it, in sufficient quantities, for the first time.
US Labor 1912 --- 1918
Before and During the Capitalist World War (1914-1918)
Imperialism as a phase of the Capitalist Stage began shortly before 1850. In the succeeding half century the major imperialist countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, USA, and Japan) divided the rest of the world amongst themselves as colonies. Super profits began to come back to European capitalists from these imperialists adventures as the 20th century unfolded. The entire world labor movement was aware during the first decade of the 1900's that the capitalists were leading the world to war on a global scale. Throughout Europe and America all kinds of protests against this policy were underway and all kinds of resolutions swearing opposition to the inevitable imperialist war were passed.
Nevertheless the capitalists started the world war in 1914 and it continued for two and a half years until finally in the spring of 1917 Russian workers revolted against the war altogether and the Russian Revolution began. The capitalists would keep the war going for another year and a half, but throughout the capitalist world workers began to see a new path forward. So, for example, in the USA, by War's end at the close of 1918, chaos within the working class movement began to give way to a period where clarity could be imposed on the international working class movement by the Russian Bolshevik leaders --- now the leaders of the workers of the world.
However, the capitalists were still very much in command of the countries in which they had state power. In many of them the capitalists solidified that control with a
new political philosophy called fascism. Fascism began in Hungary in 1919 during the civil war of Admiral Horthy against the Red Government of Bela Kun. It was named ``fascist'' in 1922, by the Italian clown (and former right wing socialist) Benito Mussolini. Its chief diagnostic was in one way or another to raise to the level of legality, the most violent arbitrary capitalist rule over a mass of slave like workers.
The Soviet Republic (after 1924 the Soviet Union) was embargoed by the capitalist world exactly as Cuba has been embargoed by the Gringo regime for half a century. Confronted with this hostility the Bolsheviks launched a massive international business program supplemented by an even more massive international industrial espionage network of gigantic proportions. So, as the capitalist world entered yet another of its innumerable depressions --- this time the worst depression ever began in 1929 and lasted until the end of World War II in 1945 --- the Soviet Union was beginning the most rapid modernization possible of the industrial base that would have been capitalist industry in any other country but was now publicly owned.
This was the context within which the North American labor movement emerged as a decisive factor in the global struggle for socialism and against fascism and imperialism of any kind (including that of the democratic [parliamentary] imperialist powers of the English-speaking world.) You want to keep this in mind as you become familiar with our own labor history and be prepared to go back and study what was happening in Europe (as for example in Chapters 12-16 below.)
Eugene Debs and North American Social Democracy (1898)
Of all early US and Canadian Socialists perhaps Eugene Debs is the man most remembered today. Debs corrected the ultra-left sectarianism of Daniel De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party and forged an alliance with the AF of L. A new Socialist Party was created out of anti-De Leon SLP elements and the U.S. Social Democratic Party in 1900.
Debs Leads the Fight against World War I
Debs remains famous because he led the North American Socialists who solidified with V.I. Lenin and his demand that the imperialist world war (WW I) be called for what it was. This is to say a world-wide war of capitalists against Labor. Against workers in the capitalist countries and against working people in colonial countries.
Debs was eventually, imprisoned in the USA, in 1918, for his opposition to the world war but nothing could reverse the fact Debs had received three quarter of a million votes during the Presidential election of 1912 and in 1916 the Socialist candidate for President got nearly 600,000 votes. All of this despite the Left appealing phony slogan of the Democratic Party to ``Keep Us out of War''.
North Americans Suddenly Cognizant
President Woodrow Wilson said it belatedly best when he said in St. Louis on the 5th of September, 1919 ``Is there any man here or woman --- let me say is there any child --- who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?...This was a commercial and industrial war.''
You will recall in our discussion at the beginning of Chapter 13 (The Stage of Stalinist Socialism) the real reasons for the World War just concluded were twofold: (1)
the desire of capitalists in control of the principal capitalist countries of USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia and their clients in the lesser states of Europe to kill as many supernumerary workers as possible. They were no longer needed in the age of imperialism (machinery had long since been sent to the cheap labor colonial world) and their women and children would be available in case of any need for additional domestic labor power. ---And, (2) each of the capitalist ruling classes in the imperialist countries believed that seizing their rival's colonial possession of cheap labor power was worth the risk. Especially when the 1913 profits coming back from these overseas factories and their sub-subsistence level wages were as stupendous as they were. The negatives in case of defeat were minimal and worth risking as far as the capitalist oligarchies in charge of the imperialist countries were concerned.
538What about North American labor and its preparation for the World War?
The US Left All Over the Place
I - The Socialist Party
For the entire decade prior to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and throughout the war, North American intellectuals in the socialist movement made all kinds of correct assessments as to what was going on, what had happened, and so forth. But when it came to doing something about it --- namely sending cadre into the armed forces to organize sedition and subversion and to prepare to mutiny, shoot their officers and turn their units to the service of the proletarian revolution the gringo socialist leaders failed. (Something which should be our first order of business today.) Consequently, when the gringo capitalists gave the order to enter the World War, there was nothing to stop them.
If US Socialists were not ready to seize power, then were they able to put up any other kind of effective resistance to the capitalist war policy? The answer is yes and no.
The war was terribly unpopular with the Party's membership but by 1918 it had become popular with the Party's highest leadership --- many of whom were important elected leaders, especially in the labor states. This despite the fact that nearly all the Socialist leaders and members enthusiastically supported the October Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
However, as often as not this support came for bad reasons. Specifically an ignorance of Marxist basics --- any socialist leader should have known, because it is elementary Marxism, that the state is owned by capitalists in all capitalist countries and that any war is a war of theirs for profit for them, and to murder millions of trouble-making workers. Instead we see pure silliness coming out of so-called Socialist leaders. For example, when the October Revolution replaced the capitalist regime in Russia many of these so-called socialists naively greeted the arrival of Lenin as meaning the US would support the turn toward real democracy in Russia so that US socialist opposition to the world war was no longer necessary!
The 1917 Socialist Party St. Louis convention had passed an emergency resolution opposing the war and that became the center for further socialist party dissolution as pressure from the Government against them picked up. However, clearly, a Party whose leaders were often this illiterate politically and historically ignorant, failing to understand even the most basic parts of Marxism, left them in an extremely vulnerable position not to mention leaving them isolated from not only the mass of workers but most
especially from the mass of those who could be most permanently organized. That is, the industrial proletariat.
In short, no one was more ``all over the place'' than US Socialist Party thinkers and adherents... Members, leaders, writers, editors, opinion makers of all sorts among Socialists, were first against the war and later maybe for it, depending on who they were, when and where.
Nevertheless this did not stop the capitalists from launching an all-out war against them as well as the IWW in 1917. Of course the real reason for the attack was to silence the most effective leaders of the US labor movement. Backing the attack was every reactionary force in the US civil, governmental and state life. No amount of conciliation could call that off.
The AFL would soon confront its own conflict between pie-card leaders and militant members as the cap attack was pressed against labor everywhere in the years after the World War concluded. No one was stronger in their anti-communism and pro-capitalist activity than the AFL national leadership and, of course, the prince of the pie-cards Samuel Gompers.
Talk is Cheap --- in the Crunch American Socialists Fail
The Left US Socialist strategy of relying on mass demonstrations and protest petitions to stop the inevitable world war was ludicrous to begin with. But in retrospect it also highlights the core weakness in our country's working class preparation to combat the world war itself in that it demonstrates the extreme naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé of the leaders as well as the membership of the Socialist Party (and the rest of the Left as well).
Workers have to organize militarily and prepare for class combat in the streets, mountains, inland waters and deserts of the USA if they are to be taken seriously when it comes to liquidating the political power of the ruling class of trillionaire oligarchs and billionaire scumbags. Nothing short of this will do the job and a Party that fails to make armed insurrection the de facto central strategy in its fight for power must inevitably fail. In other words, protest petitions and mass demonstrations are fine to demonstrate to the participants and the watching masses what it is we want and demand. But all of this is still just cheerleading --- the team still has to play the game and win!
Something would have to be done by the gringos in their own country. Just as something had to be done by the workers in every capitalist country. The labor parties throughout the world had betrayed their workers and of course the workers of the world as well. Only in Russia had Marxists done the right thing. ---And then only some of them --- i.e., the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Therefore, only in Russia would revolution succeed in that fateful year of 1917.
Lenin would get to the North Americans, setting them straight, and then the rest of the world too, as soon as he could. For the moment (1917 --- 1918) he had his hands full fighting the armed class struggle in the newly created Soviet Republic. When he did turn his attention to the rest of the world in January 1919 he kicked off the Third International to teach these intellectuals and their working class followers how to do it.
Looking around at the class of 1918
The World War ended officially on the 11th of November, 1918. One full year after the successful Bolshevik seizure of power (November 7th 1917). ---And the
consequences in gross summary were stunning: 10 million dead soldiers and 20 million more wounded, maimed, crippled; 13 million dead civilians and ten million more homeless refugees and five million homeless orphans.
Capitalism had exacted an awful cost on the peoples of Europe and Asia. ---And the only reason it had ended in 1918 was that workers in Germany had taken matters into their own hands and were revolting and setting up their own ``soviets'' in German industrial centers and in the German Army and Navy. All of this so frightened the German oligarchy that the Kaiser fled the country and the War was over!
The first real call by a ``state-power-holding government'' for such direct action by workers to end the world war --- meaning armed insurrection --- against the capitalist governments participating in the World War --- came in April of 1917 from the Petrograd City Soviet (Petrograd City Council). It was directed explicitly to the workers of North America and Europe among all the nations of the Earth.
Menshevik-like US Socialist Party leaders reacted in horror to the idea workers should take direct action and end the war by taking everything in hand themselves. Confronted with the possibility of revolution at home the cowards and fakirs of US social democracy did what their caste had done worldwide and that was to attempt to fool workers into supporting their respective capitalist regimes. However, the rank and file Bolshevik-like Socialist Party members in the USA were demanding that their Party do what the Russians were calling for. As were rank and file socialists in Great Britain, France and Italy,
On April 6, 1917, President Wilson got the declaration of War from Congress he had asked for and the gringo regime was off and running on its newest imperialist adventure --- the first against a European capitalist imperialist regime since it went after Spain in 1898 and seized her global empire. But when it was all said and done the US Socialist Party, after much fire and brimstone and an emergency national convention, did nothing!
Fighting a more militant resistance to the US entering the war, the IWW did more but not nearly enough. In fact, the International Workers of the World, and their various unions, did as much as they could. But they suffered from their own inherent weaknesses as we shall see.
The Left All Over the Place II
The Industrial Workers of the World (1905)
Worker's fights across the US from New England to California and everywhere in between had become increasingly militant. Out of the great struggles preceding 1905 came the Industrial Workers of the World; a union that acted as a Party, having the objective of establishing Socialism in the USA and Canada. Its mass base was initially in a few Eastern manufacturing centers, Mid-West working class communities and the working class mining and lumber unions of the Northwest USA and adjacent Canada. After 1912 the IWW rapidly spread to many of the most important mining centers of both countries and then into many of their cities too. Its program: one big society as one big industrial union.
Fatal Weakness
However, the IWW's history had been tortured and complex. (1) Its membership
was never very large and (2) always demographically unstable. (3) Its greatest internal and inherent problem was its failure to be clear about where it was going in a realistic way. In the end it was this third problem area which would be their undoing.
The idea of setting up a kind of syndicalist heaven on Earth, somewhere here in the USA, had about as much chance of success as the Mormon hope to build a permanent heaven on Earth in Utah. The IWW had to be able to settle-in for a decades-long struggle, and all that that implies for a temporarily submissive way of life under capitalism. Because that is the way life would have to continue for the foreseeable future, and was not the bright future the majority of its unionized members were willing to fight and die for. This settling-in for a submissive way of life --- albeit temporary --- the IWW leaders could never do. That is they could never separate their long term socialist goals from the immediate struggle needs and demands of its members --- ``immediate'' meaning how, in the meantime, workers were to live their daily lives over the coming period, which after all could last a few years or many decades. This was the Achilles Heel of the ultra-left in the entire international working class movement.
539It stands in direct contrast to the Achilles Heel of the right wing socialists which was their unwillingness to understand that capitalism had to go as soon as possible and that meant preparation for an inevitable armed struggle. This was something the right wing socialists were unwilling to do precisely because their interest in socialism was limited to their achieving the role of petty bourgeois foremen for the international capitalist class.
During the three years from 1905 to 1908 the IWW had witnessed several of its key constituents departing over reasons of ideology. With the departure of the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party and the Western Federation of Labor, the Party was reduced to two groups centered out of Chicago and Detroit. However, this industrial leadership was still able to perform some rather spectacular strikes in the years preceding the World War and consequently was in a pre-revolutionary position --- albeit weak and incipient it was at least a beginning.
A beginning where the IWW leaders could have begun to organize effective armed strikes as resistance to the federal government's war policy. Preparing thereby to go over to the military offensive when the time came. However, despite a lot of a backwoods scuffling with 50,000 troops of the US Army in the Northwestern States in the event, the IWW did not go over to military preparation. The reason for this failure was not that workers in these industries were stupid and did not know how to prepare for armed conflict. The reason the IWW failed was ideological. Its leaders did not believe in conquering the capitalist police and military power first before establishing workers control. They foolishly thought this could come about purely and solely through industrial action organizing workers in shops and factories to take power directly over the means of production in this way. This is what is called Syndicalism.
540This is particularly troublesome in that the IWW had been at war, literally, throughout the first decade of its existence. It was always involved in some kind of localized armed struggle somewhere. The IWW leaders should have seen the necessity of turning local conflicts into broader regional ones; then on struggling to win key armed victories in the major cities closest to its hinterland bases in Idaho, Montana, Washington, (Alberta and British Columbia too), Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona not to mention in the big states of Washington, Oregon and California. They should have
seen the obvious military road forward.
However, despite all the talk about ``One Big Union'' and ``workers running everything'' the truth became apparent. Namely, only a few people in the world could see the task at hand and most of them in the early 20th century were Russian, and all of them under the leadership of just one man, V. I. Lenin.
What is it that must be done?
Organize the working class and associated classes to seize power by force of arms! It's that simple.
We had the experience but not the leadership. Don't get me wrong. We had men and women with the balls to do the job and the ability. But first of all we didn't really know what it was we were going to create. Lenin showed us with the emergence of Council (Soviet) power in the Russian Empire but that was during and after this 1905-1917 period. With that model, tough leaders could proceed to do the job but apparently not before. At least that is the way our history unfolded (and we must adhere to the principle that history is always unfolding as it should.)
Let's take a look at the experience. Why? You should learn right now that experience no matter how romantic and educational means little if you don't have the right theoretical worldview in order to understand said experience. In other words, they had all this experience you are about to review in summary yet they could not take things to the next step strategically - which would have been to plan for an inevitable class war and thus plan to launch, when the time came, an armed seizure of power in some, many or even all of the States and/or in Washington DC. In the meantime, to build the prosperity and wellbeing of their members. All of this will be reflected in the increasingly high standards of physical health and mental preparation demonstrated by the next generation of communists. For it is that coming generation which will conduct the inevitable class war for state power.
541That is what the Left Marxists and the IWW should have done to get on the road to revolution.
What Is Syndicalism?
You have seen how Anarchism missed the boat altogether in failing to understand Karl Marx's discovery that the ``state'' is simply an instrument of class suppression (army and police). Whatever class exercises its dictatorship over the class society in question uses that state to control the mass of slaves, serfs or workers (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, respectively, as the three stages of class-state society comprising the Servitude Epoch between Primitive Communism and Modern Communism. Preceded and succeeded by transitional stages.) This scientific discovery has certain undeniable consequences. Marxists and now the Leninists also considered the defeat of the ruling classes and their state as a necessary precondition to the establishment of socialism.
The anarchists wanted only local seemingly spontaneous bodies to go about governing with no enforcement mechanism other than the armed mass of the people as a whole. There were many unionists who saw a broader front had to be created to organize for working class state power than what the anarchists could assemble from their illiterate farmer base and the resulting anarchist industrial proletariat. These men and women believed workers could seize society by first seizing the shops and factories in which they worked and would then proceed to create the new society.
Syndicalists were very similar to the anarchists in many ways but most importantly in this inability to understand the nature of the state and class rule in any class society. In Europe (especially in England and France) these syndicalists had what they considered to be considerable success in building their base for eventual working class takeover of society.
William Z. Foster traveled to Europe while still an active member of the IWW and came back after a year or so convinced that American revolutionaries had to get inside the AFL and by winning over a militant minority, especially in certain specific unions, go about the reform and rehabilitation of that huge organization.
The IWW Fails Because of its Anti-Communism
In the fall of 1920 the underground Communist Party USA told the IWW leadership that its membership in the First International and any working relationship in the USA between the two would require the IWW to stop teaching workers ``that the revolution can be achieved by industrial organization of the shops and factories and the direct seizure of industry, without first overwhelming the capitalist state (military and police --- ed) and establishing the Proletarian Dictatorship of the Soviets.'' (See Foner 8:234). To make a long story short the ultra-left leadership ended up refusing any relationship with the Third International whatsoever. This marks the beginning of the end of the IWW.
After its anti-communist turn the IWW did occasionally have success in dramatic strike and free speech actions across the country now and then. But for practical purposes the IWW was dead and the continuity between it and the coming generation of revolutionaries would consist of the movement to the Communist Party of persons such as William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who I met, for example, 42 years later, in January of 1962, at her office in the National Office of the CPUSA in New York City.)
The Communists willingness to participate in the capitalist electoral system (along with joining the fight against the class enemy on every other front in the class war) was the most immediate and obvious given reason by the IWW ultra-left leaders. The real reason was their long commitment to the idea of industrial organization of workers to take ownership of those factories directly and without participation in the capitalist parliaments or without reliance on their own state apparatus. By 1920 it was clear to the ideologically narrow ultra-left IWW leaders in Chicago and Detroit that the Russian Bolsheviks had turned their revolution into an anarchist's bad dream and a syndicalists nightmare, in that the Bolshevik state apparatus was not only successful but an idealized version of a state apparatus commanded by Marxists. In other words to construct their socialism the Bolsheviks had adopted the capitalist mechanism of using state power.
542There was certainly nothing new about the Marxist approach in this regard except for the Bolsheviks having made it practical in the way in which they applied proletarian police power to back up proletarian military power on the land and sea. The American syndicalists (and Anarchists like Emma Goldman) should not have expected anything else. After all this is what everyone had been arguing about since the days of the First International and the Marxist and Russian Bolshevik interpretation were well known to just about everyone on the Left.
Class War in Gringolandia before and during the First World War
The IWW was a Party of professional revolutionaries bent on destroying private property in general and capitalism in particular as soon as possible. Unfortunately all this good work by IWW revolutionaries had no domestic program to occupy its leaders and members over the coming years. What were they to do in the near term, in the event the IWW should fail in its initial attempt(s) to establish its own form of government?
In practice this meant that a small number of IWW organizers --- 287 --- could organize, lead and keep on strike some 30,000 textile workers in the great strike of 1912 at Lawrence, Massachusetts. This was a great victory for the IWW. Its strikers got wage increases to 25%. This was also the year when the IWW reached a stable membership high of some 18 to 19,000 dues paying card carrying members.
However, over all, the strength of the IWW was being frittered away in the failure of its leadership to come up with a live-for-now program structurally equivalent to the domestic peace program of Gompers and his gang of traitors in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). For example, in the real world the newly empowered Lawrence workers now had to get used to the idea of continuing the way of life they knew, but without themselves as the masters of their universe, even though this put them at odds with the IWW's highest leadership. The latter wanted to keep them in a state of perpetual conflict with the Bosses. That was not and is not an acceptable living condition for workers in the interim period. Why? Because people don't want to live as if they were in a maximum security prison forever on the alert for the next outbreak of violence. Workers, with newly and hard won higher wages and benefits, were more than ready to get on with civil life, as long as their minimal civil rights were respected. But, their leaders were emotional and accordingly not so well prepared. What the IWW and its leaders should have done was to adopt an AFL like public posture while preparing for direct action (through Sports Clubs and the like) at a later date when it would become possible as well as necessary.
543In the meantime the membership base of the IWW in the most important sector of the economy for Marxist workers --- industrial manufacturing --- was dwindling to next to nothing. This as a result of the failure of the IWW to come up with a temporary live-for-now program. Disguising this inherent fatal weakness was the sudden 1917 influx of members and their dues and initiation fee money from the agricultural, lumber and mining camps of the Mid-West and South and Far West. (In fact the IWW was so broke at its annual 1916 convention --- its leader Vincent St. John, declined to run for Secretary-Treasurer for fear of having to preside over the financial dissolution of the Union he had fought so hard to build.) Yet by the end of summer, 1917, a New York Times hatchet job on the IWW had its treasury swollen to well over $175,000 dollars. As well, it had at its disposal some 32,000 new members recruited by organizers going gang-busters.
544But this was all in the West and Mid-West (as well among black and white timber workers in the Southern states). The most oppressed masses, largely minorities, flocked into the IWW in their struggle to eat and live from day to day. But what the IWW had to have for the long-term was a mass base of workers participating in the capitalist way of life with sufficient reforms having been gained to make life bearable for another generation or two. Agricultural and lumber camps do not provide that kind of setting. Mining camps could provide that kind of setting as they matured into real towns with a permanent cadre of workers and their families --- if they were allowed to do so. So far, and at that time, the miners and their families were constantly under armed attack by
Pinkertons, vigilantes hired by the owners, US and State troops not to mention the local yokel cops.
Bisbee
Not long after Ben Wade made Bisbee, Arizona, famous by burning it to the ground (see the movie 3:10 to Yuma) the IWW made Bisbee a permanent milestone in the armed struggle between miners and capitalists. In the end every federal and state cop and every kind of mercenary from Pinkertons to local vigilantes were used to kill and/or seize every union leader and union member in Bisbee and deport them to a locale farthest enough away to make their return difficult. It was made impossible by the use of these same forces, policing the roads and rails, to prevent the return of the still living deported miners.
Summary
If the IWW had used their temporary surge in membership strength and the money it generated to continue a campaign of building Eastern city industrial bases then things could have gone well for them. But they did not.
Thus, as the first post-war year for the North Americans began (1919), the US Left would have to redefine itself.
The Bolshevik Revolution Super-charges US Labor
Only one capitalist country had a more active and politically knowledgeable working class movement than the USA in 1917. Only in Russia were workers more sophisticated educationally. Under Czarism there had been a great deal of secret reading and debate as most political and trade union activities were illegal in the day to day life of proletarians.
As we have seen this sophistication had been reflected in the maturation of the labor movement itself where a Menshevik-like American Federation of Labor took the strongest anti-communist and pro-capitalist positions, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The Left of labor, which had become the Industrial Workers of the World, and virtually all of the Socialist Party, quickly identified with Lenin and the Bolsheviks as 1917 ended with revolution in Russia. In this sense the Americans had in their own way come to their own Menshevik-Bolshevik split within the SP in 1919.
The effect on American and Canadian labor of Lenin's seizure of power in October (November 7-9, 1917 on the US calendar) was spectacular. All of a sudden the previously nearly fantastic ideas about forming a new society, and a new world, were not just pipe-dreams, but were reality! Nowhere would labor move faster than in North America, in accepting the consequences implied by the success of Bolshevism in Russia.
Present at the Bolshevik seizure in Petrograd was Oregonian socialist John Reed (see the movie Reds for a dramatic depiction of these events) who would author a world famous book entitled Ten Days That Shook the World! As 1918 and then 1919 unfolded the true impact of what had happened in the Czarist Empire began to sink-in among American and Canadian Marxists (and socialists of all persuasions for that matter.)
Left Wing Socialists Regroup
All over the world traitors and renegades on the Left had joined the capitalists in their world war. Now, the Soviet Republic's embattled leader V. I. Lenin was drawing a dividing line between authentic socialists and the capitalist agents on the Left. It came in the form of his Call for delegates to the founding convention of the Third or Communist International held in the spring of 1919 in Moscow.
At the second Comintern Congress in 1920 the US was represented by two delegations and the Comintern had to sort out which was to be its representative Party in the USA. The movie Reds shows us one version; that of John Reed and his attempt to influence the Comintern's Executive Committee.
However, the important thing was not what was happening among the Comintern intellectuals in Moscow. But what was going on `on-the-ground' in Gringolandia. Gompers had thrown the official US labor movement behind the Wilson warmongers but workers on the ground were conducting their own fights. These continued and were stepped up by Left militants, especially in the IWW, throughout the war years and led to many conflicts between the 50, 000 man force the US Army sent to the Northwest forests, and the strikers. Eventually the soldiers began to become disaffected with their bosses and sympathetic to the strikers.
This was the Achilles Heel of the capitalists in their attempt to turn the war into an excuse to break up unions wherever they could. That is, their soldiers were subject to being subverted onto the side of workers and as that sentiment spread in the Army, the Generals in Washington wanted their troops withdrawn before they became totally disaffected.
The Gringo System for Controlling the US Working Class
Gompers Creates Gringo Equivalent to European Fascism
You will recall from Chapters 12 and 13 that capitalism in Europe generated a labor aristocracy (meaning craft unionized workers capable of paying union dues on a regular, long term, basis). The leaders of this caste of workers had the resources and the need to fight the capitalists on their own and for their own limited (hours, wages, and working conditions) objectives. Along the way this caste and its leaders became acquainted with the laws of development of the capitalist system from reading Capital Volume One (1867). They knew if they increased the amount of production dedicated to these limited objectives (e.g., wages) they could count on their members to vote as they were told in union affairs. Of course, they had to fight a class war to get these concessions because capitalists always live in a dream world and fight like Merchants of Venice to grab and squeeze every coin from the workers pocket right now without regard to the long term picture. This initially led to alliances between these labor pie-cards and theoretical socialists of the Marxist variety who were trying to build a new and better world.
545Eventually, this kind of marriage of convenience between the Socialist Left and Right would have to dissolve. In Russia it dissolved early on (1903), in the division of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into two wings (Bolshevik vs. Menshevik; revolutionary versus reformist-revisionist). In the USA the Socialist Left and Right divided into separate political parties in 1919, but unlike Russia (where all unions were outlawed from the get go) the most powerful base of the right wing SP was not in the SP but in the reformist-revisionist Marxists of the Samuel Gompers persuasion in the
American Federation of Labor (AFL). Likewise the most important base of the Socialist Left was in the unions created by the Socialist Party and by the IWW.
The difference was that for the most part Gompers was going after men and women who worked in factories with long term prospects. The Left organizers were going after men and women in agricultural, lumber and mining camps who were inherently unstable in terms of demographic commitment.
Furthermore, Gompers was a real world person. He believed the ideas of the Left Marxists to be not much different from the silly and unrealistic programs of the earlier social reformers of the Utopian variety. He had no commitment to any of these schemes because his view of the world told him people would not change. Certainly they would not change sufficiently or to the degree necessary to put these various ``new society'' plans into effect. So, in the long run, Gompers simply rewarded his followers with steady union wage and benefit jobs.
Throughout his life Gompers was against supplementing labor gains through ``political action'' such as might be offered by a steady advance in utopian plans for social legislation, on the grounds that Marx had proven the state to be always at the service of the employers and one could not expect much from a capitalist state apparatus including its government and political parties.
Gompers deserves the credit for forcing the US capitalists to accept him, his philosophy and his Union (and associated unions such as the railroad brotherhoods). After all he engineered a, until then rather unique, system of the rich ruling the poor, where he made the top capitalist ruling families institutionalize this new kind of Capitalist system. In short, as much as we dislike Gompers and his entire ilk, we do not want to denigrate his intelligence nor his competence. No one else in any other capitalist country had generated a Government hand-in-glove with Labor system. Even in Great Britain, under Lloyd George, their capitalist Government had simply given in to labor when it threatened the regime with strikes during the World War. In the USA Labor under Gompers actively supported the capitalist regime and demanded a respectable place in the oligarchy of governmental rulers for the AFL.
546In 1918 only Gompers had created a new system featuring the top capitalist ruling families sitting jointly with the AFL and its allies (e.g., Railroad Brotherhoods) as the basis of their post-World War I system for forcing US labor to collaborate with their ongoing capitalist system. That was no mean accomplishment. ---And, he did it while maintaining Labor should stay away from the existing political parties (and all political action other than to punish and reward individual politicians for their support or lack thereof.) In the rest of the European capitalist world the same kind of collaborative cabal was coming into existence under a new rubric: fascism!
It happened this way.
Right Wing Socialists Attack
Before and during the World War the Right Wing Socialists who controlled the AFL worked unceasingly to help the capitalists and their governments in Washington (and their State governments) destroy the IWW. This course, on the part of the AFL under Samuel Gompers, was accentuated by the success we have just reviewed of the IWW in organizing the Far West. When IWW membership rolls started cutting into the AFL's membership in a big way in the lumber states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and
Montana, not to mention California, and the mining state of Arizona, Gompers pulled out all the stops and asked the Justice Department to launch an all-out war against the IWW for ``patriotic'' reasons.
In the USA the AFL had been openly maneuvered into supporting the coming capitalist world war by Samuel Gompers. You will recall Gompers had been one of the early labor leaders with a good knowledge of the economic side of Marxism. Yet, he used this knowledge to help his class (or caste) of petty bourgeois labor pie-cards gain and keep control over larger and larger sections of the organized working class of the USA. Where Gompers was strong (as opposed to the IWW) was precisely where the IWW was weakest --- namely the IWW's inability to develop a live-for-now program in precisely those capitalist towns and cities where workers could anticipate several decades of life under capitalism. In other words, workers would have only successive minor gains in their welfare to look forward too. Opposed to this policy vacuum, was the AFL's plan (piss poor though it was.)
547The AFL strategy, (despite all the well-known evils of labor aristocracy-dominated craft and guild unionism,) did fit workers and their families into the capitalist social order any which way it could (e.g., achieving continuing social reforms albeit under capitalist rule; providing social assistance of various kinds and so forth.)
However, Gompers dictatorship over the AFL did not mean the majority of US union organizers and members supported the coming imperialist war. It was precisely because the overwhelming majority of class conscious Town and City workers were against this coming war that Gompers and gang were desperately trying to mislead the labor movement.
Gompers was not just leading the 3 million AFL and Railroad union members toward war he was a member of the President Wilson's Council of National Defense where he sat on its Advisory Council with the big capitalist bosses. Their job was to construct the civil base of support for the coming war. Gompers specific job was to organize the subordination of the organized labor movement to the war program once it began. Consequently, every anti-war petition Gompers got from the member AFL unions (and others) he promptly shit-canned. He went much further in initiated strong suppression decisions for union goons and lists of suspected radicals along with their addresses and whatever information his men had been able to gather for federal cops to use in coming raids on Socialists of all stripes --- not just the IWW --- meaning all the anti-war elements in the country.
548Gompers had initiated the call for this national institution of repression in December 1915, and had been rewarded with membership in the August Body called the National Defense Council in October 1916 and within a couple of months Gompers was formally appointed the head of its Labor Commission. In February, 1917, Gompers reported to the Executive Council of the AFL in his capacity as head of the Labor commission for the capitalist gang of Woodrow Wilson rather than in his capacity as union leader.
In his capacity as head of the counter-revolutionary movement within US labor Gompers pledged to organize a series of Labor Conferences to Support the War, once it was announced. The most important of these was held in Washington in March of 1917. The meeting produced unanimity in support of Gompers ``American Labor's Position in Peace or in War.'' This was a total sell-out of US workers to US capitalists organized, as
usual, by right wing ``respectable'' socialists like Samuel Gompers, in that these Rightists were throwing their support behind the coming imperialist war (which began less than one month later in April, 1917, for the USA.)
16 Months of Government Unions --- 1917 - 1918
On the eve of the World War in 1914 US workers still worked 7 days a week 12 hours a day for about $15.00 a week. About 30% of workers were unemployed in the major cities.
On the eve of US entrance into the World War in 1917 there were some 2 million 800,000 unionized workers in the building, clothing, machinery, metal, shipbuilding and transportation industries. These were industries composed of workers in communities raising families and living permanently from day to day selling their labor power. Within eighteen months an additional 800,000 workers joined their ranks. These were virtually all AFL unions.
While the Government unleashed the Army, Navy and a multitude of Pinkerton wannabees onto the agricultural, lumber and mining camps of the far west destroying the IWW in the process, the AFL leaders had sold out the international working class movement and were being richly rewarded in the process.
Furthermore, workers with and without unions were witnessing a rapid rise in wages and this would have the effect of making the members of the AFL unions grateful and loyal to their hierarchy --- in other words, this rapid success in remuneration for many workers resulted in making these unions permanent. Even though workers were confronted with rapidly escalating prices there is nothing like a substantially bigger paycheck at the end of the week.
In July, 1917, the Wilson Administration established the War Industries Board to act as the clearinghouse of war industry production needs. Eventually it would take its place as a principal component of the War Labor Administration. These were critical to a reorganization of the US economy which de facto was underway with the US entrance into the World War. For example in the sixteen months of war the US got involved in, the Government had to move to take over the economy in critical sectors. These included takeover of the US telephone and telegraph system, the railroads, and the shipbuilding industry.
Furthermore a generalized attack against all the gains Labor had made before the war got underway. In every case it was framed as patriotic justification for cutting workers' paychecks and repealing social legislative gains of the previous decade. Employers demanded the repeal of labor legislation and six states enacted a legal provision suspending labor laws (California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Kansas, Vermont and New Hampshire.) Strong labor states like New York defeated these proposals but the trend was clear. Everywhere they could, capitalists would use ``patriotism'' against labor.
What really institutionalized things was the decision to set up the War Labor Board in April of 1918. Serious students should study the sixteen month record of the WLB in detail, which is beyond the scope of this Handbook. What I would like you to take away from these introductory comments is recognition that the US rulers under Wilson had decided to take advantage of Gompers more-than-willingness to be corrupted, by performing ``scab'' sort of services to the US rulers.
This is very interesting because it shows a certain sophistication existing among the US rulers and their political class that certainly did not exist in most of the country and its bourgeoisie. The WLB gave many assurances to the protection of unionized workers rights and other workers too. Even though these did not generally have much effect they were canonized one might say in the ideology of the US ruler's administration of the nation. Hours, wages and working conditions were supposed to be fair; women were to receive equal pay, and so forth. Overall results for labor were good. For example, half of North American workers had the 48 hour week at War's end compared to some ten percent in 1914. The Railroad Brotherhoods saw their members average wage increase from $828 in 1914 to $1,820 in 1920.
549By the end of the war in 1918, the steel industry had been forced to institute the eight hour day. But as soon as the war ended in November the steel capitalists went back to the twelve hour day. This was symptomatic of the overall condition of labor after the War.
Even so, when it is all said and done the AFL emerged in a much better position than it had gone into the imperialist war and in a way that would make it a permanent partner of capital in the long-term exploitation of US workers. Dialectically, this improved legality for the AFL would provide the basis upon which Left organizers from the soon to be created Communist Party (unified) USA, would build.
The AFL is ``Labor's Spokesman'' at War's End
Gompers had provided the AFL with a program for winning the war and for postwar reconstruction that followed his own narrow and anti-Left ideology. In doing so he assumed the mantle of ``Labor's Spokesman.''
``No important measure vitally affecting Labor is now taken.'' declared the New Republic, ``without consultation with the leaders of the American Federation of Labor, and in the most important government boards the wage earners are represented.'' When the Nation criticized the government's choice of Samuel Gompers to travel throughout Europe to assess labor conditions there, Solicitor General Howard Lamar informed Oswald Garrison Villard, the Nation's editor that Gompers ``has rendered inestimable service to this government in holding labor in line,'' and that ``while this war is on we are not going to allow any newspapers in this country to attack him.'' The AFL leadership had been fully absorbed into the war apparatus. ``(Foner, Vol. 7:345, 1987) -And, that pretty much says it all.
550The Gringo Capitalists invent Cost Plus Contracting
Perhaps no more important development occurred in this time than the invention of the idea that capitalists should be paid on the basis of a capped percentage guaranteed profit against the costs of production. Costs guaranteed paid by the US Government. One million in costs plus a guaranteed percentage of these costs as profits --- say 17%. The more you spend the more you get paid! That is still how US war contracting works.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 25: The United States in the Imperialist Phase of The Capitalist StageThe capitalist media uses the term imperialism to mean some kind of overbearing hegemonic attitude on the part of some nation against other nations. The capitalists do
this because their entire educational system for the masses is a system of propaganda consisting of lies of omission and outright lies (about facts.) As far as the masses of North Americans are concerned the capitalist control of their thinking is established in their textbooks (with which I have years of personal experience as an author being forced to write according to formula and reactionary oversight).The capitalist publishers always educate to obfuscate. It's no wonder so few students enjoy history courses. How could you enjoy something which is barren of truth at every turn and purposely made therefore extraordinarily boring and usually these books are just plain silly in the end. At least this is true as far as the mass educational system is concerned.
In ruling class preparatory schools like Phillips Academy (Andover, Mass.) or in their elite colleges and universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, you will find that students are often told the truth, or the truth is at least made available to them. That is because the ruling capitalist families understand that a few very safe and select students have to know what is really going on. Thus, you will find Marxist professors in these bastions of the capitalist oligarchy. On the other hand we Bolsheviks can see to it that this knowledge is passed on in proper form to the mass of working people which is one reason for this handbook.
The scientific definition of imperialism is the one given it by V. I. Lenin based on understanding the role of exported capital. In other words, when we Marxists use the word imperialism we are always referring to the export of constant capital (machinery and/or entire factories), from the advanced industrial capitalist countries to cheap labor centers in other parts of the world. These latter parts of the world were initially the ``colonies'' of the advanced capitalist countries of Europe and Japan, in Africa and Asia. In the case of the United States, it was the semi-colonial countries of Latin America, and then the Philippines and China. In other words, the advanced industrialized capitalist countries were initially the USA, England, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and (barely) Russia. By the end of the 1800's the entire less developed world had been turned into colonies of one or the other of these great capitalist powers.
551In short, our use of the term imperialism is highly specific, scientific and not susceptible to idiosyncratic redefinition by imperialist ideologues. It always means the export of constant capital backed up when necessary by military force of the state apparatuses of the capitalist countries. These capitalist countries are always class dictatorships of their respective capitalist classes no matter if they happen to be dressed up in parliamentary democratic forms from time to time.
A man named Hobsbaum wrote the first book on imperialism and Lenin took that data, along with a great deal more, and wrote the book Imperialism, the Highest Developed Stage of Capitalism, which was published in 1917. In the pantheon of Leninist theoretical texts this book immediately took its place with The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and State and Revolution.
We have seen in Europe and the Americas, capitalism began with a phase of primitive capital accumulation and proceeded to a phase of massive capital accumulation. The final imperialist stage of capitalist development overlapped with massive capital accumulation beginning by 1850. Imperialism reached its zenith with the division of the entire world by 1900.
Scientific Note: Stage and Phase Overlap in Sociocultural Evolution
By the way, in the nature and course of stage and phase evolution in sociocultural evolution overlapping is commonplace and the rule not the exception. Why? Because society and culture belong to people and people live all over the globe. The overall pattern of sociocultural evolution - which is to say the ``general pattern''- is clear cut and looks in our charts as if one stage always gives way to the next, neatly and cleanly. One phase always giving way to the next, within each Stage, neatly and cleanly. But, in reality once we get beyond the general level and look at the highly specific geographic contexts in which people live we see differences in rate of both Stage and Phase evolution from people to people, geographic zone to geographic zone, and so forth.
552We have Old World feudalism fully extant when slavery is the highest level of development in the New World and I have explained why in specific terms several times in this text. We saw in this case that massive accumulation of capital occurred a few decades earlier in the UK and adjacent Western Europe while northern US was in primitive capitalist accumulation and southern US was in slavery! This in no way changes the general global pattern of sociocultural evolution from Slavery to Capitalism via the intermediary transitional Stage of Feudalism. The epoch transformation from chattel slavery to wage slavery. It simply deepens our understanding of the mechanics of the process.
Back to our Story
Of course, exporting constant capital to cheap labor centers did not lessen the struggle of working people for a decent wage, and for an honest system of working hours and livable working conditions. Thus, the exporting capitalists had to use their governments and their state apparatuses (Army, Navy, police) to keep these workers and these countries in line. They also had to use their state apparatuses to fight one another for control of these cheap labor colonies which were both sources of raw materials and cheap labor and markets.
US Imperialism
For the North American nation the struggle to control foreign cheap labor and foreign markets had begun immediately after the US Civil War with the intervention of a variety of US firms in Latin America. For Gringo imperialism the countries of Latin America were considered its own. They were de facto colonies for the most part by the end of the 1800's even if they operated as supposedly independent countries in many cases. Those that did not accept de facto colonialism were nevertheless bound up as de facto semi-colonial nations.
It is ironic that the so-called Monroe Doctrine had been issued by a weak but brave New Republic when it could hardly enforce it but was anyway willing to try, in order to support the national liberation struggles of Latin America which began in Mexico and climaxed with the South American wars of national liberation from Spain led by Simon Bolivar. Ironic because as the US changed from being the Brave New World Republic of working people in alliance with small capitalist farmers and industrialists, it transformed into a nation ruled by a ruthless super-rich oligarchy.
Thus, after the end of the US Civil War this tiny ruling oligarchy began to use its federal government to achieve their capitalist imperialist objectives worldwide. Their
interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine was quite a new and different thing. Namely a license to their exclusive right to exploit America south of the Rio Grande.
Initially it was US banks and railroads which invaded Mexico, and lands further south (see the movie Bandidas for a real flavor of the evil these men did in Mexico).Yet, it was what we call the Spanish-American War of 1898 that propelled the US officially and finally into the era of Imperialism.
The Spanish-American-Cuban War of 1898
Why did the US go to War with Spain in 1898? It did so because the biggest US capitalists wanted a share of the colonial world beyond that which, as we have just seen, they had already acquired by imposing gringo hegemony over Latin America. Spain was the weakest of the old colonial powers. The opportunity was at hand to attack Spain in the name of furthering democracy. Thereby seizing the Spanish empire and its Philipino road to China!
Where?
In Cuba. The Cubans had been fighting Spain in a guerilla war for decades and the struggle was coming to a head. In 1898, the Spanish were on the verge of defeat by Jose Marti and the Cuban patriotic national army. If the US wanted to get in on the act they had to do so before Cuba became independent on its own merits. This might not have mattered much in Washington if it had not been for the fact the gringo imperialist bosses in Wall Street, the capitalist (``cap'') press, and in their government in Washington, knew that once Spain was defeated they could seize Spain's entire empire not just Cuba. Most importantly globally were the Spanish Philippines.
The Philippines had been Western Europe's road into China for four hundred years and so it was in 1898. ---And, China was well into the process of being dismembered precisely by these same countries that were now the most important competitors for the US ruling families of centi-millionaires and billionaires led by the Rockefellers.
In reality beating Spain meant getting a piece of China. That was the prize the US ruling oligarchy had its eyes on.
The US Enters the Imperialist Struggle for World Oil
If the US was a late-comer in dividing up Africa and Asia it was certainly not a late-comer in the world-wide struggle for oil and oil markets. In fact, since the US had initiated the modern oil age in every sense it was perfectly positioned to take advantage of its new global position resulting from its victory in the Spanish American Cuban War.
Gasoline Comes of Age with the Invention of Thermal Cracking
In 1909 an American scientist, working for Standard, named William Burton; acting on his own, without authorization, knowledge, or support, from Rockefeller and his henchmen, conducted a series of experiments which put oil under high temperatures and pressures! Burton found that his ``fancy still'', cooking crude oil to 650 degrees Fahrenheit in pressure-cooker conditions, would produce a gasoline fraction running to 45% of the total. This ``thermal cracking'' of the long carbon chained molecules of crude oil into short gasoline length molecules made gasoline available to use in all of the new internal combustion engines that demanded it, in sufficient quantities, for the first time.
Dividing Up the World
Oil was a big part of the worldwide competition between capitalists as we have seen but it was certainly not the only part --- nor, even the biggest part. For example, since the mid-1800's the struggle for cotton, and the cheap labor workers to weave and dye it, had been a critical part of the world wide struggle between capitalists. No part of the world was more important in this regard than the Indian subcontinent (principally, what is today, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.) Also capitalists were searching the world for iron ores and the cheap labor to extract them. Then it would be rubber, rice, etc. ad infinitum. However, in this handbook we will focus on petroleum. Accordingly, we shall review the unfolding struggle among the giant oil monopolies to get the backing of their respective governments to secure contracts and the use of their troops to back up their foreign claims.
553Anglo-Persian (British Petroleum)
Iran
During the course of the First World War (1914-1918) Anglo-Persian moved towards becoming a fully integrated oil monopoly along the lines of what Rockefeller had done with Standard and the Nobel's had done in Russia. Anglo-Persian's boss Charles Greenway took aim at a British government seized, German owned, distribution company in England, when the war started. It was called British Petroleum. Anglo-Persian purchased BP from the always friendly British regime and in so doing also acquired a far better name. ---And, a distribution arm. Anglo-Persian did not immediately adopt the name British Petroleum to replace Anglo-Persian, but for our purposes we shall henceforth refer to Anglo-Persian as British Petroleum. At the same time BP moved to acquire a tanker fleet so that by wars end it was a fully integrated oil giant.
554This was no small thing because by 1918 the number of internal combustion engine driven vehicles in the British Army in Europe had jumped from its initial 1914 number of less than 1,000 to 56,000 trucks, 23,000 automobiles, 34,000 motor cycles and the Americans had brought 50,000 more gasoline driven vehicles with them when they entered the War in April 1917. (At the same time Lenin arrived in Petrograd [St. Petersburg renamed during the War, as Petrograd, by the Czar for patriotic reasons] and Lenin gave his famous April Thesis to the Petrograd City Council. The Czarist replacement Capitalist Provisional Government had six months to live. Once it was gone so would the foreign oil monopolies be gone --- but, of course, they didn't yet know that.)
Also, during the War, the UK produced 55,000 airplanes, France 68,000, Italy 20,000 and the Americans 15,000. All, of course, gasoline driven. The Iranian oil fields and the Iraqi refinery jumped from 1600 barrels of oil produced per day (bpd) to 18,000! As you can see the War took BP and its stockholders from obscurity into national prominence.
Along the way BP had some luck in Arabia because while it was entirely susceptible to armed intervention the Arabs never really tried to shut it down nor did the Turks (allied to Germany) with one exception. Excepting this one time when the pipeline from the producing Iranian fields was bombed, and several months taken to rebuild it, the oil flow to Abadan and Basra was uninterrupted. This was fortunate for England, because the few British troops stationed in Iraq would not have been able to withstand a strong Turkish push had it been made.
Shell as Allied Oil Quartermaster
If BP emerged from the War as new fully integrated oil monopoly Shell had begun the War that way. Shell, had along with Standard (especially Standard Oil of New Jersey), the ability to organize oil production and distribution for the war effort. Furthermore just to get a firm foundation for completion of its initial work, and then its war time expansion, BP had had to get the British Government to take a 51% equity stake in its stock. Shell on the other hand needed nothing more than a British Government market and the War made that a certain thing.
Marcus Samuel (Shell) and his organizational boss Deterding were staunch British patriots (despite the bad mouth from BP about the Dutch aspect of Shell [the Netherlands were neutral in the War and many said pro-German]) and had proven producing oil reserves extending from Baku to Borneo and Sumatra. BP had only its Iran oilfield and it was highly vulnerable should the German-Turk forces ever figure that out.
Furthermore, Shell had discovered how to produce the key ingredient for TNT (toluol) from oil rather than coal as had the Germans. Samuel however was willing to go all the way and he secretly smuggled the Dutch toluol refinery out of Rotterdam and reinstalled it at Somerset England giving Britain what it absolutely had to have to make artillery shells.
Eventually, Royal Dutch Shell and Standard combined in what was called the Inter-Allied Petroleum Conference to plan for the supply on an organized basis of the US, Britain, France and Italy both domestically and militarily. Accordingly the Anglo-American side never had a serious petroleum shortage. Germany was not so lucky.
At any rate Germany's submarine attacks on shipping to Europe, especially to Britain and France, led to severe shortages both militarily and domestically (not to mention bringing the US into the War) during 1917 and 1918 but in every case the Petroleum Conference was able to resolve the shortages and bottlenecks. In large part this was because of Standard's ability to produce so much oil so regularly. US production jumped from 266 million barrels of oil in 1914 to 335 million in 1918.
To the Victors Go the Spoils
Iraq
The Bolsheviks knew the war had been fought for two greedy reasons. The imperialists seizing each other's markets and resources was one. Both imperialist sides had succeeded in their second war aim which was the killing of as many million supernumerary male workers in Europe as possible. They were the enemies within created by capitalism. They were no longer needed and, the massive armies of unemployed they formed, were a dagger pointed at the heart of the capitalist system of production relations as the Bolsheviks had proven in the Russian Empire, Hungary, Germany, etc.
The division of the spoils of war was now the prime task of the Allied powers. British PM David Lloyd George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau had divided up ``Mesopotamia'' (Iraq) among themselves three weeks after war's end on the latter's visit to his colleague in London.
However, the struggle between the world's biggest oil monopolies was over oil as yet undiscovered. The governments of Britain and France were, of course, just the
instrumentalities of the rule of a few capitalist oligarchic families and they were used in the struggle to get the hands of the respective greedy evil families of Europe on the oil of the nation eventually to be known as Iraq.
At the time Iraq was still called Mesopotamia, and considered somewhat apart from the rest of Arabia. For four hundred years Mesopotamia had been part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. However, Turkey had joined the war on the German side, and lost. So, it lost its empire too.
Part of the deal between Lloyd George and Clemenceau was giving the French oil monopoly 25% of the oil from Mosul and France taking all of Syria. Yet, no one really knew if there was any oil in Iraq although one world class expert (Gulbenkian) had written a paper claiming that a major strike would be had in Iraq. It was not until 1925 that the first exploratory team arrived in Iraq; not until April 1927, that a bit entered the ground in Iraq and not until October 1927 that oil was actually struck immediately outside the Kurdish city of Kirkuk.
It flowed at 95,000 bpd! But, it was also heavily loaded with deadly poisonous gas. Kirkuk had to be evacuated and the free flowing oil contained in manmade dikes and the well capped. All of this took up the last days of October. No one had expected to hit so much oil, let alone on the first try.
Then it took nine months to hammer out the details about which imperialist company would receive what. The initial exploration had been undertaken by a joint British, Royal Dutch, and American team. An agreement was signed in July 1928. British Petroleum (Anglo-Persian), Royal Dutch Shell, the French Government and the Americans (organized as the Near East Development Company) each got 23.75% for a total of 95% of the total and 5% went to one individual --- Calouste Gulbenkian --- who had had his hand in this entire operation for 35 years (and who had created the Turkish Petroleum Company as his holding entity). Gulbenkian had written the initial report outlining the potential for Iraqi oil. As you can see the shape of the modern Arabian-Persian oil world was beginning to take shape and was purely an imperialist operation.
555Part of the settlement among the explorer monopolies was the so- of called Red Line Agreement. This was just a line drawn in red pen around the old Ottoman Empire Turkey. It would include all of today's Arabian oil fields except for that of Kuwait and Bahrain. Iran was also excluded from this agreement as it had not been part of the Turkish Empire.
From World War (1914-1918) To the Greatest Capitalist Depression (1929)
Part II: US Labor 1919-1923 - Finding Our Way in a Raging Class War
You should focus on trying to understand the milieu, on the one hand, of (1) Left confusion and (2) two contradictory labor approaches (trade unionism vs. revolutionary political unionism), meaning a long-term labor strategy to either moderate wage slavery or adopting a strategy of altogether liberating North American labor from wage slavery. (Note: It would be the task of the soon to be formed CPUSA to find some effective way of doing both.) -And (3) the ongoing physical capitalist attack on those workers (by the capitalist state apparatus --- i.e. the federal and state police, US Army, mercenaries and vigilantes) who had been organized by militant Marxists, on the other hand. (That is, the pre-Lenin, pre-1917 militant Marxists.) These are two separate categories of class struggle. Yet, both of these categories of class struggle are intimately interrelated. We
556may think of these class struggle categories as the struggle for scientific comprehension and the struggle for physical survival of the working class vanguard organization(s).
Comprehension
In the last chapter we reviewed how the Left in the US was all over the place in its attitude to the inevitable imperialist war in the years preceding that event. ---And, we have seen how that confusion and contradiction continued throughout the war years. From January 1919 to mid-1923, this confusion crystallized into two major tendencies and eventually ended for the parties in contention with the dissolution of the old Socialist Party. Two de facto new parties emerged. One was the new Socialist Party and the creation of a new Communist Party USA (unified by 1923). The former Right and the latter Left. With that development we scientific socialists (Marxist-Leninists) had gone a long ways toward achieving clarity, but we still had a long way to go.
557Simultaneously the labor movement was crystallizing around the two tendencies which had become so manifest during the war. (1) One was, the Right tendency toward trade union issues only (as opposed to what Gompers called ``political'' commitments meaning he wanted the AFL to have no Labor Party platform to fight for) punishing and rewarding the capitalist parties according to their performance on labor issues. The second tendency (2) was the Left AFL movement which now wanted a Labor Party such as the Brits had developed, and was sympathetic to the emerging Marxists of the CP persuasion emerging around William Z. Foster and the TUEL movement. (3) During these four years the capitalists pretty much succeeded in destroying what little was left of the IWW.
Survival
Before the World War the capitalists had launched all out attacks against workers in some parts of the country, and an overall general attack against the Left Wing of the Socialist Party and its ideological allies (IWW, etc.) During the World War capitalists used said war to demand patriotic attacks on workers. Their demands were simply an excuse to exploit their workers even more intensively and this led to a raging armed class struggle. The violent state attacks on workers and their leaders were stepped-up immediately after the war.
In this latter period, beginning by the time the war ended in November 1918, the class struggle moved to a new level of intensity as the Gringo rulers unleashed a generalized government and state attack on all the non-Gompers elements in the US Labor movement.
Selected Highlights
Attacks against Labor Prior to the War in August 1914
New England
In 1913 the capitalists in Lawrence, Massachusetts, managed to defeat the IWW leadership in its failed program for continuing the strike to gain ultimate objectives. Something these leaders should never have embarked upon. Especially after scoring such a great working class basic victory (hour's wages and working conditions) the previous year.
Attacks against Labor 1914 --- 1917
Northern California
During the first six, months or so of 1916 San Francisco had become radicalized over the issue of the obviously coming war. The Gompers forces in the AFL unions were busy building support for the coming war. During one of the right wing demonstrations, a labor boycotted ``preparedness parade''; capitalist provocateurs had set off a bomb in the Embarcadero district. It happened during the busiest time of day with a parade and business going on, at 1:30 in the afternoon of July 22. The bomb killed 22 people and injured many more.
The real reason for the attack was to establish a legal pretext for massive raids and physical attacks on the organized Left in and out of the union movement. Murder charges were brought against two working class leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings (and three others were arrested.) These two were charged with planting and detonating the bomb and convicted. Billings was framed-up on totally false testimony and sentenced to life in prison. Mooney likewise was framed-up, but he was sentenced to death!
The Origin of May Day
It was obviously the greatest frame-up of union leaders since the capitalists had attacked labor in Chicago on May 1, 1886 (the original Haymarket Massacre.) Unions internationally reacted. Now, international outrage over the frame-up eventually forced a commutation to life imprisonment. It was this Haymarket Massacre on May 1, 1886, which made May Day the international holiday of the workers of the world.
The Intermountain Northwest
In the years preceding the Great Strike of 1917 in the forests and mills and shipyards of the Northwest the instigator of this struggle, the IWW, had undergone some radical internal changes. It lost most of its broader base in the SP, WFL and SLP by 1907, reverting to ultra-left leaders in Chicago and Detroit. Its eastern membership steadily dwindled in competition with the AFL and even the success in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 had ended in de facto defeat in 1913.
Then the IWW went from near financial collapse in 1914 to financial prosperity in 1916 due to its success in the oilfields, mining camps, agricultural labor camps in the mid-west and far west and last but certainly not least in the forests of the Northwestern states. Phillip Foner discusses the Agricultural Workers Organization and the Lumber Workers Industrial Union Number 500 in Volumes 4: 474-485 and 7:247-263.
But when it was said and done the IWW talk was a lot stronger than the IWW walk. On the other hand, determined proto-fascist thuggery on the part of the ``Boise Gang'' and allies in Washington State and Montana succeeded in lynching, otherwise killing, imprisoning, and deporting, IWW organizers.
But, the reactionaries did not win easily and not without exposing their utter contempt for democratic procedures of the capitalist variety. The dummies that composed this so-called ruling class in the intermountain northwest could not see far enough to collaborate effectively with the AFL which had done everything in its power to sabotage the IWW efforts to organize by fielding its own union (the Shingle Weavers and Timber Workers Union).
At any rate the IWW organizers were well trained as guerilla fighters in what they openly called a class war. (---And the reactionaries answered in kind.) Organizers arrived in the Lumber workers camps with their membership books and dues stamps and signed workers up right and left. When snitched off the expelled organizers left behind men ready to respond to the incoming IWW organizers already on their way through the recruitment offices of the Lumber companies and the employment companies elsewhere.
Local 500 of the Lumber Workers Union called a strike in June and in July the capitalists answered. The ``Boise Gang'' of local would-be Rockefeller equivalents (although they were as far from that financially as they were socially) launched a series of official State of Idaho attacks on the IWW, its offices and organizers. The Idaho Legislature passed several anti-sabotage laws enabling the arrest and prosecution of IWW organizers and officers and indeed regular members. The Idaho Criminal Syndicalist Law put the finishing legal structures on capitalist state power in that State and an Idaho Defense Council was creating amalgamating official and quasi-governmental vigilante organizations. On August 1, 1917, IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Montana. The cap press in Boise and the rest of the Northwest was jubilant urging similar treatment locally for IWW organizers. A week later the miners of Bisbee, Arizona, were deported en masse. On August 12, 1917, Governor Moses Alexander (Idaho) at Washington Governor Lister's request sent Idaho National Guard troops to occupy Spokane, Washington, where they declared martial law!
558Against the roughly 50,000 men on strike in the lumber industry (from forests to mills and shipyards) local hoodlums and state power were far insufficient so on September 1, 1917, the federal government stepped in with the US Army sent to occupy the forests, mills, and shipyards. The strike was broken. But it was not an event, rather a drawn-out happening which resulted in the soldiers becoming disaffected and their commanders in Washington DC urging their rapid withdrawal. But by that time the IWW had been dismembered and coming in to pick up the scraps, often, only the AFL.
Selected Attacks after the US Enters the War in 1917
The US Congress voted for war as Wilson had asked on the 6th of April 1917. Afterwards the gringo state apparatus was freed from any restrictions it might have felt prior to that date. The assault against the Left Wing of Labor was intensified and continued until about 1923 when workers finally fought and won enough battles against the Government, forcing them steadily back, to gain legal status for their new vanguard --- the Communist Party USA.
The IWW had switched its emphasis from the Eastern industrial centers to the mid-west and far west agricultural, mining and lumber camps. These workers were seething with demands for social justice and many for a new society. The brought a huge and desperately needed new base to the IWW, albeit demographically unstable and temporary, and as importantly a huge new source of revenue, from the membership dues and initiation fees the IWW collected in its highly successful organizing drives. Needless to say the capitalist war was not popular among these workers and the IWW found them an increasingly fertile recruiting ground for the most militant section of their movement.
The Big Strike of 1917 initiated the capitalist-worker struggle in the far west, in the lumber states of Idaho, Montana, and Washington. Before it was over the US Army had 50,000 troops fighting against workers in these states.
In the end the Army broke the strike but not until after the lumber millionaires had been forced to accede to the eight hour day! Although the AFL debated the Company Union for credit with regard to the eight hour day, everyone involved knew this gain had been made by the IWW.
1919 the year of massive strikes.
The Greatest Rising of US and Canadian Labor to this Point
Philip Foner, a fellow communist, and the premier leading labor historian in the USA devoted an entire volume (8) of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States to 1919 and its massive strike movement. Serious students will want to pursue this in depth in his work. For our purposes I want to mention the general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg.
Seattle
In January of 1919 the First World War had been over about six weeks (the armistice signed; the peace treaty would take several years to work out) and workers in Seattle as well as across North America were looking forward to higher wages and a higher standard of living. They were about to be brutally surprised everywhere. But, in Seattle the capitalist struck back with vigor when the Metal Trades Unions put forward their long (patriotically) suppressed demand for a fair wage scale.
Seattle, in 1919, had been one of the most pro-union cities in North America. It was a closed shop city and virtually all workers were AFL members and many of them were also in the IWW (the first for a job the second on principle.) Yet these AFL unions stood for everything Gompers and his gang were against.
Coming out of this struggle were two newly converted Bolsheviks, Arne Swabeck and Anna Louise Strong. I met Arnie in 1965 in Los Angeles some 46 years after the defeat of the Seattle General Strike of February 6, 1919. Arnie told me he believed the reason for the worker's defeat was their failure to launch and maintain a strong information offensive to keep all the rest of the potentially sympathetic population informed as to what was going on in reality. In other words, in addition to the internal problems of strike committee organization the primary reason for the worker's defeat were the effectively unchallenged out-right lies of the capitalists and their press and radio (i.e., about what the strikers wanted).
At any rate the Unions took over the city and apparently had sufficient confidence in their daily newspaper (the only Union owned newspaper in the US with a paid circulation well over 100,000) to keep the public informed that they went their merry way. A woman comrade, Anna Louise Strong, emerges about this time as a Bolshevik. She wrote the General Strike call to action printed in the Union daily and explained how public services would be run during the strike. (She later was recruited by Red Army G2 in China where she worked for us for many years, including a stint of duty with Richard Sorge when he was building his networks in China.)
The capitalists negotiated with one hand and then took back everything they conceded with the other. The first hand was their negotiating committee. The second was the US Governments Emergency Fleet Corporations, Labor Board. When the caps gave in with the one hand the next day they took it back with their Government controlling agency.
Within six days the General Strike was defeated, the radicals isolated, the unions demoralized and the caps launched an open shop city campaign that was largely successful.
Winnipeg
Seattle had been outright pro-Bolshevik as much of the union movement had been swept up in the enthusiastic US working class response to the Russian Revolution. But Western Canada was even more radical!
The general strike in Winnipeg began much as it had in Seattle when workers pent-up demands for fair increases in wages were denied at war's end. The iron workers and carpenters led the way and the central labor council for Winnipeg backed their ploy with a call to a general strike. The strikers had three demands: (1) the right to organize (2) the eight hour day and (3) a living wage.
Before this was over the city police would join the strikers and the RCMP would be called in to shoot down the strikers. The strike was broken also much as it had been in Seattle. In the aftermath however the strike leaders found their cause continuable in the Provincial legislatures and in Ottawa.
The strike had gone on from May 16 to June 26th as far as the workers were concerned but in effect it was broken with the mass murder of unionists by police, army men and thugs on June 21.
Analysis
These strikes were defeated along three avenues of bourgeois attack. The first was the road of information control. This was critical because a proletarian action in what is a very petty bourgeois setting (farmers of middle and lower strata as well as the regular urban petty bourgeoisie) have to reach out and build bridges to these other strata. It takes time for the old classes to wither away and be replaced by the new proletarian classes. For example, it would take a century to go from -0 per cent farmer to 10 percent farmer in terms of both Canada and the USA.
The second boulevard along which the bourgeois forces attacked was that of armed physical murder of the strikers and the confinement and maiming of as many others as possible.
The third path to defeating the proletarians lay in the raising of the specter of communism (soviets) by the bourgeoisie before the workers had gone beyond vocal bullshitting in support of the Soviet Republic.
Attacks after the War ends
The Red Scare!
The Bolshevik Revolution put a real scare into gringo capitalists for the first time. Simultaneously they saw the opportunity to create a panic within the country simply by telling a mountain of totally concocted lies on a continuing basis about the dangers of the Red Menace. With this new anti-communism as its prime ammunition US capitalists could and did attack all of labor's gains in hours, wages and working conditions.
We have seen how US capitalists often used patriotic camouflage for their selfish greedy acquisitiveness versus any regard to fairness in exchange for a worker's labor-
power. The capitalist's only idea was to maximize his theft of the individual worker's only sellable commodity - i.e., his labor-power.
A steady build-up of propaganda in the cap press led to the announcement by the US Attorney, General A. Mitchell Palmer, in early 1919 that US Communists planned on overthrowing the Government on May 1st. All of this was a lie cooked up to justify the massive arrest and deportation of many thousands of persons accused of being foreign saboteurs and Bolshevik plotters.
At the same time as US capitalists unleashed Palmer they also sent a US Army Force to Siberia to engage the Bolsheviks, support the Whites and act as a counterforce to the some 70,000 Japanese troops already occupying the Siberian area around Vladivostok.
The Red Scare had served its purpose by the summer of 1920 and with the Left largely destroyed, in prison or deported, US capitalists began to relax their total police state grip and return to normalcy.
US Labor: Creating the Communist Party USA, 1919 -1923
In 1919, the right wing of the Socialist Party decided there was no possible common future for it alongside the left wing. The rightists proceeded to stage a coup. The Left Wing of the SP had won the national Party elections overwhelmingly literally everywhere. The Right should have been on the way out. In the event, the coupists expelled 70 percent of the Party membership and invalidated the election so that when the SP National Convention met in Chicago on the 30th of August, 1919, it was headed for a final split. The Chicago police were used to clear this workers convention hall of all of the Left Wing delegates giving de facto control of the Party to the rightists who had brought in the police.
The expelled majority forms two Communist Parties
Emerging from the Left majority of SP members, now expelled, were two groups, each expecting to get Comintern recognition as the US Communist Party. Although both groups were formed too late to participate in the March 1919 founding meeting of the Comintern in Moscow earlier in the year they did meet their international comrades at the 2nd annual convention of the Comintern the following year.
(1) One of these groups was the Left Wing majority of the old SP. They became the Communist Labor Party USA, holding their founding convention also in Chicago on September 3, 1919, just a couple of blocks from the SP convention where they had been denied their rights. The CLP was largely composed of US born English-speaking workers and may have numbered about 10,000 members. Elected as head of this Party, was First Secretary Alfred Wagenknecht.
Among CLP's best known protagonists was the now famous John Reed (the Oregonian Socialist whose 1918 book Ten Days That Shook the World had made him world famous, and at that moment in 1919, Lenin's favorite American.) Reed had gotten over 17,000 votes to lead the SP in its next presentation to the Second International of Traitors and Renegades trying to regroup in Switzerland after the end of the war. His nearest right wing competition Morris Hilquit got somewhere around 4000 votes. This is roughly the same percentage of Left to Right power that existed in the SP nationally. It
was this realization; they could never prevail over three quarters of their members, which had lead the Rightists to go for broke with their successful coup.
(2) The other of these expelled groups was the Left Wing minority of the SP (that had early-on given up on the idea of recapturing the SP national convention to which their voting victory entitled them) and simultaneously was forming the Communist Party of America. This Party was largely composed of foreign born communists in what were called the Foreign Language Federations. The CPA (thereafter usually simply referred to as the Communist Party or CP) total membership was probably about 58,000. Elected as head of this Party was First Secretary Charles E. Ruthenberg.
The Capitalist Attack Drives Our Party Underground
We have seen the capitalist attack on labor as it developed in the prewar and war years. Now in 1919 communists were being forced underground by a massive All-States campaign of the federal regime against us. Even so both Parties continued a legal publication of their main organs as did the Foreign Language Federations. But what leadership was still out of prison had to hide. These leaders began work to create certain Mass Organizations which could take an open legal role.
One of these Mass Organizations was the American Labor Alliance (July, 1921). Another was the Worker's Council.
In the meantime the two communist parties struggled to unite. The first attempt occurred in May of 1920 and was only partially successful. Then in May of 1921 at a second conference, another attempt at establishing unity finally got these two together creating the unified new Communist Party of America, (CPA.) In December of 1921 an organizing convention of the mass organizations and the underground now unified Party was held in New York City. Ruthenberg again emerged as the leader of The Workers Party with a seventeen man central committee and The Worker as its main organ. This was to be the legal above ground organization of the still underground Communist Party (unified CPA and CLP)
During August of 1922 the new Party struggled to get a strategy together for emerging from illegal status and despite renewed and ongoing capitalist state attacks the two were able to hold a unifying convention in April of 1923 where everyone was finally subsumed under one title in one legal above ground Party. - The Workers Party of America. This is the seed from which the then still underground Communist Party USA emerged as a legal entity of some 20,000 members in 1923. A long ways from the many times larger membership the Left had enjoyed in the old SP. But the federal and state capitalist attacks had taken their toll.
Analysis
What you have just witnessed historically is the most important single contrast within the capitalist world in the post-World War I period. Namely, the different ways the ruling classes of Europe and America developed to use against Bolshevism. In the USA something rather new had emerged and that was a capitalist appreciation for the work of the all-out pro-capitalist pro-imperialist labor leaders of the AFL under Gompers. Elsewhere as in virtually all of continental Europe ruling classes were resorting to the
elevation of outright (legal) police tyranny over workers as the preferred form of domesticating the working classes (i.e., fascism).
In short, one could say that fascism emerging in Europe and Gomperism in the USA were structural equivalents as far as their principal role in subordinating labor to capital was concerned, but there were important differences. When properly exploited this difference would allow Russian Leninists and the Soviet state, to ally with the North American capitalist state, to defeat fascism in the coming Second World War.
Jane Edgar Hoover
Chief Red Hunter for Attorney General Palmer and eventually for the entire US Government was a young attorney newly employed at the Justice Department named J. Edgar Hoover. On August 1, 1919, Palmer announced Hoover's appointment to investigate the reported communist plot to overthrow the US Government by armed violent action. Thus, the man who would eventually be known in the intelligence community as Jane Edgar Hoover had begun his career as chief of the then just created General Intelligence Division within the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, where the systematic intelligence gathering against the Left was now being conducted.
Hoover was a homosexual of the feminine variety but deep within the closet as far as the public was concerned. Within a few years he had found a 2nd in command for the now named internal security service, the FBI. Number two in the FBI was the masculine homosexual for Hoover (who never lived with a woman other than his mother.) Hoover took on the role of ``wife'' to ``husband'' Clyde Tolson. Tolson who had been in the FBI for all of two years prior to elevation to this coveted number two seat. All of this might have been irrelevant to us if it had not been for Hoover's whoring for cock.
The Three Musketeers
Lansky, Costello and Hoover
Hoover's homosexuality was turned to the advantage of Meyer Lansky and his -chairmanship of organized crime's national crime commission when Meyer played cupid to Hoover with the handsome Frank Costello. Costello was the mob's top internal organizer and closest associate of Lansky, Benjamin Siegel and Charles Luciano. This relationship between the FBI boss (who one might have thought would be building a case against these men) and Costello, helped change that law enforcement mission dramatically. In fact, what happened was Costello's quid pro quo for giving it to Jane up-the-ass every weekend (Saturday get together's between Hoover and Costello occurred in Five Star Hotel rooms across the country for years) turned out to be Hoover's assertion that there was ``no such thing as organized crime in this country.'' Part and parcel of this quid pro quo was the ``giving-up'' of John Dillinger et. al. by the Lansky organization. This gave Hoover the breathing space he needed (of seeming success in his crime fighting) while he built his one man monopoly of federal criminal and political intelligence. See the movie Public Enemies for a visual account.
559William Z. Foster
On July 8, 1924, The Workers Party (above-ground name for the Communist Party) nominated William Z. Foster and Benjamin Gitlow for President and Vice
President of the United States. This was the first national ticket for the underground CPUSA and it featured one of its emerging principal leaders at its head.
Foster had a strong labor union orientation having begun his militant Marxist life in the IWW. He left the IWW and in 1915 wrote a serious theoretical pamphlet entitled Syndicalism. Eventually Foster began to grasp the significance of Karl Marx's work in the analysis of society's evolution in terms of what it means for the day to day conduct of a generalized class war. In other words as he grasped the fundamentals of historical materialism he left syndicalism behind and had graduated to being a scientific socialist. That had specific immediate ramifications. Namely organizing on every level possible (not just within normal trade union bounds) to win a broad spectrum of social victories including higher wages, better hours and working conditions. The long-term perspective being to create a socialist transitional order in the USA on the road to communism; specifically a social order that would look a great deal like Soviet Russia.
560The Trade Union Educational League
What Is Syndicalism?
You have seen how Anarchism missed the boat altogether in failing to understand Karl Marx's discovery that the ``state'' is simply an instrument of class suppression (army and police). Whatever class exercises its dictatorship over the class society in question uses that state to control the mass of slaves, serfs or workers (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, respectively, as the three stages of class-state society comprising the Servitude Epoch between Primitive Communism and Modern Communism. Preceded and succeeded by transitional stages.) This scientific discovery has certain undeniable consequences. Marxists and now the Leninists also considered the defeat of the ruling classes and their state as a necessary precondition to the establishment of socialism.
The anarchists wanted only local seemingly spontaneous bodies to go about governing with no enforcement mechanism other than the armed mass of the people as a whole. There were many unionists who saw a broader front had to be created to organize for working class state power than what the anarchists could assemble from their illiterate farmer base and the resulting anarchist industrial proletariat. These men and women believed workers could seize society by first seizing the shops and factories in which they worked and would then proceed to create the new society.
Syndicalists were very similar to the anarchists in many ways but most importantly in this inability to understand the nature of the state and class rule in any class society. In Europe (especially in England and France) during the first decade of the 20th century, these syndicalists had what they considered to be considerable success in building their base for eventual working class takeover of society. That takeover was to be accomplished by building control over shops and factories and taking direct ownership after which the class war would see a rather automatic taking of social power --- that is, without doing what the Marxists said was essential and that was first fighting and destroying the capitalist state apparatus (and its concomitant the establishment of a proletarian state --- something anathema to both anarchists and syndicalists because of their failure to understand the nature of the state (any state) as the instrument of ruling class oppression and the proletarian state as the necessary enforcer and guardian of working class political priorities.
561
William Z. Foster traveled to Europe in 1910 while still an active member of the IWW and came back, after a year or so, convinced that American revolutionaries had to get inside (bore from within) the AFL and by winning over a militant minority, especially in certain specific unions, go about the reform and rehabilitation of that huge organization.
The IWW Fails Because of its Anti-Communism
In the fall of 1920 the underground Communist Party USA told the IWW leadership that the IWW's membership in the First International and any working relationship in the USA between the two would require the IWW to stop teaching workers ``that the revolution can be achieved by industrial organization of the shops and factories and the direct seizure of industry, without first overwhelming the capitalist state (military and police --- ed) and establishing the Proletarian Dictatorship of the Soviets.'' (See Foner 8:234). To make a long story short the ultra-left leadership ended up refusing any relationship with the Third International whatsoever. This marks the beginning of the end of the IWW.
After its anti-communist turn the IWW did occasionally have success in dramatic strike and free speech actions across the country now and then. But for practical purposes the IWW was dead and the continuity between it and the coming generation of revolutionaries would consist of the movement of persons such as William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who I met in January of 1962 at her office in the National Office of the CPUSA in New York City.)
The Communists willingness to participate in the capitalist electoral system (along with joining the fight against the class enemy on every other front in the class war) was the most immediate and obvious given reason by the IWW ultra-left leaders. The real reason was their long commitment to the idea of industrial organization of workers to take ownership of those factories directly and without participation in the capitalist parliaments or without reliance on their own state apparatus (organized military units.) By 1920 it was clear to the ideologically narrow ultra-left IWW leaders in Chicago and Detroit that the Russian Bolsheviks had turned their revolution into an anarchist's bad dream and a syndicalist's nightmare, in that the Bolshevik state apparatus was not only successful but an idealized version of a state apparatus commanded by Marxists. In other words to construct their socialism the Bolsheviks had adopted the capitalist mechanism of using state power.
562There was certainly nothing new about the Marxist approach in this regard except for the Bolsheviks having made it practical. In other words, the way the Bolsheviks seized power and then fought a civil war to defend it was also precisely the Marxist way of applying proletarian police power to back up proletarian military power on the land and sea. The American syndicalists (and Anarchists like Emma Goldman) should not have expected anything else. After all this is what everyone had been arguing about since the days of the First International and the Marxist and Russian Bolshevik interpretation were well known to just about everyone on the Left
Syndicalist League of North America
When Foster returned from his self-directed sabbatical in Europe, in 1911, he was convinced that the ultra-left IWW policy of ``dual unionism'' was self-defeating. Instead
he proposed to do in the USA what the syndicalists in Great Britain and France had done. Namely get inside the conservative pie-card run trade unions and build a militant minority, which would then take over the entire union, working through extant union structures.
The IWW leadership rejected Fosters ideas and he left that organization the following year (1912). Foster began his one man crusade as a full time employee in the railroad industry (12 hours a day 7 days a week) and a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen's union which had had a rather good militant history. His first step was to organize a syndicalist league within his union and to write to other persons he knew across the country to do the same thing in some union in their cities. By July (1912) Foster was able to get delegates from a dozen US cities and British Columbia to meet in Chicago to form the Syndicalist League of North America.
In September 1912 Foster was able to publish a de facto statement of principles in the form of a monograph entitled Syndicalism (along with Earl Ford) which acted as the organizations constitution and theoretical statement. Chicago was the seat of the new organizations main journal The Syndicalist, where Foster acted as Business Manager. There were regular syndicalist monthlies in Omaha (The Unionist), Kansas City (The Toiler, where future CPUSA boss Earl Browder was editor) and San Diego (The International.) A syndicalist weekly was being published in St. Louis (The Unionist).
The International Trade Union Educational League
Half-Way There
In January, 1915, Foster and associates from around the country put paid to their first effort with the SLNA and convened a second try. They believed the ``boring from within'' policy not only correct but one which needed to be pursued with increasing vigor. However, when it was all said and done, the ITUEL had gone only partway toward Marxism by adopting an alternative to IWW ultra-leftism on the question of elections. The term in those days for participating in capitalist elections was ``political action.'' The new ITUEL position was that there was a difference in participating in elections and the resulting parliamentary struggles between right wing socialist and trade unionist selling out (participating in the cap government rather than plotting its ultimate destruction) and taking advantage of legislative opportunities arising as a result of ``direct industrial action.'' ITUEL said the latter was alright but the IWW leaders took the former position.
563Foster was half-way to the correct Marxist position and by the time he made his final transformation into a communist he was able to bring his concept of boring from within (``education'') to the AFL militant minorities to the fore as the Communist Party's main strategy. Thus, Foster arrived at his concept of a CP led Trade Union Educational League (TUEL.) By mid-November of 1920 Foster opened the National Office of the TUEL in the building owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor.
Foster said it best himself in a letter to Upton Sinclair:
``it seems to me it is time that the left wing of the great labor movement develops an industrial program. It had one fifteen years ago, but that led to the IWW and all the years of impotency. The time is ripe for another and the new one, if it is to fare better than the last, must call for this inevitable industrial unionism through the old unions.'' (Foster 9:105)
More on the IWW collapse Because of its Anti-Communism
In the fall of 1920 the underground Communist Party USA told the IWW leadership that its membership in the First International and any working relationship in the USA between the two would require the IWW to stop teaching workers ``that the revolution can be achieved by industrial organization of the shops and factories and the direct seizure of industry, without first overwhelming the capitalist state (military and police --- ed) and establishing the Proletarian Dictatorship in the Soviets.'' (See Foner 8:234). To make a long story short the ultra-left leadership ended up refusing any relationship with the Third International whatsoever. This marks the beginning of the end of the IWW.
After its anti-communist turn the IWW did occasionally have success in dramatic strike and free speech actions across the country now and then. But for practical purposes the IWW was dead and the continuity between it and the coming generation of revolutionaries would consist of the movement of persons such as William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who I managed to meet in January of 1962 at her office in the National Office of the CPUSA in New York City.)
The Communists willingness to participate in the capitalist electoral system (along with joining the fight against the class enemy on every other front in the class war) was the most immediate and obvious given reason by the IWW ultra-left leaders. The real reason was their long commitment to the idea of industrial organization of workers to take ownership of those factories directly and without participation in the capitalist parliaments or without reliance on their own state apparatus. By 1920 it was clear to the ideologically narrow ultra-left IWW leaders in Chicago and Detroit that the Russian Bolsheviks had turned their revolution into an anarchist's bad dream and a syndicalist's nightmare, in that the Bolshevik state apparatus was not only successful but an idealized version of a state apparatus commanded by Marxists. In other words to construct their socialism the Bolsheviks had adopted the capitalist mechanism of using state power.
564There was certainly nothing new about the Marxist approach in this regard except for the Bolsheviks having made it practical in the way in which they applied proletarian police power to back up proletarian military power on the land and sea. The American syndicalists (and Anarchists like Emma Goldman) should not have expected anything else. After all this is what everyone had been arguing about since the days of the First International and the Marxist and Russian Bolshevik interpretation were well known to just about everyone.
Foster had been one of those super-charged by the success of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. A few highlights from his career will give you an idea of how strongly.
The Great Packinghouse Strike
On July 11, 1917, as an unaffiliated one-time syndicalist working in Chicago young William Z. Foster got the idea of organizing the altogether crazily thrown together Packinghouse District workers. The meat packing industry had gone from one farmer slaughter of cows to a one-man slaughter per cow in the Chicago stockyards. Now, the entire process was broken up into a series of jobs until about half the jobs were in the hands of one immigrant population or another from Eastern Europe. About 80% of the other half went to White workers and 20% to Black workers.
The AFL unions had virtually all been racist in Chicago and this was the number one weapon of the capitalists in keeping their workers divided and disunified. Racism combined with nationalist bigotry did the job until Foster came along and changed the course of mass organizing in racist divided capitalist workforces.
Foster belonged to a rather small AFL union made up of railroad Carmen. He got them and the AFL Butcher Workmen's union to approach the Chicago Federation of Labor to kick off an organizing drive in the packinghouses and stockyards. Only five days later the fight was on!
The most amazing struggle unfolded and is certainly worth your effort in study. A good place to start is Volume 7 of Foner's History of US Labor series. Suffice it to say for now that by Easter of 1918 the Packinghouses and Stockyards had been organized and the combined power of the capitalists and their state apparatus and quasi-governmental goon squads had been decisively defeated. Workers had won, temporarily anyway, the eight hour day, time and a quarter for overtime and a 20 minute paid lunch break. Workers walked away with a flat ten percent across the board wage increase. The Union won on key points such as worker seniority and changing, cleaning and toilet facilities, dining rooms, and anti-discrimination clauses in worker contracts.
Actually the AFL unions were a bulwark of the capitalist racial structure designed as the post-Civil War method for keeping US workers divided (from Slavery to Segregated racial serf). To the degree that the Packinghouse labor movement failed it was because of the racism. Foster recognized this and began his lifelong anti-racism campaign aimed at educating White workers.
The Mines
The Great 1919 Steel Strike
In April 1918, on the heels of the victory in the Packinghouse-Stockyards Organizing campaign Foster again approached the Chicago Federation of Labor and with nominal support from the AFL union which should have taken the point long before (the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers) Foster won support for his next organizing target: the US steel industry.
The Depression of 1920 --- 1923
The collapse of working class buying power (rise in prices) began at War's end (November 1918.) Then from August of 1920 to August 1923 the US economy sunk into another of the continuing nearly innumerable depressions of the US capitalist system and its history.
You will recall the first of these capitalist depressions in the USA began in 1819 and continued uninterruptedly every few years thereafter until the Civil War. After the Civil War these capitalist depressions continued. During the Spanish-American-Cuban War of 1896 and again during the First World War (1917-1918 for the US) there had been temporary spurts of employment and increased wages, which is to say as long as the war contracting continued.
Now in 1920 the old pattern of attacking working class gains across the board was the policy of the ruling capitalist classes across the gringo nation. Even gringo capitalist
academics decried the fact that workers' wages were largely below their calculated minimum working class family need at an annual 1617.00 US dollars. Scott Nearing (an early communist writer) calculated that in fact a minimal standard required $2285.00 for a US working class family of five and that only AFL labor aristocrats made that much, let alone more.
Worse yet was that gringo (cap) economists believed the problem was market saturation! That is, in all the cap press of the year 1920 we saw this idea being put forward that there were too many goods and too few buyers thus too many workers and many would have to be released to find other kinds of livelihood. Again Nearing pointed out in response that the problem was that workers didn't have any money to buy the many things --- almost everything --- they desperately needed time and time again! By contrast capitalist profit had increased several hundred percent by the most conservative estimates. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see what was going on. The eventual capitalist solution to this dichotomy would come after the next great depression began in 1929 and would continue unabated until the 1932 election of FDR, as by 1933 the US cap system was definitely tottering and the most important pusher coming would be the Communist Party USA.
565The New York Times anticipated this by warning in 1922 that Canadian Bolsheviks had begun to lead the unemployed movement up there and that had to be prevented at any cost in Gringolandia. They kicked off another red-baiting campaign of their own against US Communists (all still underground) they claimed were running the unemployed demonstrations in US cities.
In the meantime unions fought back by providing assistance to their members and to members of their international unions. Civilian sympathizers with workers in unionized industries sometimes created food banks and produce distribution centers in the factory districts of Philadelphia and Buffalo. Workers never really win in these situations but sometimes they can weather them.
Capitalists Have Their Solution to the Depression
In his outgoing State of the Union Address Woodrow Wilson had called, in one sentence, for the Government to launch public employment programs of some kind to take up the slack expected by the returning waves of conscripted soldiers. However, the incoming Republican administration of Warren G. Harding decided on a different course after convening a Conference on Unemployment. Perhaps the best way to describe the attitude of US capitalists to the rising tide of unemployment and higher prices for everything (food to housing) is to recall how they reacted to labor's demands for health and dental care.
There's Your Dental Plan
Cut Wages by 2/3rds
During the New England textile strike of 1922 several Pinkerton's had grabbed an IWW speaker so that the local fat-cat magnate could kick him in the head. Having removed most of his dentition with one kick the local offended capitalist pronounced ``there's your fucking dental plan!''
Harding's Conference on Unemployment institutionalized this proto-fascism when it pronounced that US wages in the textile industry should be cut by two thirds in
order for US capitalist owners to be better able to compete with German industry. In fact, the Conference recommended that all US worker wages be cut back to the German level for the same specious reason. Quite an outcome to the imperialist war fought by American workers against German workers. They won but then they lost everything they had gained over the previous years and decades!
Of course, workers didn't lose everything they had gained but they came close to it. ---And, although the President's recommendation to cut US wages across the board by 67% was not enacted in general it certainly was the policy being enacted across the nation as individual blood-sucking capitalist scum took advantage of every opportunity presented by the capitalist governments in Washington and Statehouses everywhere, it was clearly the policy of capital in North America to enslave labor to the degree possible.
Slave Auctions
Beginning in September 1921 one activist named Urban Ledoux, using the name Mr. Zero, sold 50 unemployed men at a slave auction in Boston. More and more of these were held in the buildup to the unemployment Conference and supported by a broad spectrum of liberal and progressive organizations including the ACLU and the NAACP. The idea being to prove the difference between Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery was not all that great.
Right Wing AFL Leaders Throw Their Qualified Support
Gompers and Gang were challenged by their own unions for failing to effectively stand up the wage slashing proposals of the capitalists at the President's Conference. But, by this time the outright sell out role of the pie card leaders of the AFL was so well established that in reality nothing else had ever been expected. Their program? The same as the capitalists. To urge family and friends to come to the aid of their unemployed family and community members.
Time for Leninism
More would have to be done to insure the social welfare all working people regardless of sex, religion, race or ethnicity, but this would require the ``legalization'' of the status of the Communist Party and a massive education of workers in unions about unity and how the capitalist conspiracy against them was based on exploiting prejudices about others due to their race or sex, religion or ethnicity. We have reviewed how US communists handled the Government-Hooligan attack. Now let us take a look at how US communists approached the trade union movement even before their legalization under the leadership of William Z. Foster and the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL).
The Trade Union Educational League
Meanwhile Capital Expands
The Science of Petroleum Geology and Engineering
Throughout the 1920's a primary concern of bankers and long term thinkers and planners was whether continuing sources of crude could in fact be found. Many experts thought it was just a matter of time until crude oil ran out and then where would we be? Science, engineering and technology continued to advance by gestalt leaps and bounds
and it was not surprising that something as potentially rewarding as oil science should have been a big part of this. Consequently, we saw the emergence of entirely new ways of searching for oil and these were:
The torsion balance
The magnetometer
The seismograph and refractive seismology
Aerial reconnaissance
Deep drilling technology
Conservation oriented oil field production engineering
Improved refining (better shortening of long chain oil molecules or cracking)
Electric logging
Expelled from Russia
In the meantime, the imperialist oil families had to face the reality of having lost their entire investment in Russia. At first they tried wishful thinking and asserted the Bolshevik regime could not survive even though by this time (1920) an objective observer could see that the Wrangel threat out of the Crimea and the Polish threat against the Soviet West were both doomed to final ultimate defeat. So, these super-rich families engaged in long and drawn-out negotiations among themselves over one or another aspect of Russian oil. It was all irrelevant.
In Chapter 13 we reviewed the rise of Baku-Batum oil and the organization of its labor movement by Vladimir Illych Lenin and his agents of change, Joseph Stalin, Michael Kalinin and Kliment Voroshilov. We saw how these men, and other Old Bolsheviks, organized the nationwide general strike of 1903 that led to the Czarist War against Japan in 1904 --- its miserable defeat --- and the subsequent Revolution of 1905. We need not go over it once more here.
Suffice it to say the Bolsheviks were successful in 1917 establishing the first working class government and state in the world. The Soviet Republic became the Soviet Union in 1924 and the old Czarist Empire had been restored in new proletarian form. Leonid Krassin who had started his career in the oil corridor of Baku-Batum organizing strikes and robbing banks now took over the business aspects of the Commissariat (Ministry) having to do with getting government owned business up and running. Lenin needed the cash flow from oil and instructed Krassin to make modernizing the Russian oilfield and producing and selling Russian oil, his number one concern. Money was pouring in to Russia for its oil and the Rockefellers, Nobel's and the Rothschild's were totally excluded. They had lost it all. It would be their greatest defeat until Mexico.
566Mexico
Revolution broke out in Mexico in 1910 and the revolutionary struggle would continue for a quarter century. Most people around the world became familiar with leading figures such as Pancho Villa who controlled the revolutionary armies in the north and Emiliano Zapata who was in charge in the south. ---And a huge number of New Class technocrats in Mexico City also joined in revolutionary activity. The federal army (state apparatus) of over-thrown President Porfirio Diaz vacillated from one Mexico City New
Class technocrat to another and occasionally simply took the Presidency itself under one or another general.
All of this was fueled, (as if it needed any more fuel than centuries of oppression had already put into place,) by the discovery that year of oil in northwest Mexico in the State of Tamaulipas near the city of Tampico at a well called Potrero del Llano 4. Potrero flowed at 110,000 bpd making it the biggest oil well strike in world history. Over the next 24 years the Mexican oilfield did not miss a stroke despite the ongoing civil war. The success in the oilfield suddenly gave even more impetus to the participants in the civil war because whoever won would have access to the incredible wealth of Mexico's petroleum reserves.
In 1917 the Mexican Congress, pushed hard by native would-be Bolsheviks, and an in-process of being Bolshevized labor movement, passed a new Constitution which had oil declared a property of the nation (Article 27 paragraph 4). The Imperialist Oil Companies of course refused to recognize the right of the Mexican nation to seize subsoil rights and the battle that would only end two decades later was on.
In the midst of all this was the fight between the imperialist oil monopolies for ownership of the Mexican oil. That fight would go on until the nationalization of said oil by Mexican President (former General) Lazaro Cardenas. Cardenas was the man who would go down in history as the second, and last, honest Mexican President (all the others yet to come were crooks of one kind or another.) In 1927, Charles Lindbergh's father-in-law, as US Ambassador to Mexico, managed to avert a Third Mexican War with a series of compromises accepted by the newly elected PRI Government of Mexico under Plutarco Elias Calles and the Oil Companies. The Companies were primarily British investor controlled Royal Dutch Shell (65% of the total foreign investment) and the US companies Standard Oil of New Jersey, Sinclair, Cities Service and Gulf (30%). But 1927 was a close-run thing with President Calles ordering General Cardenas to prepare to set the Tampico oilfields ablaze, should the gringos invade. Cardenas was a hero of the revolutionary civil war and at that moment was the general in charge of the oil zone.
567By that time Mexico had been the number one oil producer in the world and for a long time continued as number two. In 1921 Mexico produced 193 million barrels of oil and supplied over 20% of US demand. In the late 1920's Mexican production began to decline and so did the PRI Government's revenues.
The US government owned lock, stock and barrel by capitalists was frequently called upon to use its influence and/or its troops to see that the US and British oil monopolies got their way. The way was cleared for the final battle between Mexico and Imperialism by the election that put General Cardenas into the Presidency in 1935.
During the electoral campaign of 1934, Cardenas had been backed by a broad united front of workers, small farmers, the Army, and New Class technocrats, under the leadership of Mexican Communists (some of whom became my closest associates a quarter century later.) Sixteen odd oilfield unions were in the vanguard of that leadership. The hand-writing was on the wall. Nationalization was inevitable.
Two years later the Mexican oilfield unions went on strike in May, 1937. Mexican labor rallied behind the oilfield workers and began preparing a national general strike. They were propelled to do so perhaps more quickly than they might otherwise have done by the successful nationalization of Standard in Bolivia.
President Cardenas could not afford to have a strike that would paralyze the nation for a variety of reasons and set up a commission to study the Companies books and prepare a recommendation. The Companies fought back. To make a long story short Cardenas seized the oilfield and nationalized the entire infrastructure on March 18, 1938.
This time war seemed inevitable. -And in fact, the US came extremely close to invading and occupying Mexico again (this would have been the Third Mexican War for the US had it happened). The years 1938-40 featured FDR seriously considering the possibility. An embargo was placed on Mexico by the UK and the USA. Mexico severed diplomatic relations with Britain and almost did the same with Washington. However, the ongoing capitalist depression had reduced the US demand for Mexican oil and suddenly Germany and Italy took all of Mexico's oil and willingly paid a high premium price! Japanese oil geologists began oil exploration in Mexico and mapped a pipeline to take Tampico oil across the country to a Mexican Pacific Port.
But the embargo hurt the Mexican people in other ways. I have spoken with Mexicans who lived through it, who were from relatively wealthy families and for the first time felt the pangs of hunger and deprivation. In the end, FDR decided that the effect on Latin America of another US invasion of Mexico would be to turn the entire region south of the Rio Grande against the US precisely at a time when the Nazi's, the Italians and the Japanese were making strong probes and serious attempts at winning over the comprador regimes of South America to their side in the coming Second World War. FDR opted for peace with Mexico and came to a quiet agreement with Mexico City that gave Gringo acquiescence to permanence for the Mexican nationalization. In exchange Cardenas gave believable assurances that the US would continue to get the Lion's share of Mexican production --- and all of it, if necessary --- in the inevitable coming World War.
568At the end of 1939 FDR reached an accommodation with outgoing Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas over the 1938 nationalization of Mexican oil, thereby setting a favorable political scene for gringo imperialism to prevail over fascist imperialism south of the US border. Roosevelt then countered Axis inroads into Latin America by sending US Army Intelligence agents to neutralize incoming German, Italian, Japanese and other fascist spies and saboteurs. They did this by assassination of these persons in their five star hotels and favorite whorehouses from Mexico City to Buenos Aires. These foreign agents were fairly easy to recognize, even in Argentina and Chile, and most vulnerable when not ensconced with their fellows in embassies and safe houses. By 1941 these pests had been exterminated for the most part. US hit teams were called ``rat hunters'' and the tactic ``rat hunting.''
569When I joined US Army Intelligence in 1959 these tactics were still routinely being taught. We learned how to do it
Finally, Mexico having gained ownership of its own oil was able to produce cheap fuel oil and gasoline to support Mexico's own industrialization. It set up a government oil monopoly, Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) ---And, generations of Mexican's would enjoy the luxury of cheap automotive gasoline. This lesson would be learned by colonial and semi-colonial countries all over the world, not just Latin America, for many decades to come and had, thus, a world-wide significance far in excess of its immediate national import.
Equally important with the passage of time would be the criminalization of the Mexican oil labor movement under La Quina the Mexican super boss of oilfield labor who eventually was sufficiently powerful to challenge the PRI President for control of the nation. Another story for another time but we will return to this subject once more below.
The Rape of Venezuela
In the 1920's, the Rockefellers and other US producers had been looking for an alternative to Mexican crude. While they had not yet missed a barrel in production from their Mexican oilfields, they had to operate within an atmosphere featuring the constant threat of nationalization from Mexico's Labor movement and its powerful Communist Party. The foreign capitalist oil families took Bolshevism seriously now, because they had lost everything in Russia once and were not looking to losing everything twice in the event of Communist Revolution or Leftist Labor led nationalization in Mexico.
The aftermath of the wars of national liberation led by the bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes of South America featured the descendants of Venezuelan leader Simon Bolivar settling into a kind of post-Roman Empire West series of fiefdoms, where each local feudal boss was a military dictator. In fact of the 184 members of the bourgeois 1890 Venezuelan parliament, 112 were generals. This was still the case in Latin America in the 1920's. This was called the Caudillo system (Caudillo is a Spanish term used for military leader) meaning local strong man bosses were running the show. Top Caudillo in Caracas, Venezuela, at the time the Rockefellers went looking for an alternative to Mexico, was ``General'' Juan Vicente Gomez.
Gomez was paid and he delivered a Venezuelan oil lease, on a platter, to Royal Dutch Shell in 1913. Paid again and delivered again to Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1919. Washington paid again and was thus able to put order into the Venezuelan system by getting Gomez to announce the Petroleum Law in 1922 which brought to Venezuela then current concepts in Anglo-American law regarding the exploitation and regulation of subsoil rights to oil.
Small time production of Royal Dutch in 1913 was joined by the first major strike in December 1922, at what became the Standard La Rosa field on the northeast coast of Lake Maracaibo. La Rosa blew in at 100,000 bpd! Standard now had its Mexican alternative source identified. All the imperialist companies switched their focus away from unstable, revolutionary, pro-Bolshevik Mexico. ---And the imperialist companies had the Washington imposed Petroleum Law in hand. A law they had written for an orderly way to share in the rape of Venezuela. The bought-off comprador regime of totally corrupt General Gomez would last until 1935.
FDR Saves the US Petroleum Industry
The oil monopolies were confronted with a nearly as serious coming catastrophe in the USA, which in many ways was far more severe than what they had lost in the Soviet Revolution. It was, at bottom, the General Crisis of Capitalism which we have defined in earlier chapters, which was responsible. But, the immediate form of US oil capitalism's collapse lay in overproduction, and the chaotic destructive profit-seeking of greedy production.
If not for Rockefeller and Flagler the US petroleum industry might have continued floundering in internecine and senseless warfare among producers, refiners, railroads, pipeline companies and banks, many years earlier. But, even then, as we have seen, with Rockefeller and Flagler de facto in charge, it had been impossible to continuously impose clarity on men who could not see beyond the greed on the tips of their noses.
This situation has been exacerbated and brought to crisis by the discovery of one gigantic oil field after another in the States of Texas and Oklahoma. California oil men contributed their part to the chaotic state of the industry, but were too far away from the eastern and mid-western markets to affect them. Then the biggest strike of all came in 1931, in East Texas, when perennial promoter and octogenarian Columbus ``Dad'' Joiner hit it big in Rusk County (East) Texas on the farm of Daisy Bradford. In fact, the field turned out to be ten miles wide and 45 miles long. By the next summer wells were producing 500,000 bpd!
All of this was great news, at least initially, for Dad Joiner. But, for the industry already suffering from too much crude on the market it was a disaster. Others hit it big before the collapse in prices and made the fortunes with which they would fund their future notorious activities such as H. L. Hunt. Texas fascist-to-be (and Kennedy assassination co-conspirator) Hunt, swindled Dad Joiner and many others, coming out with a Lion's share of the new East Texas bonanza. But this was the depth of the First Great Depression (we are in the second now) and no one could take any more hits than they had already taken and were now taking.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in the November 1932 election and four months later took the Presidency when the USA was itself on the verge of Bolshevik Revolution. Among other things the progressive capitalists under FDR had to get the price and supply of oil under control and they proceeded to do so. FDR appointed Illinois Republican and former Progressive Party lawyer Harold Ickes to take command as Oil Administrator in the Public Works Administration (one of FDR's ``100 days'' emergency pieces of legislation.) Ickes had already been appointed US Secretary of the Interior so the two tasks fit together like hand in glove. Oil had sunk to ten cents a barrel when Ickes warned Roosevelt that collapse of the entire industry was imminent! Indeed, for once, US oil capitalists were begging Washington to save them.
570To make a long story short FDR issued an Executive Order with ``100 days'' authorization to control the price of oil. To do this he had to stop the bootleg oil (being stolen at every opportunity from reserve tanks, pipelines and refineries to the tune of 500,000 bpd!) He used the power of his executive branch to send special cops into Texas and Oklahoma to enforce the new Oil Code authorized by NRA but operated by Ickes through the Interior Department.
Next FDR had to get the producers under control. Ickes issued quota orders for Texas and Oklahoma and instructed the State Governors to enforce the quotas. Ickes toyed with the idea of price fixing but gave that up (and we would not have it until World War II). By the time the ultra-reactionary US Supreme Court outlawed the NRA and NIRA the industry was under control and willingly accepted the regulation they had first vehemently opposed and then begged for.
Finally FDR acted to impose a tax on all foreign oil coming into the country and that put an end to oversupply originating overseas. Foreign oil imports dropped to 5% of the total.
Demand had been stabilized and so had supply. The Depression was far from over, but the immediate danger of Bolshevik Revolution had been avoided, and the oilfield was once again an integral part of the newly emerging, reformed, US capitalist system.
On the Eve of World War II
The Good
We have used the oil industry as our example of imperialist expansion before and after World War I. We have seen that a handful of super-rich families owning a handful of super-rich corporate monsters with a monopoly on oil (and yes natural gas, but the expansion of natural gas to contemporary levels would not happen until after World War II) had their own ideas. In this book we reviewed the fact that the entire post-World War I period can be defined in just one way. The international capitalist class considered itself to be at war with the international working class's first national ``state'' power holder: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The entire post-World War I period is a time characterized first, foremost, and exclusively by anti-Bolshevism from the standpoint of the great capitalist countries.
571Now, how did Stalin prepare the oil industry of the working class for the inevitable coming world war which would decide the fate of mankind?
Oil Will Be Produced in Record and Needed Quantities
No Bolshevik, with the possible exception of Leonid Krassin, knew more about oil and natural gas than Joseph Stalin. You have seen that Stalin began his career as a fourteen year old young man, studying with oilfield workers in the Baku-Batum oil corridor. You have also seen, shortly thereafter, Stalin organized the first successful permanent labor union in Russia and that was also in the Baku-Batum oil corridor. Finally, you have seen that Stalin returned again and again to this part of the Czarist Empire to organize secretly both these unions and the Bolshevik Party apparatus itself. Stalin had been educated in the technical details of petroleum engineering by Leonid Krassin.
Krassin was college educated, and self-educated petroleum engineer and geologist, (in those days there were as yet no independent fields of petroleum engineering and geology) and an experienced oilfield company man (meaning in the oilfield, the financier's boss of the drilling site), not to mention being an individual capitalist entrepreneur. It was Krassin, Lenin had put in charge of the oil industry to begin with, and with Lenin's passing it was only natural that the new Bolshevik Party boss, Joseph Stalin, Krassin's leading pupil, who was undertaking the greatest industrialization of any nation in the history of the world, before or since, would personally oversee the energizing of the USSR via oil and natural gas, and would take command of this most important economic sector. As you know the primary area from which petroleum would come in the years preceding World War II, was precisely here in the Trans-Caucuses.
572
The First Five Year Plan (beginning August 1928) had such vast industrialization objectives that oil and gas were not just one part of it but petroleum was the essential underlying foundation for it.
Cracking the Whip: Five Year Plan Style
Accordingly Stalin told his oilfield managers in 1929 that failure to meet their quotas would result in mandatory death sentences. Stalin knew the oilfield and he knew all the tricks. Drilling dry holes to get investor money. Calling wells drilled ``dry'' when in fact they were not (so you could dump your investors and come back later and take it for yourself.) Corruption of this sort existed all through the Baku-Batum oil corridor as it did in every oil strike region of the world. There were many consequences to Stalin's firm stance.
In this case I remember reading the biography of the Schlumberger's by Anne Schlumberger and her saying to paraphrase: ``I recall that the Soviet petroleum engineer who cased a non-productive well would have a visit from NKVD shooters within days if not hours and would be taken outside the drilling rig shack and shot then and there!''
One result of this heavy emphasis on oil and gas production, and this draconic incentive program, was the creation of the modern well logging industry. The Schlumberger brothers had invented surficial electrical prospecting in the 19 teens and 19 twenties, traveling all over the world to do so, with limited success. So what was it exactly that made the middle level managers beg Stalin to do in technical terms?
Just before this time, in 1927, in Pechelbronn, France, when Stalin was just beginning to crack the whip in the Soviet Union on the oilfield managers, the Schlumberger brothers tried something completely new. Up and until this time they had been running electrical cables across the surface of the Earth looking for electrical evidence of petroleum deposits. Then they began trying something never before done. Namely, running one end of a very long telephone cord wrapped in electrical tape (later this would become today's armored electrical cable) downhole in a newly drilled well,` and placing the other end on the surface. Then they withdrew the telephone cord by winching it onto a drum at a given rate (I used to do this at about 13 feet per minute) and they measured the resistivity (conductivity) of the formations touched by the downhole end of the cable. In this way they were able to determine what kind of rock it was touching if it was sedimentary: (sandstone, shale, limestone) and even what that rock contained (water, oil or gas --- or all three). In Baku and Batum they had great success in identifying producing zones downhole.
573Middle level Soviet engineers approached Stalin and asked him to bring the Schlumberger brothers and their men and women, and their equipment, to the USSR and help them develop the Baku-Batum petroleum corridor in a scientific way. Stalin was told in no uncertain terms that he owed this to the engineers who were putting their lives on the line given the new incentive program. Stalin agreed. He did owe it to them under the circumstances --- and oil and gas were absolutely essential to the success of the Five Year Plans - so he went even further. Stalin contracted with these French brothers to build, in the Soviet Union, factories that would produce the downhole logging, perforating and pipe recovery tools they had invented in their home country. He also contracted with them to train an entire generation of Soviet petroleum engineers.
574
Thanks to Stalin the Soviet Union moved into the world leadership in petroleum geology, engineering and technology. Soviet oil and gas production was always thereafter up to whatever demands the Five Year Plans placed upon it. Soviet petroleum production soon surpassed that of the entire capitalist world combined. For the moment, there was in the Soviet Union, from that time forward, always sufficient oil and gas to run the Red Army and Red Navy military machine. In those years the USSR had the most advanced military in the world.
Along the way the Schlumberger family became the wealthiest family in France.
The Bad
Now, in the capitalist world, the oil oligarchs had only one remaining interest in Russian oil and that was to destroy the Soviet oilfields as part of their drive to (1) monopolize the world's oil supply and (2) achieve unity for a joint campaign of all major capitalist countries to destroy the Soviet Union and Bolshevism.
Arabian Dreams
All of this time the idea of petroleum under the vast deserts of Arabia was just that --- an idea --- actually in the minds of all those who were supposed to know about these things; dreams. Naturally, as had always been the case, there were a handful of men advocating exploration and doing so hard and often. Yet, as of 1932, the only petroleum activity in the Arab world proper had to do with BP's refinery near Basra Iraq. Oil from non-Arab Iran had to be brought two hundred miles from non-Arab, southeast Iran, by pipeline.
Furthermore the division of the Ottoman Empire among World War I victors the USA, Britain and France, had placed all of Arabia in a kind of purgatory dependent upon the unanimous consent of these victors to the exploration of Arabia by whoever among them might petition to do so.
Several individuals deserve comment at this moment as leading lights of the vanguard of capitalist oil exploration in Arabia. Three of them deserve special attention. New Zealand mining engineer Frank Holmes, Saudi Arab Chieftain Ibn Saud, and the Britisher Harry St. John Bridger Philby.
Now, before you ask, let me answer. Yes, this is the same family from which came the famous Soviet Spy Harold Adrian ``Kim'' Philby. In fact St. John Philby was the father of Kim Philby. Now let's see what Holmes, Philby Sr. and Ibn Saud did that changed the world of oil.
Frank Holmes had discovered gold at home and become wealthy. He embarked upon a career in prospecting for gold, tin and a few other metals. He served in the World War and shortly afterwards, in 1920, he set up a pharmacy in Aden (capital of today's Yemen). But what he was really interested in were all of the rumors he had heard about in his travels in East Africa and Arabia about oil seeps along the coast of Arabia. Over the next six years he talked cash poor sheik, after cash poor sheik, along the Arabian coast into giving him what he hoped would be legally enforceable ``concessions'' (lease options) to explore for oil. To make a long and fascinating story too short, let me jump to his first success, which was on the Arabian Island of Bahrain. May 31st, 1932, which marks the date when he hit oil on Bahrain Island, becoming the first person to prove that there was in fact oil in Arabia.
575
Along the way (in 1923) he had acquired a concession to drill for oil at al-Has a which is in the eastern part of what is now Saudi Arabia. The problem at al-Hasa was that the imperialist oil monopolies had signed an agreement to honor the Red Line (division of the old Ottoman Empire they had conquered in the imperialist First World War.) Now, that there was real interest in Arabia for the first time, King Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia wanted to drill for oil too. Yet the oil monopolies could not, unless they all agreed and shared in the take. There were two exceptions to this Red Line Agreement and they were the Mellon Family oil monopoly --- Gulf Oil --- and the Rockefeller Trust spin-off, Standard of California (SoCal). Making the internal capitalist struggle between the British and US oil monopolies and their respective governments into a sideline story. Suffice it to say, oil was struck by California Standard at al-Hasa Saudi Arabia, in March of 1938! Just a few weeks before Gulf and BP would hit oil in Kuwait! The rush was on.
576Philby Sr. and Ibn Saud
The King of what is now the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had a long pedigreed history of his own which is beyond the scope of this outline. However, he had found his back to the wall with the great capitalist world-wide depression as his revenues collapsed. His cash flow was the main pillar of his regime as he had to pay all the subordinate sheiks and also to finance his modernization program. Enter the British iconoclast St. John Philby.
Philby had a history of working for the British establishment as had his ancestors for centuries. But in India he became disillusioned and eventually found his way to Arabia as a person essentially anti-British imperialist in every way. Accordingly it was not long before he found Ibn Saud struggling to create a modern nation in Arabia and joined whole heartedly with him. Philby even took on the Sunni Moslem religion of the Watabi sect and took a second wife, and with her had another son at the age of 65. (His son by his British wife, ``Kim'', born in India, was now at Cambridge, and just beginning in the world of the Red Secret Service as I have mentioned elsewhere in this book. See my forthcoming book Red Sword, Red Shield for all the details.)
St. John Philby engineered for Ibn Saud the most important agreement to date between the Kingdom and one capitalist oil monopoly; one that had not signed the Red Line agreement. Philby brought to Ibn Saud and his Kingdom, Standard of California operating under the rubric California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casoc).Naturally, the strike at al-Hasa solved all of Ibn Saud's problems and, of course, the financial problems of St. John Philby too. Vast new petroleum reserves were now at the disposal of the world's capitalist oil monopolies and this would be critical to the British effort in the World War yet to come. It also made the Americans the players replacing the British which was a source of great personal satisfaction to St. John who had become almost pathologically anti-British.
577The Ugly
The most dangerous decade in the history of humanity unfolded with fascism at odds with Bolshevism in a way that could only be resolved by war.
The Most Dangerous Decade in the History of Humanity
History has two meanings. The invention of writing is the definition in archaeology for the beginning of the historic period. Before writing we speak of prehistory. What about those societies and cultures which exist without writing, for example Bands and Tribes, but after its invention. We sometimes use the term protohistoric for them.
History also refers to the entire process of sociocultural evolution. That is the process of the evolution of human society and culture from its inception to the present time. In this case we are using the first definition.
Why is the decade of the 1920's sometimes considered to have been the most dangerous decade since the emergence of written history? Precisely because the entire world was involved and a fundamental decision had to be made about which direction global humanity was going to take. What were the choices?
Capitalism had given humanity a great industrial infrastructure but at an extremely high cost. It had caused World War I as you have seen in this book. Capitalism was finding its preferred political forms in North America, Latin America, Europe, China and Japan which were (1) fascism and/or (2) parliamentary democracy. (Today capitalism is proving how dangerous it really is to the health of all working people.)
Capitalism had also created its own gravedigger. In other words Capitalism had also provided the solution to its General Crisis (which we have defined extensively in this book) in the form of the international industrial working class. That class had found its leaders and its scientific ideology in the form of the Communist Parties and Marxism-Leninism (historical materialism.) These parties were grouped around the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These parties had found that one could not jump into Communism but would have to build into it via a transitional phase called Socialism. The first political form of working class government and state power was evolving in the USSR and Mongolia. In addition there were Red Base areas in countries as vast as China and as small as Cuba.
578Fascism often means in everyday language any kind of bullying reactionary behavior on the part of dictators and their police. But the scientific definition of fascism is the elevating of absolute ruling class police power over the working class. The rulers do anything they wish and the workers must accept it or die.
There were different forms of fascism in the world as 1930 dawned; a world in a state of complete capitalist global collapse. Its most virulent forms were seen in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Fascist Japan, not to mention Fascist China (the territory of China occupied by Chiang Kai-shek). Smaller thug run countries of the fascist type existed everywhere in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Parliamentary democracy had evolved in Western Europe and the Americas as we have reviewed. Its central feature was to allow the newly ascendant bourgeoisie (small capitalist farmers, small business owners, new class technocrats, and large capitalists of the financial and manufacturing types) to resolve their differences among themselves in a kind of national crime commission (as the Lansky operation in North America would later name itself) in country after country. This national consortium of bosses met in parliaments of one kind or another and followed a set of rules for debate and resolution of issues also of their own creation. An important lesson for all of us here is to recognize
and always remember that all capitalist parliaments are just Lansky Crime Commissions at-bottom.
Between Matches
During the 1930's the capitalists would have to rearrange themselves and the workers would have to prepare for an inevitable Second World War. The former far outnumbered the latter in terms of number of countries they controlled and therefore were certainly far superior in terms of industrial power. Fortunately for the workers the inherent greed of the capitalists tended to turn themselves against each other frequently.
Therefore the situation offered the opportunity for an intelligent working class foreign policy to keep them divided, unable to attack the heartland of Socialism and thus unable to prevent the global advance of working class power. Lenin had, as we have seen, taken advantage of this to split the capitalist encirclement in 1922 when his diplomats negotiated the Rapallo Treaty that made capitalist Germany into the de facto ally of socialist Russia. But, that division of capitalist powers could not last forever. Yet it had to last long enough for the workers to get organized, and armed, and ready for the final struggle.
The 1930's were the period of jockeying for final position between these two great classes on the verge of determining the course of global history for centuries to come. That jockeying for position had obviously a military aspect. It also had an underlying economic aspect.
In our study of imperialism (remember this phase of exporting capital and the military muscle to back up its employment is the highest and final phase of the Capitalist Stage and had already been in existence for some 160 years) we have focused on oil and so we shall now continue to see how the struggle to find, develop and utilize petroleum reserves became the key to both sides long-term strategic planning for the inevitable coming Second World War.
German Fascism Prepares for War
As everyone knows German fascism had taken a particularly noxious form in the National Socialist German Workingmen's Party (Nazi Party) of Adolph Hitler. Its racism and especially its anti-Semitism were designed to divide the working class before the final confrontation and its consequences were especially repulsive. On the other hand the Nazi's had control of one of the two most powerful West European industrial establishments, and therefore whatever it did, had to be of primary concern to the international working class movement.
Joseph Stalin in command of the CPSU and the Comintern had been running its intelligence and covert operations branches since the beginning. He was well aware of what the Nazi's, Italian fascists, Chinese fascists and Japanese fascists were up to. No part of our preparation for war (whichever imperialists, if not all, vs. the USSR) was more important than the economic intelligence department of the Red Secret Service (Cheka). Stalin was also well aware of what the equally anti-Communist Western Parliamentary capitalist regimes were up to.
With that background in mind let's see how the world struggle for oil played out in this the most dangerous decade in the history of humanity.
Fascism Struggles to Secure Oil Reserves
The fascist powers had an Achilles Heel and that was that none of the three that initially signed the Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) Germany, Italy and Japan, (Spain joined in 1939) had internal oil supplies. All of them depended upon oil imports and these imports had to come from their most dangerous capitalist competitors or from the Soviet Union. ---And, as the inevitable conflict unfolded it would be the fascist countries failure to secure adequate oil reserves that would doom each and every one of them to military defeat,
Germany had no internal oil reserves and depended upon Fascist Rumania to supply its needs and the world oil market. Germany lost the Lion's share of Soviet Oil in 1936 when Stalin choked off most of it.
Italy could have been stopped at any time in its war on Africa if the parliamentary capitalist governments had placed an oil embargo upon Italian fascism. But they did not. Japan was almost totally dependent upon the USA for its oil reserves and Japanese fascism had to roll the dice (war with the USA) in its drive to secure the reserves of Royal Dutch Shell in the Dutch colony of Sumatra once the American's cut off their oil.
The German fascists tried to create a substitute industry by producing oil and gas from coal but this never worked out for them despite very heavy expenditures aimed at building the necessary industrial plant.
We have already reviewed the subsequent Second World War in Chapter 16. When that war was over US Labor found itself living in an entirely different chess game.
In the next chapter we shall see how Stalin handled the transition from hot war against fascism to cold war against US led global capitalist imperialism. ---And, let us look at how US Labor matured.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 26: See Saw --- The Cold War: 1945 - 1972Perhaps it was Joseph Stalin's uncanny ability to properly weigh the human pieces in his global chess game which was his strongest personality plus. This skill would be especially important in the post-1945 world as he would lead the Socialist camp for the first third of this Cold War I period. Equally powerful in his instinct was his overriding belief in the scientific accuracy of Marxism-Leninism and its ability to pull you out of any mess. To Stalin this meant class struggle fought out to the bitter end as the sure-fire always certain final solution. He was going to need both character attributes to deal with the new and nearly as dangerous post-Hitler world Bolshevism now confronted as it faced off against the would-be nuclear aggressors from North America.
Furthermore, the Gringo aggressor was historically off-base. The US acted as if it already owned the capitalist world. In some ways it did. But certainly not in all ways. The US rulers would inevitably confront powerful adversaries in the recovering ruling families of Europe, in the emerging oil producing nations, and certainly not least in a rapidly growing Soviet Camp which many expert economists at the time considered to be
an economic miracle in the making. The Americans of the gringo variety demonstrated a remarkable ignorance of reality --- a strange kind of naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé that would have been funny in a child but was rather disturbing in adults.
Truman as Illogical as Hitler
Overnight the world had changed from the one we have reviewed several times in this book to one in which there was (1) just-unbridled US imperialism struggling for total hegemony over the rest of the capitalist world while revving-up to attack the Soviet Union just as soon as humanly possible, versus (2)(a) the USSR with massive forces occupying half of Europe establishing cooperative civilian regimes (as the capitalists were in the countries of western Europe they occupied) and (b) Communist led revolutionary wars raging in Asia in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaya and the Philippines. In the midst of this Stalin had to get used to Harry Truman who had replaced his ``friend'' FDR and Clement Atlee who had replaced his erstwhile ``friend'' Winston Churchill in the election of 1946.
579Stalin did not have to rely on his instinct alone in dealing with either the original giants or their somewhat pygmy successors in post-War Western Europe. He had daily reports coming from his spies in London and Washington, Paris and Berlin, Milano and Madrid. He knew Truman had been blinded, or allowed himself to be blinded, to the power of the Soviet Union and its allied movement, by two things: (1) the great obvious US military-industrial strength emerging from the second world war and the fact that Gringolandia was the only creditor nation in the world (excepting Switzerland) plus (2) what the Gringo bosses considered to be their real trump card, the atom bomb! This apparent atomic monopoly made persons eager to believe in the possibility of a US-ruled world, think it was possible. Indeed the new Truman warmongers seemed to think the task required only a certain degree of gutsy Presidential leadership. This was fantasy land at Disneyland! But the gringos believed it! -And that meant something specific about what had to be done.
580The first thing Stalin had had to get used to was this - Truman's unjustifiable arrogance. This is to say Truman's completely incorrect view of the relative position of the United States vis a vis the USSR which as we have seen was terribly inaccurate. As was his view of Asia and the relative power of the Communist movement there. Which meant that Truman much like Hitler could not be trusted to use ``logic'' and would have to be approached in a different way. Stalin had learned how dangerous it was to expect an opponent to act logically when he had mistakenly concluded Hitler was too logical to launch a war against the Soviet Union when he did.
Truman seems never to have considered the possibility that Stalin might have a bomb of his own. Stalin's poker-face at Potsdam, when Truman told him about the Los Alamos first atomic bomb test explosion, made Truman think Stalin was stupid and unscientific and did not understand the significance of an atomic bomb. Originally (1961) it was Steve Nelson who first told me Stalin had in actuality learned of the Los Alamos successful atomic bomb test even before Truman! Now it is well documented, that Stalin had been told about the Los Alamos explosion before Truman had been!
No Appeasement This Time
Stalin decided to go for broke once again, as he had so many times in the past when the Soviet movement was at cross-roads. He knew from the crisis of 1918 this meant going all the way into making the Soviet Union into nothing more than a military camp --- this time for the long term --- and confront the USA with an assured ongoing massive military retaliation in the event of war. ---And, it meant rebuilding the industrial infrastructure destroyed by the Nazi's.
As the War wound down and the reconstruction really got underway everyone could see that once again the Party had just the man at the helm to see that the reconstruction would be done and on time and that this would be just the beginning. The New Beginning Lenin had so often spoken of Stalin was going to make a reality. As far as the Boss was concerned, since we had just done this industrialization once we can certainly do it again!
Truman's arrogance had been based on ignorance. The events of the five years after the collapse of Hitler in his Bunker had led to the disgrace and replacement of the Truman administration by a worldlier US leader Dwight David Eisenhower. Whatever negatives Eisenhower might have had his World War II experience had left him at least ``not ignorant'', if not well informed, about the relative power of the Soviet Union in the world, and he had called off the disastrous war in Korea and retired McCarthy. The responsible US ruling families were settling-in for a protracted conflict of what we had come to call the Cold War.
Stalin's strategy of confronting the US imperialists with blow-for-blow tit-for-tat military responses to US aggression worked. As we have seen, within a decade the Soviet Union and its allies in Europe and Asia and Communist China had faced down US imperialism and forced it into a coming many decade's long ``cold war.'' There would be no appeasing US ruling family ambitions for world domination this time. Stalin began a determined campaign to stand up and face down the international bully of US imperialism.
Establishing Gringo Hegemony
Over the Post-1945 Capitalist World
Checkmated by Stalinist Socialism US imperialism found smashing success elsewhere. Namely, in asserting its hegemony over the capitalist world which meant the entire non-socialist globe directly or indirectly. ---And, it is that phenomenon, the emergence of one nation's de facto rule over one entire global sociocultural stage for the very first time in world history, the USA over the capitalist global sociocultural stage, which is the subject matter of this chapter.
Every industry was expanding, and spawning (new industries), as was every science, and this included the now central mineral extraction industry of petroleum and the associated geological sciences. Coal had replaced wood. Now coal was being replaced itself by the petroleum industry, oil and natural gas, the foundation of every form of industrial activity and transportation on land, in the air and on the sea. (---And, on the sea nuclear reactor-run de facto steam engine (special turbines) power was rapidly replacing diesel engines and would eventually replace them all in the world's greatest navies.) Oil is accordingly, a most useful continuing theater for examining the way in which the US ruling families established and constructed their post-1945 hegemony over the rest of the capitalist world; maintaining it until throwing it away in Iraq at the turn of the coming century.
581Foreign Oil
The US came out of the Second World War as a net exporter of oil to the tune of some 90% of the Allies oil requirements. By 1948 the US had become a net importer. As soon as the balance of payments began to shift in favor of gringo trading partners the cry began to arise in the US to find some way to combat the ``evil of foreign oil.'' Yet US industrial expansion was occurring at such a rate that more and more oil was needed. In fact oil alone simply could not satisfy the domestic requirements of the US market --- it had to be supplemented and soon by natural gas.
Natural gas, or methane, is simply CH4 --- one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. It is the simplest of the petroleum molecules. All of the other kinds of petroleum you will ever hear of are simply different agglomerations of CH4 into chains and various snow-flake looking organic molecules. (``Organic'' in chemistry does not mean ``alive'' or ``natural'' by the way; it simply means anything with Carbon atoms in it. Many carbon containing molecules have never been alive and are certainly entirely ``natural.'' ``Organic'' with regard to healthy food is another term originally pirated from science by some greedy and ignorant entrepreneur's decades ago, and so now we are stuck with it.) When heavy (long-chained) oil is cooked to high temperatures (over 600 degrees Fahrenheit) and several atmospheres of high pressure, the long chains break up into smaller ones until some even break up into CH4 gas --- i.e., methane or natural gas.) Between the heavy asphalt molecules and the gas methane molecules are all the other fractions in between, especially Jet Fuel (Kerosene) and Gasoline of varying octane's including those specific to high performance propeller driven aircraft.
582Industrial production was stepping up in Europe and Asia with the continuing massive US investment in these spheres in the decade following Hitler's defeat. ---And, in place by the mid-1950's, the new submissive and totally subordinate shock absorbing sub-currencies the gringo regime finally foisted on the rest of the capitalist world in the form of the German Mark and the Japanese Yen. Oil and Gas was in increasingly short supply due to the rapid growth in demand despite the fact that giant fields after giant field was being discovered and brought on line especially in the Near East and Iran.
As an aside I might mention that Mesopotamia, known in the 20th century as Iraq, was always known as the ``Near East'' when British Imperialism was running the show over there --- after the Americans took it away from them - and everyone else - with the end of the 1950's rearrangement of the world --- it was called by them the Middle East; to them Iraq was ``mid-way East'' not ``near'' as it had been with the Brits. West Africa was the ``nearest'' East for the Yanquis; Mesopotamia was ``middle'' East; China, the Japans and Indonesia and Indochina were the ``far'' East.
Terminology in history can change on a dime when the underlying shift in global power is real, complete and final. So it was with the advent of gringo hegemony over the oil of the ``Middle East.'' But terminological bullying was the least important of the Gringo incursions on the ruling classes of the rest of the now reconstructing post-War capitalist world. On a spectrum of Strict Nanny on the Right to Sado-Masochistic disciplinarian on the Left, the Gringo rulers spent the fifteen years after the end of the War in Europe reinstructing those who would be their ``Nome bosses'' in a global capitalist order they alone would lead, were trained and tested.
Learning about Hegemony: Gringo Style
1948 was the hinge of fate for the US petroleum export/import ratio. That was the year petroleum imports outpaced exports for the first time. In exactly sixty years the imbalance would be so great as to be one of the key factors precipitating the greatest global capitalist crisis since the one that had begun a generation earlier. It had been obvious to FDR and his highly informed and educated advisors this would happen, and soon after WWII ended. In the event it was Harry S. Truman who had been left to deal with the mess of creating a post-War Petroleum Order.
It wasn't something that could be done quickly or therefore permanently imposed. There were the natural factors at work --- namely those being tackled by petroleum geology. There were political factors at work --- namely the USA against the USSR in the redivision of the world's natural resources. There were class factors at work as North American wealthy families elbowed the less fortunate families, running the downtrodden remnants of the capitalist world war in Europe, out of the way. New North American capitalists arose challenging the old order of the Seven Sisters and in the 1960's there would be hundreds of independents entering the global search for and production of oil and natural gas.
But in the fifteen years following the end of the War the West European capitalist families and their governments were pretty much told what to do and when to do it with regard to all important strategic economic decisions. An excellent archetypical example of what Harold Wilson would later call ``a form of 20th Century helotry'' imposed by the Americans on Europe is the way in which the gringos just pushed the British and French oil companies out of the way in territories that had been theirs before the great change following the War.
The Struggle for Persian and Arabian Oil
The US capitalists emerged from the War in 1945 as the net exporters of petroleum products to Europe from their own native reserves. The US oil monopolies were set on securing foreign sources of supply, keeping their New World reserves and especially the North American reserves held in reserve, being tapped if at all, at low rates, as a form of long-term conservation of the oil supply within their political control.
To supply Europe one needed foreign oil as close to Europe as possible which meant Persia (Iran) and Arabia. Within weeks of Truman's ascendancy to power US agents were busy fomenting discord in Iran.
Elbowing the Competition out of the Way: Tehran
US agents had four opponents in Iran. The Soviet Union was one. Another was British Petroleum and its allies. Not least was the indigenous Persian cross-class opposition led by Iran's fiery new nationalist Prime Minister Mossadegh. Finally the gringos had to deal with the division within their own ranks represented by the warmongering Far Right represented by Truman, Nixon and McCarthy on the one hand and the left-over FDR New Deal managers like Secretary of State Dean Acheson. To make a long story short the US engineered a coup managed by the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt, against Mossadegh, in alliance with their puppet Shah Reza Pahlavi and his loyal Army officers.
In mid-August 1953 the gringo cabal kidnapped Mossadegh, and eventually threw him into prison where he would spend the next three years. For the rest of his life he
would be under house arrest. The coup d'etat placed the Shah in the position of being an absolute monarch in a country anxious to move in a different direction. But to the imperialists, with their congenitally established inability to think beyond the immediate profit and loss statement for the Quarter, this was immaterial. They would reap the rewards of their short sightedness in another quarter century.
Coming in to the imperialist consortium were just about all of the major independents from the US as well as the Seven Sisters and BP. Considering the Brit capitalists relatively powerless position, their class brothers in the New World had been quite generous in providing BP (Anglo-Iranian then) a good piece of the action.
Saudi Arabia and Aramco
The gringos had waited as long as they had to settle the Iranian situation with their Pahlavi coup because they had far more important irons in the fire in Arabia. Namely in the formation of a cartel of their own --- a Consortium if you will --- which would include those participating in the original Red Line Agreement. There was far more oil in Arabia than in Iran and the gringos already had it, as we have seen, in the form of ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company --- Standard New Jersey, Mobil, Texaco and Standard California) and did not need or really want Iranian oil. However, something had to be done to impose order on the rapidly escalating amounts of oil available on the world oil market. Iranian oil could be diverted to the Soviet Union and it had been that consideration too which speeded up the coup. Emerging was the US led Producers Consortium which signed an agreement with the Iranian National Oil Company. In the consortium were virtually all of the US and European major and minor oil companies. This situation would last until the Islamic Revolution expelled the North Americans in 1978.
583Elbowing the Competition out of the Way: Arabia and Clause 10
To begin withthe Rockefeller family emerged as the new principal boss of US petroleum policy in its role as main de facto share-controller in the various Standard companies spawned by the ``anti-Trust'' Supreme Court decision of 1911. The Red Line Agreement left over from World War I between France, England, and the USA, Clause 10 outlawed any signatory countries petroleum owning families from developing Arabian oil prospects unless all agreed that company X would be allowed to proceed. As we have seen little occurred in the two decades between the World Wars as a result. Not until just before the Second World War when oil was discovered for the first time in Arabia as we have reviewed.
The post-War World Petroleum Order being constructed in the financial and oil capitals of Washington, New York, Houston, Dallas and New Orleans, made a new key player out of the Rockefeller entry in the world oil contest via their company SOCAL, Standard Oil of California. This time the rivalry between the eastern Gringo oil establishment of the now somewhat sophisticated Rockefellers with their Jeb Clampett country cousins in TEXACO had been set aside in favor of cooperation in a joint venture now called ARAMCO. The Arabian American Oil Company was the big prize and the Gringo rulers had it!
However, there were risks. A lot of risks of all types. The best way to ameliorate risk is always to dilute it. The way you dilute risk in financial-industrial endeavors is to
spread it around so that failure or cost overruns can be absorbed by the participants in the event they may occur without bringing about the collapse of any one of them.
Enter Standard Oil of New Jersey and Mobil
The Rockefellers needed oil desperately but not in California. It was their principal company Standard Jersey and its clients which now had to be brought in on the action. Also desperate to enter Arabia was Chicago finance capital owned Mobil (Socony Vacuum) which also had been another signatory to Gulbenkian's Red Line Agreement (they knew he drew that line around Saudi Arabia in 1928, and they had agreed). As you have seen it was this Red Line Agreement that was the basis of the imperialist oil companies' gang-land style agreement to split the Arabian take.
However Gulbenkian had bet on the wrong horse with the outbreak of War and gone with the Nazi's. There was therefore the possibility that the victors in the imperialist contest could impose the law of victory. Namely, they take everything they wanted from the enemy. Gulbenkian had made himself the enemy by going to Vichy France with the outbreak of hostilities. That could have turned out to be the end for him and his many years fought over Red Line Agreement when the Gringo oil companies declared it null and void in 1946. However, Gulbenkian was an expert world-class international lawyer and the companies decided after months of litigation the better part of valor would be to settle the litigation by replacing the Red Line Agreement with a new Group Agreement which kept a place for Gulbenkian, no longer forever nickel and dimeing for his five percent. Now he got more.
584---And, now the US imperialists dominated Arabia replacing the hated British, expelled at the insistence of Saudi King Ibn Saud, who had learned well at the foot of St. John Philby the true dangers of British imperialism and preferred the Yanqui version. By 1960 Arabia was an all Gringo concern. But it wasn't all Ibn Saud. There was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Philosophy of the Revolution: Egypt.
If FDR had lived, or had he been succeeded by Henry Wallace instead of Harry Truman, who ousted (with engineering from Meyer Lansky) Iowa progressive capitalist Henry Wallace from the Vice-Presidential spot on FDR's ticket in the 1944 campaign, it is likely things would have gone a lot easier for those getting out from under the thumb of British and French imperialism after World War II. If, if, if
In the event what happened was FDR's anti-colonialist policy was replaced almost overnight by an aggressive pro-colonialist position toward both the French and British and their colonies on the part of the new Truman (Lansky) gang. The result would be the Indochina War against the French and the Indochina-American War. It also necessitated the overthrow of comprador regimes in Africa, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent by revolt, revolution and civil war.
Take Egypt to Begin With
Genies are hard to put back into bottles. Mossadegh was the first of the Islamic leaders to use the radio and the mass resulting human mob turn-outs to shape a nation's political policy. All of this had not been lost on young Army officers burning with nationalist passions around the Muslim world. Nowhere was this impact more intense
than in Egypt and in the minds of the young Army officers chomping at the bit for their turn at the head of State and Government in their own country.
Egypt had been ruled for millennia by the same ilk and the British occupiers in Cairo were no different than their predecessors. It was inevitable that the young military patriots of Egypt would be inspired by the mass social movements changing the world, as the imperialist empires disintegrated around them. Inevitable they would find support in Stalin's Socialist Camp which now stretched from Germany to the Bering Straits and from the Arctic to the China Seas.
Leading the uprising of military officers in Egypt had been General Mohammad Naguib. But the real organizational boss behind the scenes was a young ideological colonel named Gamel Abdul Nasser. After the coup which overthrew the King and brought the military Junta to power Nasser wrote a book entitled Philosophy of Revolution. I read it as soon as it was published and I recall the electrical effect it had on me, so I can easily imagine the dramatic effect Nasser must have had on his fellow Egyptians. Equally dramatic effects were reverberating throughout the entire Arab world as Nasser replaced the General and the Junta as the leading executive for Egypt, and in his own mind anyway for Arabia, demanding the complete withdrawal of the British and the French from the Middle East.
585Voice of the Arabs
By 1954 Nasser had replaced Naguib who faded away like an Old General should. ---And, in the place of the parasitical rulers foreign imperialism had placed on the Egyptian and other Arab thrones was an entirely new phenomenon. An Arab who could not be bought. Furthermore, an Arab with the ability to raise the mob as had Mossadegh. Nasser had himself been fired up by Mossadegh's speeches and he recognized it was Mossadegh's ability to turn out the Persian Street which had kept him in power as long as he had been. Nasser did exactly the same thing with his radio station and its 24 hour broadcasting to the Arab World (and anyone else who would listen.) It was called Voice of the Arabs and the invention of the transistor radio and its mass production in the mid-1950's brought the entire Arab Street into the listenership. Nasser could overthrow regimes he deemed pro-British or pro-Imperialist or pro-Israeli and mobilize the masses in Egypt to support him against other Egyptian leaders anxious to replace him.
586Elbowing the Competition at Suez
The British and French ruling capitalist families had one view of the Suez Canal. A French engineer had designed and led the project and British and French finance capital had led the investor group. The lifeblood of the post-1945 Europe was oil and it came at half the previous price (when it had to go around South Africa) now essential to the recovery of West European industry.
The Egyptians under Nasser were aggressively threatening to impose their rights over the Canal as it was the source of a great deal of money. The US had still another view of the Suez Canal.
The Special Gringo Deal with the Saud Family
The Americans were concerned that their extremely lucrative arrangements in Arabia could be derailed altogether if the Arab Street were to become enraged at all
things Western not just British. The gringos needed the oil and especially under the arrangement with the Saud family that required them to use all US contractors and to spend all their money in the US and on US paper. This would allow them to save North American petroleum reserves (in Canada and Mexico as well as the US) until such time as they would need them. It offset the ``Problem of foreign oil'' which was essentially a monetary cash-flow problem with the specter of huge outflows of actual cash being offset by the agreement to spend it on US contracting. This Saudi agreement was the best of all possible worlds as it also kept US financial (dollar) reserves intact at home even though they were being spent abroad!
Egypt Acts
British occupation troops pulled out of Egyptian Canal Zone on June 13, 1956. One week later the US canceled its promised loan to build the Aswan High Dam. The Soviet Union stepped in with an offer to be the financier for Aswan, relieving the blackmail pressure from Nasser's back, and on the 26th of July Nasser seized the Canal declaring it Egyptian property, during a speech in Alexandria where he and the military cadets, who had sworn allegiance to Naguib and Pan-Arabism originally ten years earlier, brought their great romantic adventure to its logical conclusion.
During the speech Nasser gave the code word ``de Lessups'' several time (the name of the French engineer promoter who had built the Canal). As if there had been a flick of a switch the Army sprang into action, doing what it had been dying to do ever since the 1953 Naguib coup. That was the signal and the entire Canal was made Egyptian by armed force in a few hours.
Ike says No!
The Brits and French went ahead with their own plan and regional ally (Israel) and sprung an attack on the Egyptians October 29, 1956. Only three months after Nasser had seized the Canal in nationalization, Egypt was at war with Britain, France and Israel.
Meanwhile the Red Army had been engaged in suppressing a CIA/US Army Intelligence conspiracy to overthrow the Government of Hungary. (I participated in the Hungary debriefing sessions at Ft. Holabird, Baltimore, in 1960, as a student US intelligence analyst).
In Moscow and Peking the European aggression against Egypt was seen as more ``taking advantage'' of the post-Stalin liberalization, New Class boss Nikita Khrushchev had set into motion. These new Soviet leaders saw the blackmailing of Egypt over the Aswan High Dam loan by the US Government as part of coordinated aggression the gringos had secretly encouraged while trying to deny their culpability to their allies in the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and elsewhere. The Soviets and the Chinese were right on all counts but the important thing emerging was that temporarily anyway, the imperialist rivalry between Europe and the US was being worked to the advantage of the international working class movement and its allied anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist national movements.
When Ike (Dwight D. Eisenhower) found out what had happened (less than a week before the US Presidential election in 1956) he threw a fit and launched a campaign to force the Brits, French and Israeli's to withdraw. Meanwhile the Canal had been sabotaged by Nasser with the sinking of many ships so the Canal itself had been
withdrawn from the world economy. High costs and rationing were resulting in Europe and would continue even after the Americans and the Soviet Union had forced the withdrawal of European imperialist troops and Israeli's to behind their frontiers.
Nasser emerged as the victorious hero the Arab world wanted. By the spring of 1957 the crisis was over with Harold Macmillan, Ike's old friend from World War II, as Prime Minister it was unlikely any more such independent efforts such as that shown over Suez would be on the agenda. Along the way Macmillan had cleared Kim Philby, in the House of Commons, of being the so-called Third Man in the Burgess-MacLean espionage case.
Testosterone was flowing throughout the military of the previously colonial world and after Nasser there would be no stopping it. For the next several decades military men would overthrow comprador regimes, expel colonial imperialist troops, and take command of the primitive economies of their now ``Third World'' countries.
Revolution in Iraq
1955 featured the Voice of the Arabs taking aim at the British comprador ruling family of Hashemites in Baghdad. Three years later, at the height of summer, Iraqi Army officers finally acted on Nasser's demands that they overthrow the traitors and bring Iraq into the ``Arab Revolution.'' The July 1958 military revolt in Baghdad featured the liquidation of the Hashemite family and their government in rather gruesome ways. Nasser had placed his stamp on the future of compradors in Arabia! The emerging Army Officers Junta immediately informed the Iraq Petroleum Company (the holding entity of the foreign imperialists in Iraq) of changes in revenue sharing.
Syria joins the United Arab Republic
1958 featured Nasser at the zenith of his power as Syria joined with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic.
Libya and Dr. Hammer: the Collapse of Capitalist Oil Pricing
Another Seed of Gringo Imperialism's Eventual Destruction
Among the most important of the Nasser inspired military revolts was that of the Libyan army officers under the sincere dedicated nationalist leader Colonel Muammar Khadafi. ---And stepping in to help was long time US Communist Armand Hammer.
You will recall that the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution resulted, in subsequent years, in the flight of tens of thousands of political refugees to Europe and North America. One of these had been Dr. Julius Hammer, Social Democrat of the Lenin variety (Julius Hammer attended the Joint Bolshevik-Menshevik Congress in London in 1907), who arrived in New York and established a medical practice and a pharmacy. Imprisoned eventually on trumped up abortion charges for anti-communist political reasons in New York, Dr. Hammer spent several years in New York State prison where his son Armand Hammer visited him weekly. See Hammer's autobiography entitled Hammer.
Armand Hammer had become a millionaire in his own right by selling a home remedy (in alcohol) at the outbreak of the prohibition period when he had a virtual monopoly on this particular ``medicine'' which was sought really for its legal alcohol content. Armand was finishing medical school, visiting his father and running the family business when Lenin seized power in Russia (in the US November 7-9, 1917). Not long
thereafter, as committed as his father to the theory of Bolshevism, Dr. Armand Hammer arrived in Moscow, with an entire US Army Field Hospital he purchased as a gift for the Red Army, and a plan to do business in Russia along the lines allowed by the Soviet Government.
To make this long story too short (Read Armand Hammer's autobiography Hammer) let me skip ahead to say, at the age of 65 when most men are thinking about retirement, Armand had drilled on two leases he purchased in Signal Hill California. Signal Hill is a town surrounded on all sides by the city of Long Beach. It has a long distinguished US oil history and at one time around the turn of the 20th century Signal Hill (1901) was the center of California oilfield production. Hammer struck it big there and got bit by the oil bug. So by the time he arrived in the Libyan capital of Tripoli he was President of Occidental Petroleum the largest major independent in the US.
Hammer made the deal of the century for himself and his oil company and set the standard for decades of foreign oil company cooperation with established regimes. It began with the concession Hammer grabbed for Occidental under Libyan King Idris.
As usual the always ignorant US CIA told its bosses what they wanted to hear ``Libya is completely stable today and for the next five years or so and a smooth transition is then expected to occur.'' In actuality everybody in Libya knew the Army was getting ready to move. So ready there were several coups planned by different Army officer groups for the same day! Of course, the gringo ``intelligence'' establishment managed to miss all of that. (As they had managed to miss the build-up to the Suez invasion.)
Beating the others to the punch on September 1, 1969, Khadafi seized the Government. Fulfilling High School boy vows (to follow Nasser and liberate their own country and join in the war of the Arabs against imperialism) these Army officers stepped up to the plate and brought the foreign domination of Libya to a close.
Dr. Hammer stepped lightly from the ship of Monarchy to the new ship of State under the Army officers led by Khadafi. The Revolution proceeded to expel the gringo and British military bases. Then it expelled the Italian population, originally settled in North Africa under the Fascist occupation of Mussolini. In the midst of all of this Hammer got what he wanted which was Libyan oil in large quantities and the Libyans got 55 percent of the take. The other companies were forced to accede to this new Agreement, and the world of producing countries vs. producing companies had taken on a new and ominous perspective, as far as the exploiters of the world were concerned.
On Feb 14, 1971, all the companies gave in at Tehran to the demand for 55% of the take to go to the producing countries. Over the intervening years the companies had lost more and more power to the producing countries and now Hammer had finished them off.
Hammer was welcomed in Moscow as a conquering hero for he had broken the imperialist stranglehold on the pricing of world oil. Something the imperialist bosses in Washington and Europe would never regain and this loss of control over capitalist pricing would, over the coming decades, lead them into devastating military adventures and eventual economic collapse! Lenin must have slept well that night with his favorite American back in the fold and successful for the cause.
The Soviet New Class
Guanlong Capitalism 1953 --- 1975:
The Classless Intelligentsia in Transformation: Phase I
This is a critical part of the history of the Stalinist Socialist Stage. Understanding what begins to occur with the death of Joseph Stalin and how the New Class evolved, explains the collapse of the Soviet Union. I have approached this matter in two parts reflecting (A) the mild predation form of the post-Stalin (post-1953) New Class in the USSR and the East European People's Democracies, and (B) the monster form which devoured all the accomplishments of Soviet Socialism after about 1975. In this section we will deal with the years of the first predatory New Class phase (~1953 --- 1975).
First of all, why this particular labeling: Guanlong and Tyrannosaur? The answer: because the monster we all have come to know as the 7 ton Tyrannosaurus rex of Cretaceous times actually began as a very small (~150 pound) carnivorous predator in the Triassic period some 100 million years earlier. We call this original little fellow Guanlong after the fossil locality in China's Gobi Desert where it was found. I think this is a useful analogy, for in this sociocultural case, the relatively powerless New Class Stalin created, and named ``the classless intelligentsia'', (that had been essential to the construction of Socialism in the backward conditions of the USSR, and which he kept in check during his lifetime), began to grow into something monstrous. In other words with Stalin's death the New Class went from being a potentially dangerous small scale predator to something much more fierce. We can distinguish two growing forms of the monstrous New Class: the early small to medium predator sized Guanlong form and the truly monster form of its post-Stalin final manifestation.
587In summary, the Czarist Russian New Class itself had been the product of long and intricate evolution from the earliest days of class society which began some 6000 years earlier (see Chapters 1 through 10 above). (1) Under Stalin's leadership the Soviet New Class emerged in its ``classless intelligentsia'' phase of early Soviet history. Then (2) it morphed into what at first was a relatively mild predation form. At the end, (3) it transformed into a monster. This final New Class Tyrannosaur form was a lethal all-consuming carnivore of all that was good and righteous in the USSR.
Today, New Class ruled Russia is coming to grips with the inherent contradictions which, as history proves, all class societies must eventually confront and resolve. The way forward for the shattered remnants of the old Soviet Union is being worked out. Mr. Putin calls the collapse of the old Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and he may well be right. As a KGB career officer he knows what you will know, once reading these sections on the New Class and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In my opinion, our side will require their (the people and Party of the former Soviet Union) internalizing of this scientific account of what happened. As such, the study and understanding of the facts of history is preparatory, to a second Bolshevik Revolution for them, and this time one that prevents this capitalist restoration event from occurring once
588again in those former Soviet Republics and East European nations. It is also critical for you in pursuing your historical task of bringing Communism to the USA and Canada.
Learning from the Past, Application in the Present, Hope for the Future
One critical lesson you will see emerge is that the path of bringing the hidden capitalist class of the Guanlong-Tyrannosaur form out of hiding and into the open as the Chinese Communist Party has done since Deng (1975), allows our Party and its State and Government in the PRC to clearly identify the capitalist elements in the nation and regulate them. Something which was impossible in the old Soviet Union, that is to say, because the transforming New Class was largely hidden from view, denied to exist, it could not be confronted and defeated under the system then extant in the USSR. A brief cursory glance at the multiple English language Chinese periodical internet publications shows us that a constant muckraking of Chinese capitalist and socialist sectors is ongoing alongside a constant rectification movement in the form of teaching and studying Marxism-Leninism and Mao's and Deng's thinking (Collected Works of both are online and available in English.)
589Now on to the details of how the New Class underwent its transformation from the rather mild form it had taken when it was very largely vocational and one had his or her day job in the bureaucracy, educational facility, factory or collective farm.
Origins
We have seen how the original New Class of technocrats in the Soviet Republic (and after 1924 the Soviet Union) had two principle components and why. In that review you have seen simultaneously how the New Class emerged in part from the old New Class of Technocrats under the Czarist Capitalist-Feudalist Regime. But, these bourgeois specialists left over from the pre-Revolutionary period, even being supplemented by those finishing college and technical schools in the first five years of Soviet power, were joined immediately by Communist Party generated technocrats (or often wannabe technocrats) who wanted the technocratic positions for their own employment. This was especially true for the three hundred thousand officers and Non-Coms who had served in the 5 ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂý million man Red Army. The latter (Party originating) candidates for technocratic employment won out over the former during the period of the Five Year Plans (beginning in August 1928). In the coming decade they were supplemented by millions more from the new Soviet Universities and Technical Institutes who had proper proletarian or poor and middle farmer backgrounds. By 1938 there were about ten million of them. The old petty bourgeoisie specialists had been swamped out of the picture.
590
There was always a capitalist economy even in these years but it was relatively small. Some of it was legal but much was not. The multitude of small forms of exchange and petty functions of an economic nature to be fulfilled could best be handled in this way, and in fact in practical terms could be handled in no other way. For reasons of expediency and efficiency, as long as this secondary capitalist economy was not threatening rule by the Party, Stalin and his (e.g., Prime Minister Molotov's) Government allowed it to continue.
The Doctor's Plot
Toward the latter part of Stalin's reign as General Secretary he received a letter from a citizen (you will recall anyone could, and millions did, write to the Boss whenever they were pissed off, and certain types of letters were routinely taken to him) claiming that corrupt doctors were doing a series of illegal things including charging unlawful fees in order for citizens to obtain medical care, medicines, hospital admittance, and other things of this nature. Stalin investigating via Beria found this to be true, common practice, and furthermore began to see that the second economy --- the capitalist sector previously small and non-threatening --- was growing by leaps and bounds. There were a variety of reasons for this but for purposes of this Handbook suffice to say the Boss decided to fully investigate the growth of this second economy (a de facto secret capitalist economy) and to conduct a thorough purge of the entire phenomenon. This would have involved a massive press campaign against this sub-rosa corruption as had characterized the thousands of trials of local agricultural tyrants in the 1930's and a complete public expose of the entire second (capitalist) economy phenomenon. Stalin died before he could get this anti-capitalist campaign underway. (Trotskyist and other imperialist historians have made a mountain out of this fact ever since calling it ``the Doctor's Plot'' implying another irrational and paranoid adventure was in the making by Stalin, just before his death, such as the irrational and paranoid plots they claimed the Boss had made against them in the 1930s. We have already reviewed the truth about the purges of the 1930's and won't rehash old ground here.)
591
Guanlong Capitalism Grows by Leaps and Bounds
An excellent summary of this secret capitalist ``second economy'' is provided by the historians Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny in their book Socialism Betrayed, Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 2004, International Publishers, New York, 230 pp. I recommend you read it especially beginning with Chapter 3. Let me simplify some of the terminology.
To begin with there are numerous ways this second economy is referred to in scholarly works (black market economy, private economy, illegal economy, and a half
dozen others) but for our analysis it is best to refer to the second economy for what it was scientifically, which is to say a capitalist economy. In the USSR it always had two components: a legal component and an illegal component. However, since the entire legal economy is where virtually everyone worked --- that is, the first economy --- what inevitably had to happen was that everyone with any kind of private enterprise was taking things from their job for usage in the capitalist second economy whether the activity was legal or illegal. Illegality was therefore inherent in the way in which the capitalist economy in the Soviet Union worked. This illegality was always there and grew and grew, virtually unchecked, in the 37 years from 1953 to 1990.
Khrushchev and his crew enabled the capitalist economy to undergo this rapid expansion in a variety of ways but the point is that with the death of Stalin, and the removal of Beria as Boss of the Cheka, the entire campaign to isolate and liquidate the capitalist second economy was itself isolated and liquidated. The showdown came June 18 --- 21, 1957 when the Politburo (named at this time the Presidium, voted 7 to 3 and one abstention [neutral]) to kick Khrushchev out and his policies. The fat boy managed to get a full Central Committee meeting called immediately thereafter with just enough Moscow Party bosses and allies present (Khrushchev had been Party Boss for Moscow before being elevated to Chair of the Politburo) to reverse that decision! Instead they kicked out the key anti-Khrushchev Politburo (Presidium) members, including the leaders of that seven man group, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, labeling them the ``anti-Party group''. Khrushchev held on another seven years until even the compromised bureaucrat (second economy advocate) members of the Central Committee had had enough of his bullshit and threw him out. (His failure to counteract US imperialism over the Bay of Tonkin incident being the straw that broke the fat camel's back.)
592
The Party Disarmed
This was not the last time the Soviet Party had a chance to correct the capitalist course the nation was on but it is symptomatic of a fundamental change in power at the top of the Communist Party. In a little over thirty years after Khrushchev's consolidation of power capitalism would be fully restored. Note that the major reason this secret restorationist policy was successful was because the Party denied that there were classes in the Soviet Union and that capitalism in any form even existed in the USSR. If you don't recognize a growing dinosaur about to devour your system you can't fight it. The Party had permanently disarmed itself. The true anti-Party New Class leadership had succeeded in reversing Stalin's entire domestic policy in only four years. (On the other hand as D. F. Fleming pointed out in 1962 (in The Cold War and its Origins, Doubleday, New York), it had only taken the most fascist reactionary section of the US ruling class two weeks under Truman to reverse FDR's entire foreign policy.)
593
Let us look at some important statistics.
Guanlong Capitalism Unleashed
The backbone of Russian capitalism and the primary demographic of the Soviet Republic and early Union had been the farming classes. In 1926 theses classes constituted 83 percent of the Soviet population. By 1975 the total farming population had been reduced to 20 percent of the population. Furthermore almost all of that 20% were devoted first to their collective farms for regular paychecks and only secondly to their private plots (3/4 of an acre). Simultaneously, the industrial working class and those workers involved in the construction and transportation industries had grown from a total of 5 million persons in 1926 to 62 million by 1975. Of the latter some were involved in private market legal selling, service providing and exchange but this was clearly the type of income we have come to call supplemental to their regular paychecks. Truly illegal private capitalist activity existed by 1953 but had been closely watched, regulated (police) and even utilized (MOCR style) --- (all this aside from the fact we have stipulated; namely, that legal capitalist activity always implied some degree of illegal (theft) activity as persons involved took from the public teat for private benefit at least some of their tools and/or resources. In a manner similar to the way secretaries take from their day job employment office supplies for their home businesses.)
594Soviet law allowed certain forms of hiring of labor (household domestic staff for example) and certain kinds of private entrepreneurial activity. In this latter case the boundary between legal and illegal was arbitrary by nature and not difficult to get around. Persons employed in agriculture (collective farmers) were allowed to cultivate up to ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂþ of an acre for private gain. Certain other non-farming elements were accorded the same privilege. By 1974, only 17 years after the Khrushchev Central Committee victory 1/3 of collective farmer work-time was spent on these plots (ten percent of national GDP work-time.) One can see that in the case of agriculture this system invited corruption inherently in the form of obtaining (stealing) seeds, fertilizer, equipment, cattle feed, water and of course transportation.) You can't really blame the farmers because where else could they turn to get what they needed since all of this was publically owned as part of the first economy. They did not have the option of going to WalMart or Home Depot to get these things.
595Contrary to capitalist propaganda personal property was never endangered by the socialist order. Included in the category of personal property was housing --- or at least if you had a house before the revolution (and were not a class enemy) or built one with your own hands after the revolution it was your legal personal property. Thus, housing became another source of growth potential for the second (capitalist) economy. By 1975 ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂü of the
Soviet city population lived in such private housing. Inevitably this led to corruption in the form of renting rooms (charging rent was illegal) as was common place in Cuba when I visited eight years ago; hiring illegal construction activity by underground firms (such as the illegal Mexican labor component in the California housing industry, without which that industry as currently constructed could not function). Keep in mind that the Home Depot option being non-existent meant that `building materials' had to be stolen from public resources.
In mining, and in the oilfield, individual entrepreneurs could mine and drill provided they sold to the Government (similar to the way in which all gold mined by prospectors in States like Idaho had to be sold to the US Government until recent years.)
Note that bribery of regulatory officials and policemen was an inherent function of all of this second economy activity as one could easily declare any specific act a crime otherwise.
Doctors, teachers, craftsmen, tutors, dentists, veterinarians and virtually any professional could legally sell his or her services, within certain constraints --- easily avoided or evaded.
Any person could sell their personal private property and who was to say how a used item had been originally obtained?
Even so all of this legal capitalist activity did not grow in and of itself into its Tyrannosaur form under Socialism. In fact, it declined from about 22% of the total economy in 1950 to about 10% in 1979. (At least, that is until Gorbachev began wholesale introduction of capitalist economics in 1985.) The overall size of the second economy grew because the first economy by which we measure the percentages just quoted was growing massively, so the second economy while percentile smaller was much larger in gross terms. Yet even this would have made the second economy no more than a significant portion of economic activity. We must look elsewhere to see how the New Class of the First Economy expanded their economic and political power beyond their utilization of petty bourgeois entrepreneurial activity. We don't have to look very far. What did grow was the illegal criminal component of the second (capitalist) economy!
596
Mafia! The Rise of Organized Crime
With the death of Stalin and removal of Beria in 1953 ``illegal money-making presented a much greater problem than legal activity. Illegal activity eventually assumed an astounding array of forms, eventually penetrating all aspects of Soviet life, and was
limited only by the boundaries of human ingenuity. The most common form of criminal economic activity took the form of stealing from the state, that is, from the work places and public organizations.'' (Keeran & Kerry, 2004:55-56)
In addition to the petty theft we have already mentioned wholesale theft began to occur. True wholesale activity in which large scale systematic thefts on docks and from air and land transport cargo warehouses, ships, planes and trucks became common place. These required retail outlets. Criminal swag organizations exactly as in the USA and Western Europe emerged. These activities required law enforcement (police, judges, and so forth) functions to be suborned and disciplined to mafia type operations.
Four Curses of the Modern World
Communist historians not to mention historians in general remained blissfully unaware of all of this --- both in capitalist countries and most especially in socialist ones. At bottom this is why when we list the four deadly curses of the modern world we must include naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé as the number two curse. For those of you with an interest in these sorts of things I have included in the modern world's four curses, and in this order of importance: (1) modern revisionism, (2) naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé ultra-leftism, (3) Trotskyism and (4) anarchism. Think of the eight curses of Ancient Egypt as the analog.
Institutionalizing Criminal Illegality
Managers in the Soviet Union had a long history of bad acts and we reviewed many of these early ones in Chapter 15. Then at least the bad acts (e.g., hoarding supplies) had been part of paving a road of good intentions. No longer. Now these bad acts were pure criminal endeavors aimed at lining ones pocket to the max, including: black market selling of large quantities of goods reported as spoilage, or lost; lay-away plans for the well-to-do buyers of the best merchandise (goods, food) and to hell with the public (these buyers paid special tips to those so engaged); putting goods on ``waiting lists'' invited the practice of selling list positions to highest bidders who paid to go to the top of said list. Speculation was invited when higher income persons could buy more than what they required for personal consumption for purposes of selling at a later date at a much higher price. Organizing of the repairs and services for houses, cars, sewing and tailoring, moving furniture and transporting household contents, became major sources of illegal profit making.
597It was not long until large scale tract-housing construction operations were organized by the Russian mafia so that personal home construction, always legal for an
individual worker, now was transformed into the completely illegal capitalist spec-housing construction business, almost identical to the way it was and is conducted in the USA! Large scale bribery of police and judges was essential here. Nor was this large-scale production restricted to housing.
By 1975, tens of thousands of these illegal factories had been built nationwide on the QT. Every conceivable type of commodity began to be produced in these illegal factories after 1953, including clothes, shoes, household appliances, and a variety of small items such as sunglasses, handbags and gloves, knick-knacks. Such large scale production underground illegal production could not happen in a cottage industry way and had to take place through the back door of legal above ground factories. These factories meant workers were hired and exploited for their labor-power exactly as in the USA. Capital was accumulated through a variety of typical capitalist investment house practices, and as in New York City every cop on the beat and every judge on the bench were suborned.
598A bourgeois class structure emerged with New York 5 Family style super millionaire Russian criminal family clans at the top. Big bourgeois Soprano style boss families as middle level management and your basic hood and one man (or one-woman as in house-hooking) house-based criminal enterprise at the bottom.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union played the role of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in New York's Italian boroughs. Going on as if everything were fine except for a few persons who had lost their way.
Needless to say a simple Stalinist police operation would have prevented all of this and or reversed it once underway. But, that is precisely why the anti-Stalinist Khrushchev government was so absolutely essential to the rise of the secondary economy in general and organized crime in particular. All of the Khrushchev bullshit about Stalin's crimes and violations of socialist legality was nothing more than an invented cover for this counter-revolutionary process of restoring capitalism. They started out with the elaboration of Trotsky's lies and then took on a life all of their own as in the fat man's, last hour, ``secret speech'' to the Party Congress in 1956. All of the rewarding of mentally challenged authors, and a variety of Russian misanthropic iconoclastic malcontents, by the Western cap press, was nothing more than encouragement of this on-going criminal activity. (In 1985 Gorbachev turned the Soviet press over to this worst of all persons crowd). All that was required was to reach a ``critical mass'' and have the right mafia man in the right place to give socialism in its proper form the coup de grace. It came in the form of the assassination of Andropov and the rise of Gorbachev. However, we are getting way ahead of ourselves.
599 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/2011/ABCC999/20110726/658.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ from .docx from author (see ABCs.el) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil
We will continue this story in Tyrannosaur Capitalism 1976 --- 1990: the Classless Intelligentsia in Transformation: Phase II (Chapter 27)
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 27: See Saw II: The Cold War: 1973 --- 1989The Rockefellers had decided five years earlier, during the Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968, to wind up the failed strategy of globally confronting Bolshevism with armed force in favor of a live-and-let-live agenda with Socialism. They sent Nixon and Kissinger to Peking to make peace with the leader of the world socialist stage Mao Zedong in 1972.
I was familiar with many of these details because high ranking Rockefeller US agents had asked my mentor Frank Pestana for his help in arranging this ``sit down'' between Kissinger (then Nixon and Kissinger the following year) and Chairman Mao. Frank was the head of his own organization now (the US-China People's Friendship Association), having previously been, along with his wife Jean Kidwell, one of the principal attorneys for the CPUSA on the West Coast. These two having left the CPUSA when it began its long slide down the slope of modern revisionism. In China, Frank met with the Chairman and PRC government boss Chou En-lai, and followed their advice to return to the USA and continue his work; along the way to help the newly emerging Progressive Labor Party which would replace the renegade CPUSA (having been taken over by the gringo modern revisionists and siding with the Soviet New Class bosses) to become the revolutionary (real) communist party in the USA! Chairman Mao would later refer to Frank as ``my outpost on the West Coast of the United States.''
600As 1973 opened, and the US was exiting from Indochina, the Cold War began to take on a new shape. For our purposes let us continue to follow the petroleum thread in imperialism's many colored coat.
October 16, 1973: Exporters Set the Price
Dr. Hammer had broken the companies' ability to set the price of international crude and introduced tough negotiated bargaining over price and profit sharing. The Egyptian and Syrian attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 6th to 12th, 1973, had placed the Arab nations and Iran in the oil exporting position they had been angling for since their first fledgling attempts to establish a price setting cartel (OPEC) a decade earlier. Namely, they were now in position to set the price unilaterally themselves.
Deep Battle 1973
Israel Faces Annihilation
At mid-day October 6, 1973, hundreds of Egyptian and Syrian fighter-bombers struck Israel everywhere behind the lines while nearly two thousand field pieces opened up on Israeli positions on both the Egyptian and Syrian borders. Deep battle had come to
Arabia. One could see the clear influence of Soviet military doctrine (known also as Deep Operations) which apparently had been well learned by both the Egyptians and Syrians as they blasted Israel's fixed positions to bits and broke up their rear into so many scenes of chaos it was a wonder they ever got a defense together at all. They did, but had to threaten Arabia with atomic attack in order get both the US and USSR to step in before Israel was obliterated from the face of the Earth.
Israel had the ability to mobilize 250,000 men within 24 hours and excellent strategic positions ranging from the Suez Canal (they considered their bulwarks along the Canal to be invulnerable) to strategic dominance against Syria and Lebanon. That was on October 5th, 1973.
The next morning, 100,000 Egyptian soldiers, with 1,000 tanks waited to cross the canal and get through openings to be created in the bulwarks and do it quickly. In the event it took 4 hours under fire for the Egyptians to get their first tanks across the Canal, through the blasted-out openings, and within another hour were miles into the Sinai.
Israeli tanks a few miles away tried to plug the gap in the Canal wall but encountered new Soviet anti-tank missiles which could be steered by soldiers on the ground during their flight. The Israeli tank force was completely destroyed.
Unbeknownst to the Israeli's (and needless to say to the always ``intelligence'' challenged gringos) the Soviet Union had installed its most advanced SAM's to cover the canal against Israeli warplanes. So, while Egyptian armies blasted away the canal bulwarks the Israeli's had built, made of sand, with high pressure water hoses, the Israeli counter strike by air flew directly into a trap --- a killing bottle.) In other words, when the Egyptians and Syrians launched their surprise attack on the 6th of October, the Israeli air force flew against them and was caught in the SAM trap where most of its best jet fighters were blown out of the air! Without adequate air cover Israel was finished and Arab troops began to blast their way through Sinai and into northern Israel and the Golan Heights (occupied Syrian territory). 1200 Syrian tanks and 60,000 Soldiers were attacking and breaking through all along the line. Israel called for total mobilization of all reservists as well as active duty personnel. It took two days to get reinforcements together in an organized fashion to enter the northern fight.
601Golda Meir begged Washington to save them by restocking their armaments. But the fact was also that Israel could not win on both fronts at the same time. The northern fight was most strategically important because the massive Arab armies were only a few miles from Israel's heartland. ---And, then for reasons unknown the Syrians stopped. They lost the initiative at just the moment they could have struck the decisive lethal blow against their enemy. The Israeli's fighting for their very existence now pushed everything they had into the northern fight and began to retake some land. Within a day the Israeli's were within 30 miles of the Syrian capital of Damascus!
Coming to the assistance of Syria, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat launched a powerful, but high risk, attack against Israel. Now came the biggest tank battle of the war. As Egyptian tanks moved forward and out from under their SAM cover, they left themselves vulnerable to Israeli warplanes, which knocked out 260 Egyptian tanks while losing only 20 of their own.
Within three days Washington landed thousands of tanks and warplanes in Israeli ports. Israel had bought enough time to rearm, reorganize, and frighten their population to
death about the otherwise imminent destruction of their country, them personally, and their property.
The Israeli's had to do something fast if they had any hope of winning because Israel cannot win a war of attrition. It is the smallest country in the world and simply cannot militarily prevail surrounded by every people in its neighborhood, all of which hated them and every fiber of what they stood for. Thus, Israel launched their own attack across the Canal and succeeded in destroying the SAM air screen so that the newly US supplied warplanes could blast the Egyptian Army on the West Bank into total disarray. It was Deep Battle again, in reverse this time.
This time the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev said he would intervene unilaterally if the US did not join in a joint effort. The US went to full alert with its triad strike organization. But, the US told the Israeli's to back off --- ``consider you won.'' For their part, the Egyptians lost. In the end, the Arabs had insufficient strength to continue. The Syrians were ready to sue for peace. By surviving Israel won the war.
But, Israel had been so badly beaten up in the War she was in no position to enforce any wishes of her European and American imperialist sponsors. The US was in no position to intervene militarily in Arabia or Persia due to its ongoing commitments to its lost war in Indochina and the concomitant rebellion of the North American people which was so powerful that even the Cap Congress had to go along. No more imperialist wars for the moment.
The Soviet Union on the other hand had no such constraints and had proven its reliability in supplying and then resupplying both Syrian and Egyptian forces. Furthermore, the Soviets had prevented the Israeli's from pulling their fat out of the fire, at the last minute, despite massive secret US airlift of war supplies and materiel to the Israeli's, by threatening military intervention and having a Soviet parachute Army standing by to drop into the Canal Zone, as Soviet warships carrying nuclear weapons closed on the Mediterranean coast.
Meanwhile
In Kuwait City the oil ministers of the Arab World conferred --- first with the Iranians present --- then among themselves alone. Coming out of the meeting was the announcement that the price of oil would be raised by some 70% and companies could take it or leave it. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) had teeth.
Embargo, Super-tankers, New World Petroleum Order
The oil weapon --- the Arab embargo - had been unsheathed first by Nasser and now by Sadat. All the imperialist oil monopolies were threatened immediately by the ability of the Arabs to cut off all of their oil by shutting down pipelines, or if necessary blocking the canal again, or in the last resort setting the oilfields ablaze. Contracts, pipelines, all this meant nothing in the new real world. One technological innovation however remained to the imperialists and that was the idea of the supertanker.
Congenitally unable to think in any but the most short-sighted unintelligent way when it comes to matters of greed the imperialists had refused to invest in research, exploration or anything else that was capital intensive. With a few exceptions. We have seen one of those in the form of the Schlumberger monopoly worldwide on oilfield service and we were about to see a second. The Japanese invention of the supertanker.
While the Gringo bosses and their Brit lapdogs went about trying to make excuses and disavow their alliance with Israel the Japanese had been doing something much more to the point. Namely building a super big oil tanker. They were taking the Nobel invention of cargo bulk oil shipping to its ultimate and final breathtaking step. Building ships of new steel so big they could carry enough oil to fund an entire market for an extensive period of time --- furthermore these new super ships could pick oil up anywhere --- meaning they were no longer directly dependent upon the exporting countries for anything.
(Note how fast the Anglo-Saxon ``supporters'' of Israel were willing to abandon their ``ally'' when times got tough. Something the Israeli leaders had always known would happen; the reason they had prepared their defense in an atomic manner that in no way depended upon the same people who had let them be slaughtered in Europe before they had a homeland. Atom bombs are no joke and it is only Israel's possession of those weapons --- a product of their own initiative --- which, in the end, saved them.)
Today's Israeli leaders should really take a long look at their alliance with US imperialism which is in precipitous decline and will be no more reliable to them now than it has been in the past. The Gringo dominated post-Yalta Middle East is dissolving overnight from Tunisia, to Egypt, the Gulf States, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia are all in play. Whatever comes out it will not be good for Israel. Israeli leaders have an alternative but they have to act fast. Failure to do so may lead them to the total destruction they almost suffered in the Arab attack of 1973. Fortunately the Jewish people will survive no matter what happens to Israel but Israel's total destruction is not necessary and those with the ability should try and help their fellow religionists in avoiding annihilation which is the road Israel is currently on.)
602US ship builders had been taking the position that supertankers could not be built because of the size and weight of the cargo and the insufficient strength of then available alloyed steels, since the onset of the Eisenhower Administration in 1953. However, Japanese ship builders were already building big super-big tankers and soon with the invention of super steel the entire project had taken on a new life. By the end of the Suez crisis in 1957 and 1958 the Japanese had the ships and the ability to travel to Iran and Arabia and just about anywhere else to pick up loads of oil and get it back to the industrial heartland of their new Empire. Within a decade Japan was creating supertankers with five times the capability of these early ones; furthermore, in 1968 six new Japanese tankers were getting ready to go on a permanent run from Iran to Japan --- each with a capacity in excess of 300,000 tons of cargo --- seven times the size of the first generation (1957) supertankers.
603No longer would physical control of the oilfields be the key issue. Now it would be price.
British Capital Gets Lucky
Always preferring to steal rather than work to get what they want the Brit capitalists along with their French allies had lost Arabian oil to Nasser and the Arab Revolution. What happened to save them in the end was the huge oil strike in the North Sea.
The same year as the Arabs almost liquidated Israel --- 1973 --- exploration offshore Norway and the UK had yielded evidence of enormous quantities of oil in the North Sea
and at levels not even very deep. By 1975 Britain's labor fakir Prime Minister Harold Wilson was able to see that by 1980 Britain might well be the head of OPEC.
The Iranian Islamic Revolution
The corrupt US puppet Iran Regime of their creation --- the Government of the so-called ``Shah'' of Iran, Reva Pahlavi, was doomed to overthrow when his nincompoop son, the 1960's Shah, inherited the Throne. It was inevitable he would be overthrown by a coalition led by Iranian capitalist farmers under the leadership of the extremely orthodox Shia spiritual boss Ayatollah Khomeini. ---And the exit for the Americans was extremely messy as they had no leadership whatsoever on the ground in Persia or for that matter in the halls of government in Washington. Ken Follett's book On the Wings of Eagles describes the situation about as well as I think it can be described. (This is the story of how H. Ross Perot organized and carried out an armed rescue and prison break for a number of his employees being held in Tehran. In the process they released all the prisoners in Tehran's central jail.)
604For our purposes we should note that Iranian Communists seized control of the oilfields establishing what they called the Committee of 60 which was composed primarily of the Party's technocratic arm in alliance with the industrial workers in the oilfield plants and refineries. However, without a strong Party organization in other critical sectors of the working class and working farming masses the Party could not proceed to the seizure of state power and thus was cornered eventually by the ignorant Black Hundreds of the Islamic crackpots and liquidated.
-And, for our purposes in following the petroleum thread in this new multi-colored coat of international imperialist expansion we should note the Islamic Revolution succeeded in bringing the cap classes of the world to their knees once again. Even though Iranian output was only about 6 percent of the world's then total daily consumption it came on top of dislocations in supply already being experienced by the competing imperialist oil monopolies. (e.g., where the four Aramco partners had locked out others (like BP) from Saudi Arabia --- the main Arab producer). Also, it came after the Japanese had increased their private take of Iranian production (with secret agreements on price much to the disadvantage of the other oil monopolies) to some 20% of their total daily consumption and so faced the dire fact of almost immediate industrial paralysis should the new Muslim bosses in Iran choose to cut it off. A collapse of the Japanese economy would trigger a global capitalist collapse!
605At the time all of this was going on in the late 1970's I had my hands full in South America so, like you, I have had to learn much about those years from the historical record. By the time I got back to the States in late September 1980, the future of the US in Persia had been settled once and for all. No more oil for gringolandia from Iran except as it suited the Ayatollahs.
Venezuela Standing Up
Meanwhile in Latin America the tide was turning in favor of the national patriotic bourgeoisie and the national comprador bourgeoisie too. The latter joining the former time and time again to expel Gringoism (US control of local economies) in favor of themselves taking command of their own working people and exploiting them on their own for their benefit not the benefit of the gringos. Thus, from the early days of Juan and
Eva Peron in Argentina (1940's and early 50's) to the Viceroyalties of the Gringo Regime (of the 1970's and 1980's) in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, the cry was arising: Peron Si Yanqui No! Peru Si, Yanqui No! -And so on.
Alongside, inspired by Cuban Socialism, patriotic bourgeois, working class and farmer leaders throughout Latin America were forming guerilla armies to overthrow the local fascist and comprador (of US imperialism) regimes by direct Castro and Guevara like action.
In Venezuela, as we have seen, the US imperialist oil monopolies and the US Government had thoroughly tamed the all-too-willing to-be-corrupted regime of General Gomez. Subsequent regimes in Caracas had been just as corrupt. The end to all of this had to come, which is to say the end for the imperialists was inevitable, as the national bourgeoisie in Venezuela was chomping at the bit for a chance to get rich running their own country. Again, alongside, was a rapidly expanding communist movement, inspired by the success of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
In 1948 the oil monopolies succeeded in a military coup in placing a Colonel in charge of the Venezuelan government. The Truman Administration with its new imperialist foreign policy (having shit-canned FDR's within two weeks, the new fascist bosses were in full command) fully backed the new military tyranny. The Gringo's new boss was Marco Perez Jimenez and he was of exactly the same type as good old General Gomez (the oil companies had liked so well) before he had been unseated by ``local left wing trouble makers'' (As referred to by the CIA station boss report in 1958) in 1936. This was the period of Gringolandia attempting and often succeeding in establishing fascism in its own image throughout the world but especially in Latin America as in their earlier adventures against democracy in Guatemala and Cuba (organizing the fascist military adventures of Castillo Armas and Fulgencio Batista, respectively).
606The 1958 overthrow of oil monopoly stooge Perez Jimenez brought a temporary progressivism to Caracas. Among other things this resulted in the new bosses sending military and other support to Fidel Castro then fighting the final life and death battles for Cuba's liberation in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba's Oriente Province.
The first change in oil policy came as the new regime in Caracas hired once again the man who more than any other would shape the democratic direction for PDVSA: his name was Jose Pablo Perez Alfonso. Perez Alfonso had been around a long time with a lot of scrapes with the oil companies and their Government stooges. Most of this time as a result had been spent in exile. Now he had the opportunity to reshape Venezuela's oil policy so more of the money would actually (1) come to Venezuela under the never adhered to but always quoted 50/50 principle, and (2) be for the benefit of a broader social program for the people of Venezuela.
PDVSA
The first great change occurred in 1973. It centered around the creation of a Venezuelan form of PEMEX which they called PDVSA (Pay Day Vay is how these Spanish initials are pronounced in Spanish with SAW thrown in at the end --- S.A. is the Spanish equivalent for Inc. or Incorporated.) Petroleo de Venezuelos would evolve exactly as had PEMEX in Mexico; which meant the focus of corruption would be on the relationship between the Oilfield Workers Union and the imperialist oil bosses directly. Just as it was and is in Mexico today.
Remember, just because the oilfields are national property doesn't mean private enterprise is not involved. It is, and always has been, heavily involved in every way in Mexico and then also in Venezuela. Most oilfield service contracting in Mexico has always been done by Mexican privateers (e.g., Armando Leiva Torres) and international oil service monopolies (Shlumberger, Halliburton, NL Industries.) So it would be in Venezuela. -And the labor leaders in Mexico and later in Venezuela were labor gangsters almost to a man! Trillions have been extorted from the oilfield in both countries by these gangsters. This is a special form of legal combined with illegal corruption so unique it has its own group of US oil scholars in several universities.
Crisis in Mexico 1982
-And, in Mexico all was not well for imperialism either. I happened to be there and lived through the crisis.
I spent the years 1982 and 1983 as the Assistant Manager for NL Industries Mexican oilfield service operations (where we operated under the duked-in trade name of NL Shaffer de Mexico SA de CV.) Shaffer was an oilfield Blow Out Preventor company assimilated by the Borg-like expansion of NL as one of the world's three biggest oilfield service conglomerates. It already had legal status in Mexico and so we used it to bring in all the other new NL divisions such as NL McCullough which was the real operator for NL in Mexico and where I was a Logging Engineer (the key technocratic position in that realm of oilfield service known in the industry as ``wireline'' --- logging, perforating and pipe recovery) and Assistant Manager for Mexico. (See volume 7 in my autobiographical series: Amazon Empire.) (BOP stands for Blow Out Prevention in the oilfield and later I would learn it also stood for Bureau of Prisons in Gringolandia's totally corrupt federal judicial system.)
607However, my knowledge of the Mexican oilfield went back to 1962, when, at the foot of Carlos Prieto, I learned about the STPRM (Oilfield Workers Union of the Republic of Mexico) and its then new boss Joaquin Galicia Hernandez known as La Quina, throughout the nation. His ``closest comrade in arms'' as described in the STPRM propaganda was then Senator from Tamaulipas, Barragan Camacho. Another labor gangster who had taken the number two spot next to La Quina in exchange for his oath of fealty and more down to earth self interest in exploiting every aspect of the oilfield workers union for personal benefit, as instructed by his new ``closest comrade'' La Quina.
So I knew this and back then, twenty years earlier, in 1962, Carlos Prieto had told me how he had first personally encountered the new labor boss. Carlos had been on a trip to Tampico doing a documentary film for PEMEX. As they approached the refinery La Quina and his men had stopped the incoming caravan and La Quina personally mounted the cab carrying Carlos Prieto demanding money if they wished to enter and do their filming. Carlos told me he had almost lost his life without knowing it when he had refused. Upon telling this story to the local PEMEX manager of the refinery he said the manager became quite upset and left the room to pay La Quina himself and beg forgiveness for the ignorant intellectuals from Mexico City!
Whereupon Carlos launched into a long diatribe about how the labor gangsters had killed off or bought off the communists (Plomo o Plata --- Lead or Silver) and the sad state of labor relations in Mexico. I had this data under my belt by the time I arrived in Villahermosa, Tabasco, in September 1982 to take up the position of Assistant Manager
for NL Industries with secret orders to shut down the entire Mexican operation when the word was given from Houston.
The Gringo Regime had encouraged the Mexicans to borrow and borrow and borrow still more from the US oligarchy and its banks. That encouragement coming in the form of huge bribes. For the Mexican people, that borrowing being justified by the immense Mexican oil reserves and the assured annual income it produced, and for the social programs introduced and for which the Union claimed credit for itself. (These programs were important for the oilfield workers and their families but were a mere pittance compared to the billions being stolen outright by these union gangsters --- many of whom I knew well in more ways than the obvious. See my book Third Crusade for the details.)
The problem in 1982 flowed initially from collapsing oil prices globally and the subsequent inability of the Mexican government to pay its bills --- lack of cash. Then it got complicated when the Mexican oil minister ran afoul of the PRI President Lopez Portillo (1976-1982). (The Pemex chief is considered a Minister despite the fact he is technically under the Energy Ministry.) The oil Minister was the Mexican aristocrat Jorge Diaz Serrano, a longtime partner of George Bush Sr. in a variety of US and Mexican offshore oilfield service and actual oil ventures including Zapata Petroleum in Texas and PERMARGO in Mexico. (PERMARGO was the Mexican government contracted Marine Drilling Company of Bush and Diaz Serrano. It gave these two capitalists everything every capitalist wants: which is no competition and assured governmental payment --- this costs a lot in bribes in any country, including Mexico, and the USA.)
608Diaz Serrano unilaterally made the decision to cut the price on Mexican oil to compete in the global collapse of oil prices. Every barrel of oil going out of Mexico has a designated dollar amount going directly to the bank account of the President (whoever he may be, then and now.) Thus, this cut in oil prices meant a cut in Lopez Portillo's personal income! Lopez Portillo fired Diaz Serrano over this and more importantly removed ``the finger''.
What is ``the finger''?
When the PRI Mexican President announces his pick for successor, said pick is said to have received ``the finger.'' The PRI then proceeded to elect said person. His election was assured. Diaz Serrano had received it from Lopez Portillo and now it was gone.
Lopez Portillo chose in his place another New Class type of technocrat named Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (MMH). Before this was over Diaz Serrano would spend the next six years in prison. (That's when I realized how duplicitous Bush Sr. was. If he wouldn't help his friend and longtime business partner stay out of a Mexican jail when all it would have taken for a US Vice President was a phone call, I knew what kind of man he was --- and his whole fucking family as it turned out.) Bush dumped Diaz Serrano because now he had locked up his ``special relationship'' with the Saud family and this would eventually make him into a trillionaire. Too bad and tough shit for ``old friends.''
On this date I arrived in Villahermosa with my formal assignment as Assistant Manager for all of NL Industries operations in this most important foreign NL district (even though we only made about $300,000 per month in Mexico it was still the biggest foreign operation for that conglomerate at that time. Surprisingly even more than we made in the North Sea at that time.) Of course I had my secret orders to prepare to shut
down the entire operation when the word was given either from Houston (operational HQ for NL) or New York (where the rather parasitical Board of Directors for NL was sitting at the time. Their days were numbered too; although they didn't know yet about Harold Simmons and his soon to come hostile takeover.)
Lopez Portillo had appointed another famous Mexican aristocrat as Finance Minister in April (1982) and now came to depend upon him and his famous name to help in removing Diaz Serrano and the entire PEMEX bureaucracy that had sworn allegiance to him. The new Finance Minister Jesus Silva Herzog was himself also a very well trained technocrat. Furthermore his father had been involved in the original nationalization of the Mexican oilfield (1938) and was an early Director General for PEMEX. Together these two managed to get the nation to accept several things including the reorganizing of PEMEX under leadership agreed to by MMH, the incoming President, and the nationalization of all of Mexico's banks!
In the midst of this mess we (NL) were not getting paid and when I arrived had not been paid for nearly one year. It was for this reason the NL bosses wanted to shut down the Mexican operation. It wasn't that the Mexican's refused to pay; it was they didn't have the money to pay us for the ``tickets'' we had written monthly for services and which they had signed and agreed to. There were many other more important people to be paid with what they had.
What to do?
After I saw how well run the Villahermosa district was thanks to the best manager I have ever known --- E. King Freeland Jr. --- I decided a wiser course was available and decided to pursue it.
Of course the reality ignorant US bureaucrats in Houston and New York did not know how to get paid because they are the typical children of the US petit bourgeois New Class. Raised and educated in a fairy tale like way at ruling class prep schools like Andover these guys can barely get a hard-on, let alone figure out how to deal with the real world fucking they have to get into to work in a third world shit-hole like Mexico. If you want to get paid in these places you have to pay yourself! Yes you have to pay the paymaster to get at the front of the line. Anyone with any street knowledge of Latin America at all would have known this. Of course, those of you who have read my three Peruvian books know I had garnered plenty of that.
So I put the paymaster at PEMEX on my personal payroll. Then not satisfied with that I went to BANAMEX now owned by the Government and told them they would extend us full credit against our tickets. Just to be sure these bankers (I went to Mexico City to do this and then came back to the local BANAMEX bank chief to implement it) understood the importance of this cooperation to their own healthy wellbeing, in both cases I took with me Luis Contreras --- number one underboss of the STPRM in Mexico's Zone Five! Needless to say we got all we asked for and in fact even more.
As Mexican payments to foreign contractors collapsed (only NL was being paid for some reason, Schlumberger's boss for Mexico told me) Mexico formally defaulted. The gringo Regime had no choice but to work things out with the Mexicans and after several years of in-fighting between them it was. Then the other oilfield service providers got paid too.
The initial moratorium agreed to by the Yank bankers and political bosses in Washington was converted into a ``roll-over'' and Mexico given the time it would need to
put its house in order. Rising oil prices later on would take care of that and Mexico would not collapse again until the Gringo economy itself collapsed in 2008, a quarter of a century later.
As the World Turns
The Assassination of Miguel Zenteno
As an interesting aside, MMH upon assuming the Presidency, had appointed in 1983, young, well-educated and oilfield experienced Mexican petroleum engineer Miguel Zenteno as the de facto number one, within the new oil ministry. MMH had given him complete authority to reorganize PEMEX contracting. Since this involved in Zenteno's opinion the removal of the Union's automatic 2% on all contracting and their guaranteed oilfield service contracting preference it was also a death sentence, as it would turn out!
My principal Mexican partner was my girlfriend Leticia Mari whose former husband (Armando Leiva) had been Mexico's biggest oilfield service privateer - drilling and bringing-on-line, hundreds of oil wells in Mexico's major oilfields now in Zone Five (Tabasco and adjacent on and offshore drilling sites.) At the time I met her he had amassed 400 million dollars and was deriving many millions more per month in royalties! At my request she had organized a luncheon at Winston Churchill's (a major ruling class watering hole in Mexico City) where our (NL's) entrance into the Vera Cruz zone of Mexico's oilfield had been agreed upon among the ``wives.'' Who in this case included the wife of Mexico's oilfield paymaster, and the new wife of this new Pemex master engineer Miguel Zenteno. As a consequence Leticia and I had been invited to a get together in Poza Rica with PEMEX middle level engineers and Engineer Zenteno, his wife and children. We were to go there on a PEMEX Lear Jet the following Thursday.
609What happened in fact was only minutes after she had returned from that luncheon with all this news we were telephoned by Don Andres Sanchez Solis, boss of Zone 5 for the STPRM (Oilfield Workers Union of the Republic of Mexico) whose wife's home we were living in, in the Mexico City exclusive quarter called Polanco. He asked that I take them on an Opal hunting trip to Queretaro that Thursday and Leti thought it was the better choice for us than the trip with the Zenteno's to Poza Rica, since we now had in hand the contract to expand NL's interests in Mexico at Poza Rica.
The night in question came and after a long day of recovering Opals we two couples danced the night away in Queretaro's fanciest five-star hotel. A kind of super luxurious one-storied ``Best Western Motel'' like Hotel with full blown animal shrub sculptures (as in the movie The Shining). Upon returning to the room and turning on the TV we saw the news that Zenteno's Lear Jet had blown up over Poza Rica killing all on board. The engineer, his new wife and their children, the pilot and co-pilot were all dead.
Of course this was no accident. Not the explosion nor the fact I was not on the plane. Actually, I had been saved by accident. Doris Sanchez Solis was the best friend of my girlfriend. So the world turns.
T. Boone Pickens, Michael Milken and Me`
In 1984 I struck out in an independent way in Mexico and brought NL to the negotiating table not as an employer but as a ``target.'' As I say all of this was happening
in 1984, a quarter century ago, but the ramifications would last the better part of the remainder of my life.
Again
It all began for me when I met newly divorced Leticia Mari in Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico, that year. It was one of those cases of ``fascination at first sight''. The woman for whom I had fallen was extraordinarily experienced in the real world of Mexican oil and the politics that go along with it. She had climbed the success ladder with her previous husband over a period of some fourteen years; as he climbed from being a company man to the richest privateer in the Mexican Oilfield with at least four hundred million dollars in cash and a monthly income (royalties paid on a permanent ongoing basis as part of the contract with PEMEX for his COPSA services) of commensurate size. To make this long story too short let me skip ahead to January 1985. (For the details of how I got into the oilfield service business and then into the oil business itself you are invited to read the forthcoming Volumes 6 and 7 of my autobiographical series which are entitled Third Crusade and The Eunuch Wars).
610The following year, 1985, was a critical year because it was then I formed Jason Smith Petroleum Corporation (JSPC) in Los Angeles and proceeded to raise investor money and drill for oil in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming; specifically, in Weston County, near the small town of Upton. My strategy was simple. Search for oil in the cheapest way, which meant on land and in an area relatively well known geologically and simple to get equipment into, for less-than-deep total depth (TD.)
Deep in the oilfield means over 14,000 feet and ultra-deep means beyond 20,000 feet. This has a technical component and most importantly a financial component, as oilfield service price book charges increase at both deep and ultra-deep frontiers by a factor of 100% or more. (Everything in the US is done by oilfield service companies as the Oil Companies themselves are simply financial entities without in-house expertise of any kind in geology and engineering let alone drilling and all the jobs that go along with it.)
Some of the most important of these jobs and therefore the work of specific service companies are exploration, leasing, platform preparation and drilling, drilling mud, wireline (perforating, pipe recovery and well logging), fishing companies that specialize in recovering tools dropped down the hole, and many more.
My first well in the Powder River Basin's Wyoming province reached TD at about 8000 feet which made it the deepest well in Weston County. Here we hit considerable oil according to oil shows (as we later proved in federal court when the Gringo Regime's prosecutors were pursuing their client's (NL's) desires in trying to put me out of business --- which we also proved after I uncovered secret correspondence between the SEC flunkeys and Dock Parnell, NL's so-called ``security chief''.) That particular client being my former employer NL Industries. NL was scared to death I would put them out of Mexico and take that business for JSPC. They were right.
I was the typical ``small'' oil man. Something akin perhaps to Dad Joiner in Texas we have reviewed above. My opponent --- NL Industries --- was one of the three biggest oilfield service companies in the world (Schlumberger and Halliburton being the other two at that time.) We reviewed Schlumberger's origins in our discussion of the First Five Year Plan in Chapter 15.
Halliburton was originally just a cementing company with a small wireline arm called Welex. Then it made a deal with Dick Cheney and this nothing politician jumped from being Wyoming's only congressman to being Halliburton's CEO. Along the way he and they would make billions as Cheney duplicated Bush I's strategy as the fast way to the big time. Cheney's new job as Bush II's VP gave Halliburton everything every capitalist dreams of --- no competition, guaranteed no bidding contracts, and the Iraq War to go along with it, which provided still more super profits via no bid contracting.
Get Smith Forget About Madoff
NL had one important asset and that was its ownership of the gringo SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). They simply bought (bribed) SEC lawyers and some high officials in the LA US Attorney's office. In other words the SEC had among their employee's, many flunkeys in the US Attorney's Office for Los Angeles and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), specifically at their local parasitical nest for the West, in Denver. Especially three scumbags named Dan O'Brien, Robert Fusfeld and David Abbot. Accordingly federal cops and prosecutors spent millions trying to put me out of business (and in jail) over several years (1985 --- 1991).
During that time, beginning in 1989, when numerous complaints about Madoff began to be filed with the SEC, they purposefully managed to miss this real con man (I was always a real oilman and the proof lay in the fact the totally corrupt US regime could never find an investor to testify against me) Bernie Madoff, altogether, even though he eventually made off with well over fifty billion dollars! Gosh I wonder if that was an accident?
No, it wasn't. It was the direct result of a direct order from the National Security Council! Why was I a greater danger to their system then Bernie Madoff?
We have seen what NL was afraid of. What the US Government was deathly afraid of was another Armand Hammer --- the US Communist we have reviewed above who by that time was untouchable, as a billionaire himself --- and as President of Occidental Petroleum. We have reviewed some of Hammer's successes in Chapter 26 foregoing.
In short, my problem was not just with low level scumbags like Assistant US Attorneys (e.g., O'Brien) or comical bureaucrats, (e.g., Fusfeld and Abbot.) If these had been all I had to confront we could have handled that. The problem came because it was the US National Security Council weighing in. These top spy bosses in Washington felt they had one communist oilman on their hands and did not want another! The National Security Advisor gave the Green Light to destroy JSPC and me.
(This infuriated a few Special Agents with a sense of fair play in the FBI, because no matter how they may have felt about me and my politics, they saw the gross injustice being done to several hundred innocent investors by the Government's actions. This helped me in ways I cannot yet divulge.)
Additionally, and at exactly the same time, all the fattest of the fat US ruling families were scared to death of T. Boone Pickens who while much smaller than Hammer had proven that with the few hundred million dollars of value in Mesa Petroleum in Texas he could make himself into one of the most important ``independent'', albeit small, among Middle-sized oilmen. (Superior Oil was valued over
five billion at the time and the biggest of the Middle-sized oil companies, with about 25 times as much capital as Mesa.) Jason W. Smith was in the National Security Council's view quite capable of raising a hundred million and that would put everyone into play and by a communist! They were, of course, right on all counts.
Finance is the Gun in USA High Level Gangster Economics
Politics is Knowing When to pull the Trigger
The Gringo federal political system is simply a ``regularized and fair'' gangland system of the Meyer Lansky type --- just on a much bigger scale. The gun behind Pickens, which terrified these fat cats, was not Mesa which was strictly ``small potatoes'', but the financial genius Michael Milken down the street from us (so to speak, I was in Culver City, Howard Hughes Jr.'s old stomping grounds) in Beverly Hills (and no Hillbilly's) where his Drexel Burnham Lambert financial operation was raising billions of dollars for Pickens who intended to take over ``their'' (Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon etc.) oil companies by hostile stock buying. This was the death knell challenge for each and every one of the Seven Sisters.
Milken had invented the idea of investors getting big returns (rather than tiny percentage offered by the ruling families and their banks) by buying into companies with scientifically derived real world values using an older, time-tested and tried instrument, usually associated with ``penny-stock'' offerings The cap press immediately dubbed these new instruments as ``junk bonds.'' Milken and I would both end up in a federal prison because the federal courts are totally corrupt, but along the way we kicked a lot of ass and did not go willingly! Remember US federal judges are just another category of corruptible federal bureaucrats. (Not just my opinion but judging by the number of them in federal prison, a fact agreed upon by the US oligarchs.)
The mechanism was simple and worked in this fantastic new way because investors had confidence in the issuer. It derived from the fact Milken had proven over many years his ability to investigate a given company and when he found it well managed, with real potential, he would advise his private clients to buy its stock, perhaps putting one of their own on its Board of Directors just to be sure this potential was realized once injected with capital. The buy-in was done via the old penny-stock route where these ``stocks'' were now called ``bonds'' and as we have seen were considered a new instrument by pundits and their press which immediately dubbed them as ``junk bonds.'' In actuality the only difference between Milken's instruments and those considered by the cap press to be non-junk was that Milken's paper was not insured. (On the other hand neither was the stock of most of the Fortune 500's listing.) Milken's cadre of investors understood this and if one believed Milken's financial advice was good, as they did, then said person would buy, and buy in amounts he recommended. It worked because (1) Milken's track record was impeccable and (2) because the greedy cap bankers had forced wealthy investors to search for some place, other than these banks, to put their money.
611When Milken met Pickens in 1983, Mesa was as I say a small entity (a minor independent, incredibly small compared to the Seven Sisters.) Thus, the fat cat directors of the Seven Sisters (who usually knew little or nothing about petroleum geology or engineering) laughed at the idea one of them could be ``taken over'' by this upstart out of
Texas. That was before they realized Milken could raise in thirty days as many billions of dollars as Pickens would need in taking over each and every one of these companies as he proceeded one by one. The end of the Old Order was written on the wall.
Cities Service
Before Milken however, Pickens had experimented in 1982 in the take-over of big oil companies with a run at Cities Service. Cities Service was the original creation of Henry Doherty, and in 1982 was the number 19 oil company in the US and number 38 in the DOW listing of industrial concerns. In the end Armand Hammer stepped in and bought up Cities Service and Pickens cleared about 30 million dollars in this try out. By mid-1983 Pickens was deeply involved in offshore Gulf of Mexico drilling (with fifty one drilling rigs working simultaneously, which mean huge daily outflows of cash) and needed ten times that much ready cash just to stay afloat! (When I went into the oilfield in Louisiana in 1982 it was common to pay $250,000 per hour for a rig only working in shallow ``inland waters.'') Thirty million dollars as an outcome would buy a little time but otherwise was like pissing into the wind when you had to have 300 million!
612Gulf
Pickens got into the big time when he next targeted Gulf Oil that dangerous year (1983) when Mesa and Pickens could have been bankrupt at any moment. Gulf was one of the Seven Sisters and originally the financial engine of the Mellon family in the US (after Spindletop) and Kuwait. But to take over Gulf would take a lot more than fooling around with stock purchases on the order of what Mesa had done with Cities Service. It would take billions --- perhaps 14 billion to take a majority position at Gulf!
Pickens had learned a lot about Gulf in his fight for Cities Service as Gulf had at first been his major competitor in the hostile takeover front. Armand Hammer had ended the fight when he bought all of Cities Service stock. Now Pickens would put his knowledge about Gulf to work. Gulf was terribly managed and had been for a long time and had not found a new barrel of oil anywhere in the world for well over a decade.
None of this would matter of course unless someone even bigger than Hammer were to get involved. Who could that be? Gulf's President Jimmy Lee, laughed ``J.R. Ewing is just a TV show'' Little did he know a real life J. R. Ewing (Dallas) was already taking aim at him and his bullshit Board of Directors. Their Achilles Heel was their investor base they had abused and misused for many years. Gulf was vulnerable precisely because its appraised value was three times its then current stock value. In December, 1983, Gulf's management survived its stockholders meeting by the narrowest of margins (52 to 48% against Pickens).
Enter Michael Milken. In January 1984 Gulf was in play and Pickens was the major threat to Gulf's management once again. Gulf decided to go for a ``friendly'' cap buyer. They found one in Chevron (another Rockefeller Trust spin off, earlier named Standard Oil of Southern California -SOCAL) and sold out for cash to the tune of 13.2 billion dollars which meant shareholders, who had gone from $41 per share to $80 per share by this time, thanks to Pickens and his Gulf Investors Group and Mesa, made some 6.5 billion in profit! Mesa's share was an after tax profit of about 300 million. Exactly the amount Pickens had to have to stay alive and continue in the Gulf of Mexico.
Univision
While this was going on NL Industries using their so-called security chief Dock Parnell suborned the SEC flunkeys in Denver and began a non-stop attack on me and JSPC in Los Angeles. I had to have money to survive that kind of attack and I decided to try a wild card much as Pickens had just done against Gulf to get the 300 million he had to have to stay afloat. I decided to go after the Azcarraga family press, radio and TV in the USA!
This Azcarraga Mexican oligarch family had illegally owned newspapers, television and radio stations in the USA since at least 1940. US law forbids foreign ownership of the press above about 10 percent, but as long as it was just the Spanish media the gringo racists had let it go. (Rupert Murdoch circumvented the US law on foreign ownership by first becoming a US citizen and then bringing in his fascist poison onto our airwaves. The Azcarragas had too much self-respect to do the same thing.)
Now however, the CIA had, surreptitiously, for its own anti-Mexican establishment reasons, brought a case against the Azcarragas, which had ended in a recent administrative judge's decision in this FCC case against that ownership. What had resulted was the longest opinion in such a matter ever issued and the bottom line was a divestiture order. They had to sell out and get out by June 1, 1986. They had been busy arranging a friendly takeover (much as had Gulf with Chevron) when I stepped in just before 5:00 p.m. on the last day, with a formal and registered offer in Los Angeles of over a quarter of a billion dollars in cash and securities with my own takeover company led by my father, former Idaho Attorney General, Graydon W. Smith.
I was aware of what was happening in this industry because the Azcarragas were involved and had temporarily become the enemy of the far fascist right in Washington under Reagan. It was my business to know what the enemies of the people were up too as you should have surmised by now. Now it was my self-appointed assignment to stop the CIA plot anyway possible.
These Gringo nutballs (typical of the screwballs that inhabit the CIA) thought they could influence the US Mexican-American population away from what they considered to be the ``left wing'' line of the Mexican press if they could force out the Azcarragas. Then they would put the Spanish press, radio and TV in the US into play and they would buy it out and convert it into the servile pack of liars that constitute the entire US English press, radio and TV already under their control. (They got their way with Telemundo eventually.)
The SEC acting on the new Azcarraga orders at the same time they were implementing the NL program and the NSC desires, this time launched an all-out attack against me and JSPC. We simply did not have the money to beat NL and Azcarraga with the US Government helping both of them against me. I had to make peace on one front and engage in total war on the other. Not yet strong enough to win a two-front war we decided we had no choice but to whip NL first and then we might or might not return to the Spanish press fight depending on where it had evolved by that time. Either way I had to beat the US Government also, so it didn't matter that much in practical terms whether we took on one or the other. But it made a big difference to me in trying to build an independent oil company in the US and oilfield service company in Mexico.
613What emerged from the attempted SICC takeover was Univision. In effect the Azcarragas got some good advice and dropped the idea of direct ownership of all of the
Spanish language newspapers, TV and radio stations, in favor of selling them to US buyers and supplying them with all of their content produced at the Azcarraga Televisa studios in Mexico City --- as I say the result was Univision. In short, the Azcarragas sold the hardware and in the end made far more money on the software. The Gringo conspirators faded away as did we. The CIA plot foiled permanently.
George H. W. Bush, Zapata Petroleum, Jorge Diaz Serrano and Me
John D. Rockefeller had always kept a coterie of politicians at his beck and call. One of the stable had been Senator Bush from Connecticut. His son George Herbert Walker Bush (sometimes called Bush I after his presidency and that of his son Bush II) decided after World War II to give a shot at the oil business and accordingly moved to Midland Texas where he did the typical rich small oil man startup and eventually created along with a few pals Zapata Petroleum. Along the way he encountered the Mexican aristocracy.
Chief new friend amongst Mexican New Class technocrats being Jorge Diaz Serrano, who became his partner in a new offshore drilling company called Permargo. This unholy combine of Rockefeller money and Diaz Serrano political power in Mexico gave these two what all capitalists want --- namely, as we have mentioned before, the best of all capitalist worlds at its disposal --- guaranteed Mexican Government contracts without competition.
George H. W. Bush no longer needed to be in the oilfield. With Permargo he had the best deal any individual oilman in his position could have had. He decided to follow in his father's footsteps. He had certainly learned as a child and as a youth from his father and from his ruling class prep school (Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) background (and Yale) the importance and potential great profitability of being at the seat of government in Washington when it came to making large amounts of money.
Bush started as an oil industry congressman for Houston and then went through the obligatory steps starting with Gringo Ambassador to the United Nations, then Chairman of the Republican National Committee (at the critical time of Watergate), moving on to become the Gringo ambassador to the People's Republic of China, and finally, boss of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was during these latter assignments his path and mine finally crossed.
After a highly successful archaeological summer (1976) in La Jolla California (a northern suburb of San Diego) Richard S. MacNeish invited me to Andover (where he was Head of the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology on the campus of this US ruling class prep school) to become his Assistant. While there he introduced me to the staff of the Anthropology Department at Harvard. I finally got to meet some of my hero's in anthropology including Gordon Willey and others including Carleton Coon. Among the three bosses of the Peabody Foundation were Scotty (MacNeish), Gerald Piel (then publisher of Scientific American magazine) and George H. W. Bush.
Mr. Bush was not terribly impressed with me (perhaps because of my obvious communist leanings) and did not deign to acknowledge receipt of a copy of my textbook Foundations of Archaeology when I sent him a copy (at his CIA office) hot off the press in 1976. Do you wonder why?
Bush got back into big time oil after he became Vice President of the USA on the Republican ticket under Ronald Reagan (Reagan beat him for the Presidential nomination
and he happily settled for this number two spot.) But Bush had bigger thing in his sights than a ceremonial position. He wanted Saudi money for himself and of course that meant he would get it by selling influence at the highest level to the trillionaire Saud family who certainly could afford him, and absolutely wanted to keep him close.
In later years his son George W. Bush would use Saudi money to get what he wanted too, including a rich investor in his (what turned out to be) Mickey Mouse oil drilling projects in Texas and elsewhere. Why would a trillionaire family like the House of Saud, with the greatest oil production rate in the world and the world's greatest then known reserves want to get involved in small time Texas oil drilling? Gosh I don't know. What do you think?
H. Ross Perot knew and it burned his ass! Perot had balls the size of church bells but he was also a little naïve all of his life. The blatant corruption of the Bush family with the Saudi's violated his sense of fair play to the degree he could no longer stand it and jumped into the Presidential race against Bush and Carter and this gave Jimmy C. the election as it turned out. (Perot withdrew but not until he had permanently alienated twenty percent of the Republican vote from Bush.)
Back at the Ranch
Bush no longer needed Diaz Serrano and went on to prove it allowing the new Mexican President MMH to put his old friend and business partner Diaz Serrano in prison for six years beginning in 1983. I have reviewed how I arrived in Mexico for NL Industries at the end of the Lopez Portillo administration when the PRI had turned against Diaz Serrano. I have described some of the subsequent events above. In the end it would be my creation of Jason Smith Petroleum Corporation which moved me and it into the sights of the new regime in Washington and specifically into the sights of the experienced Gringo spy George H.W. Bush.
All of this is perhaps of little direct interest to you readers but you should note one important thing. Namely, the ability of the Gringo Regime to force any capitalist out of business when it no longer is convenient for the Oligarchy for said person and entity to exist. These years were the final step in converting US imperialism into a private plaything for a small group of trillionaire and centi-billionaire families.
The Soviet New Class
Tyrannosaur Capitalism 1976 --- 1990
The New Class in Transformation: Phase II
We have reviewed some details about Guanlong Capitalism but in its mildly predacious form it was not a clear and present danger. We should have seen that it was. Andropov believed it was and as KGB chief he had led a fight against it not only in the Party but in many government institutions in Russia and especially in the Trans-caucuses. Unfortunately, try as he did, he could not make the Party leaders as sure of the inherent danger it posed to the very socialist nature of Soviet society. In other words, it was not yet inevitable that the great Soviet experiment would succumb to capitalism. Yet because
the Party failed to recognize the growing class structure based around the second economy the great tragedy of the 20th century did unfold. It came in the form of the monster of Tyrannosaur Capitalism.
I cannot over emphasize the importance of your grasping the equally great historical irony that our side had withstood incredibly bad odds from Day One. In this Handbook you have seen how we defeated the Whites and their foreign capitalist interventionist allies; how we defeated all of the plots of the foreign capitalist regimes against us in the 1920's and 1930's. You have seen how the USSR led the fight worldwide for the destruction of Hitlerism by transforming Rapallo from a German-Soviet alliance into am English-speaking World-Soviet alliance, and then withstood the assault of gringo hegemonized world capital when the US picked up the gauntlet dropped by world fascism. The USSR not only withstood that imperialist assault it took the lead in every scientific and engineering area. All of this accomplishment of the first economy however was to be subverted by the newly emerging bourgeoisie within our own, (socialism's own), homeland, via the second economy.
614As I say, in 1976 it would not yet have been too late to reverse the trajectory toward capitalist restoration except for three things. In the event (the 14 years, 1976-1990) these three factors weighed decisively against the ability of reformers (Andropov, et. al.) in the Soviet leadership to be able to get the USSR back onto the correct road.
First of all the capitalist second economy was largely denied by the very Party, its Government and State that would be required to excise it. Try as he did Andropov could not convince the Party that the second economy was a clear and present danger to the very Soviet experiment they were leading. Perhaps the reformers didn't try hard enough. Perhaps the enemy had grown simply too all pervasive in class structure and was just better organized. But the lesson is that the Party must get capitalist economics out of the shadows and into the open world if it is to be contained. The PRC has led the way in this regard. Perhaps, therefore, what happened in the USSR was necessary in order to teach all of us this critical lesson. It did give China the time it needed to prevent the capitalist sector of their economy from duplicating its success in the PRC. Even a cursory glance at the many English language pages from Chinese publications on the internet will show any observer that China has a complete and total grip on the capitalist sector. Furthermore that the positive aspects of emerging capitalism have been harnessed to the needs of the proletarian Party and the classes it represents.
615Second, back to Russia and the Republics, the small exchange and service supply functions which had justified leaving the second economy in place all along continued to be important and it would require some approach to the organization or at least control of small exchange we had not yet seen, if the second economy as constituted was to be replaced. This was still the pre-computer era and the
option of computerized total planning and centralization in government large-scale planning was just being born in the most advanced capitalist countries. (For example, in the work of H. Ross Perot, and EDS, in Dallas.)
Thirdly, throughout the USSR, the mafia component of the second (capitalist) economy was prepared to push their plan through, and in fact did so. To counter our state apparatus they used their gangster tactics to eliminate opponents; that is to say those who indicated they might be prepared to take steps to liquidate the second economy.
The Mafia Doctor's Plot: the Assassination of Yuri Andropov
Taking the last point first, the most dramatic example of mafia power came in the form of the case of General Secretary Andropov. The assassination of Andropov is the case in point.
Yuri Andropov was by this time an Old Bolshevik, and following Brezhnev's death in 1982 he was elevated to the General Secretaryship of the CPSU. There can no longer be any doubt but that his sudden illness (within three months of assuming his new position) was organized by the mafia. The medical plot worked and played out over the coming year like a spy movie thriller. The bottom line was that the plot reduced Andropov's fifteen month tenure to one of constant illness before he finally succumbed. Thus history, in the event, records the ``Andropov Year'' (1982-1983) as the last chance the Soviet Party had to rectify the otherwise inevitable course of capitalist restoration the Soviet Union was unwittingly following. After that it was all over for Socialism as it had come to be known in the USSR, at least for the time being.
616The Mafia had their candidates to be the new boss of the USSR. First there was Konstantin Chernenko, an ignorant and rather stupid person, who also passed rather quickly (two years, 1984-85) perhaps of natural causes. Then the evil genius himself was in position to do the final job of liquidating socialism (Mikhail Gorbachev 1985-1990). After all a system that had withstood all of international capitalism's plots so far required a coup de grace that could only be administered by the CPSU itself. Whether Gorbachev knew at first he was to be the executioner or not is another matter altogether. At long last the Mafia had a Government as an equal partner as Hyman Roth (Meyer Lansky) would have said.
Why was Yuri Andropov (1914 --- 1983) so dangerous to the Mafia and the entire second economy class? (1) First because he was a highly prestigious Old Bolshevik. Although he had joined the Party nearly a generation after the October Revolution he had been mentored by some of Lenin's top men beginning with Otto Kuusinen. (2) Second because Andropov embodied all the personal traits admired by the Party: austere living, dedication to work (a Stalin-like workaholic personality), constant self-education, and he
had (3) an impressive history of having dealt successfully with the most difficult assignments the Party had to offer, including the 1956 mess in Hungary. (4) Fourth, because he had a proven record of policing effectively against the Second Economy as KGB chief over the previous fifteen years (1967-1982), and (5) most importantly as a danger to the mafia, and Fifth, because he had proposed the complete and final uprooting and liquidation of the entire second economy. As General Secretary he would have the power to do just that. Accordingly, as far as the Mafia was concerned, he had to die!
Note (1) that the KGB, of which Andropov was boss for the preceding 15 years, was the structural equivalent in the Communist Party of the Jesuit Order in the Catholic Church. Also, note (2) Andropov's close association with the theoretical purists of the Party from the date of his joining the Bolshevik Party in 1936. From these earliest days he had the good fortune to be directly mentored by the Old Bolshevik Otto Kuusinen, and his association with this group continued over the following fateful years, especially with Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov. (3) He had an absolute personal hatred of the criminal element in the Soviet Republics and an outstanding record in breaking it up, in and out of the Party, in his years as KGB boss. Finally, (4) he was one of the few highly placed Politburo leaders who admitted, and in fact emphasized, the existence of the Mafia and the scope of its activities (meaning the entire second economy.)
617`` as head of the KGB, Andropov took responsibility for the crackdown on dissident intellectuals, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Andropov's willingness to defend these actions openly and to withstand the criticism of Western commentators and such Soviet intellectuals as Yevgeny Yevushenko, strongly suggested that Andropov would have avoided Gorbachev's blunder of turning the media over to anti-socialist elements. (emphasis added, ed.) As head of the KGB, Andropov also showed courage and conviction by investigating corruption in high places. On his KGB watch, the entire Presidium (Politburo, ed.) and government of Azerbaijan were dismissed for corruption, bribery and embezzlement. Moreover, in 1981, Andropov's deputy exposed and arrested some of the `black market-ridden la dolce vita crowd'' that included Brezhnev's daughter and son-in-law. Even investigating crime in the General Secretary's family did not daunt Andropov.''' (Socialism Betrayed, Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, International Publishers, New York, 230 pp. this citation pg. 40).
618Leading to the decision to elevate Andropov to the position of General Secretary had been the fact that the Politburo (Presidium) and the entire Party had been impressed with his theoretical preparation for tackling the problems of constructing Socialism in the USSR, which included liquidating the second economy. Belatedly many in the Party from the leadership on down were beginning to see the entire second economy phenomenon as a serious threat to Soviet socialism (or at least some of them had.) Those Politburo and Central Committee members who did not yet see the second economy as a clear and
present danger still thought Andropov's analysis of the problems of the first economy was correct, and that he could set things straight there. Andropov led the way in his call to reform the first and second economies in the following theoretical way:
(1) The internal discussions among the High Priests of Soviet Socialism, Andropov had
(2) Given three papers also delivered as speeches in
(i) November 22, 1982 (``The Better We Work the Better We Will Live'');
(ii) December 21, 1982 (again on the same topic); and
(iii) On June 15, 1983 (``Analysis of the Existing Situation and Landmarks for the Future''). ---And,
(3) A longer treatise on the matter also in 1983 (``Karl Marx's Teaching and some of the Problems of Building Socialism in the USSR''), the latter marking the Centennial of Marx's death in 1883.)
The Mafia read these papers and listened to these speeches and if they had had any doubts, they now knew that their future depended on killing the man who proposed to do away with them (the organized crime element) and the very conditions they required (the second economy) to continue operating as the bosses of this real economy, now becoming bigger than the first economy as we shall see in a few statistics below. I recommend that serious students of this Handbook read the thorough summary discussion of Andropov's analysis in pages 41 --- 46 in Keeran and Kenny (2004).
The New Class in Jurassic Park
Now let us look at the statistics relevant to the emergence of the New Class in its new Tyrannosaur form under, Brezhnev, Chernenko and Gorbachev. Note that with the death of the chief reformer (Andropov) not everything went immediately straight to hell. The institutionalization of study of the second economy was a continuing fact and one of its many forms was the Economic Research Institute of the USSR State Planning Commission. In her 1990 monograph ``The Shadow Economy in the USSR'', a leading expert on the second economy Tatiana Koriagina, compared the total amounts of legal earned income to the total amount of money being expended (spent and/or saved.)
The Growth of the Monthly Salary of Workers Compared with the Growth of the Total Size of Money Spent on Goods and Services and Saved in the Savings Banks (S/S) in Billions of Rubles Monthly
1960 1970 1975 1980 1985 1988
Salary 80.6 122 145.8 168.9 190.1 219.8
% 1960 152 180 210 236 273
Total S/S 103.2 223.2 329.9 464.6 590 718.4
% 1960 216 320 450 572 696
Overall Koriagina said that statistics for the entire economy showed that the second economy was growing at a much more rapid rate than the first economy, and faster than these selected area statistics indicated. The second economy had grown by a factor of 18 while the first economy had grown by only a factor of 4 or 5. The 1988 total of money spent and saved was nearly seven times greater than the total amount of money earned, in the first economy. How could that be?
Obviously what Brezhnev said ``none of us live on wages alone'' was true. That excessive amount spent and saved had come from the only place it could come from and that is the second economy: legal and increasingly illegal. Class power, and thus political power, was shifting dramatically. The question of legality was now an academic one. Clearly the present was full of danger for capitalist restoration. By 1985 only the most determined Party police and propaganda assault could have saved the USSR. Instead the Soviet Union got the great traitor Mikhail Gorbachev who enabled the New Class form of capitalism we witnessed emerge in 1990 and himself was followed by another traitor (Boris Yeltsin) who outlawed the Communist Party itself!
``Taken together, a variety of monographs provided a kaleidoscopic view of the second economy during the Brezhnev years. Private food vendors sold goods valued at 35.5 billion rubles a year (21). Soviet barbers in state owned barbershops customarily collected ``very high'' tips ``in effect transporting the transaction into the SE [second economy] (22). The home production of grape and fruit wine and beer, the illegal resale of state beverages, and the sale of stolen ethanol, accounted for as much as 2.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 1979. (23) By the late 1970's, the black market sale of gasoline by drivers of state-owned cars and trucks allegedly accounted for between 33 and 65 percent of all gasoline sales in urban areas (24). Privately rented housing brought
619illegal landlords an estimated 1.5 million rubles in 1977 (25). Tips, bribes and payments for private services (such as religious ceremonies) associated with funerals involved more than four times the amount of money spent on official funerals. (26) Prostitution and illegal drug sales constituted another part of the second economy. (27)'' (Keeran and Kenny, 2004:57)
Part of the changing nature of the class structure was the concomitantly changing nature of technology and the social organizational system extant. Even the perhaps 30% (1989) percentage of the population with income derived primarily from the second economy still had first economy jobs. The rest of the population (70%) whose primary income was from the first economy still participated at one level or another in the second economy, if in no other way with what Western capitalist economists call ``disposable income.'' (Of course, many persons within that 70% also operated small second economy businesses from home.)
Back to the Founding Fathers
In this sense the operation of the second economy brought ongoing stability to the Soviet Regime. As late as 1989 some 96% of the national population (the Party was constantly polling) were all in favor of the Soviet system. The most common comment being, to paraphrase, ``what we have is the best system in the world despite all its problems and we could solve these if we went back to the founding fathers'' (in this case meaning Lenin and Stalin.) Sound familiar?
Seduction Enabled and Promoted
The second economy had always provided those consumer items the first economy could not provide (given the Party's emphasis on heavy industry, steel, aluminum, electricity, etc., and then on light industry devoted to increasing overall production --- e.g., trucks and tractors.) Furthermore the increasingly prosperous Soviet citizenry had more and more disposable income to get the second economy things it wanted. Why? Because the first economy guaranteed them a cradle-to-grave annual income, covered all medical and educational as well as communication and transportation expenses. What they had monthly was largely expendable (disposable) income! ---And, as Gorbachev turned the press and media over to the most reactionary elements in the country the citizenry was being enticed with knowledge about consumer items many had never even heard of before. They had the money to get these things and anything one wanted could be obtained in the second economy after 1985, if not before.
620
The Party Succumbs to Corruption
The statistics prove that the Party was inundated with every conceivable form of bribery, extortion, subornation, and as a result its high moral character was not only reduced but it was largely destroyed. ``Believer's'' in the doctrine of Communism as developed by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, and Joseph Stalin were reduced to kids and Old Bolsheviks, much as Christianity had been reduced to children and old women in the cap countries. This affected the CPSU from the bottom to the very top as the corruption of General Secretary Brezhnev's own family proved. Once the Party was thoroughly corrupted by the Tyrannosaur second economy it was only a hop skip and a jump until it could be used to pull the trigger in assassinating the Soviet Republic. That is exactly what happened in 1989-1990.
621Coup de Grace
Finance is the gun in class politics. Politics is knowing when and how to pull the trigger. In the case of the assassination of Socialism in the USSR the financial (class) basis was the complete transformation of the Second Economy from an adjunct of the first into its driving component. The end of socialism (the first economy) was guaranteed when the now corrupt Party (CPSU) and its corrupted mode of production in the Soviet Union, as the gun, was placed in the hands of the pistolero Mikhail Gorbachev who fired the shots that did away with the last enemy Soviet capitalist mafia bosses confronted --- i.e., the Soviet state and government itself. In so doing, Gorbachev did what Hitler had failed to do. In the meantime, for better or for worse, the lessons of the second economy and the traitors it spawned in and out of the Party, and how it and they succeeded in transforming socialism backwards into capitalism of an even more hellish form than had existed before Bolshevism would have to be learned elsewhere.
622
The International
These lessons were not lost on the Chinese Party which had embarked upon a totally new road with regard to how to deal with the second economy in their own country ten years before Gorbachev took power in March of 1985. The Vietnamese, being as well led as they were, soon followed China's lead. The Cuban's in a much more dangerous geographical position vis a vis US imperialism had to take a slower road and only in 2011 did they make the big jump to the Chinese model. Korea was stuck in an increasingly dangerous stagnation as its own internal structure delayed its transition to the Chinese model even longer than the Cubans but as of this writing they seem to be about to make that move.
To the Soviet Party and to the International Communist Movement Gorbachev's March 1985 assumption of power as General Secretary gave the outward appearance of everything was going to be alright after all.
Gorbachev 1985-1986
Starting out by referring to Andropov's initial November 22, 1982 speech on the economic problems in the USSR Gorbachev initiated a series of economic policies which quickly showed an antithetical approach to what had been outlined by the great theoretician. What he called restructuring (perestroika) took the factor of centralization as the key problem facing the Government and his programs began dismantling what was in fact the most successful part of the Soviet system. Using anti-corruption measures as a cover (and some of the assaults on Party and Government bosses were correct and had been initiated by the Cheka under Andropov) to dismantle key bureaucratic institutions such as the Ministry of Instruments (where Gorbachev fired 1000 technical workers), fired 50,000 industrial managers, fired one third (50+) of the first and regional and district secretaries, fired 14 of the 25 Central Committee department heads along with their staffs and often obliterated their functions. 40% of the USSR's ambassadors were fired. Over half of the Politburo's full and candidate members were dismissed. Gorbachev had both disarmed his opponents and dismantled the Party and Government structure in his first three months.
623Simultaneously, Gorbachev began to turn the media over to the worst enemies socialism could imagine within its own borders. Everything was wrong here not the least being the almost overnight introduction of capitalist concepts of ``the good life'' which most Soviet citizens were only vaguely aware of. This precisely at the time that the US imperialists had stepped up the massive radio broadcasting into the USSR encouraging all sorts of sedition, spreading all sorts of envy creating jealousy about living standards. Then Gorbachev enabled the entire US campaign by stopping jamming! Hitler in Moscow could not have been worse.
Within the arena of international affairs at precisely the moment the Carter-Reagan offensive against the Socialist system was at its high point Gorbachev began making a series of concessions which only weakened the Soviet position. Under these two capitalist regimes the die-hard US ruling class strategy of rolling back Soviet socialism at any cost required a Stalin-like class struggle attitude --- tit for tat --- massive reinvestment in heavy industry and defense industry. Gorbachev did exactly the opposite. Let us look at what the capitalists did to subvert the Soviet Union.
(1) As we will see in the chapters on US imperialism (23 through 28) the North American colossus had complete and total control over Saudi Arabia after World War II
and this meant over most of the Arab World's oil which also meant most of OPEC's oil. Working with that tool in hand US imperialism drove down the world price of oil (being sure that the Saudi oil spigot was turned on at full production meaning low prices.) Overnight this cut Soviet foreign currency reserves by 50%. In hard dollar terms this meant that the 20+ billion dollars in annual foreign currency accumulated in the USSR was reduced by 10 billion.
(2) Simultaneously the US imperialists picked up the gauntlet against Poland (with the CIA AFL-CIO Solidarity front organization) and Afghanistan (creating the Al-Qaida Jihadist movement it directed against the most progressive government Afghanistan had ever had or would ever have for generations to come) which required another ten billion US dollars or so equivalent in rubles to be sent to both of these countries. Suddenly the USSR was back in pre-collectivization (pre-1928) levels of financial capability. (See Chapter 15)
(3) Also, simultaneously, the US ruling trillionaire oligarchy continued its policy of making relative peace with the PRC as the price of breaking up socialist solidarity with the USSR on its eastern front. The Chinese had no objection to being left alone. Undoubtedly they saw the gringo approach as a temporary rapprochement in pursuit of the Rockefeller et al overarching objective which was their decision to first bring down the Socialist country most competitive with them for global domination (as it had been since the end of World War II effectively preventing gringo imperialism from achieving its principal international objective of total global hegemony.) So, while China was no military or financial threat to the revisionist leaders of the USSR it was of no assistance either. The imperialists had succeeded in dividing the socialist camp in half with the majority of its population (the Chinese) unengaged.
624(4) During all of this the international communist movement not to mention the even broader international working class movement went into stagnation, confusion, misdirection, as years of revisionist control resulted in a Party membership uneducated, unknowledgeable, with dishonest leadership, self-interested pandering bureaucrats for leaders. (The CPUSA being an archetype example of all of this. The contending parties such as Progressive Labor and the RCP confused and uneducated also went immediately off onto the naïve ultra-left path which initially took Madame Mao as their leader. Everywhere else the communist movement splintered into multiple parties so that Italy with what had been the largest West European party split into three parties. Again and again world-wide the same was true.)
625(5) Economic direct sabotage of the USSR's industrial plant by the US imperialists went on with the long, intricate and stupid naivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé of the Soviet's Gorbachev leadership.
(i) US imperialists purposely sold defective computer chips to the Soviets to sabotage everything those chips were to be inserted into.
(ii) Faulty industrial equipment was purposely created and shipped to the USSR as part of the gringo collaboration in ``opening up'' the Soviet Union via ``trade.''
(iii) Sabotaged blueprints for gas turbines were created by the imperialists (using the CIA) and sold to the Russians.
Last Man Standing: Gorbachev 1987-1990
The final turn toward capitalist restoration began in January of 1987 and within three years it was completed
First of all, I invite you to categorize principal acting and conditioning causes in the world as 2009 ended and 2010 began:
(1) Iraq: The US has suffered the greatest catastrophic military defeat in its history at the hands of guerrilla forces in Iraq. As I predicted in the last edition of this handbook the responsible members of the US ruling oligarchy have taken command of the Pentagon and arranged for US withdrawal in such a way that they are not being literally chased out the bar room door but being allowed to exit in the rear, albeit like cheaters in the back-room poker game, they are going out back-to-back. The iconic photograph of the US defeat in Mesopotamia will be Bush being chased out of Baghdad with shoes flying toward his head. A fitting photo equivalent to the frantic helicopter escape of the US invaders from atop their Viceroyalty in old Saigon two generations ago.
626What the failed Gringo military expedition has left behind in Iraq is a total fucked-up mess. I'm speaking of the material foundations of life. Millions of Iraqi's displaced into foreign lands or slaughtered at home and an entire infrastructure destroyed. Whatever Iraqi governments emerge from the extant chaos they will expect the USA to pay for all this damage. So the cost of this war is going to go on and on and on. What the neo-con US fascist rulers did to the USA would be hilarious if it were not so tragic (it has cost the North American people with well over a half a trillion dollars so far in direct spending, all of which the US then ruling gang borrowed; meaning the people are stuck with at least another trillion, minimally, in interest costs.)
627Meanwhile the people are losing everything: roads, rail maintenance, alternative energy, schools, hospitals, pensions, affordable food and housing, health care, decent social security, jobs, etc. etc.) The new populist regime in Washington should be supported in every way as it struggles to help the people during the orgy of help provided to the capitalists. Not just because it is the right thing to do --- always to help the working people --- but because it gives us the opportunity to explain the truth to the masses
impacted by the cruelty of the US ruling oligarchy. This time the enemies of the people must be prevented from ever being able to launch another capitalist general crisis disaster. This is the only logical alternative to their ongoing assaults against humanity and the time is at hand to prepare the population by education as to the nature of their most deadly enemies --- their class enemies within our country. There will be a settling of accounts --- there always is --- and we have plenty of revolutionary action precedents to guide our vanguard workers as they lead in the struggle to overthrow the vicious capitalist oligarchy of trillionaire and centi-billionaire families.
Bottom-line, politically, the gringo regime has left behind an Iranian style government in Baghdad that will not last long (if the Sunni population has anything to say about it) and a would-be independent Kurd Republic in the north. I predict that the gringo's will not even get a permanent military base in Iraq as they run through the back door, hoping it doesn't hit them in the ass, again, on the way out.
(2) The Truth about the US imperialist Iraq War Objectives: This war was a war against Capitalist Europe, New Class Russia, and Socialist China as much as it was a war against the Arabs and Muslims. The gringos lost it all. They lost the oil of Central Asia. They lost the bullshit awe and aura prestige they had hoped to convince the world should be theirs, when the world saw that they could be militarily whipped by what the gringo racist bosses considered to be rag-headed camel-driving Arabs, who were simply guerrilla's conducting a traditional national liberation insurrection. It's far too late to expect the rest of the world to accept any interpretation of what happened to their war objectives than this one I have just stated. In short, no matter how many lies of fact and omission that the cap press spews out to the politically and historically challenged North American people (kept in near total political and historical ignorance by the capitalist media and lower grade textbooks) there is no putting that genie back into the bottle.
628(3) Consequences: The most important immediate consequences on a global basis of the US disaster in Iraq are:
(A) The US rulers having lost their hegemony (dominance) over all of the capitalist classes of the world. Let's say it again --- they lost the entire world! They even lost their hegemony over the English-speaking world not just over the other major capitalist countries and the developing capitalist countries. The US oligarchy's command structure under Bush II also,
(B) accelerated the process of realigning the world's industrial capitalist powers and gave New Class ruled Russia the breathing space it needed to rebuild its economic and military foundations and to effectively confront US imperialism in Georgia, the Ukraine, and I predict soon in every former Soviet Republic. Along these lines it appears to me as if the Putin-Medvedev New Class Regime and Party has realized that they may well have to accept a second Bolshevik Revolution to achieve their objectives of reconstituting the old USSR and regaining national security for their frontiers. The current crisis confronting global capitalism may help Russia's New Class leaders understand they are far better off with us than with our enemies. A second Bolshevik Revolution in alliance with the Putin-Medvedev New Class Moscow Regime is quite possible and hopefully will occur. I for one find it extremely refreshing to be dealing with an open and honest New Class group of leaders such as the Putin-Medvedev group than I did when we had to deal with the two-faced whimpering traitor Gorbachev.
629(C) Communist Party led People's Republic of China is now in a position no one
of us could have realistically predicted eight years ago. Of course China's Communist Party, through its own efforts in organizing the Chinese people, is primarily responsible for putting China in the position of a responsible equal leader with other states (of the capitalist persuasion) internationally! However, the Bush fascists certainly helped them along (without meaning too, of course). Remember how the Bush Gang started out so provocatively against China? Confronted with renewed Yankee aggression the Chinese leadership stepped-up to the plate in ways they never would have done eight years ago. Among other military advances China has fielded a nuclear fueled submarine fleet with nuclear tipped ICBM missiles. ---And, this was precisely because the imbeciles in Washington dropped their sheep's clothing and exposed their plans for naked aggression;
630(4) Consequences: The most important long term consequences on a global basis of the US disaster in Iraq are:
(A) The blatant obviousness of the Gringo Regime's strategic planning for world domination forced the Chinese Communist Party's leadership to do something it had not wanted to do; that is to take the lead in forming a de facto Global Socialist Alliance of China, Cuba, Vietnam-Laos and progressive countries like Venezuela, Brazil, and even Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. China's past decade has featured a friendship offensive that has given it a mirror-image of goodness compared to the US evil witch in the Snow White fable, and all of this came to a brilliant climax with the hugely successful Olympics in summer 2008 Beijing. It will take a lot more than the pathetic current stumbling around of Hillary Clinton to change the view of the world on US imperialism.
631(B) Washington launched a truly childish plan to destabilize Latin America that began in 2008 and continued through 2009. But, in the end they got absolutely nowhere except to dig an even deeper pit for themselves from which it will be increasingly difficult for them to escape. In fact, they lost the initiative altogether and are currently stuck in political and military quicksand in South America. What else should you expect from a Green Beret Navy Seals run destabilization program? (It was all explained by Kaplan in his Annapolis lectures as he remarked in comments in his Thanksgiving Day article in the Los Angeles Times two years ago.) If it had not been for the (a) wearing down and wearing out of their military machine in Iraq, and (b) their running out of money as a consequence or the ongoing global capitalist collapse (they triggered), they would already have invaded South America in a war against Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Instead (c) they were forced to settle for small-unit trouble-making activities (ranging from the Ecuador probe to the current flight of Venezuelan counterrevolutionary chiefs to Peru) --- which (d) have in the end left them nowhere.
632Finally, do not underestimate the importance of this new fact in world history and that is that the number one enemy has run out of money --- at least for the moment. ---And, this means the US ruling families will be incapable of starting another Iraq style war in the Americas; that is a wonderful new perspective. For one thing Cuba is finally, relatively, safe --- not that it doesn't have to be constantly on guard --- as is Venezuela.
(C) Washington has scared the living daylights out of those who had thrown in their lot with their would-be "puppet masters" such as the Uribe trafficker-industrialist clique in BogotÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂá, Colombia, and the similar trafficker-industrialist clique of 12 families behind social fascist Alan Garcia in Peru. -And, these types are back-treading as quickly as they can from their ill thought out earlier commitments. For Garcia it is too late and his end and the end of his gang as well, is in sight. For Uribe? Well, he still has a little time
left to do the right thing. For a comical view of what is going on in these two puppet regimes you might take a look at the old movie Moon Over Parador (Richard Dreyfuss, Sonia Braga, Raul Julia and Jonathan Winters.)
Uribe had been on the DEA's ``most wanted'' list until he was suborned by the CIA in a deal where he was to be used against all the guerilla forces in the Americas. But, now, in power, and potentially somewhat independent of his imperialist sponsors, he has struck out in an ``independent'' way that will make his ``base'', the Colombian big bourgeoisie (including the world's richest drug traffickers --- some of whom I have known for many years --- see my books, Shining Path, the Peruvian Revolution, Rivers of Blood and High Finance South American Style!), the accomplices of Washington's new ultimate nemesis Hugo Chavez. Caracas has more money to give Uribe than does Washington and Venezuela's money comes from ``honest'' sources (e.g. contracts for building an oil pipeline across Colombia where oil can be shipped directly to China from a Pacific port.)
633Peruvian puppet Alan Garcia had gone along with the Bush-Cheney demand to allow US Marines into Ayacucho but the rebellion of the opposition parties and the Peruvian people appears to be forcing their withdrawal as I write. ---And. Most promisingly the corruption of the social fascist regime of Alan Garcia in Lima Peru is resulting in the mass demand for the resignation of this traitor and his entire gang. We will see. In the meantime the patriotic Peruvian Army officers may oust the traitor and if not there is forming in Brazil a well-armed highly trained International Brigade preparing to enter the armed struggle in both of these semi-colonial provinces of the Gringo Viceroyalty for the Central Andes in Lima. Their end is not just in sight but assured when these brotherly forces enter the arena placing themselves under the orders of the National Liberation Army's operating in these subjugated nations.
634(5) Historical Consequences
(A) With Bush II, U.S. Imperialism immediately embarked upon a program of seizing defeat from the jaws of the victory they could have had. At the very least they could have maintained their hegemony over the capitalist world for several decades into the 21st century. Instead they threw it away in two short years. This is a historic defeat for them of catastrophic proportions; a defeat from which they shall never recover. For them, as for Hitler seventy years ago, all that remains is the running, and dying. For us, whatever short-term advantages some of the timid among us may have thought we might have lost with the disappearance of the Soviet Revisionist Ruling Clique from the Historical Stage, the stupidity and ignorance of the US hegemonists has more than offset. The emergence of the Putin-Medvedev New Class Russian regime's hostility toward the imperialist encirclement they confront is far better for us than if there were the old modern revisionist labor-fakir regime parading as socialists and communists whose real world system made everything we believe in a farce. Getting rid of these scumbags like Gorbachev and gang, defeats once and for all the Orwellian twist of Modern Revisionism as we came to know it.
635
(B)
At the moment, there is great instability in the global class
struggle and all of you revolutionary cadre need to continue to study
and observe, the past and the present, in order to deal the telling
blows needed to remove the
Gringo ruling families from the scene,
liquidate their State and Government establishment. In their place we
want a new Constitutional Convention to reorganize the
Government and we will have to win over the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, by building our cadre in those branches of the capitalist State apparatus. The same in many Local, State and Federal police establishments. We will make our revolution with the Army not against it. Finally we have to build a massive united front of industrial workers unions as the instrument which will lead the proletarianization of our political life. Then we can then proceed to build a new Socialist Order in the United States.
You should begin by getting involved in organizing working people so that the next time there is a mass spontaneous outpouring into the streets (as conducted by Hispanics in 2006) you will be doing far more than handing out leaflets --- which at any rate were full of inaccuracies and profound errors, so typical of the historically ignorant US Left. The US ruling families are prepared to lock-up militant White workers alongside those of the African, Hispanic and Asian origin when the inevitable collapse comes --- we must be at least as ready to lead those workers in an armed struggle for the overthrow of the fascist regime in Washington and to substitute working class power in its stead. Beginning with what our Constitution calls for in these circumstances --- that is, a new Constitutional Convention that will outlaw unbridled capitalism and guarantee the North American people they will be the benefactors of whatever structure comes out. Remember that our enthusiasm for a progressive capitalist government under Mr. Obama must inevitably result in having to face the necessity of having to split the capitalist alliance which took power in January, into its most progressive sector and its reactionary left-over sector. Depending on how that battle unfolds and plays out we will decide what to do next in US electoral politics.
636But the important things for us Bolsheviks to do at this time is (a) to complete our education begun with this book and (b) find an area of US productive industrial life where we can trigger some of the coming events we need to see. (c) Finally, the time has come to build a real Communist Party and we have begun with the establishment of the Communist Party USA (Foundation).
I describe in Chapter 13 below how, in the Czarist empire, Lenin and Stalin found the Russian oilfields of the Black and Caspian Seas to be the area where they could and did concentrate their efforts in 1901, giving them local permanent victories with a union in the oilfield and then the Empire-wide general strike that led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, the defeat of the Czar, and the First Russian Revolution (of 1905.)
(C) Socialism Unfolding in the 21st Century: China and Latin America: As we shall see the World (Stalinist) Socialist Stage climaxed at the end of the last century with (i) the collapse of Modern Revisionism in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the restoration of outright ''old fashioned'' capitalism in some of these countries, and as often, as in Russia, the old bureaucratic ``socialist'' New Class has emerged as the ruling and owning technocratic New Class of an otherwise title-deed holding bourgeois variety of capitalist. (ii) ---And, the collapse of US hegemony over the capitalist world.
(D) However, (Stalinist) Socialism as a Stage survived and advanced into a new Stage in China, Vietnam-Laos and Cuba, albeit with an embarrassingly retrogressionist left-over in Korea.
Following the difficult beginnings we shall review in Chapter 13 and 14 below (Chapter 13: The Stalinist Socialist Stage; and Chapter 14: Bolshevism Spreads to China), China managed to pull it all together and embarked upon a massive program of industrialization and agricultural modernization which features the proletarian Party in
command of a mixed economy. Since China is China --- that is at least one fifth of the entire world, Socialism, (much to the chagrin of our ideological counterparts, on the payroll of the trillionaire and billionaire families that now control at least seven of the major capitalist countries), cannot be disposed of in daily propaganda. Nor, of course, in the real world of socialism vs. capitalism.
In short, World Socialism is now in an advanced Stage. What we will be calling the Second Socialist Stage (the Stage of Advanced Socialism.) Here the construction fronts of Socialism are the primary concern of the Parties in power. ---And, that is to say, simply the bringing of adequate technological advance to the table. That is, something that the founders, Marx and Engels, had taken as a theoretical ``given.'' Nevertheless, what in practice history gave us, was its opposite - extreme technological backwardness. The greatest 20th century struggles (after those of survival) accordingly, were to achieve this technological foundation we had expected to inherit.
Simultaneously, struggles to seize power have also necessarily continued unabated in the unliberated parts of the world. This being especially true in the former colonial and semi-colonial parts of the globe. Especially Latin America only now freeing itself from the evil grip of US imperialism.
(E) The foremost revolutionary seizure fronts are now in Latin America. Thanks to the perseverance of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, communists were in place to assist the anti-imperialist working class, small farmer and patriotic-nationalist bourgeois forces in Latin America, when they confronted the reality of what the Gringo's had imposed upon them in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's.The so-called neo-liberal model of imperialism. Furthermore, these indigenous anti-imperialist forces have formed a broad alliance (ALBA: Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America) in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, with Cuba. Brazil may join soon. The probability that they will be able to hold onto state power is quite high.
(F) At the same time we must recognize that US imperialism has not gotten soft. For example, in 2008 the imperialists tried a surprise insertion of combat troops into Peru. Peru's President long-time traitor Alan Garcia proved himself to be the Arch-Comprador of Latin America. (Comprador means ``collaborator'' with a foreign power or capitalist entity of some kind for personal financial benefit.) Those of us who know about these things knew, of course, that Garcia was just one more sell-out to the Gringo establishment and had been taking money from them for decades. At any rate Bush and Cheney summoned Garcia to Washington and called in their markers. Garcia had little choice but to pay up as he has been on the gringo payroll for all of his political life. This time he sold his country to the gringo regime in exchange, I am told, for some twenty million dollars up-front, (handed to him in a suitcase by the Dark Lord himself!) plus a monthly CIA stipend of several million dollars, delivered to him monthly by a courier from the nest of evil at Surce (the HQ of the Gringo Viceroyalty for Peru and the Central Andes in Lima.) Thus he gave permission for the gringo regime to establish their much sought after South American military base. The Empire hoped it might gain an on-continent base from which to fight against national liberation not only in Peru but throughout the continent. Patriotic Peruvian Army men took the initiative threatening to depose the Arch-Traitor, as demanded by their opposition party led by Captain Humala. Mass demonstrations throughout the nation greeted the Traitor's move and demanded the withdrawal of US imperialist troops. As I write the Peruvian people are arising en masse
637demanding the resignation of the traitor Alan Garcia and his corrupt social fascist party. A miners strike in March and April left the social fascist regime without any working class support whatsoever! Furthermore, the CFPUSA is supporting the call for an International Brigade to reinforce the national liberation fighters in their struggle against fascist dictatorships in Peru and Colombia.
The New York Times reported on its front page March 18, 2009, the advances being made by the Communist Party of Peru Shining Path of Carlos Mariategui which are substantial and occurring daily in critical zones of the nation. The liquidation of the Peruvian Army units challenging the Rebels is assured in the coming 18 months unless the soldiery in those units rebels and shoots their officers, coming over to the side of the Revolution. However, their fate works out Garcia's end is in sight. Garcia's brand of comprador social fascism in collaboration with US imperialism is about to be sent to the trash can of history, no longer an option for the Peruvian bourgeoisie, or the ruling 12 capitalist families. The day that recognition becomes class policy on the part of the latter and/or new daring rebel strikes against the Traitor's Army occur in the Lima region, will be the last day of US imperialist power in this critical Andean nation. I predict the patriotic national capitalist class will break with the compradors.
638In short, what we have now as the 21st century begins to unfold is (1) advanced socialism in power and moving forward in the construction of the technological bases which will make its ``permanence'' possible and (2) revolutionary socialists in the process of seizing and/or developing power in the Latin American capitalist countries (and elsewhere). Two distinctly different things, yet intimately interrelated.
The Current Situation is a Dress Rehearsal for the Final Global Capitalist Stage Collapse: How and Why Did it Happen
When I was an undergraduate forty years ago Monthly Review long time editor, Stanford University (Marxist) Professor of Economics, Paul Sweezy, had been writing a series of editorials about the trends in US banking. Namely, the greedy trend of loaning increasing amounts of a bank's reserve capital, leaving less and less behind for possible losses and subsequent write downs. That tendency was simply exacerbated over the coming years until banks had virtually all of their ready cash on loan; then they borrowed more to loan more and had 150 percent of their assets on loan.
Now they can loan 9 times their assets! All they have to do is to go to the Fed discount window and show a capital infusion of say 1 billion dollars and they are handed 9 billion to re-loan! Furthermore, the paper they show supposedly worth a billion dollars is often of highly questionable value itself as in the case of the derivative house mortgage securities worth essentially nothing right now which were offered up as collateral securities for that new 9 billion --- with which they might buy more of this shit. All of this justified by increasingly relying upon the ultimate insurer, which was the US Government (they own), which could be counted on to come to the rescue in case things went south and the banks could not call upon reserve capital they did not have. After all what choice would the US Government have? Let the economy collapse?
639---And, they have been proven correct as events in October 2008 proved, when the US Congress was forced against its gut instincts to step up to the challenge of total collapse and back the banks to the hilt. ---And now that that collapse is at last underway, this is just the beginning. All of this anticipated, in other words, by the very capitalists
who had engineered the policy of unlimited selfish loaning without regard to the consequences --- without regard to the amounts of value and surplus value actually being created. This disastrous inherent capitalist contradiction is currently playing out. In other words the General Contradiction of the Servitude Epoch is now coming to grips with the General Crisis of Capitalism again, as I have been predicting for the last five years in this book.
Since that time one after another serious financial engineering problem has been allowed to surface and become manifest. Beginning
(1) With the need to ship capital abroad not just to implant the machinery (traditional imperialism) to which colonial cheap labor could be forced to work but this time to buy all the stuff being produced in these cheap labor centers. That's all ``globalization'' really means.
(2) Then imperialism's need to back up its international hegemony with military force led to a still greater outlay of cash in non-productive ways, thus to larger budgetary deficits for the US oligarchy; which could not force the public to swallow this bitter medicine --- they had to lie to the US people and trick them into allowing these military expenditures to occur and lie again to justify the financing to be done via borrowing.
(3) As foreign creditors became increasingly wary of US financial engineering policies and began to look around for alternative safe investments, US engineers had increasing difficulty in borrowing the money needed to stop the bleeding; that is, to offset the cash outflow to cheap labor centers and growing budgetary deficits.
(4) Then Imperialism stumbled fatally when it dropped its sheep's clothing showing its true wolf nature in its war against Iraq which was in fact as much a war against Capitalist Europe, New Class ruled Russia, and Socialist China, because it was the gringo's attempt to corner the world's oil supply. (They failed completely and finally in this regard, and are walking away like an embarrassed dog licking its wounds after a thorough ass whipping.) Now imperialism's vaunted military superiority is seen for what it is --- mostly bullshit --- propaganda designed to scare by shock and awe an unprepared and far weaker foe. Now, it is seen that standard guerilla warfare techniques can bring the great juggernaut crashing to its knees. Frankly, if I were a guerilla commander I would find fighting these gringo soldiers extremely gratifying. These are the easiest to beat and all it takes is the determination to go in against them standing up, forcing them to fight hand-to-hand without their close air support. Under these constraints they are destined to receive a serious ass whipping.
640(5) Finally, and most importantly, the world's other capitalist classes, and the world's working class governments have many alternatives now to the use of the US dollar as the sole international currency. The world ruling families are currently considering exactly how to replace the US dollar and simultaneously be sure that whatever international currency results will be decoupled permanently from the US economy and its proven danger to the health of capitalists in every other country. They could take over the existing currency in every respect if the gringos agree to give it up and create a new and second (domestic) currency with which they can fuck around to their heart's content as they will only be hurting their own people and not the world's people.
(6) The US rulers and their bureaucrats have lost the confidence of their class (the 2000 families in the world who have as much money as five billion ordinary people) after
having loaded them down with investment vehicles seeded with poison pills from the US subprime mortgage market. (These loans would never have been allowed to be packaged with the majority of good subprime loans if the US rulers had not been so desperate for foreign money obtained in any way.) The gringo conspirators dumped 600 trillion of this worthless paper on their international class brothers. Now Swiss bankers say the amount is twice that or 1.2 quadrillion dollars of worthless paper!
(7) Imperialism's many (nearly countless) recent attempts to kill Chavez, Correa and Morales and restore comprador puppet regimes in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia have all failed miserably in the face of sophisticated revolutionary strategy and tactics The rest of the American continent, with the two noticeable exceptions of Gringolandia puppets Garcia (Peru) and Uribe (Colombia), is working its way into an anti-imperialist de facto alliance of these nations against the Empire.
Finally, there are a multitude of structural failures coming to a head simultaneously for US imperialism's ruling oligarchy.
(8) The Real Estate and Housing Market crisis (interlinked intimately with the subprime mortgage crisis) is one.
(9) The shift of US incomes from manufacturing working class incomes too far less lucrative so-called ``service'' jobs and everything that reduction in income for a hundred million people involves, another.
(10) The US educational crisis closely linked to the transformation of US research from project focused individual scientist sponsored work to massive industrial style expenditures on group sponsored projects. High energy physics being a good example. Imperialism is interested in expensive science far more than inexpensive science (because that is where the ruling families make their money i.e., contracting to build these massive facilities}, when what is needed could be done in a Microsoft lab ( at the CFPUSA website or read the book by that name --- the only copies of which currently are in the library at Boise State University).
Note: the gyroscopic Lenin Atom shown on the Home Page has three parts you want to memorize as you read the four papers at New Perspectives in Physics. The nucleus is shown as a Helium atom and the horizontal gimbal shows the orbital of 2 electrons (there are never more than two electrons in any one orbital and this is the reason why) and the vertical gimbal shows the orbital of the gravitons.
(11) European central bank purchases of US paper have been halted and it is a question in doubt as to whether they will be resumed. Do not be confused by momentary panic buying by European banks occurring as I write for this is just helter skelter panic running to put money somewhere safe. They are about to find out the cave they ran into to weather the storm is already occupied --- by a Grizzly!
(12) Foreign billionaire-trillionaire and other wealthy foreign purchasers of US paper are looking elsewhere, have stopped buying US paper and it is uncertain when if ever they will resume such buying. Do not be confused by panic US securities buying on the part of foreign bourgeois and other capitalist elements at the moment because that is just panic. People scared to death by the US imperialist dumping of worthless securities on them destroying thereby not only their life savings but their means of making money! ASAP these US instruments will be traded out for Euros or some other safer instruments than dollars (about to collapse in value introducing the next crisis - the monetary crisis - and is coming immediately.)
(13) Foreign governments are increasingly unlikely to accept US demands for money to support their troops on these foreign soils.
(14) Debt service payments to US banks on the debt intentionally heaped on third world countries has been under attack for some time (as Fidel points out in his letters to Brazilian President Lula --- go to GRANMA international edition in five languages including English, on a daily basis, for the full text of these letters) and now will be placed at the bottom of the list of foreign government obligations.
(15) Sales of high-tech armaments have been reduced to the level of sweetheart deals only (with corrupt buyers, as in the case of Saudi Arabia) because internationally US war makers find the world arms market - one where competition is increasingly stiff.
(16) US Corporations are cheating on profit repatriation and buying more and more stable international currencies instead (e.g., the Euro).
(17) Financial alternatives for financing such critical inputs as petroleum (to the US financing centers in New York and London) are emerging and this reduces the amount of cash flowing back into the US.
(18) Actually, the US financial situation is worse than broke --- it has an outstanding debt in excess of 10.5 trillion dollars (outside of the US Fed bail outs now over four trillion dollars, if not more) --- which means that if every citizen sold everything they own including the shirts on their backs they could not now come close to paying this debt. Furthermore, this debt is increasing by many billions monthly.
For practical purposes this debt will never be paid. Investing billionaire and trillionaire families from Arabia, Asia, and elsewhere, have been willing to settle for timely interest payments, but the ability of the US Regime and its central bank to keep that up is now in question. Failure will, of course, mean the end of the post-World War II global economic order. Actually that is what is happening as I write. The Old Order has failed and the international capitalist oligarchy of trillionaires and centi-billionaires are working out the new order right now.
The US trillionaire centi-billionaire oligarchy cannot get out of this capitalist crisis they have created by paying in dollars' worth a fraction of what they were worth when they were borrowed - this will not do either. A new non-US international currency may result. Or, a second US currency (one domestic and the existing one converted to solely ``international'' status.) Either way, the US place in the world will shrink accordingly. A new world order absent US domination is about to emerge. Not exactly what the ``neo-cons'' told people to expect as a result of their policy of world conquest. The fact is that the war against Iraq, and its failure, is the immediate trigger for the way in which this dress rehearsal for the coming, inevitable, total collapse has precipitated.
641In order to escape their current crisis the ruling Gringo families must either pull a coup and take military control of Washington establishing a new government without any constitutional prohibitions against trespassing on the People's rights --- or --- accept a continuing budget deficit running into several trillion dollars annually for many years. Either will remove the USA from being a victorious participant in whatever international order comes out of this most recent capitalist dog-fight.
(19) China's leader has (Friday the 13th of March) called on the US to assure him and his government that the US would stand by its securities and their value. He said he was worried. He should be. The US does not have the ability to stand by its financial
agreements on the value of its T bills or any other paper. China will end up writing down the Lion's share of their trillion dollar loan to the gringos and will have to accept that as the price of their industrialization. Would China have been better off going the Soviet route? Who knows? I don't think so for a variety of reasons (at any rate that is the way history unfolded) but the cost is going to include getting fucked out of a trillion dollars. Something the deadbeat gringo capitalists are getting quite good at. As illustrated perhaps by the Saturday Night Live November 21, broadcast lead where Wu Jintao is questioning Barack Obama on US monetary policy.
Our Communist solution to the current capitalist crisis is obvious. We would seize all of the assets of the 2000 families without compensation and outlaw any debts to them. End of problem but also end of system --- the end of the capitalist system. That is obviously the working class solution to the problem. In the meantime we will fight over the issue of making the capitalist nationalization of financing a permanent reality rather than giving these entities back to the oligarchy once we have saved them. Then move to nationalize the oil and gas companies and finally move to guaranteed annual incomes for all our citizens and guaranteed jobs and educational futures. Seizing oil, gas, and banking can provide a massive source of revenue to the North American people.
642(20) Because none of the Left parties are yet strong enough ideologically or practically to mount this serious challenge to the oppressive Regime on the Potomac, the US ruling families and their foreign comprador allies (e.g., Bush and Saudi families) will recover from their current crisis. Now with the Communist Foundation Party USA it will be possible in the not too distant future to organize and lead an armed insurrection for state power. In the meantime, will the US oligarchy be able to maintain their pace of aggression against the rest of the world? I doubt this also.
They don't have the material wherewithal to use against the rest of the world any longer, because they don't have the money to pay for military equipment, deployment (US soldiers require huge amounts of supply on an hourly basis; gas and diesel not to mention uranium are expensive for planes, tanks and ships, respectively) nor troops. They can phony up with promises, as they have been doing for decades, but that is not likely to work much longer, given the new US ``deadbeat'' reputation among international bankers. ---And, how will the North American people step up to the plate upon which this dish has been served? Open revolt is just beginning and will soon spread. We need to be in place to provide leadership --- identify enemies of the people and take appropriate action --- identify immediate military targets and prepare to take them.
643(21) The financial inability of the USA to pursue its world aggression policy means that there is going to be a temporary stalemate once again in the world-wide struggle of labor against capital. For Latin America this means a brief respite (of a few months), if you will, from the danger of massive US intervention, and a shift to preparing for gringo aggression on a localized basis; Imperial attacks coming in the form of small unit assaults (e.g., the Ecuador probe; the current attempted occupation of Ayacucho, Peru, and its now underway use of US troops against the Rebel Army in Peru) and civil disorder organizing (e.g., right-wing student demonstrations; and mafia-union strikes in Venezuela) and getting their new 4th nuclear Fleet into position. It means the ALBA nations have a short period of time to catch their breath and get ready. However, desperation will lead to a US massive assault on South America eventually unless their financial bankruptcy intervenes first. Or, unless, the US working class takes power at
644home. Or, at the very least until a new, yet to be formed, progressive alliance in the Gringo Regime finds itself able to act definitively to stop once and forever more gringo invasions of Latin America for any reason whatsoever! This is possible and we must pursue every opportunity to educate the North American people about the truth of Cuban and Venezuelan socialism. Lifting this burden from the shoulders of the American people North and South would be a tremendous achievement!
(22) Getting ready for Latin America means
(A) Getting rid of the rightist agitators and organizers on university campuses; also, as a corollary to this, restricting US Embassy personnel in their movements in imperialism's target countries and also expelling these Embassy front organizations in these target countries, denying legal status to those taking their funds.
Shutting down these fascist student circles should be number one on the proletarian police target list. You know what to do. Do what they have always done to us and permanently remove the ringleaders --- disband the members to prison, work camps, Miami.
(B) Cleanse unions of their mafia components in the same way;
(C) Deploy ALBA air arms to secret SAM protected air-strips the moment Paul Revere rides. ``Stealth'' technology the gringos use is not effective against satellite recon so they always fly at night and, according to Mr. Putin, never effective against modern long-range Russian SAM's! We are about to find out. Iran has installed them to protect its nuclear installations against US supplied Israeli stealth technology
(D) Stepping up the popular revolution at home winning new and larger numbers of people to our side, especially the newly empowered would-be small proprietor farmers. ---And with regard to Latin American farmers, as you will learn in this book, these are historically the same kind of capitalist farmers who traditionally have provided the cannon fodder for armed struggle against Reactionary regimes, as farmers did in the English Civil War, the North American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars, the Russian Civil War (with its five million man Bolshevik Red Army almost all of whom were at the end, would be, small capitalist farmers); the Chinese People's Liberation Army; the Cuban Army (see Chapters 12, 13 and 14 in this book.) In the process it is important to destroy the latifundistas and their underlings as classes.
645(E) Continuing the massive investment in industrialization of the ALBA nations to provide the now essential industrial base for combating gringo imperialism.
(F) Stepping up the pace of trans-Continental transportation system construction (rivers, rail, and road) to support economic and, now as importantly, military integration of the South American continent.
(G) Introducing military conscription for all citizens as part of building up the people's armies in the ALBA nations, which we will need not only against imperialism but against counter-revolutionary forces at home.
These are relatively simple steps to take in the preparation for imperialist death-throe attacks on the ALBA countries. Relatively simple, at least, compared to the problems now confronting the Empire.
The Empire is highly dangerous still, given its offshore Carrier Death Stars. However, the Rebel Alliance of ALBA nations is also powerful and as in ``Star Wars'' can definitely prevail!
What Next
What we are witnessing at the moment is the dress rehearsal for the end collapse which is coming soon. Let me advise those of you who are aware of my old principal website (http://groups.msn.com/JasonSmithcom) and who would have been able to go to that site for news on blow by blow developments in the existing crisis, the new source of ongoing commentary will be the Daily Worker at the CPUSA (F) website. www.communisfoundationpartyusa.org
Now that MSN has closed its ``groups'' sites I decided there was no purpose in continuing this site in new form, other than the new site for the new Party. So, now you can go to www.communistfoundationpartyusa.org for a continuing commentary on developments. The letters and articles I have already published about the current crisis over the past five years will be made available in the Recent Archives of the CFPUSA website. When you read these you will see not only was it possible to predict exactly what is now occurring and in which this dress rehearsal collapse was obviously imminent (obvious to a competent Marxist economic theoretician that is) but that exactly the correct prediction was made and continuously so over the past five years.
646What about the next crisis they confront? Will we be as impotent then as we are now? If so the mass rebellion coming out of the inevitable coming final collapse may take on a fascist turn rather than a communist one, and then we will have one final hell of mess world war! The sad part of this is that it is unnecessary. We have the science of society and culture and its evolution as our virtual sole property. Let's use it. The bell is tolling in the US. The handwriting is on the wall.
The current rate of change in sociocultural evolution is actually a continuation of the generally rapid change in our respective class struggle positions which we witnessed in the 20th century. The difference perhaps is that the overall strength of progressive and revolutionary forces is far greater than at any previous time, excepting the period after World War II through the stalemate of the mid-1950's. In part this is a product of our own hard work. In another part it is a product of the series of self-imposed catastrophes which have weakened North American imperialism draconically, in every sense, financial and military.
Finally, once again, I want to bring to your attention the true Achilles Heel of the Gringo Regime and the billionaire-trillionaire families that own it: namely, its desperate financial and monetary situation. At the moment Washington depends upon an inflow of two to three and soon four billion dollars a day from the following sources to offset the flow of cash out of the country to their cheap labor production centers and for critical inputs. These are:
1. European Central Bank purchase of US paper (e.g. T Bills)
2. Foreign comprador money sent for safe-keeping and/or investment in more US paper.
3. Payments from foreign governments to support U.S. military forces stationed in these countries.
4. Debt service payments on the great debt the US has intentionally heaped on 3rd world countries.
5. Sales of high-tech armaments
6. US Corporations repatriating profits
7. New York (and satellite London) financing of everything but especially strategic inputs such as petroleum.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Chapter 29: Towards a Fifth International - 2009 was a Historical CrossroadsWe have entered a new political period in the USA as a result of the historic November 4th 2008 general election. We are in a period comparable to the beginning of 1861 and 1933. In other words, as 2009 opened, our country was again at a great historical crossroads. This is not hyperbole. Let's use the scientific comparative method for a moment.
In 1861 Abraham Lincoln took the Presidency amidst the chaos of secession as the Slavocrats began the formal process of taking their dictatorships out of the Union. This civil war had been inevitable for a long time. Slavery in the first place in the land of the free still existed as a consequence of the united front way the colonies had had to fight the revolutionary war of 1775-1781. In other words if the Northern colonies wanted to win they had to have the Southern colonies and that meant they had had to compromise on the issue of slavery. By 1861 US Slavery was in its second, and now industrial, phase, thanks to the invention of the cotton gin and the construction of the infrastructure of canals and interlocking rivers that brought cotton from the Southern interior to the great port of Charleston (among a few others). The compromise of 1776 had now to be resolved by war. We will discuss this in more detail in Part III of this handbook. Suffice it to say that the failure of the Federal Fugitive Slave Act (see Chapter 12) which had witnessed some 300,000 slaves escaping to Canada, Mexico and Florida, had made it clear to the Slavocrat dictators in the Southern States that they either had to give up their system or leave the Union and they had been preparing for this for some time. The election of Lincoln in 1860, simply gave them the excuse they wanted to separate. The country had to make a fundamental decision about the direction it was going to take.
647In 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the Presidency amidst the chaos of complete capitalist economic collapse. The collapse of the US economy was part of the global capitalist system collapse and had been inevitable, as inherent in the very nature of capitalist relations of production is the unavoidable necessity of periodic collapse. Such boom and bust collapses had been going on in the USA since 1819. We are in another one now. We will be discussing this continuous sequence of USA capitalist depressions in Part III of this book. The general crisis of capitalism brought on the 1929-1933 global capitalist collapse. The shining beacon which provided the clear as day light of proof that this need not be the case was the Soviet Union. The USSR was absolutely booming in every way as it created all of the capitalist infrastructure the Bolsheviks would need in order to be able to build Socialism as an alternative global system. Today China offers a new perspective and a distinct alternative of a mixed economy moving inexorably toward Communism.
648In 1933, the ascendancy of FDR provided the opportunity to get the USA onto the right track. What did we Bolsheviks do in each of these previous cases?
In both of these cases American Communists and organized labor played an extremely important role.
In the first instance, Communists led by Joseph Wedemeyer (a personal associate of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels before fleeing Europe for the US with the failure of the 1848 Revolutions), participated in leading Northern Labor and Northern working White people in general, in the cities and on the farms, into seeing it was in their interest to defeat Slavery in the South and hold the Southern States in a Union without Slavery.
In the second instance working people, their unions and the North American Communists (CPUSA), who created many of these unions including the CIO, saw the opportunity to forge an alliance with the petty bourgeois and progressive bourgeois forces in the country and proceeded to do so. Stalin's decision in 1936 to throw CPUSA support to FDR sealed the deal with fabulous long-term consequences: i.e., the international alliance of the English-speaking World and the USSR in the final conflict with world fascism.
Now, in this 2009 third instance, Communists can and should play the key role in leading working people and their unions and other mass organizations in pushing our large petty bourgeois classes and the progressive capitalist class to the Left. History teaches us this. Then the day will come when by revolution (armed insurrection) we can push the entire process to full Socialism and soon thereafter into full Communism. No fundamental change in society can be achieved without armed insurrection.
You may wonder, having seen so much of it with the Beijing Olympics, what those stars on the Chinese Red Flag stand for. They stand for the united front Mao and associates created. The Big Star is the Communist Party of China. The four smaller stars stand for the four pillars of the united front: the industrial working class, the poor and middle farmers, the small bourgeoisie including the intellectuals, and finally the patriotic national capitalists. We need to build this kind of progressive united front and if its current form proves insufficient in the long run, we can reorganize the united front, when that time comes. For us as it was originally with them (against Chinese fascism) we will have to engage in armed insurrection against the fascist regime in Washington.
For the moment our task is less than this, but even so it is not going to be an easy task. But then neither was defeating Slavery nor reforming and repositioning unbridled US Capitalism. No one can predict exactly how the current capitalist crisis is going to play out. What we do know, as Jimmy Doolittle once said: is that ``victory belongs to those who want it the most; it belongs to those who are willing to fight for it the most; it belongs to those who are willing to sacrifice everything for it.'' (See the movie Pearl Harbor).
To Continue
In short, Marx and Engels did not foresee the situation where workers would seize power in the most backward capitalist countries first, and then have to build what were then the modern industrial and mechanized agricultural foundations of capitalism. Let alone have to build them from scratch, without the voluntary assistance of friendly foreign worker's governments. What happened in practice, as I explain in the text, is that we seized power first in those countries where the capitalists were the weakest, thus most easily defeated. ---And they were defeated and the Soviet Republic made permanent. Then, thanks to Leon Trotsky totally fucking-up the 1920 Polish-German-European campaign (as you will learn in Chapters 13 and 14), we failed to link up with workers in
Western Europe, and finding ourselves encircled by our most deadly enemies we had to dig-in and build the industrial and agricultural foundations alone, and from scratch.
(C) Returning to the pre-1917 years, we see that Marx knew he had missed something critical when the German Social Democrats joined the British union bosses of the same ``labor aristocrat'' stripe, in wanting just a piece of the capitalist pie rather than full-blown socialism. (See Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.) That recognition by Marx was what sent him back into the study of prehistory via Lewis Henry Morgan (and by extension he studied all of the contemporary anthropologists as the book The Ethnological Manuscripts of Karl Marx proves.) That is why he produced an entire massive notebook on the Fundamentals of Geology; he anticipated much would have to be recovered from the ground, and geology is one of the fundamental interdisciplinary sciences of archaeology. (Marx knew from the work of Petrie in Egypt that the early pre-writing history of that center of origin of civilization would contain the answers he sought.) He died before he could conclude his work, but even if he had not, the necessary archaeological evidence was many decades away from being excavated. He would have had to continue doing what he was doing, which was extrapolating from the ethnographic data back into the past. Or, he would have had to engage in archaeology and come up with the data we have at our disposal today.
649(D) At any rate, what we know now is that there will be two or more transitional stages between capitalism and communism. This is of ``world shaking'' significance as John Reed might have said. Because it explains why we failed in our attempts to jump into communism and why we must accept the fact that there will be several phases or Stages between capitalism and communism. This is fundamentally why Trotsky's theory is completely wrong. A bureaucracy in the construction of these phases is not an aberration but a necessity and a diagnostic, if you will, of these transitional stages. The task is not to eliminate this bureaucracy, in the struggle for egalitarianism, but to accept it, and to be sure that we accomplish the goals of industrial modernization and agricultural mechanization and build the bureaucracy and societal class differences out of existence as it becomes convenient. But, it is certainly not convenient in technologically backward countries to struggle prematurely for an egalitarian society.
650Social Justice and Communist Egalitarianism = Two Different Things!
This is not to say that egalitarianism is not necessary when first seizing state power in such countries, as the Revolution must create a ``just'' social organizational base for the newly liberated country. But it is to say, when communist stage egalitarianism is made permanent too early --- which is to say before achieving the necessary industrial and agricultural basis, which ideally would have been achieved under capitalism, such egalitarianism runs the risk of becoming, self-defeating.
In other words, ``social justice'' is one thing and we owe it to our class to see it established immediately upon seizing state power. But ``Communist Stage'' egalitarianism is quite another thing and cannot be artificially imposed. It can only come when the Stage itself is extant. Attempting to establish Communist Stage egalitarianism prematurely is, in the long-run self-defeating. Self-defeating because in technologically unprepared countries, it runs contrary to the need for massive growth in industry and mechanized agriculture to achieve the necessary gross national product in industry and agriculture, of
a nation building the capitalist technical foundations for eventual communism via the intermediary route of socialism..
We are where we are, therefore, and the road forward is now clear. Control the bureaucracy, and/or the capitalists, while we have state power and all will be well. At least as long as we can keep the Workers Party pure of heart. Eventually, we will have the technological wherewithal to build communism but not before. So, this is going to be a several century long process of transition and we are less than one hundred years into it right now.
Raul Castro is exactly correct, therefore, as the Chinese have been before him, and proves that he is of equal stature to his brother and up to the greatest challenge we have faced since World War II. Likewise Hugo Chavez is quite correct in his priorities. He is struggling to achieve as much social justice as possible within Venezuela, while building toward socialism at home, and embracing every other progressive class and country in South and Latin America against their number one enemy US imperialism.
What Next
What we are witnessing at the moment is the dress rehearsal for the end collapse which is coming soon. Let me advise those of you who are aware of my old principal website (http://groups.msn.com/JasonSmithcom) and who would have been able to go to that site for news on blow by blow developments in the existing crisis, the new source of ongoing commentary will be the Daily Worker at the CPUSA (Foundation) website.
Now that MSN has closed its ``groups'' sites I decided there was no purpose in continuing this site in new form, other than the new site for the new Party. So, now you can go to our website for a continuing commentary on developments. The letters and articles I have already published about the current crisis over the past five years will be made available in the Recent Archives of the CPUSA(f) website. When you read these you will see not only was it possible to predict exactly what is now occurring and in which this dress rehearsal collapse was obviously imminent (obvious to a competent Marxist economic theoretician that is) but that exactly the correct prediction was made and continuously so over the past five years.
What about the next crisis they confront? Will we be as impotent then as we are now? If so the mass rebellion coming out of the inevitable coming final collapse may take on a fascist turn rather than a communist one, and then we will have one final hell of mess world war! The sad part of this is that it is unnecessary. We have the science of society and culture and its evolution as our virtual sole property. Let's use it. The bell is tolling in the US. The handwriting is on the wall.
The current rate of change in sociocultural evolution is actually a continuation of the generally rapid change in our respective class struggle positions which we witnessed in the 20th century. The difference perhaps is that the overall strength of progressive and revolutionary forces is far greater than at any previous time, excepting the period after World War II through the stalemate of the mid-1950's. In part this is a product of our own hard work. In another part it is a product of the series of self-imposed catastrophes which have weakened North American imperialism draconically, in every sense, financial and military.
Finally, once again, I want to bring to your attention the true Achilles Heel of the Gringo Regime and the billionaire-trillionaire families that own it: namely, its desperate
financial and monetary situation. At the moment Washington depends upon an inflow of two to three and soon four billion dollars a day from the following sources to offset the flow of cash out of the country to their cheap labor production centers and for critical inputs. These are:
1. European Central Bank purchase of US paper (e.g. T Bills)
2. Foreign comprador money sent for safe-keeping and/or investment in more US paper.
3. Payments from foreign governments to support U.S. military forces stationed in these countries.
4. Debt service payments on the great debt the US has intentionally heaped on 3rd world countries.
5. Sales of high-tech armaments
6. US Corporations repatriating profits
7. New York (and satellite London) financing of everything but especially strategic inputs such as petroleum.
Nationalization
The next critical battle we confront as a people will be to see that the underway Bush gang program of socializing risk and privatizing profit is grabbed hold of and gutted. ---And, that of Mr. Obama too, if he insists on reprivatizing these public properties. It's interesting once again that people who call themselves ``communists'' failed to demand on our part the immediate nationalization of the banks and other commanding heights of capitalism in the form of money market funds, insurance companies and every other form of capitalist financing, not to mention failing to demand on our behalf the immediate nationalization of the oil and gas monopolies. Properly undertaken both banking and oil can provide the US people with far more income annually than the federal income tax as currently constructed.
651In fact, it was as I say George Bush and his financial gang who immediately moved to nationalize banking and finance. But, their plan is to use your money to save themselves; then once we have stabilized the economy they plan on getting their government in Washington to give them back these banks, money market financing and insurance companies. We have to be sure that they do not get these properties back but that these salvaged properties remain public.
Alliances
This fight will lead to the fight for nationalization of our large-scale national industries and resources so the North American people can use their own money for themselves. Along the way there is no reason why North American small business cannot be secured in their existing form and helped to grow.
Furthermore, religious organizations such as the LDS Church can rest assured we will support you in whatever decisions you make to safeguard your own situation and in fact to improve it over the coming decades. Our opposition to religion is of the highest theoretical order and in no way aimed at denying you what we consider to be your right to pursue your religious objectives in everyday life, including the politics and economics of those objectives. If we are right time will prove that. If you are right time will prove
that too. Either way we want your support and will guarantee your rights! Washington will continue to do what they have always done to you and that is to pay lip service to your rights and practical opposition to your existence!
Three Principal Tasks Now
(1) Leadership
It wouldn't hurt for all Left parties to start asking the question as to whether their leaders represent change we can believe in or just the same old stale and factually challenged politics. Politics completely wrong theoretically and thus practically. Of the ten Left parties in Los Angeles 7 are Trotskyist in origin and thus as explained herein beyond the theoretical pale (why join a Party off on the wrong theoretical foot with its first step); the Madame Maoists around the RCP are ultra-leftists so far incapable of understanding 20th century socialist stage evolution as described in this Handbook and are accordingly equally unacceptable theoretically at the outset. PLP is close but not close enough as you will learn herein to the correct position. Of course there is the old Soviet sponsored modern revisionist CPUSA now a rump Party compared to its old self for fairly obvious reasons --- namely, if you want to be an Obama democrat why load yourself down with the name ``communist.'' Well if you are getting a salary and pension from CPUSA that is one reason. The first two of these tendencies (Trotskyism and Madame Maoism) could get educated and get with it but whether they will is anyone's guess. If we can help these parties in the educational process we certainly should. As for members of the revisionist party they could do the same thing but again whether they will is anyone's guess. After all they have had five decades to kick out the revisionist usurpers and they have not. Instead real communists left for other parties. We are all from the original same camp and could all be together once again.
652(2) Rectification via Education
Left over from five decades of revisionist control of the CPUSA is an incredible ignorance of basic science among the few sincere persons therein still considering themselves communists. No ``Party'' of the working class can be any good if it doesn't consistently weed out the non-Marxist non-Leninist opportunists. No one needs rectification more than the barely still alive rump CPUSA and if you wish to save yourselves you should begin these efforts soon with intense educational efforts as the center of a massive internal rectification campaign.
(3) Build a Permanent Party Led Union in Critical Industrial Arena
I wrote the Chapter on Socialism (Chapter 13) to show you what to do next. In other words do what Leninists did in the Russian Empire. The first tasks need not be completed in total before we get on with task number three (3) which is to build a permanent communist led union in a critical industrial arena. You have to find an equivalent arena of industrial battle in the US to what Koba (Party name then for Joseph Stalin) and Krassin found in the oilfields of Batum and Baku on the Black and Caspian Seas. Here Koba and Krassin fought an armed strike and won with a permanent union in the Russian oilfields and provided a model for all the rest of the industrial centers in the Czarist empire. These other cities erupted in a nationwide general strike in 1903 and in
1904 the Czar tried to distract the nation with war against Japan. When his entire fleet was sunk at sea the nation revolted in the Revolution of 1905. All this was due to the action of a small group of dedicated revolutionaries led by Vladimir Illych Lenin from London and Leonid Krassin and Koba in Baku and Batum who started the fight. They completed it in the Russian oilfields and then spread the fight to every city in Russia in the form of a general strike. A very small group of men and women dedicated to the task of organizing proletarian revolution with the objective of seizing state power.
There are equivalent industrial centers in the USA on the docks and in the few remaining auto and steel industrial centers, and many other possibilities from trucking to lumbering to mining and oil and gas to mention only a few of the more obvious pillars of the commanding heights of industry. Here, in one (or more) of these industrial foci is where you must build a permanent base with communists openly in union leadership. Here we demonstrate what we are and what we intend to do openly and honestly and prepare to lead industrial labor in an armed struggle against the fascist regime in Washington.
(1) Select appropriate leaders, (2) launch an internal rectification and educational campaign and (3) join us in building a permanent union base in a critical area of US industrial production, and in (4) reporting on the International Brigade now forming in Brazil to support the National Liberation armies in Peru and Colombia (now that the gringo imperialists have inserted their special forces these working class vanguard fighters see it as their responsibility to match this escalation and overpower it). These are the primary tasks for all you considering yourselves communists, now on the horizon.
Foundation
In conclusion to this Preface, I want to take this opportunity to draw your attention to the fictional works of our nation's most prolific book writer, Isaac Asimov. In the Foundation series of novels he authored (especially the first three books, Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation); Asimov's central point was that science could decipher the laws of sociocultural evolution so that the collapse of the Galactic Empire could be predicted by his hero Hari Seldon. In Asimov's story, Seldon took it upon himself, using his science and mathematics of social evolution, to develop a plan (the Foundation in the novels; which by analogy could be the Communist Party in contemporary real world terms) to bring the next step in sociocultural evolution to fruition, relatively quickly. Thus, in the Foundation series Seldon was short-circuiting, in 1000 years, a process that would take 20,000 years otherwise, given the scientifically predicted collapse of the Galactic Empire.
653I wrote these Foundation comments before the announcement by the Royal Swedish Nobel Committee it had selected Paul Krugman, a Princeton University Economics Professor, and occasional op-ed writer for the New York Times, as this year's Nobel Prize winner for Economics. Then that evening I heard Professor Krugman's interview with Jim Lehrer (MacNeil Lehrer News Hour PBS). Asked why he went into economics to begin with, Krugman said he was inspired to look at social evolution scientifically by Isaac Asimov and these first three Foundation novels. Interesting is it not that a theoretician for imperialism (Krugman) and a Marxist
theoretician (me) should have been inspired to do what we have done by the same author and series of novels.
Our Communist real world contemporary and urgent task is to avert total human catastrophe, now in process, as the human created degradation of our planet is in full swing, and to create on this planet instead, a world where people make themselves consciously, rather than waiting, unconsciously, for the future to be constructed as a product of otherwise operating laws. We communists have this task, and obligation, since only we have the science of society, culture and their history, as our virtual sole property.
This can be a critically important hypothetical historical lesson in analog. We can bring humanity to a rapid resolution of the problems we now confront. We know we don't have to wait for history to do it on its own. This is why our science is so important to the very survival of humanity and to achieving our next great step forward. We can do it. Or, more accurately, I should say, you can do this. For Young Communists, this is your task, because as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying, ``the Earth belongs to the living.''
History Is Moving Fast!
Foundation Now
I have resolved the problem of Stalinist Socialism as is proven in this book and accordingly we now have to sort out and educate all those who have been lost for many years.
Modern Revisionists
We will begin with the Soviet (and East Europe) New Class bosses favorite overseas suckers - the North American modern revisionists. The Khrushchev gang appropriated the name ``communist'' due to historical happenstance and so did their foreign puppets. In our country some of the left-overs still operate with the name Communist. They will continue to do so as long as they have their hands on the financial resources to get their incomes. In actuality this bunch fit in the middle of the capitalist Obama Democratic Party. Without the skeleton rump organization they command they would not have the pensions and salaries they are collecting and could not keep duping their contributors into supplying the funds to keep their individual lives going on the party teat.
I want to wish those remaining in the old CPUSA the best of luck in sorting out your situation. I decided I couldn't get into this group after re-reading Sam Webb's Reflections on Socialism. Perhaps a better name would have been ``Reflections on Revisionism.'' However, that may be, Webb's constant belittling of the role of Marx, Engels and Lenin to that of being just more social commentators of their time is like reducing the role of Darwin to being one more 19th century naturalist. To a Marxist this is insulting. To me reading this pamphlet was physically painful.
It would have been worse if it were not so obvious that Webb is an incompetent theoretical featherweight. It's obvious Webb has no accurate comprehension of Marxist economics by the way he missed the current capitalist crisis and belittled the idea of preparing for an armed seizure of power when the next capitalist collapse occurs. It is obvious Webb is anti-Leninist in that he does not want a vanguard role for a communist party. As I say this was very painful for me to read and absorb in its full significance. ``Reflections on Socialism'' could never have been published by anyone under the rubric of communist until recent years. Whatever may be really going on in the rump CPUSA is
beyond me and not worth bothering to correct. As for the remaining members, most are too old to care anymore, and any new recruits fooled by the revisionist's retention of the name ``communist'' will catch on soon enough.
With regard to the others they fall into two categories: (1) Trotskyists and (2) other Ultra-leftists. The many Trotskyist originating parties must get over their problems. Beginning with the mass of Trotskyists (SWP, News and Letters, Spartacists, Worker's World, PSL, etc.) what they have to do is to get rid of their old and incorrect understanding of Trotsky in favor of the historically accurate version as in this book. Also, and most importantly, get over the incorrect Trotskyist theory by recognizing the source of your error as explained above and below in this Handbook. Having done this by admitting your failure to resolve the matter theoretically for many decades, and openly declaring you now see it has been resolved, you will be prepared to move on; hopefully although not necessarily, by assimilating voluntarily with us.
654Madame Mao ultra-leftists
As for the RCP and perhaps PLP (if it still exists somewhere) much the same is true. Emotional commitment to the end-game of Communism and the wish for ``Communism Now'' led wishful and passionate thinkers into a morass of ideological confusion in the transition in China after Chairman Mao's death. I have resolved the theoretical problems for you but I can't force you to get educated any more than a horse led to water can be forced to drink. So let me urge you to read the proofs herein and in so doing you will get educated and then you can get with it! Especially Bob Avakian whose Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) could become critically important overnight if Avakian is a big enough man to admit he failed to resolve the source of the problem of ultra-leftism in general and Trotskyism in particular but that now that the matter has been resolved (as herein) he accepts it and is prepared to move on accordingly.
655As for the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) it got lost after Mao's death. However, some of them got at least part of it right when they took the position that we have about twenty years upon seizing power to get on with it before the revisionists take over and initiate a process of capitalist restoration. Actually what they are saying in light of what I have proven herein is simply that we are witnessing an entirely new stage in sociocultural evolution and if that Stage doesn't move on (evolve quickly) to fully developed socialism and enter communism within about twenty years, then it may be too late to avoid a now necessary subsequent two stages of socialist transition before moving on to communism. Accordingly, as with Avakian, all they have to do is to admit they failed to make the resolution needed, but now that it has been made (as herein) they accept it and are prepared to move on.
656What We Can Expect in terms of Communism Now
An immediate (or relatively fast) move into the Communist Stage will only be possible in those countries industrially prepared such as the USA. We have never seen a fully developed capitalist country move into a Socialist Stage let alone a Communist one so we are charting new territory here. In other words, it is only in totally unprepared countries that we have so far successfully seized power and that has given us the course we have followed so far and about which much of this book is concerned. That is, the
course of building the industrial and agricultural foundations for capitalism and socialism sequentially and then hopefully getting on with the task of building communism. No one has succeeded in getting that far --- to building communism - so far, in these backward countries.
Only a New Correctly Oriented Party Can do the Job Now
There is a clear, present, and desperate need for a real Communist Party in this country and accordingly, having spoken with a number of you about this for several years, we agree that the time is at hand to kick off our Foundation and now! I have to do what my age, health, and background, allow and qualify me to do and that is to teach Marxism, Leninism, and its various constituent social and historical sciences, i.e., historical materialism.
But you have to step up to the plate now. Those of you reading this book --- perhaps someone I have never heard of let alone met --- must take over our new Party and lead it into the coming decades of the 21st century. ---And you have to do this soon. I am getting beyond the point of being able to provide the energetic leadership our new Party needs and needs everywhere and at every level. I am willing to give what I have which is to say the last few years of my life but you have to take the reins, the sooner the better. To quote Obewan Kenobe ``I'm getting to old for this sort of thing.''
Initially we in the Communist Party USA (Foundation) have three objectives: (1) educating revolutionary cadre of whatever Party in the sciences of historical materialism and (2) implementing our own political program with a vertebral chord of revolutionary cells and clubs. For course work and other opportunities look for Communist Party USA (Foundation) on the internet Our structure can be seen in the table of organization. (3) Build toward assimilation of all of the sincere Marxist and Leninist organizations into one unified Party. Make no mistake about the defining and diagnostic criteria to join, which is sincerity.
The Test for Membership in the new and real Communist Party
That sincerity is ultimately put to the test by determining if there is a willingness to see the essential underlying fact of two or more sociocultural evolutionary stages existing in the (Second) Transitional Period in human history. That is the period we are currently in with its already defined Stages of Stalinist Socialism and Advanced Socialism (and perhaps another one or two on the way). All of the theoretical schisms of the past 150 years can be made to go away with this correct understanding of the stages of sociocultural evolution and the dialectics of cause and process within.
Learning Little by Little
Along the way, you're learning to think scientifically (beginning with dialectical materialist epistemology), will allow you to understand the previous unanswered great question in world anthropology which is now resolved herein. Namely, how the general contradiction of the primitive communist epoch (99+% of human history) transformed into the general contradiction of the Servitude Epoch (Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism. This is the central topic of the first ten or so chapters of this book.
Let's Not Get Off on the Wrong Foot from the Start
The brief explanation of the history of the internationals in this blurb at Venezuelanalysis toward the end of 2009 is completely misleading, wrong and unacceptable.
The First International did not collapse. It was threatened by anarchist takeover in Europe so General Secretary Karl Marx sent it to Philadelphia. There the 19 sections of US communists dissolved it at Marx's bidding. In its stead they created the Workingmen's Party of the United States and other Marxists in Europe created their own social democratic parties. I discuss this in detail in my new book in Part III on the history of the Labor Movement in the USA.
The Second International was taken over from the beginning by revisionists. They did what we have come to expect from revisionism (both this original archetype kind which is still with us and in power in many capitalist countries, and modern revisionism of the USSR-East Europe type, which is now gone thank goodness, except for the leftover puppet parties) and supported the capitalists in their imperialist world war in 1914.
The Third International created by Lenin set things straight. It is a lie to say that the Comintern was perverted by Stalin and/or Stalinism. If we are going to start a new international it cannot be just an excuse to bring Trotskyist mythology back to the fore. In this new book ABC's OF COMMUNISM, BOLSHEVISM 2011, you can read the truth about the history of the 3rd International in 150 pages (chapters 13 through 16 pp 140-275). (http://www.abcsofcommunism.info .
The Fourth International of the Trotskyists never got off the ground. That is true. They have never been able to secure state power anywhere. Originally because, at least in my opinion, the only programmatic difference between Stalin and Trotsky was on the question of pace of the five year plans. The only other real difference being the personality struggle between the bourgoisiefied wannabe aristocrat Trotsky and the long term Old Bolshevik Stalin. Trotsky was an enemy of Bolshevism most of his life and with us only a short time. (The total time being the ten years from 1917 to 1927).
Stalin gave Lenin the first permanent labor union in the Czarist Empire in the oilfields of Baku and Batum and robbed banks and stage coaches and ships to get Lenin money. It was Stalin and associated Old Bolsheviks (never including Trotsky) who triggered the national general strike that led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the Russian Revolution of 1905. Again all of this is discussed in the above referenced sections available (gratis) at www.abcsofcommunism.info.
A fifth international is exactly what is needed but not one based on silly Trotskyist lies, distortions and mythology. If those assembled should decide to create the 5th International they should consider setting up a Historical Commission to study and resolve differences of opinion on all these matters. Any attempt to foist Trotskyist mythology on the international working class movement's most important central body will doom such a body to defeat right from the start. We need to get off on the right foot.
To Recap
These are the two central most important theoretical breakthroughs since Lenin reinvigorated Marxism in 1903. With them we can rearm the working class world-wide. The concomitant is that it is now your responsibility to internalize these new facts along with everything else in this book and take this ideological rearmament to its logical
practical application, which is the global conclusion of the period of class and state society. Hopefully within this century.
__ALPHA_LVL1__ Index to Fundamentals of Historical Materialism Bolshevism 2010
(This will have to be repaginated for the 2011 edition above before we go to press)
A
Abraham Lincoln Battalion 247
(15th IB Brigade, Spain, 1937) 252
Absolute declines
Rate of Profit 121, 126, 127
Rate of Surplus Value production 121, 127
Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms Stage 107, 110, 114, 117, 122
Affluence 85, 86, 90, 98, 100
Original Affluent Society 90, 98
Agricultural revolution 91, 93, 112
Self-triggering 95
Agriculture (Russia 1917-1934) 213-216
Agriculture (Russia 1928-1934) 218, 223
ALBA 383
Albania 240
Altruism 102, 136
American Federation of Labor (AFL) 333
American Outlaws (movie) 333
American system of manufacture 319, 322
American Workers Congress 332
Anarchism 35, 113, 114
Spain 240
Anarcho-syndicalism 240, 243
vs. Marxism 113, 114, 243, 253
Ancient Society (1877; Morgan) 89
An En Cult (Iraq) 108
Animism 89
Animatism 89
Anthropology 89, 98
Apocalypto (movie) 110
Aptheker, Bettina 36, 278
Aptheker, Herbert 36, 278
Aragon, Kingdom (Spain) 238
Archaeology (US Southwest) 394
Arkwright spinning machine factory 320
Asiatic Mode of Production 112
Assassination (US current program) 385
Asteroid impact (Yucatan) 74
Atlee, Clement (Brit PM 1945-1950) 274
Atomic bomb
Japan 272
Korea 274
US (only 2 bombs) 273
Production rate 272-274
Soviet bomb (1949) 273, 274
Nuclear umbrella 274
Austria 120
Azcarraga Family 378, 379
B
Badajoz (Spain, Massacre 1936) 251
Bagration, Operation 268
Bahamas 125
Bahrain 350
Baldwin-Chamberlain Plot 249
(See London-Berlin-Rome axis)
Baldwin, Stanley (Brit. PM) 229, 249
Bandidas (movie) 333, 339
Bands (societal form)
First band stage 80
Second band stage 88
Third band stage 90
Barragan Camacho 356
Bayo, Alberto (Cuba, Spain) 249
Belize 16, 105
Beria, Lavrenti 221
Berlin pressure point (1949) 274
Best (MI6 agent, double ``O'') 253
Bessie, Alvah 254
Biological hardware 74
Blast furnaces 194, 122
Blyukher, Vasily Konstantinovich (Galen) 168, 197, 200
Blow Out Preventor (BOP) 356
Bolivia 105
Bnito 153
Bolshevism 139, 141
Bond, James 139
Bonnell, Dan (Botany Prof.) 254
Borgia, Archbishop, Pope of Rome 239
Borodin, Mikhail 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 239
Boss hierarchy 141
Braveheart (movie) 110
Broad-spectrum revolution 90, 91
Budenny, Semyon 168, 171, 176
Bukharin, Nicolai 174, 227, 232-235
Can We Build Socialism in One
Country in the Absence of the
Victory of the West European
Proletariat 182
Economic Organization in Soviet
Russia (1922) 183
Burgess, Guy 229
Bush George (H W) I
CIA 377
Diaz-Serrano (Partner) 357
Bush George (W) II 378
Byrnes, James 277
C
Cairncross, John 229
Cambodia 35
Capital
Constant capital 138
Volume One 143, 187
Capitalism 42, 119
American system manufacture 319, 322
Assembly line manufacture 318
Census 322
Cheating & corruption 129, 130
Chemical engineering (US) 330-331
Communist Manifesto 134, 139, 158, 324
Constant capital 337
Cotton 322
Creating its own gravedigger 351
Depressions 320, 321, 322, 332, 385
European Revolutions 1848-1850 133, 134, 324
Free enterprise 129, 130
French Revolution 132-133
General crisis 42, 125-128, 132, 133
Globalization 385
Government guaranteed contracts 130
High human costs 351
Imperialism 139
Industrialization 318
Innovation 138, 330
Interchangeability of parts 319
Internationalism 253
Iron and Steel (US) 330-331
Iron Law capitalist relations 44
Machine tools 122, 310, 319
Massive capital accumulation 325
Mercantile 121
Monopoly 130
North America 130, 134
Origins 122-24, 130
Primitive accumulation 317, 322
Pure 121
``Rosy dawn'' 125
Stage 119
Standardization of Parts 318
Steamships 319
Unchained
Unfettered 325
Unions 319
Unleashed 330
US Capitalism unchained 317
US subprime mortgage scam 385
Waterways 319
Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Co. 153
Castile, Kingdom (Spain) 238
Castro, Fidel 279
Castro, Raul 279, 393, 398
Challenge (social) 86, 105
Chamberlain, Neville (Brit. PM) 229, 244
Chavez, Hugo 286, 393
Chayanov, A. V. 99
Theory of Peasant Economy 99
Chayanov's rule 96, 99
Cheka (Extraordinary Commission to
Combat Counter-revolution, Sabotage
And Speculation) 186, 217, 219, 231,
Founded (Dec 20, 1917) 232-235
Chen Tu-hsiu 190, 198
Chiang Kai-shek 206
Chiefdom Stages 110
China 188-212
Agrarian Reform (1949-1958) 275
Backburner (Prol. Rev.) 193
Backwardness 188, 189, 283
Blast furnaces 188
Blyukher, Vasily K (Galen) 197, 200, 204
Bolshevik politburo view 189
Borodin, Mikhail 194, 195, 196, 198, 200
Canton (Guangzhou) 189
Capitalism in China
Origins 118, 191
Capitalist factor 191
Green Gang 191, 205-06,
Chen, Tu-hsiu 190, 194, 198, 200
Chiang, Kai-shek 206, 274
Chin (Kingdom) 118
Chou En-lai 190
Civilization (origins) 105
Comintern in China 190
1st Cong. 1919 190
2nd Cong. 1920 190
3rd Cong. 1921 190
Communist Party of China founding 190
Countryside, revolution 263
Reform 264
Cities 264
Collectivization 264
Great Leap Forward 264
Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution 264
NEP 264
New Class 264
Peoples Communes 264
Deutscher, Isaac 194
Du Yuesheng (Big-eared Du) 190, 191
Feudalism 117
Gaia, Gai General 201-04
Galen, General (Blyukher) 197, 200, 204
Great Wall 118
Green gang 205, 206, 274
Imperial feudalism 117
Jiang Qing 209
Joffe, Adolph 192
Joffe-Sun Agreement 193
Kidwell, Jean 363
KMT Party 191
KMT-Soviet Agreement 193
Legalism 118
Lenin's Analysis 188, 192, 195, 198, 199, 200
Lungshan (religion) 108
Machinofacture (1921) 189
Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) 50, 228, 263, 280, 351
May 4th Movement (1919) 190
Molotov, Vyacheslav 195
National Revolutionary Army 193, 197
New Class 276
NEP (Chinese) 281
Northern expedition 193, 203, 206, 207
Nuclear submarines 286
Nuclear weapons 286
Opium trafficking 189
Origins 106
Peking (Beijing) University 190
Peoples Communes 275
People's Republic of China (1949) 273, 274, 275
Pestana, Frank 363
Philippines 339
Plot point (in Soviet policy) 192
Proletarian revolution 192, 193
Rakovsky, Christian 195, 196
Rapallo 191, 240
Religion 108
Soong Dynasty 191, 206
Stalin responsibility for China 194, 195
Steam engines 189
Sun Yat-sen 192, 195, 204, 213
Taiping Rebellion 189, 118
Taiwan 275
Three Reasons for examination 185
First period (1921-1927) 185
Second period (1928-1949) 185
Three systems one country 297
Trotsky, Leon 194, 201
Two systems one country 297
US-China People's Friendship
Association 363-364
US financial crisis & debt to China 386
US-Spanish-Cuban War road 339
Warring States Period 118
Working Class Factor 1921-1927 190
Chiquita (United Fruit Co.) 279
Chou, En-lai 351
Churchill, Winston 230
CIA 376
Civilization (Slavery) 105
Origin areas 105, 110
Classes 110
Class analysis 123
Clavell, James (China) 244
Gai Jin (Japan) 158
King Rat (Singapore prison)
Shogun (Japan)
Tai Pan (Hong Kong)
Clemenceau, Georges 341
CNT (Anarchist Labor Org., Spain) 240
Coal 321, 322
Cold War 261, 263
Collectivization (USSR 1928-1934) 220, 223
Colombia 255, 381
Uribe clique 381
Colon, Cristobal (Columbus, Christopher) 124
Cold War: See Saw I: 1945-1971 353
Cold War: See Saw II: 1972-
Comintern (See International, Third) 185, 190, 254
Secret department 190
Commodity 97, 98, 101, 119
Destination 119
Exchange value 119, 121
Surplus Value 119, 121
Value 119, 121
Form 119
Utilitarian value 119, 121
Labor-power 120
Paid labor-power 119, 121
Unpaid labor-power 119, 121
Commoditized labor-power 91, 94, 101
Communism
Defined 172, 395-396
Modern 186, 100, 278, 396
Primitive 40, 95, 97, 98, 100, 186, 278, 395
Future 34, 100, 396
Communist Club (New York, 1857) 324
Communist Manifesto 134, 139, 158, 324, 394
Communist Party of China (founding 1921) 190
Communist Party of Iran 354
Communist Party of Peru 384
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (b)
Army-Party 168
Congress of Victors 1934
In power 52
9th Congress (1920) 48
Politburo 162
Trotsky's criticism 51
Communist Foundation Party USA 382, 390
Program 388, 399-405
Company man (oilfield) 149
Comprador (defined) 384
Congress of Victors (1815) 226
Congress of Victors (1934) 168, 227
Contradiction (See General Contradiction) 41, 96, 126
Coon, Carleton 377
Correa (President Ecuador) 386
Cotton 322
CPUSA (Communist Party, USA) 254, 255, 280
Districts
California 280
Oregon 255
Idaho-Washington 255
Crick (Watson & Crick; DNA) 38
Crimean War (1853-56) 135
Crises Dialectics 42
Cromwell, Oliver 123, 131, 135
Cross-cultural Comparative Analysis 40
Crusades, The 124, 125
Cuba 131, 279, 367
Batista, Fulgencio 367
Granma 386
Culture 40, 41, 81
Evolution of 41, 42, 100
Culture, People and Nature (Harris) 100
Czechoslovakia (1938) 229, 230
D
Daily Worker (CP NY London) 255
Daily Workers (CFP USA) 33
Darwin, Charles 36, 37
Origin of Species 38
Debs, Eugene 335
Deep Battle (Deep Operations) 230, 256, 352
Khalkin-gol, Battle of 256, 257
Definition of terms 33
De Gaulle, Charles 176
De Leon, Daniel (SLP) 333
Deng, Xiao-ping 264
Green gang 262, 263
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) 263
People's Republic (1949) 262
Taiwan 263
Deutscher, Isaac 195
Dialectics
Dialectics of contradiction in
Cultural evolution 41
Diaz-Serrano Jorge 357, 378
Dien Bien Phu 280
DNA 38, 81
Mitochondrial 81
Du Yuesheng (Big-eared Du) 190, 191, 263
Dzerzhinsky, Felix 221, 232-235, 254
E
Ecuador 385
Egypt
Aswan High Dam 361
Canal Zone War 1956 361
Civilization (origins) 105
De Lessups 361
Eisenhower intervenes 361
Elbowing the competition (Suez) 360
Naguib, Mohammad 360, 361
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 359, 360, 361, 362, 365
Philosophy of Revolution 359
Voice of the Arabs (radio) 362
Pyramids 115, 116
Sadat, Anwar 365
Solar cult (religion) 108
War (1973) 364
Eight hour day 332
Einstein, Albert 36
Electricity 331, 335
Elizabeth (I, Queen, England 1588) 238
Encirclement, imperialist 237, 246
Engels, Frederick 37, 38, 114, 132
Communist Manifesto 134, 139
Origin of the Family Private
Property and the State 114, 166
England, Britain, United Kingdom 130
Abolition of monarchy 124
Anti-restoration revolution 1688 131
Civil War 122
Cromwell, Oliver 123, 131
Republic 124
Revolution 123
Enigma 240
Envy (jealousy, coveting) 83, 85, 87, 95, 99
Equations (see Mathematics)
Era of Freedom 101
Era of Necessity 101
Espionage
Germany 246, 247
Japan 256
Kursk 260
Orlov 252
European Revolutions 1848-1850 133, 134, 324
Exchange 91
Exes (Expropriations) 155
F
Factory 122
Fascism 228
Defined 228
Countries 228-229
German 352
Family
Horde 81
Faraday, Michael 36
Fascism 253
FCC 376
Feudal stage, feudalism 111, 117, 118, 395
``Finger, the'' (Mex. Pres. Select) 357
Five Year Plan, First 183, 220, 222-227,
Five Year Plan, Second 226
Fleming, D. F. 273
The Cold War and its Origins 273
Fleming, Ian 139, 244
Follett, Ken
``A Place Called Freedom''
``On the Wings of Eagles'' 354
Foner, Philip S.
History of the Labor Movement
In the US 316
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemmingway) 244
Ford Motor Company 218-219
Formula
(sociocultural evolutionary equation)
1st Band Stage 88
2nd Band Stage 88
3rd Band Stage 91
Tribal Agriculture Stage 94
Simple Chiefdom Stage 103
Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms 109
Slavery 115
Feudalism 117
Capitalism 127
Socialism 297
Advanced Socialism 297
Communism 297
Forrestal, James 277
Foundations of Archaeology (Smith, 1976) 99
Foundations of Leninism (Stalin, 1924)
France
Congress of Victors (1815) 133
French and Indian War 125
French Revolution of 1789 132
Napoleon Bonaparte 133
Frunze, Mikhail 171, 175, 178-180, 198
Fugitive Slave Act 134
Fundamental Needs (Value) 88
G
Gaia, Gai 176
Gasoline 336
Galicia Hernandez, Joaquin (La Quina) 356
Garcia, Alan (Peru traitor) 383
Gellhorn, Martha 249
General Contradiction 41, 96, 101, 103, 115, 117, 126
293
General Crisis 42, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 101, 103, 104, 115, 117, 119, 126, 132, 320, 321
Tribal Agriculture 93, 94, 95, 96
Feudalism 117, 119
Slavery 42, 115
Capitalism 42, 126, 320
Simple chiefdoms 101, 102, 103, 104
USA Capitalism 2008 288-293, 320-321
Geological time 74-76
Germany 174
Defeat of 1919 Jan Revolution 175
Spartakusbund 174
World War I ended 174
Gibson, Mel 110, 317
Gilman, Antonio 62, 100, 172
Goff, Irving ``Irv'' 247
Gompers, Samuel 333
Gorki, Maxim 161
Gorski, A. V. (Chekist, London) 252
Gotha Program, Critique of (Marx) 254
GRANMA 386
Green Gang 205, 206, 263
Guatemala
Armas, Castillo (US coup) 367
Civilization (origins) 105
Guevara, Ernesto (``Che'') 279
Gulf Oil 334, 350
H
Halliburton 356
Hammer, Armand 362
Hammer 362
Hammer, Julius 362
Hammerquist, Don 255
Hammerquist (Wheeler) Susan 255
Harris, Marvin 99, 100
Hegel, George 162
Hemmingway, Ernest 259
Heterosexuality 78
Himmler, Heinrich 244
Hiroshima, A-bombing 261
History
Original Documents 37
Strategic Magnitudes 185
Unfolding as it should 37
Historical materialism (origins) 38
General Theory 40
Hitler, Adolph 140, 230, 243, 254
Plot to assassinate (Brit.) 246
War with USSR 230
Hollis, Roger 235, 253
Homo
australopithecus 80, 82, 85, 86, 88
erectus 82, 86, 90
sapiens 82, 86, 88, 90, 91
Homosexuality 78
Honduras 105
Horthy (Admiral; Dictator, Yugo.) 254
Hungary 175
Hunting/gathering 91
Hydrogen bomb (Soviet) 276
I
Ideology (as 1/3 of culture) 38, 81, 88, 89, 97, 100, 102, 117
Altruism 136
Origins 89, 97
Sadism-selfishness 102, 114, 117, 136
Imperialism 139, 336
Elbowing the competition 357
Expelled from Russia 342
US enters imperialist phase 336, 338, 339
US Imperialism Postwar 72, 279
US imperialism today 383, 384
Financial Evolution 265
Imperialist conspiracy against USSR 228, 229, 230, 237, 240-272,
246, 247, 250, 256, 257, 258
Industrialization 318, 326
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 335
Innovation (invention) 85, 138, 330
Inside Snapshots
Minusinsk (1899): Lenin,
Krupskaya 144
Baku (1901): Stalin,
Voroshilov, Kalinin 153
Tbilisi (1907): Stalin,
Caucasian Bolsheviks 159
Petrograd (1917): Lenin, Stalin 160
Petrograd (1917): Politburo,
Dzerzhinsky 232
London (1922): Borodin, Rakovsky 199
Moscow (1925): Stalin,
Molotov, Sorge 185
Moscow (1922): Stalin, Molotov 198
Moscow (1922): Stalin, Borodin,
Lenin, Blyukher, Molotov 200
Moscow River (1922): Blyukher,
Borodin 203
Moscow (1923): Stalin, Blyukher,
Borodin 206
Moscow (1926): Stalin, Sorge 218
Moscow (1926): Stalin,
Cheka graduates 219
Moscow (1928): Stalin, Menzhinsky,
Yagoda 221
Moscow (1936): Stalin, Orlov,
Molotov
Poskrebyshev 248
Moscow (1937, Molotov, Stalin
Beria 253
Saragossa (1937): Philby, Himmler,
Von Furstenberg 255
Moscow (1938): Stalin, Molotov
Beria 262
Moscow (1941): Stalin, Red Square 270
Intelligence (proletarian) 229-240
Philby, Kim
Borodin, Michael
Sorge, Richard
Interchangeability of parts 319
Intercontinental Missiles 273
International Brigades (Spain) 244, 248, 250
Inserted 244
Madrid, Battle of 244
Merriman, Robert 244
Merriman, Marion 244
Withdrawn 250
International (1st) (1864-1876) 136, 137, 253
Of Workingmen's Association 125, 132, 134, 135, 325, 332
Formed London 1864
Dissolved Philadelphia 1876 332
International (2nd) 141, 185, 253
International (3rd) 176, 190, 254
First Congress (1919) 176, 185
Second Congress (1920) 176
Indochina 351
Internal combustion engine 331, 335
Iran (Persia)
Committee of 60 366
Follet, Ken 366
A Place Called Freedom
On the Wings of Eagles 366
Iranian National Oil Company 358
Islamic Revolution 366
Japanese oil relationships 353
Oil 349
Mossadegh (PM) 357, 359
Pahlavi, Reza 357, 358, 366
US subversion for oil 357, 366
Iraq 108, 378-380
Great Oil Robbery 284
Hashemite family 362
Iraq Petroleum Company 362
Kirkuk 342
Revolution of 1955 362
Spoils of World War I 341, 349
US invasion 378-380
US defeat 381
Iron
Bessemer process 330-331
Pig (flowing) 122
Wrought (decarburized) 122, 330
Mild steel 330-331
Religion (An En Cult) 108
Steel 331
Siemens-Thomas process 331
Thomas process 331
US capitalism 321
US production rate 321
Iskra (Spark) 56, 145, 152-154
Israel 364, 365
Israel (policy 2009) 353
Italy
City-states 125
Padua 124
J
James, Jesse 332
Japan 255
Attacks USSR 255, 256
Defeated (WW II) 260-61
Feudalism 123
Heroin & Opium 213
Khalkin-gol, Battle of 255
Last Samurai, The (movie) 123
Maquiladoras 213
Meiji Revolution 123
Ronin 112, 116
Shogun (novel; movie) 123
Supertankers (invented) 365
Jason Smith Petroleum Corp 376, 378
Jefferson, Thomas 293, 315, 316, 320
Jiang Qing 206
Joffe, Adolph A 191, 192
Junk bonds 374
K
Kalinin, Mikhail 154, 156
Kazbegi, Alexander 149
Keenan, George 277
Kerosene 150
Khalgin-gol, Battle of (PR Mongolia) 255, 256,
Kissinger, Henry 280, 351
Kidwell, Jean 363-364
Kinship 86
Kirkuk 342
Kirov, Sergey 168
Assassination of 168, 227
KMT Party (China) 191, 193
Knowland, William (US Sen. Calif.) 274
Korea 274
Krassin, Leonid 55, 146, 150, 152, 153, 347, 348
Krupskaya 143-45
Khrushchev, Nikita S. 148, 149
Kirov, Sergei 227
Kitty Hawk 336
Kulaks (Fist) 216, 217
Kun, Bela 175
Kurnatovsky, Victor 146, 154
Kursk, Battle of 260
Kuusinen, Otto 186, 229
Kuwait 350
L
Labor (concrete) 40, 92
Labor-power 40, 91, 92, 93, 115, 120, 121, 122
Marx original contribution 122
Labor movement 1866 USA 331
Labor movement Bolshevism USA 336
Labor Parties (USA) 323
New York Workingmen's Party 323
Lady ``X'' 235
Land Reform (Russia) 167-168
Lansky, Meyer 190, 191, 261, 273, 359
Largo Caballero, Francisco (Spain 1936) 241
Latin America 2009 380. 383
Laws
Absolute Decline in rate of profit 42
Capitalist relations (Iron law) 138
Fundamental Needs (Law) 84, 88
History 45
Sociocultural Evolution 46
Stage sequential laws 46
Value 45, 120, 121, 129
Leiva Torres, Armando 356
Lenin (Ulyanov), Vladimir Illych 140, 141, 143, 163-173
Abolishing ranks 167
Address to Comintern 1st Cong. 167
April Thesis 165, 340
Bolshevik Party 140
Bern, Switzerland (1914-15) 146
Can the Bolsheviks Retain
State Power? 166
Development of Capitalism
In Russia 145, 337
European liberation 173
Far East Policy 189, 192, 193, 198, 199, 200, 256
German Army General Staff 165
Hiding (1917) 162
Iskra (Spark) 146
Jailed 145
Letter to the Workers of Europe
And North America 165-166
Imperialism, the Highest Developed
Stage of Capitalism (1917) 337
London 152
Materialism and Empirio-criticism 337
On the Fine Laws 145
Revolution October 1917 161-173
Sealed train 164
Siberian exile 146
Soviet-Polish War 1920 176
State and Revolution 165
Switzerland (1917) 161
Wife (Krupskaya) 143
Libya 362, 363
Hammer, Armand 362
Idris, King 363
Khadafi, Muammar 362
Mussolini's Italian occupation 363
Nasser's influence 363
Occidental Petroleum 363
Liebknecht, Karl 174
Light Brigade (Charge of) 135-36
Limbaugh, Rush 140
Lincoln, Abraham 324
Lloyd George, David 341
London-Berlin-Rome Axis 228, 230
Lopez-Portillo (Pres. Mex. 1976-1982) 357
Lowell, Francis 322
Lumer, Hyman 241
Luxemburg, Rosa 174, 175
M
Machinery, 119, 121, 122
Machine tools 122, 310
Machinofacture 119, 121, 317
MacMillan, Harold 361
MacNeish, Richard S. ``Scotty'' 16, 377
Madoff, Bernie 373
Manila galleons 239
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) 263, 280, 351
Marti, Jose (Cuba) 244, 339
Marty, Andre 248
Marx, Karl Heinrich 37, 38, 128, 140, 393
Capital Volume One 128, 134, 136, 143, 153, 393
Capital Volume Three 130
Capital Volume Four 136
Communist Manifesto 134, 139, 158, 324
Critique of Gotha Program 130, 141
Ethnological Notebooks 89, 101, 397
Fundamentals of Geology 397
Funeral (1883) 140
New York Daily Herald 137, 324
Marxism (philosophy of science) 39
Marxism (terminology) 33
Marxism and Archaeology (Seminar) 100
Marxism-Leninism 33, 244, 254
Marxism arrives (USA) 324
Olympian perspective 185
Mathematics of Sociocultural Evolution 40, 120
Social Production 120, 127
Madrid Hurtado, de la, Miguel
(Pres. Mex. 1982-1988) 357
McCarthy, Joe (US Sen. Wisconsin) 273, 277, 357
Reign of Terror 273
Retired 277
March, Juan 243, 244
Mathematics of sociocultural evolution 88, 92
May 4th Movement 190
MacLean, Donald 229
Mendel 36
Mensheviks 141
Mental imprinting 146, 186,
Menzhinsky 221
Mercader, Ramon 250
Mexico
Azcarraga family 376
BANAMEX 371
Bush, George H. W. 369
Calles, Plutarco Elias (President) 344
Cardenas, Lazaro (President) 344
CIA 376
Cities Service 344
Civilization (origins) 105
Communist Party 344
Constitution of 1917 344
Contreras, Luis (STPRM) 371
Crisis of 1982 356
De la Madrid Hurtado, Miguel 370
Diaz, Porfirio 343
Diaz-Serrano Jorge 369, 377
Gulf 344
Imperialist oil companies 344
Lindbergh, Charles 344
Lopez Portillo, Jose (Pres.) 369
Madrid Hurtado, Miguel 357
Nationalization (3-18-1938) 344
New Class 343
Oil Axis overtures 1938 345
Oil industry 343
Oil production 344
Olmec religion 108
PEMEX (Petroleos Mexicanos) 345, 368, 370, 371
Potrero del Llano 4 343
PRI (Party of the Institutional
Revolution) 344
Price, Tehran 1971 363
Royal Dutch Shell 344
Silva Herzog, Jesus 370
Schlumberger 371
Sinclair 344
Standard Oil New Jersey 344
Tabasco, Villahermosa 356, 370
Tamaulipas 343
Tampico 343
Third Mexican-USA War 344
Univision 375
Villa, Pancho 344
Zapata Emiliano 344
Zapata Petroleum 369
Zenteno, Miguel 371
MI 6 (British Secret Service) 246
Michener, James A. 247
Migration (human populations) 82, 83, 84, 104
Milken, Michael 372
Mitchell, Billy 236
MOCR Roach Motel
(Monarchist Organization
Central Russia) 185-87, 221
Mode of Production 40, 81
Modern Revisionism 247, 351, 253
Molotov, Vyacheslav 183, 195, 236
Money capital 317, 318
Moon Over Parador (movie) 381
Moore, Michael 73
Morgan, Lewis Henry 89
Morphemes 79
Monthly Review 384
Murdoch, George
Muslim interface 125
Mussolini, Benito 140, 243, 254
N
Nagasaki, atomic bombing 261
Nazi Party 140
Nelson, Steve 236, 247, 253, 255
New Class 41, 48, 61-71, 96, 105, 111,
148, 227, 276, 281
New Economic Policy (NEP) 182, 183, 281
New Model Army 123
New World 112
NGM (Next Generation of Machinery) 44, 126, 128
Newton, Isaac 36, 38
Nin, Andres 241, 247, 358
Nina (Bolshevik secret press Caucuses) 156
Nixon, Richard M 280, 357
NL Industries 356
NL McCullough 356
NL Shaffer de Mexico SA de CV 356
Nobel family (Robert, Immanuel, Ludwig,
Albert) 150-152
Northern expedition (China 1926-27) 193, 203
Nuclear umbrella (Soviet) 274
O
Oil and Gas (Petroleum)
Arabian Dreams 349, 350
ARAMCO 358
Anglo-American 340
Baragan Camacho 368
Bolshevism avoided 347
British Petroleum 340, 349, 350, 357
Bulk tanker shipping 151
Bush, George H. W. 369, 377
California Arabian Standard Oil Co. 350
Chevron 375
Cities Service 375
Civil war (US) 328
Chemical engineering 336
Clause 10 (Arabia) 358
Coleman Lantern 327
Cracking 336
Cullinan, Joseph 334
Dallas (TV) 375
Diaz Serrano, Jose 377, 378
Digging for Oil 327
Drake, Edwin L. 326
Drexel Burnham Lambert 374
Drilling invented 326, 327
Cable drilling 327, 334
Rotary drilling 327, 334
Fascism struggles for oil 353
FDR saves oil capitalists 346, 347
Flagler, Henry 328, 346
East Texas Oil Strike 1932 346
Engineering, petroleum 342
Ewing, J.R. (TV) 375
Foreign imports at 5% 347
Foreign imports at 50% 355
Galicia Hernandez, Joaquin 368
Gasoline 336
Geology, petroleum 342
Gulbenkian 359
Gulf Investors Group 375
Gulf Oil 334, 350, 375
Halliburton 368, 373
Hammer, Armand 362, 373, 375
Holmes, Frank 349
Hughes, Jr., Howard 334
Hunt, H. L. 346
Ickes, Harold 347
Imperialism Dividing the World 340
Imperialist struggle for world oil 339
Jason Smith Petroleum Corp 372, 376
Joiner, Columbus ``Dad'' 346
Kerosene 150, 327, 328
Kirkuk 342
Kuwait 350
Logging (well) 348
Mellon family 334, 350
Mesa Petroleum 374, 375
Milken, Michael 372, 374
Mobil Oil 358, 359
National Security Council (US) 373
NL Industries 368, 370, 373, 376
NL McCullough 368
NL Shaffer 368
North Sea 366
NRA, NIRA, oil code 347
Occidental Petroleum 363, 373
Oil States 329
OPEC 365
Permargo 377
Pennsylvania 327
Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. 326
Philby, Harry Bridger St. John 349
Pickens, T. Boone 372, 374
Red Line Agreement 359
Rockefeller, John D. 328, 346, 377
Saud, Ibn 349
Schlumberger 348, 368, 373
Scientific chemical engineering 329, 342
SEC 373, 376
Seven Sisters 357
Shell 341
Signal Hill, California 362, 363
Simmons, Harold (NL) 370
Smith, Jason W. 372
Spindeltop 333
Standard Oil 328, 330, 358
Standard Oil of California 350, 358, 359
Standard Oil of New Jersey 358
Standard Oil Trust 328
STPRM 368
Supertankers 365
Texaco 334, 358
Townsend, James 326
World Petroleum Order post-War II 358
Yergin, Daniel 325
The Prize 326
Zapata Petroleum 369, 376
Old Regime (Ancien Regime)
Spain (239)
France
Olmec (religion) 108
Olympian perspective 185
OPEC 351, 365, 366
Origin of the Family,
Private Property & the State (book) 81
Orlov, Alexander M (Lev Feldbin) 229, 235, 236, 237, 241, 242, 243,
250, 251, 252, 259
Ottoman Empire 349
P
Paine, Thomas 315, 316
Paris Commune 333
Parnell, Dock 376
Patricide, The (Alexander Kazbegi) 149
Patriot, The (movie) 110
Payne, Robert 148
Pemex
Corruption 356
PDVSA 355
People's Democracies (E. Europe 1948) 273
People's Republic of China 274
PERMARGO (Offshore Drilling) 356
Peron, Juan 367
Peron, Eva Duarte (Evita) 367
Perot, Ross 378
Peru 255
Civilization (origins) 105
Garcia, Alan 381
Religion (Chavin, Paracas) 108
Shining Path 384
Smith, Jason W 162
US puppets 381
Pestana, Frank 363,364
Petroleum thread 351
Philby, Harry Bridger St. John 239, 348, 349
Philby, Harold A. R. ``Kim'' 229
Cleared of espionage by MacMillan 361
Harry Bridger St. John (father) 348, 349
MI6 240, 244
My Silent War 229
Penetrating MI6 252
Spain 245
Warning Stalin 1937 247
Philosophy of Science (Marxist) 37, 38, 126
Dialectical Materialism 100, 126
Epistemology 39
Explanation 40
Method: History Unfolding 37
Class analysis 123
Original Documents 37
Model building 172
Theory (General) 39, 41
Theory (Specific) 40, 41
Philippines 339
Phillips Academy 377
Phonemes 79
Physics (New Perspectives in) 74
Pie-cards 141
Piel, Gerald 377
Pipes, Richard 184
The Unknown Lenin 184
Plekhanov, George 153, 157
Pol Pot (Cambodia) 35
Poland 175
Portugal 123, 125
POUM (Spanish quasi-Trot Party) 247
Powder River Basin 372
Priests, priestesses 105
Prieto, Carlos 236-237, 268, 371
Prieto, Evelyn
Prieto, Ayari
Prieto, Deni
Primate evolution 75-78
Prime Directives 41, 42, 103
Primitive Communism 40, 97
Primitive Communist mentality 97
Professional specialization 102
Profiles in Ethnology (Service, Elman) 98
Profit 106, 122, 126, 128
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) USA 53, 280, 364
Progressive Party (US 1948) 273
Proletarian dictatorship (see Working
Class dictatorship) 266
Protestant ethic 310
Psychology
Fetishism of commodities 137, 187
Material relations appear as
Social relations 137
Mental imprinting 36, 146, 187, 188, 278
Mental templates by Epoch 147
Psychological theory of Marxism 136
Q
La Quina (See Galicia Hernandez, Joaquin) 368
R
Race 82
Racism 140
Radek, Karl 174
Railroads 321, 325, 331
Rakovsky, Christian 183
Ranks (social) 104, 108, 110, 114
Red Army, Navy 167-168, 237
Rapallo (Italy) Treaty 183, 191, 192, 237, 240
Red Army 168-174, 200, 201,
Commanders (3) 172
Deep Operations (Deep Battle) 183, 226, 364
Military Opposition 171
Strength: One million Aug 1918 175
Strength: Three million Aug 1919 175
Strength: 4.5 million Apr 1920 176
Strength: 5 million Aug 1920 176, 178
Reds (movie) 53, 336
Reed, John 166, 336
Ten Days that Shook the World 166, 336
Religion 89, 97, 105, 108
Olmec 108
Origins 108
Revisionism (modern) 281, 351
Collapse 281
Revolution, Cuban 279
Ricardo, 122
Rise of Anthropological Theory (The) 100
Roach Motel (MOCR) 187-188, 221
Robert S. Peabody Foundation 377
Rockefellers 351
Rodontslov, Maria (Orlov) 235
Ronin 112, 116
Rothschild's Family 152, 156
Russian Revolution 1905 158
Russian Revolution Feb 1917 161
Russian Revolution Oct 1917 163-173
Farmers key to success 167, 215, 216
Russian Second Proletarian Revolution
Aug 1928 215
Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party (Bolsheviks) 141, 158
5th (London, 1907) Congress 158
S
Sadism 102, 136
Sahlins, Marshall 90, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 247
Salazar, Dr. (Portugal Dictator) 254
Saud Family (Saudi Arabia) 239, 357, 360, 370, 377
Saudi Arabia 350, 358, 360
Aramco 358
Gringo special deal 360, 370, 377
SEC 373, 376
Schlumberger 356
Science 43
Scissors Crisis 217
Seagrave, Sterling 191, 192
Second Proletarian Revolution (Aug 1928) 215
Selfishness 102
Service, Elman 98, 247
Sexuality (evolution of human) 78
Shakty case 221
Shamans 105
Sharing 85
Shining Path 384
Sholokov, Mikhail A. 164
Simple Chiefdoms 101, 293
Siqueiros, David Alfaro 249
Slave stage 42, 110, 111, 112,
Smith, Adam 122, 311
Smith, Graydon W. 376
Smith, Jason W. 99, 191, 372, 373, 376, 377, 378
Foundations of Archaeology 99, 182, 377
Idaho Smith's Search
For the Foundation 293
Volumes 1 - 5
The Buccaneer 229, 279
The Romantic Years
Shining Path, Peruvian Revolution 286, 381
Rivers of Blood 286, 381
High Finance South American style286, 381
New Perspectives in Physics 386
Social classes 110, 115
Social dissolution 85
Social Organization (as 1/3 of culture) 38, 40, 81
Social ranks 104, 108, 110, and 115
Socialism (Stalinist) 128, 140, 172
Comparative analysis (chiefdoms) 293
Defined 172
Socialism in One Country 181, 182
Model 172, 181
NaivetÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂé 130, 141,
Our problems 277-278
Strategic global position 281
Today 383
Utopian 173
Socialist Labor Party (USA, 1890) 333
Socialist Party (USA, 1898) 335
Socialist Revolutionary Party (Russia) 161, 215
Left SR's 161
Right SR's 161
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) USA 280
Socially necessary labor-time 93, 101,115, 120
Society for American Archaeology 99
Sociobiology 39
Sociocultural evolution 166
(See General Contradiction and
General Crisis)
Egalitarianism, communist 398
General patterns 338
Social Justice 398
Specific patterns 338
Sodalities 86
Solar cult (Egypt) 108
Soong Dynasty 191
Soong Sisters
Mao's ally
Sorge, Richard 183, 185-187, 218, 237-239,
256, 257
Soviets (Councils) 164
Soviet Polish War 176
Soviet Republic (Soviet Union 1924) 237
Sovnarkom (Highest Soviet Govt. Body) 232-235
Spain 240-256
Background 241-251
Badajoz 251
Best 256
British capitalist strategy 247
China, Spanish road to 244
Civil War (1936-1939) 241
Communist Party of Spain (PCE) 246
Election 1931 245
Election 1936 245
Expelled Spanish capitalists 244
Expelled expatriate capitalists 244
Franco, Francisco 251
Gold, Treasury (Soviet collateral) 236, 250, 259, 260
Hemingway, Ernest 259
Isabel and Ferdinand 241
International Brigades 248, 250
Kingdoms, Castile, Aragon 241, 243
Madrid, Battle of (1936-1937) 252
March, Juan 247, 251-252
Merriman Robert 252
Merriman, Marion 252
Moors (Spanish Ghurkas) 252
Nin, Andres 248, 258
Orlov, Alexander 248-250
Sanjurjo (Gen. Spanish revolt) 251
Service, Elman 258
Siqueiros, David Alfaro 259
Stalin's Spanish Strategy 241, 248
Stevens 256
Trotsky 246, 249
US War (1898) 244, 247, 339
Weaponry perfected 267
Spanish-American-Cuban War 339
Speech 79
Spindeltop (Beaumont TX, 1902) 333
Sputnik (I & II) 277
Stakhanov (ism) 128, 225
Stalin, Joseph V. ``Koba'' (Dec 1879-1953) 54-61, 146-150
(Djugashvilli, Joseph Vissarionovich)
Borodin, Mikhail 197
Civil War (Russia) 51
Cold War 353
Congress (5th) 1907 London 159-160
Congress of Victors (1934) 168, 226-227
Cheka creation 232-235
Dizzy With Success 225
Far East strategy 194, 195, 197, 257
Foundations of Leninism (1924) 173, 18_
Inside Snapshots
Minusinsk (1899): Lenin,
Krupskaya 144
Baku (1901): Stalin,
Voroshilov, Kalinin 153
Tbilisi (1907): Stalin,
Caucasian Bolsheviks 159
Petrograd (1917): Lenin, Stalin 160
Petrograd (1917): Politburo,
Dzerzhinsky 232
Moscow (1921): Stalin, Dzerzhinsky 185
Moscow (1922): Stalin, Molotov,
Dzerzhinsky 188
London (1922): Borodin, Rakovsky 199
Moscow (1925): Stalin,
Molotov, Sorge 185
Moscow (1922): Stalin, Molotov 198
Moscow (1922): Stalin, Borodin,
Lenin, Blyukher, Molotov 200
Moscow River (1922): Blyukher,
Borodin 203
Moscow (1923): Stalin, Blyukher,
Borodin 206
Moscow (1926): Stalin, Sorge 218
Moscow (1926): Stalin,
Cheka graduates 219
Moscow (1928): Stalin, Menzhinsky,
Yagoda 221
Moscow (1935): Stalin, Dimitrov 259
Moscow (1935): Stalin, Beria 260
Moscow (1935): Stalin, Beria 261
Moscow (1936): Stalin, Orlov,
Molotov
Poskrebyshev 248
Moscow (1936): Molotov, Stalin 270
Moscow (1937): Molotov, Stalin
Beria 253
Saragossa (1937): Philby, Himmler,
Von Furstenberg 255
Moscow (1938): Stalin, Molotov
Beria 262
Moscow (1939): Stalin, Beria 280
Moscow (1941): Stalin, Red Square 270
Moscow (1943): Stalin, Beria 283
Jobs (Party, Government, State) 197
Kazbegi, Alexander 148
Krassin, Leonid 55, 146, 150, 152, 153, 347, 348
Koba 55
Lies about 60-61, 147
October Revolution, The 50
Oil expert 347
Post-World War II 353
Problems of Leninism 182
Revolution 1905 158
Revolution of October 1917 161
Schlumberger well logging 348, 349
Second Revolution (Aug 1928) 215
Secret Service (proletarian) 229-240
Seminary 55
Socialism in One Country 181
Soviet Polish War 1920 176-181
Spanish strategy 241, 248
Special Relationship (Lenin) 148
Spies 129-140
Stalin v. Trotsky I
Stalin v. Trotsky II
Stalin v. Trotsky III 180
Stalin v. Trotsky IV
Stalin v. Trotsky V 214
Strike 1901 Baku, Batum oilfields 154, 156, 157
Strike 1903
(All Russia general strike) 158
Ten Years is all we have 222
Tiflis (Tbilisi) 55, 150
Trotsky 177-181
Truman 353
US confrontation strategy 262
Youth 147, 149
Stalingrad, battle of (1942-43) 260
Standardization of Parts 318
Star Trek Stage 34, 172, 181
State, the 42, 47, 106, 107, 110, 113
Origins 113
Power 333
Steam engines 188, 122
Stevens (MI 6, double ``O'') 247
St. Louis Council (1877) 332, 333
St. Louis Soviet (1877) 332, 333
Stone Age Economics
(Sahlins 1974, 2004) 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101
STPRM (Oilfield Workers Union
Of the Republic of Mexico) 356
Surplus value 137
Sweezy, Paul 384
SWP (Socialist Workers Party, USA) 48
Syria
Syria (attacks 1973) 358
Sudoplatov, Pavel A (Chekist) 252
Sun, Yat-sen 190, 193, 204
Superstructure (ideology) 81
Supertanker 352
Surplus avoidance 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90
Surplus social product 79, 84, 87, 88, 90, 93, 94, 103
Surplus Value 40, 94, 103, 120
Swabeck, Arnie 53, 61
Syria 361, 364
T
Taylor, Glen (US Sen. Idaho) 273
Technology (as 1/3 of culture) 38, 40, 81, 120
Innovation 85
Tehran Conference 260
Televisa 376
Terminology (definitions) 33
Tet Offensive of 1968 358
Tbilisi (Tiflis) 55, 150, 153
Tito (Josip Broz; Yugolsavia) 248
Transitional stages 48, 110, 113
Tribal agriculture 91, 92, 93
Tribal hunting/gathering 91, 93
Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Brom) 48, 235
Assassination 250
Behavior 215
China 194, 201, 202
Fall of Trotsky 181-182, 397
Fifth Congress (London 1907) 159
Lenin 158, 184
My Life (autobiography) 215
Peace with Germany 235
Spain 241, 248
Stalin 149, 159, 176
Trotskyism 47-54
Warsaw (Polish-German Campaign) 176-181, 201, 201, 202, 397
Truman, Harry S. 240, 261, 274, 359
Prendergast Gang 273
Please send Philby 240
War mongering 273
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail 168, 176-180, 201
U
UGT (Marxist Trade Union, Spain) 241
Ultra 240
Ulyanov, Alexander 143
Ulyanov, Vladimir Illych (V.I. Lenin)
141
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 237
Atomic bomb 262
Collapse 41
Congress of Victors 168
First 5 Year Plan 212, 348
Hydrogen bomb 264
Industrialization 220
NEP 212
Oil industry 343, 347, 348
Red Army 169
Schlumberger 348
Second Proletarian Revolution 1928 213
Unions (trade and labor) 321
Philadelphia Central Labor Council 321
National unions 322
United Fruit Company (Chiquita) 279
Univision 375
Uribe (President, Colombia) 381
United States of America
American Federation of Labor 336
Agricultural mechanization (1834) 326
American system of manufacture 319
Assembly line manufacture 318
Bacon, Nathaniel (1646) 314
Bolshevik Revolution arrives 336
Boston 315
British Colonial Law 311, 318
Capital, primitive accumulation 317
Capitalism prospers 134
Capitalism unchained 317
Cause of Current Crisis 288
Census & Demography 322
Child workers 322
Civil War 135, 136, 150, 322, 326, 328
Coal 321, 322
Committee of Mechanics 315
Committees of Correspondence 315
Common Sense 316
Communist Foundation Party USA 382
Concord, Battle of 315
Constitutional Convention, New 382
Cotton planting, industry 318, 322
Cromwellian tradition 313
Daughters of Liberty 315
Defeat in Indochina 280
Depressions (US Cap Gen Crisis) 320
320
320
1837 321
1844 321
1854 321, 322
1857 321, 322
1873 332
Erie Canal 320
Evans, Oliver (1782) 318
Factories 318, 322
FDR saves oil industry 346
Financial desperation 287
Fitch, John 320
Flagler, Henry 328, 346
Flying shuttle 312
Foreign oil 355
Fugitive Slave Act 134, 135
Fulton, Robert 320
General Crisis 320, 321
Georgia 316
Hegemony over cap classes 354, 356
Helotry over Europe 357
Historical crossroads 2009 391
Hudson River 320
Hunt, H. L. 346
Illegal manufacturing 311, 318
Imperialist phase 336, 337, 338, 383, 384
Indentured servants 310
Industrialization 318, 326
Industrial progress 322
Iraq, historical consequences for US 381
Iron production 321
Interchangeability of parts 319
Intracoastal Waterway 320
IWW 335, 336
James, Jesse 332
Jefferson, Thomas 315, 316
Joiner, Columbus ``Dad'' 346
Kerosene 328
Labor movement (1866) 331
Labor parties 323
Labor short 311
Leisler, Jacob (1689) 214
Machine tools 319
Marxism 324
Massachusetts 316
Mechanics liens 323
Mississippi River 320
Monetary crisis (2009) 386
Monroe Doctrine 338
Nazi gauntlet 274
New Jersey 316
New York 315, 320
Ohio River 320
Oneida 320
Paine, Thomas 316
Parties, labor 323
Patriot, The 317
Petroleum (See Oil and Gas)
Philadelphia 320, 321
Pittsburgh 320
Post-war Hegemony 1945-1999 72, 279
Primitive capital accumulation 322
Proletarian origins 314
Protestant ethic 310
Public education 323
Puritanism 310
Railroads 321
Reds (movie) 336
Revolutionary War (1775-81) 123, 132, 136
Rockefeller, John D 328, 351, 346
Seamen's Association 315
Secret societies 315
Slater, Samuel (1790) 318
Slavery 132, 134, 313
Socialist Party 335, 336
Socialist Labor Party 336
Sons of Liberty 315, 316
Sons of Neptune 315
Spinning Jenny 312
St. Louis Council (1877) 332
St. Louis Soviet (1877) 332, 333
Standardization of Parts 318
Steam engines 312
Strike, national 1877 332, 333
Symington, William 320
Telegraph 321
Trade Unions 320, 321, 322, 331
Turpentine 328
Unfree 310
US Attorney's Office L.A. 373
US National Security Council 373
Wallace, Henry 359
Washington, George 315, 316, 319, 320
Watt steam engine 318
Wedemeyer, Joseph 324
Whitney, Eli 318
Wilkinson, David (1790) 318
Wilson, Harold 366
Women workers 318, 322, 323
Workingmen's Party of the
United States (1876) 332, 333
Yorktown 318, 319, 320
US-China People's Friendship Association 363
US Hegemony (1945-2008) 72, 261, 265
US, picks up Nazi gauntlet 262
Utopian Socialists 323, 324
V
Value (Fundamental Needs) 40, 80, 88, 93, 120, 121, 128
Law of value 128
Primitive 80, 81, 84
Socially necessary labor-time 93, 101, 116, 120, 121
Surplus value 92, 120, 121, 137
Value 1 and 2 122
Venezuela 345, 367
Bolivar, Simon 345
Castro influence 367
Caudillo system 345
Chavez, Hugo 381
Coup of 1948 367
Gomez, Juan Vicente 345, 367
La Rosa oilfield 346
Maracaibo, Lake 346
PDVSA 367
Perez Alfonso, Jose Pablo 367
Perez Jimenez, Marco 367
Petroleum Law of 1922 346
Rape of Venezuela 346
Royal Dutch Shell 346
Standard Oil New Jersey 345, 346
Standing up 1948-1958 354, 345
PDVSA 355
Rockefellers want alternative 345
Vietnam
Revolution 280
Tet Offensive of 1968 363
Villahermosa, Tabasco (Mexico) 356
Von Furstenberg, Gloria 244, 245
Voroshilov, Kliment 154, 156, 168, 171
W
Wallace, Henry A. (US VP) 273, 359
War, Civil (1917-1922) 169
War Communism 163, 182, 183, 216
War, First Imperialist (Crimean) 135
War, Japan 1905 158
War, Korean 274
War, Mexican (1st) 134
War, Spanish-Cuban-American 339
War, Soviet-Polish 176-181
Warsaw, Battle of 201, 202
Washington, George 315, 319
Watson (Watson & Crick; DNA) 38
Webb, Sam 148, 247
Wedemeyer, Joseph 324
Die Revolution (1852) 324
Western Front 237, 257, 258
Whampoa Island 204
White, Leslie A. 38, 99, 100
Whitney, Eli 318
Willey, Gordon 377
Wilson, Harold (Labour MP, PM) 357, 366
Wittfogel, Karl 106
Women workers 318, 322, 323
World Ethnographic Sample 98
World War, First (1758-63) 125
World War I 142, 147, 162-163, 349
Rapallo Pact 183, 191, 192, 237, 240
World War II 54
Beginning (6-22-41) 230, 241, 259
Jockeying for Position 230, 258
Moscow, Battle of 259
Opening shot (Spain 1936) 237, 241
Phony War 257
Postwar US position 265, 353
Stalingrad, Battle of 260
Standing Up to US imperialism 353
World War II:
When there were Giants (movie) 54, 148
Working activity (human) 40
Working Class dictatorship 266
Working Men's Party US 333
Wrangel 176, 180
Wright Brothers 336
Wright, Peter 235
Spycatcher 235
X
``X'', Lady 235
XX (20) Committee 240
Y
Yagoda (Cheka: NKVD) 222, 251
Yalta, Conference 260
Yemen 350
Yezhov (Cheka: NKVD) 251
Yom Kippur War (Oct 6-12 1973) 351
Yucatan 105
Z
Zapata, Emiliano
Zapata Petroleum (George H W Bush) 357, 369, 376
Zinoviev, Gregory 176, 228, 234
__ALPHA_LVL1__ Home PageTable of Organization and Information
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Fundamentals of Historical Materialism: Bolshevism 2009
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The End (for now)
For our purposes it is time to wind down this discussion. In future years, I intend to elaborate different sections of this Handbook. For the moment suffice it to say that the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism have been presented to you to the best of my ability given the space constraints of a handbook.
You're Tasks
Propaganda, agitation and organization are the three magic bullets if you will, of the first phase to a revolutionary working class seizure of state power. This is your task. Never forget that in the capitalist countries revolution is now on the table - it is the order of the day. We have the technological basis to make both Socialism and Communism work, or in the latter case we soon will. The General Crisis of Capitalism has created the conditions which necessitate working class action everywhere in the world. Only after revolution can working class state power allow the successful construction of Socialism and Communism. It is the task of those of us who call ourselves Bolsheviks to proceed to the leadership of the class struggle everywhere, and to take it in the directions outlined above. Namely, the new Bolshevik Party in the USA our Communist Foundation Party USA. Never forget that we are American Leninists. We know we are right. We know we are going to win and by taking command now we will be privileged to make the World know it too. Thus we return to Epilogue as Prologue where we began this book - we have
657come Full Circle. Good Luck.
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Chart of Sociocultural Evolutionary Stages
(Read this chart from bottom to top which is to say from the oldest to the most recent category.)
Second Egalitarian Epoch
Star Trek Stage
Communist Stage
Second Transitional Period
Advanced Socialism Stage
Stalinist Socialism Stage
Servitude Epoch
Capitalist Stage
Feudal Stage
Slave Stage
First Transitional Period
Stage of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms
Stage of Simple Chiefdoms
First Egalitarian Epoch
(Epoch of Primitive Communism)
Stage of Tribal Agriculture
Stage of Advanced Homo sapiens Hunting and Gathering
Stage of Homo erectus Hunting and Gathering
Stage of Home australopithecus Hunting and Gathering
__ALPHA_LVL1__ Biographical DataJason W. Smith was graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from California State University Los Angeles, in 1968. He received the Ph.D. from the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Department of Archaeology at the University of Calgary in 1974. He authored his first textbook Foundations of Archaeology, in 1976 (Jason W. Smith, Glencoe Press, Beverly Hills, 568 pp. see The Romantic Years) and his most recent in 1999, New Perspectives in Physics
The author's autobiographical books are entitled Idaho Smith's Search for the Foundation in eight volumes five of which have been published and are available in university libraries across the US and Canada, and from Foundation Press at http://www.communistfoundationpartyusa.org. For autographed copies contact IdahoSmith@hotmail.com.