From the archive of struggle no.75: anti-Stalinist Leninism in the 1930s (MIA special)

It’s months now since I’ve looked through the Marxist Internet Archive. Since I’ve last been there, loads of really good stuff is up. The below is just from November and December last year, and it covers a period from ca.1930 to ca.1940 which was pivotal in the development of the anti-Stalinist left.

The material here focuses on three overlapping currents in this anti-Stalinist left. The first is the POUM, the Spanish party whose name this blog’s is taken from, who fused the “left” and “right” opposition in Spain to the official Stalinist Communist party, to form a democratic mass movement of radical socialism, before being liquidated by the Stalinists in during the Spanish Civil War.

The second is the Trotskyist movement, Communism’s “left” opposition. While Trotsky supplied much of the intellectual justification for Stalin’s brutal misrule in the Soviet Union, his sharp critique of the degeneration of the Stalinist state made him a criminal in the dictatorship. His followers have formed one of the main planks of anti-Stalinist socialism globally. The material below focuses mainly on American Trotskyists, but particularly those who developed beyond the rigid and damaging orthodoxies of “official” Trotskyism.

Parallel to Trotsky’s Left Opposition, the Right Opposition called for a more democratic path to socialism, and was bitterly excluded from the Communist movement. Unlike Trotksyism, it leaves little organisational trace today, and so its history remains more deeply buried.

In the period from 1930 to 1940, these currents moved from composing a dissatisfied internal dissident streak within Stalinism, to a fully developed critical analysis of Stalinism. From 1940 to 1950, they several different interesting directions forward, some positively, others less so. Between them (along with anarchist, democratic socialist and left communist currents not represented here), they constitute a significant part of the heritage of anti-Stalinism that continues to be relevant to thinking about the task of reforging a radical movement today.

The POUM

Added to the Spanish-language Archivo Andreu Nin and English-language Andrés Nin Archive:

• The Tasks of Spanish Communists (1931)
• Hacia una nueva etapa de la Alianza Obrera (1936)

The Catalan Andreu (or Andres in Spanish) Nin i Pérez was a left dissident in the Communist Party, forming a left opposition group Communist Left of Spain (ICE), which merged with the Right Opposition party Bloque Obrero y Campesino, to form the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) in 1935.

Added to the new Julián Gorkin Archive in the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL):

Hands off Suez! Hands off Hungary!

From Entdinglichung:

Hands off Suez! Hands off Hungary! (pdf file, 1.13 mb), a 1956 brochure from the anti-Stalinist Marxist Vanguard circle around Walter Kendall (1926-2003), which opposes the imperialist intervention in Suez and the Soviet intervention in Hungary and seeks to popularize these positions in the TUC:

Related articles

• Hungary’s Needy Given Money to Burn (in Their Furnaces) (blacklistednews.com)

Misk

[Some links via my usual source]

Against Martovism! Some fantastically po-faced Stalinism spotted in the Morning Star letters page.

When tweeting can get you hard labour: Against Socialist Unity’s support for the Chinese regime.

Obituary for an anarchist: John Brailey 1934-2012.

Edd Mustill: The Daily Herald is one hundred years old

Our operaismo: Extract from Mario Tronti’s memoirs. Not read it yet, but I like this from the NLR intro: it offers an illuminating contrast of the springtime of 56 and hot autumnn of 69, and draws a sharp distinction between classical operaismo and its distant echo, autonomism, which persisted on the counter-cultural margins of Europe’s cities from the late 70s, to emerge in more hygenic form in Hardt and Negri’s Empire at the turn of the century.

From the archive of struggle no.74

This material mostly comes from a bumper edition at Entdinglichung. This leads off with MIA’s pdfs of The Workers’ council. An organ for the Third International. For info on this, see here or here. This was from an overwhelmingly Jewish and New York based left faction in the Socialist Party, that merged in 1921 with the WPA, i.e. what became the CPUSA.

The hammer strikes

Syndicalism and gefilte fish

The Jewish Socialist Group has organised an event this week in London on “United Against Sweatshop Slavery: The 100th Anniversary of the Great 1912 Tailors Strike” – Wednesday night at the Bishopsgate Institute (scheduled to be in the same building as SWP/Respect renegades John Rees and Lindsey German doing a rather overpriced “A People’s History of London“, so be careful not to stray into the wrong room). Speakers include Donnacha DeLong, who blogs here. More details on Indymedia and the Facebook event. A couple of days later, on Sunday 27 May at 6pm, David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists’ Group will lead a walk through the radical history of the East End, focussing on the 1912 strike, starting at Freedom Books in Whitechapel – details on Indymedia.

Other events: in Dublin, the anarchist bookfair is at the weekend – details here.

Jews and the left

I’ll probably return to this at some point when I have more time, but the YIVO conference earlier this month on Jews and the left sounds to have been fascinating. Some coverage: The Tablet, American Thinker, Commentary, Forward. Related, and following up my last linky post, read Ralph Seliger on Did the kibbutz really fail, responding to Michael Lerner.

Bobism

Tendance Coatesy with a wonderful post on the Bob Avakian Institute.

Mother Jones

Great article about a wonderful woman on the WSM website, also in the new issue of their Workers Solidarity.

From the archives of struggle

Below the fold, via Entdinglichung.

From the archive of struggle, no.72

Thanks once again Petey for spotting an error in my last post. I’ve reposted the link below, with extras. Thanks once again, of course, Entdinglichung, whose archival gleaning is becoming impossible to keep up with.

“The roots of multi-racial labour unity in the United States” was published in International Socialism 2:63, Summer 1994, and can be read either at MIA or the SWP’s own archive. It’s a review  of Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class and Politics, 1863-1923 (New York and Oxford, 1991). Here’s the intro:

The idea that white workers in the US have historically benefited from racism is widely accepted on both the academic and political left. Even those who hesitate to draw such conclusions concede that a class analysis is insufficient to explain the persistence of racism in the US. [… For socialists in the US the question of the ‘socio-economic nutriments’ of racism is a matter of practical politics. The persistence of racism cannot be accepted as a ‘baffling phenomenon’, but is either explicable in terms of the class struggle, or, if race can be proven to be a more fundamental social division than class the struggle for workers’ power in the United States is sheer utopianism.

Previous articles in this journal have taken up the relationship of race and class in general and racism in the US in particular.² Therefore there is no need here to recount the theoretical debates on the centrality of class. Rather this review article will attempt to show how multi-racial workers’ unity could take root in seemingly the least likely context: the segregated 19th century South. It will argue that whites did not benefit from the exclusion of blacks from the ranks of organised labour, but that such divisions were disastrous for black and white workers alike.

Further, despite white supremacy, black workers North and South often rejected alliances with the small, but influential, conservative black middle class to make common cause with white workers in trade unions and socialist organisations. It will conclude by arguing that the struggle against racism in the US working class is above all a political question that cannot be resolved within the economic framework of trade unionism. Rather it must be rooted in the struggle for socialism and black liberation.

You can read Lee Sustar elsewhere,at ZSpace (on various historical and political topics), at International Viewpoint (on Egypt), at Viewpoint (on Karl Marx) and even at NPR (on Dennis Brutus).

Here’s some recently posted material from Entdinglichung, including stuff I’d missed last month. 

Corrigendum

Bund election poster from Latvia, inviting to a meeting with member of Saeima (Parliament) Dr. Noah Maizel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thanks to Entdinglichung for red greetings and EP Thompson. Thanks to Petey and Peter for pointing out a couple of wrong links in recent posts. I’m re-posting the links here.

From the Eugene Debs archive: The New Age Anniversary: The Socialist Leader Says Support Labor Press that Opposed the War (pdf, 1922)

Ten years have passed since The New Age was launched and  in this brief span of time the world in which we live has been shaken and shocked, torn and devastated; ravaged and bled as never before in its history. Every page of the record capitalism has made in that time has been written in the blood of its slaughtered victims. All previous wars were crude and dismal failures in point of slaughter as a science and destruction as a fine art compared to the Twentieth Century World War under the Christian Capitalist Competitive System. All the modern ingenuity the world afforded, all the arts and sciences in its command were employed in the highly Christianized and civilized undertaking to blow the earth to atoms, destroy everything in sight, and slaughter all mankind, save alone the international bankers and profiteer and their hireling slaves.

The New Age does not have a Wikipedia entry; the British periodical of the same name and same period does, but this is the Buffalo, New York one. Founded in 1912, it was associated with the Socialist Party of America. For more information, see this tenth anniversary review by co-editor Robert Wark at archive.org.

Nick Cohen: How the Left turned on the Jews, Standpoint. Flawed but fascinating. Some extracts:

“You cry out against Jewish capital, gentlemen?” cried one. “You are against Jewish capital and want to eliminate the stock manipulators. Rightly so. Trample the Jewish capitalists under foot, hang them from the street lamps, stamp them out.”

Ruth Fischer sounded like a Nazi. She used the same hate-filled language. She wanted to murder Jews. But Hitler would never have accepted her. Fischer was a leader of the German Communist Party. She made her small differences of opinion with the Nazis clear when she went on to say that her audience should not just trample Jewish capitalists to death, but all capitalists.[...]

The movements for Jewish self-determination and Russian Communism were twins separated at birth. The First Zionist conference met on August 27, 1897, to discuss the escape from anti-Semitic Europe to Palestine. The General Jewish Labour Bund held its first conference in Vilnius on October 7, 1897, to organise the Russian Empire’s Jews in a united socialist party. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, from which the Bolsheviks split, held its first conference in March 1898. Naturally, the Bund sent delegates. For liberal and left-wing Europeans of the late 19th century, no regime was more repellent than Tsarist autocracy, and nothing better symbolised its reactionary nature than its anti-Semitic pogroms. Jews responded to the terror by keeping their Jewish identity and joining Jewish socialist movements, such as the Bund, or by becoming entirely assimilated Communists, as Trotsky and many others did.[...]

Rudé Právo, the organ of the Czech Communist Party, said that Slansky and his co-defendants were “Jewish cosmopolitans, people without a shred of honour, without character, without country, people who desire one thing — career, business and money”. Communists and their supporters imagined a vast Zionist conspiracy reaching from the US Supreme Court to Tito’s anti-Stalinist supporters in Yugoslavia. For all that, they maintained that they were not anti-Semites but enemies of Zionism. They might have been modern “leftists” talking about the “Israel Lobby” conspiring to organise the Iraq War of 2003, while all the time insisting that there was nothing remotely racist about their conspiracy theories.[...]

Ralph Miliband, the father of Ed and David, dissected it well. He was a Marxist who retained the capacity for independent thought, and got into a furious argument with Marcel Liebman, a fellow Marxist Jew, at the time of the Six Day War of 1967. Miliband pointed out an essential truth: that the corrupt regimes of the Middle East needed Israel and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to distract the attention of their peoples. “If Israel did not exist, they would have to invent it,” he said.[...]

Andrew Hosken, Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone, Arcadia Books, 10 April 2008. Extracts at Powerbase and Adloyada. Extract from the extracts:

John Ross was at the forefront of the internal struggle to ditch the industrial strategy and get all IMG members to join the Labour Party en masse and then seek to control the Left bloc within it. Supporting Ross was another key figure in Livingstone’s political career, Redmond O’Neill. At the December 1982 conference, Ross carried the day and over the next few months IMG members joined the Labour Party. A minority who disagreed with the policy of ‘deep entryism’ split away and formed its own party, the International Group which became a political irrelevance.

Despite becoming Labour members, the Ross majority still remained organised as a separate political organization. They decided to rebrand themselves as the Socialist League, and to establish a newspaper called Socialist Action. Like Militant, the group became known by the name of their paper rather than as the Socialist League. ‘The.next steps towards a revolutionary party comprise a fight for a class struggle within the Bennite current,’ said one discussion paper at the time. [...]

The Socialist League/Socialist Action met for the first time as a central committee at the Intensive English School in Star Street near Marble Arch for the start of a two-day conference on Saturday, 22 January 1983. The official launch of Socialist Action took place the following morning[13] and it first appeared on 16 March. The group’s old paper, Socialist Challenge, ceased to exist.[14] The group’s overall revolutionary objective did not change, only the strategy to bring it about, as an internal document in January 1983 made clear: ‘…

Socialist Action believes that it will be impossible to make the transition to socialism without incurring the armed resistance of the ruling class and thereby the necessity for violent self-defence by the working class.’[15] From the outset, Ken Livingstone was clearly an important force within the ‘Bennite current’ for Socialist Action. John Ross and comrades identified two Bennite wings: the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, a left-wing coalition within the Labour Party comprising Chartists from Briefing, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, CLPD. Socialist Action identified the second wing ‘crystallising around forces such as the Campaign Group of MPs, Livingstone, the left of Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (LCND)… and the constituency left…’[16] Its slogans were now: ‘Deeper into the Labour Party!’, ‘Deeper into the trade unions!’, ‘For a new newspaper!’,[17] ‘Defend socialist policies!’, ‘Stop the witch-hunt!’, ‘Remove the right-wing Labour leaders!’[18]

In September 1983, Socialist Action took the decision to disappear from public view. This meant closing down the Other Bookshop and taking extreme security measures to guarantee invisibility and deniability. Two months after the decision, Socialist Action’s leadership drew up a document entitled The dissolution of the public face’. It said: ‘This is a historical fact – namely that the public face dissolved itself. This requires no public announcement but all bodies of the [Trotskyist] world movement must be informed and act accordingly.’[23] Some members disagreed with the decision; one wrote: ‘The September meeting took a momentous decision. It voted 23 for and one against to formally dissolve our public organisation. The decision was taken on the basis of a false prognosis: that following the Labour Party conference there will be an immediate witch-hunt of our supporters within the mass organisation.’[24]

Jim Denham on Eric Hobsbawm. Extract:

On the minus side is his persistent lack of identification with the working class (indeed, he now seems to say that it no longer exists), his “reality denial” (Robert Conquest’s term) over the Soviet Union, his shameful and evasive record over Hungary in 1956 (the Soviet invasion led Hill ad Thompson to resign from the CP while Hobsbawm remained) and his persistent refusal to come to terms with Stalinism itself. The fact that he was – and remains – a person of towering intellect makes these shortcomings less, not more, forgivable. While working class Communist Party members could be forgiven for not knowing about, or believing the truth of,  the full counter-revolutionary barbarity of Stalinism, an intellectual like Hobsbawm has no such excuse. As David Caute put it “One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn’t you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn’t you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956.”

Also new at the Marxist Internet Archive (and hopefully with no dud links this time; items in bold especially recommended):

“Added to the USA History Publications Section as part of joint project involving the Holt Labor Library, the Encyclopedia of the Trotskyism On-Line and the Riazinov Library, we have completed the digitization of he remaining volumes of the International Socialist Review published by the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. from 1900 through 1918. Representing America’s premier Socialist journal, the ISR had the full pantheon of American revoluitonary socialist thought expressed in it’s pages, from Eugene V. Debs to Big Bill Hayword to John Reed. Presented in high resolution PDFs. Later, we will upload separate issues for each volume, starting with the volumes listed below: 1902 – 1903, Volume 2 1910 – 1911, Volume 10 1911 – 1912, Volume 11“

Added to the International Socialism Archive – 2nd Series (1991–2003):

• Duncan Blackie: The United Nations and the politics of imperialism (1994) (No. 63)
• Lee Sustar: The roots of multi-racial labour unity in the United States (1994) (No. 63)
• Peter Linebaugh: Days of villainy: a reply to two critics (1994) (No. 63)
• Peter Linebaugh: ‘To the teeth and forehead of our faults’ (1995) (No. 68)
• Dave Sherry: Trotsky’s last, greatest struggle (1994) (No. 63)
• Peter Morgan: Geronimo and the end of the Indian wars (No. 63)
• David Beecham: Ignazio Silone and Fontamara (1994) (No. 63)
• Chris Bambery: Bookwatch – understanding fascism,by (No. 63)
• Mike Haynes: The wrong road on Russia (1994) (No. 2:64
• Jane Elderton Suffragette style (1994) (No. 64)
• Chris Nineham: The two faces of modernism, by (1994) (No. 62)
• Mike Hobart: Reply to Jazz: a people’s music? – 1 (1994) (No. 64)
• Dave Harker: Reply to Jazz: a people’s music? – 2 (1994) (No. 64)
• Mike Haynes: The resurrection of Bukharin (1978) (No. 2:2)
• Alex Callinicos: Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today – A critique (1978) (No. 34)
• Colin Sparks: Fascism and the working class: Part 1 – The German experience (1978) (No. 2:2)
• Floya Anthias: Does ‘femininity’ keep the family going? (1978) (No. 2:2)
• Colin Sparks: Fascism and the working class: Part 2 – the National Front today (1978) (No. 2:3)
• Joan Smith: Women’s oppression and male alienation (1978) (No. 2:3)
• Matt Kelly: Reply to Jazz: a people’s music? – 3 (1994) (No. 64)
• Lindsey German: Frederick Engels – life of a revolutionary (1994) (No. 2:65)
• John Rees: Engels’ Marxism (1994) (No. 2:65)
• John Newsinger: Matewan: film and working class struggle (1995) (No. 2:66)

Added to the USA History Publications Section as part of joint project involving the Holt Labor Library, the Encyclopedia of the Trotskyism On-Line and the Riazinov Library, the Left Opposition Digitization Project has started placing online the internal discussion bulletins of the early Trotskyist movement in the United States organized as the Communist League of America (Opposition)1928-1934 and then the Workers Party of the United States (1935-1936). These are the first of the entirety of the internal bulletins of the US Trotskyists through the early years of the Socialist Workers Party. Presented in high resolution PDFs.”

• Communist League of America Internal Bulletins
• Communist League of America International Internal Bulletins
• Workers Party of the United States Bulletins.

Below the fold, more from Entdinglichung:

From the archive of struggle, no.70

Some new material at Entdinglichung:

*From Gruppe Internationaler SozialistInnen (GIS): Aghis Stinas: Das Massaker an den internationalistischen Kommunisten in Griechenland (Dezember 1944) (1977)

*From Cedar Lounge Revolution: Class War, Mai 1994 [This is the Irish sibling paper of the London anarchist tabloid]

*From irishanarchisthistory: Irish anarchism in the 1880s (1997/2008) [Two articles by Fintan Lane: Practical Anarchists We was published by History Ireland in March/April 2008 (vol.16, no.2), and The origins of modern Irish socialism, 1881-1896 in Red & Black Revolution (no.3) in 1997.]

*From R.a.D.A.R.: Marceau Pivert: Révolution d’abord ! (1935)

*From Libcom:

- Baumanskaya Group Proletarian Opposition VKP(b): New Forgery (1928, ein Untergrund-Flugblatt der “Demokratischen Zentralisten [Decists]” [Source used for this translation was Stephen Shenfield's upload: Collection of documents on the Decists (p. 71-73). This relates to one of the early anti-Stalinist opposition groups]
- Ross Winn: Texts from Firebrand (1895) [Winn was a Southern anarchist born in the 1870s)
- Peter Principle: What is anarcho-syndicalism?: libertarian reformism, vanguardism or revolutionary unionism? (1997) [From Black Flag, on a polemic within the International Workers Association]

I missed this instalment at Entdinglichung, which includes the following:

* Martha A. Ackelsberg: Free Women of Spain (1991, archive.org, also at Libcom)

* Juan Andrade: “El reñidero español. Relato de un testigo de los conflictos sociales y políticos de la guerra civil española” (Franz Borkenau, Ruedo ibérico, París, 1971) (1972, Fundación Andreu Nin)

* Cindy Coignard: Militants et sympathisants étrangers du P.O.U.M. (2010, La Bataille Socialiste)

* Ricardo Flores Magon: Land & Liberty (191?, archive.org)

* Emile Pouget/Emile Pataud: Syndicalism and the co-operative commonwealth (1913, LibCom)

And did I miss this instalment too, with these things:

* Zeitungen: auf MIA einige weitere Ausgaben des The Toiler (1921/22) sowie die Jahrgänge 1935 und 1942 des Militant, auf R.a.D.A.R. weitere Ausgaben der Jeune Garde, der Clarté (Februar 1927, Januar 1927, Mai 1925), der Cahiers Rouge (Januar 1938, mit Beilage) sowie der Lutte de Classes vom31. Dezember 1942, sowie auf Materialien zur Analyse von Opposition die Wahrheit – Kommunistische Arbeiter-Korrespondenz desKommunistischen Bundes Bremen (KBB, der Laden von Ralf Fücks) 1972/73.

* L’Humanité: Gustav Landauer, héros de la pensée et de l’action prolétariennes (1923, Espace contre Ciment)

* Sojourner Truth Organization: Workplace Papers (1980, LibCom)

Related articles

From the archive of struggle no.69: Emma Goldman, anti-fascism, etc

Most important link today is an apparently previously unpublished text by Emma Goldman on “The political Soviet grinding machine“, written in Barcelona in 1936.

I’ve only recently noticed the newish website Anti-Fascist Archive, which mainly has material from the history of British militant anti-fascism. Here’s a recent weekly update to give you an idea of what’s there:

• The blanks have been filled in the fighting talk collection.
• The World in Action documentary on anti-fascism is final available for all to watch!
• Information about picture 6 in the Collection of Beatings post has been supplied by Pedro.
• TAL fanzine and Celtic anti-fascist information has been helpfully supplied
• An old picture of Joey Owens has been added
• A new various AFA literature post
• Pre-War articles on anti-fascism
• Some fascist stickers have been added too

Most relevant to this blog, I guess, is the pre-war stuff, so here’s a taster.

The Two-Gun Mutualist site has been updating its translations. Among the updated are: “Nihilism” by Voline (ca.1929); Joseph Déjacque,Authority—Dictatorship (Down with the Bosses!) and Exchange; Henri Rochefort, letter on Louise Michel; Han Ryner, from “The Congress of Poets” and ”The Revolt of the Machines“.

There’s lost more from the radical archive at Entdinglichung, mainly in French but also including Rare texts by the Situationist International 1966-1972 and Nestor Machno’s The Anarchist Revolution (192?).

Below the fold, what’s new at the Marxist Internet Archive:

From the archive of struggle no.68

First, here’s Steve Hanson on the Working Class Movement Library, Salford:

Across from the Museum and Art Gallery in Salford is the Working Class Movement Library, which houses some very important documents about co-operative societies, including records on the Fenwick Weavers, a very early society:

‘Early societies tended to operate separately and did not come together to form a movement until the early 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution. Industrialisation brought the rapid growth of towns and fewer people producing their own food.’

Robert Owen is viewed as a founder of the movement, paying higher wages for shorter hours in the factory, much like the Fielden family over on the Yorks-Lancs border. The movement then blossomed in places such as nearby Rochdale, a place now on it knees, which is attempting some desperate revivification of the area around the train station.

What else?

Erich Mühsam (1878-1934) was a leading figure in the German anarchist movement. The Erich in English site will be home to critical English editions of several of his most important works.

Newly published old texts now. In agone the entirity of Retour à l’Ouest by Victor Serge, written June 1936 to May 1940, via Ent./Espace contre Ciment. From the same source: Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands: Bulletin VI/2 (März-April 1946), G. Munis: La non-révolution (1966), Marc Chirik: La nature non-prolétarienne de l’État russe et sa fonction contre-révolutionnaire (1944)

From Bastard Archive: by Colin Ward Anarchism – A very short introduction (2004), via Ent.

And the next several items are also from Ent.:

Moses Hess: Zunächst der Hinweis auf ein Online-Archiv mit Texten von Moses Hess, der am 25. Januar 200 Jahre alt geworden wäre und eine nicht zu unterschlagende Rolle in der revolutionären Bewegung in Deutschland gespielt hatte, es war Hess, der Marx und Engels für die Idee des Kommunismus gewonnen hatte [an online archive of texts by Moses Hess , who on 25 January would be 200 years old. Hess had played a not inconsiderable role in forging the revolutionary movement in Germany; it was Hess, who won Marx and Engels for the idea of communism:]

“Der Mensch muß mit sich anfangen, mit dem Ich, wenn er schaffen, tätig sein will. — Wie die alte Geschichte, die Naturgeschichte, mit dem ersten Menschen anfing, so muß auch die neue, die Geschichte des Geistes, mit dem ursprünglichen Individuum anfangen. Cartesius hat einen unglücklichen Versuch gemacht — er ist, wie wir gesehen haben, beim zweiten Worte gescheitert. Spinoza hat alles getan, aber die Geschichte hat sich nicht sogleich seiner Tat bemeistert; seine Ethik lag mehrere Jahrhunderte unfruchtbar im Boden, bis endlich das zwei­schneidige Schwert der geistigen und sozialen Revolution den Schutt wegräumte, der den Keim der Neuzeit erdrückte. Da zeigten sich plötzlich zwei Blättchen, deren Wurzel unbekannt. Atheismus und Kommunismus wurden von Fichte und Babeuf in den beiden Hauptstädten diesseits und jenseits des Rheins, in Berlin und Paris, zum Schrecken der Philister gelehrt, und Jünger strömten herbei, die sich für die Lehre begeisterten. Atheismus und Kommunismus!” (aus Philosophie der That, 1843)

Gefunden dank La Bataille socialiste: der Grand dictionnaire socialiste von Adéodat Compère-Morel (1924), der leider wie viele andere seines Milieus als Vichy-Kollaborateur endete [thanks to La Bataille Socialiste: the Grand dictionnaire Socialiste of Adeodat Compere-Morel (1924), who unfortunately ended like many others of his milieu as a Vichy collaborator]

Three texts at Collectif Smolny:

* Paul Mattick: Interview à Lotta Continua (1977)
* GLAT: Pour un regroupement révolutionnaire (1969)
* BILAN: Le droit au soulèvement armé (1937)
* Acta de la reunión del Comité Central del  Buró Internacional de las Juventudes Revolucionarias (1937 unter den Anwesenden u.a. Willy Brandt)

From the website of  Fundación Andreu Nin, mainly Poumist related texts:

* Benjamin Péret: Cartas de Benjamin Péret a André Breton sobre la revolución española (1936-1938)
* Reunión del Subsecretariado Internacional del POUM, 14 de mayo de 1937: Informe del camarada Gorkin sobre las “jornadas de mayo”(1937)
* Juan Andrade:  Prefacio a la edición de Ruedo Ibérico de Los problemas de la revolución española (1931-1937), de Andreu Nin (1986)
* Joaquin Maurin: Hacia la segunda revolución (1935)
* Amigos de Durruti: Hacia una nueva revolución (1937)

In La Presse Anarchiste:  La Voix du Travail n°2 of  IAA from September 1926.

From Marxists Internet Archive:  1941 volume of  The Militant. ["These are intermediate to high resolution scans for almost the entire year, 46 issues, preceeeding the US entry into World War II. These scans were made possible by the combined efforts of the ETOL, Holt Labor Library and Riazanov Library project." This is when Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman were editors.]

Also at MIA: Added to the Spanish Archivo Andreu Nin: La situación política y las tareas del proletariado (1937)

From the Anarchist Library:

Letter of América Scarfó to Émile Armand  (Buenos Aires, 3 December 1928. Translation of an important document in the history of Argentinian anarchism and of anarchist thinking on amatory ethics. “I desire for all just what I desire for myself: the freedom to act, to love, to think. That is, I desire anarchy for all humanity.” From Libcom, updated.)

The Luddites’ 200th birthday by Bernard Marszalek (FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 4)// Back to 1911 by Peter Lamborn Wilson (“Reversion to 1911 would constitute a perfect first step for a 21st century neo-Luddite movement. Living in 1911 means using technology and culture only up to that point and no further, or as little as possible.” FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 10) // Against Negation Or, Positively Revolting by Patrick Dunn (FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 24) // Disobedience: The antidote for miserablism by Penelope Rosemont (Tracing a line from Paul Lafargue to Andre Breton and Jacques Vache to Franklin Rosemont to Bernard Marszalek to Fredy Perlman to Occupy. FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 25) //Redrawing The Line: The Anarchist Writings of Paul Goodman by Paul Comeau (A review of Drawing The Line Once Again: Paul Goodman’s Anarchist Writings, PM Press, 2010. FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 28)  //  Declaration by the Ghost of Emma Goldman by Rick London (FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 30) // Three anarchist Rebellions on Film by Dan Georgakas (“Hundreds of films take on anarchist themes in some manner, but only a handful deal with anarchist governance. Three of the most interesting of these are, Alexander the Great (Megalexandros, 1980, Greek), Viva Zapata! (1952, United States), and Rebellion in Patagonia (La Patagonia Rebelde, 1974, Argentina)… Rebellion in Patagonia deals with a revolt in 1821 by Argentine anarcho-syndicalist workers in the rural area of Santa Cruz and their alliance with workers in Buenos Aires who also raised the black flag. The film opens with an anarchist hurling a fatal bomb at a Lieutenant Colonel Zavala, a prominent military officer. .” FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 36) // Spain: model for anarchist organizing by David Porter (A review of The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Volume I by Jose Peirats, Edited and Introduced by Chris Ealham; Translated by Paul Sharkey PM Press / Christie Books; 432pp, 628; www.pmpress.org, FIFTH ESTATE #386, Spring, 2012, Vol. 47, No. 1, page 45)

The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921  by Voline (A complete translation of La Revolution Inconnue, 1917-1921, first published in French in 1947, and re-published in Paris in 1969 by Editions Pierre Belfond. An abridged, two-volume English translate of the work was published in 1954 and 1955 by the Libertarian Book Club (New York City) and Freedom Press (London). The present edition contains all the materials included in the earlier edition (translated by Holley Cantine), as well as the sections which were omitted (Book I, Part I and II, and some brief omissions later in the work, translated by Fredy Perlman). Originally at Ditext, copied at Anarchist Library and recently updated there. More from Ditext below.)

Ditext – Digital Text International – is a large and bizarre repository of texts on anarchism, Marxism, philosophy and the Ukraine. Sections include Anarchism: The Unfinished Revolution. Here are some texts: Camillo Berneri, Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas, 1942 // John Paul Himka, Socialism in Galicia, 1983. // Colin Ward, “The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism” Freedom, June-July 1992. // Rudnytsky, Ivan L. Essays in Modern Ukrainian History. Edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky, Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1987 (includes The Political Thought of Soviet Ukrainian Dissidents) // Adams, Arthur E. The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution, edited by Taras Hunczak, 1977. // Arshinov, Peter. History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918-1921), Translated by Lorraine and Fredy Perlman, 1974, originally published in 1923 by the Group of Russian Anarchists in Germany. // Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. // Hunczak, Taras, ed. The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977 // Souchy, Augustin. The workers and peasants of Russia and Ukraine, how do they live? 1922.

Vie Ditext, I followed links to a number of digital text archives and portals.

*The López Martín Collection. “This collection inspired by the Spanish and Portuguese Historical Society (SPHP) and sustained by Lynn H. Nelson (University of Kansas), Jack Owens (Idaho State University), and Ignacio López Martín (European University Institute) is since 1996 the first step of a wider project regarding the use of Internet to study Early Modern Iberian history.” In turn this has links to other sites such as Roberto Ortiz de Zarate’s Political Collection, a collection of political leaders and formation of Spanish Governments from 1931. Ferrol Urban History by José María Cardesín (U. Coruña) (“La ciudad española de Ferrol fue diseñada “ex-novo- por ingenieros militares que trabajaban al servicio de la monarquía de la Ilustración, para alojar una base naval, astilleros y arsenales. La doble necesidad de defender la ciudad frente a ataques del exterior y de asegurar la disciplina de sus trabajadores condujo a la aplicación de un plan espacial cargado de violencia y segregación entre la Marina de Guerra y la clase trabajadora. A largo plazo los cambios que se fueron produciendo en la economía y en la geopolítica internacional, así como aquellas novedades que se introdujeron en el arte de la guerra, tuvieron un impacto directo en la ciudad y vinieron a arrojar dudas sobre su viabilidad. Así mismo, los cambios que también se fueron produciendo en la cultura política y en las alianzas de clase condujeron a una redefinición de las prácticas de poder. A lo largo del siglo XIX, la base naval y la economía de enclave que caracterizaba a Ferrol sufrieron repetidas crisis de obsolescencia. Más adelante, durante la Guerra Civil española, la Marina franquista erigió la represión de la clase trabajadora en objetivo mayor dentro de la cuestión principal de derrotar a la España Republicana. La dictadura franquista conllevó el retorno de un Ferrol segregado y militarizado, un modelo que quedaría finalmente obsoleto a partir la década de 1980, con la consolidación de la democracia y la integración de España en la Unión Europea.”) History of Madrid by Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal and Angel Bahamonde (U. Complutense) “An excellent site on the evolution and development of Madrid from “Borderline to Metropolitan Area”". Loads of Catalan history resources here.

*KnowledgeRush Book Directory Large directory of popular literary works and historical documents available on the Web. Includes biographies of some authors and can be browsed by author, genre, or title.

*The Humanities Text Initiative. This includes such things as this:

Radical Responses to the Great Depression Images, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan The Great Depression conjures up one of the profound American twentieth-century experiences. Unlike earlier depressions and periods of hard times, this economic paralysis was of a magnitude and duration that approached trauma and and although amelioration was evident after federal relief measures were taken, the long-awaited recovery never took place. Almost all of the items exhibited here come from the Labadie Collection of social protest materials, with some augmentation from the main Special Collections Library, the Graduate Library, and the Music Library. This particular collection captures over 100 digital images of the items from this exhibit.

Related articles

• From the archive of struggle, no.67 (poumista.wordpress.com)
• From the archive of struggle no.66 (poumista.wordpress.com)

Spanish Revolution and Civil War gallery

A wonderful gallery at Libcom. Here’s just a taste – go enjoy the real thing.

Theft at the Atenou

As I already reported (thanks to Kate Sharpley Library), there has been a terrible theft at one of the most important cultural spaces in Barcelona, l’Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular, which will be celebrating its centenary this year. Here is a statement from the Ateneu, badly translated into English – please circulate.

Today, 1 February 2012 entered in force to steal important documents from the Library of the Athenaeum.

Among the items stolen were:

• Original posters of the Civil War era as well as various objects also the period of the Spanish Civil War.
• Postcards from the civil war, pamphlets of many organizations and groups of the 20s and 30s and of the Franco-era underground.
• A collection of currency notes of the collectivized villages
• A postcard collection of civil war and of personalities such as Bakunin and Kropotkin
• A collection of film programs for the period of civil war
• A collection of old tram tickets for ten cents a pts.
• A collection of medals, pins, badges and insignia of the Civil War
• A folder with pictures of the free women’s and libertarian cultural associations, as well as documentation of collectivised enterprises based on the road from Ribes de Barcelona and visit of experts from Mexico.

The website contains some images, as well as a zip folder, and people are urged to look out for these. Here are just a couple of items:

Theft at the Ateneo enciclopèdic Barcelona

Important news from KSL, more on this to come soon:

The Ateneo enciclopèdic Barcelona suffered a major theft a few days ago, especially items and publications dating from the Spanish Revolution. Their statement (in Catalan) is at:
http://www.ateneuenciclopedicpopular.org/spip.php?article399
This page has a link to the document listing the lost items with details of the missing handbills, paper currency, posters, stamps etc. This page also contains photos of stolen items (you should click twice on the thumbnail for the larger version).
Alternatively the article with large format photos can be seen in pdf format:
http://www.ateneuenciclopedicpopular.org/spip.php?page=article_pdf&id_article=399

Get in touch with the Ateneo if you see these items being sold online:
Ateneo enciclopèdic Barcelona contact details:
http://www.ateneuenciclopedicpopular.org/spip.php?rubrique11

From the archive of struggle, no.67

First, some items from Roland Dodds’ latest webtrawl, and below the fold, the latest installment of the From the Archives of Struggle series.

Union Rights:  Shiraz Socialist brings to my attention theLabour Start campaign to free Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb, President of the Bahraini Teachers Association (BTA) who is currently under arrest. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has an excellent piece criticizing members of the left that mourned the death of Kim Jong Ill in one form or another. Rossie Huzzard echos my sentiments: “This nonsensical affection for tyrannical “anti-imperialist” states taints the entire left. We are on the side of the international working class against all enemies. Solidarity with the working class of North Korea against their state oppressors!”

Anarchism, Socialism, Unionism: AWL also has a pamphlet debating the role of anarchism in the labour struggle.

And forget the OWS movement, with Newt Gingrich making inroads with Republican voters by criticizing the capitalist culture Romney comes from and perpetuates, Peter Dreier asks if Capitalism is on trial in America.

The Social Democrats USA, the small but influential organization led by Penn Kemble before his death in 2005, has been revived to some degree. Follow their activities at Social Currents.

Some items from Entdinglichung and elsewhere:

Central European Social Democracy 1900-1933

From the archive of struggle no.66

On This Deity:

* 1ST JANUARY 1804THE BLACK JACOBINS AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

*1ST JANUARY 1994THE ZAPATISTA UPRISING

*4TH JANUARY 1960THE DEATH OF ALBERT CAMUS

*8TH JANUARY 1972THE DEATH OF KENNETH PATCHEN

*11TH JANUARY 1943THE ASSASSINATION OF CARLO TRESCA

From Bastard Archive, via Ent.:

* Anarcho-Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists, September 1973 from Melbourne/Australia from Bastard Archive, with the article Desire and Need by Murray Bookchin.

* J.A. Andrews – A brief biography

by Bob James. Published by Monty Miller Press. Originally published in 1985. John Arthur Andrews was an Australian anarchist and early member of the Melbourne Anarchist Club in the nineteenth century. This brief biography by Australian anarchist historian Bob James covers his emergence into the Australian labour and anarchist scene at the turn of the century.

From archive.org via Ent.

* Dittmar Dahlmann: Land und Freiheit. Machnovschina und Zapatizmo als Beispiele agrarrevolutioärer Bewegungen (1986)

* Arthur E. Adams: The Great Ukrainian Jacquerie (1977) Article in the anthology The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution, edited by Taras Hunczak, 1977

Image by Adam Crowe via Flickr

From libcom via Ent.:

-  John Foster: Class Struggle and the industrial revolution: early industrial Capitalism in three English Towns

- Robert Weldon Whalen: Like fire in broom straw: Southern Journalism and the Textile Strikes of 1929-1931

- Antonio Negri: Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy

- Lucien Van Der Walt/Michael Schmidt: Black Flame: The revolutionary class politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism

- Benjamin Franks: Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchism

- Errico Malatesta: At the Café: Conversations on anarchism

From the Irish Anarchist History archive:

* Anarchist Workers Alliance expose fascist meeting – April 1981

* Alexander Berkman -The Only Hope of Ireland (1916)

From anarkismo:

* Del desgaste del modelo neoliberal al ciclo de protestas. by Horacio Vergara Tello

* Aniversario del golpe militar en Polonia (dic. de 1981) y del colapso de la URSS (dic. del… by Frank Mintz

* “The Anarchist Movement In Egypt 1860–1940″ by Anthony Gorman (2010)

*Emilienne Morin

*Las luchas revolucionarias de la región, a calzón quitado by Daniel Tirso Fiorotto

*Facón Grande: en la Patagonia cuentan proezas del legendario carrero entrerriano by Daniel Tirso Fiorotto

From the Marxist Internet Archive:

*Added to the Raya Dunayevskaya Archive: State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats, 1960. This is what Criticism etc has to say about it:

A January 1960 text by Raya Dunayevskaya—”State Capitalism and the Bureaucrats“—has just been released by the Marxists Internet Archive. This article originally appeared inThe Socialist Leader, the newspaper of the Independent Labour Party. Although long past its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, the ILP maintained a newspaper until it re-merged into the Labour Party in 1975.

Dunayevskaya had just visited Italy to attend an international conference of tendencies adhering to a state-capitalist (regarding the USSR) position, which was organized by Onorato Damen. The text of speeches she delivered to workers in Genoa and Milan on this occasion can be found in the microfilmed Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (see #9470 and #9474). Dunayevskaya also visited the UK on this trip, meeting with Peter Cadogan, who was instrumental in publishing her Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions in Britain in 1960, and the Scottish Marxist-Humanist Harry McShane.

The text is a stirring indictment of the theory and practice of what can be called the high era of automated production. This piece is notable for Dunayevskaya’s discussion of such figures as sociologist C. Wright Mills, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Norbert Weiner, the father of now largely forgotten school of cybernetics. Note that in this piece she cites her 1947 manuscript, Marxism and State Capitalism (see The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #472-#504). This was the text that was to be developed into Marxism and Freedom, published in 1958.

*Added to the French  Boris Souvarine Archive: Après le Congrès de Tours et la scission salutaire [1920]

*Added to the Maurice Brinton Internet Archive:  France: Reform or Revolution, Solidarity Leaflet (May 1968); France: The Theoretical Implications, Solidarity, V, 8 (March 1969); The Events in France, Solidarity, V, 9 (April 1969); A Question of Power, Solidarity Leaflet (July 1969)

*Added to the Chris Harman Archive: Response to Christopher Hitchens (1994) (Letter to the London Review of Books)

*Added to the new Arthur Rosenberg Archive: A History of the German Republic, 1936

* The Spanish Section greets the new year with the addition of a text to the Archivo Andreu Nin: El marxismo y los movimientos nacionalistas (1934)

*Added to the French Trotskyists under the Occupation History Archive: Bulletin interne of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, 1944

From radicalarchive.org:

*Murray Bookchin: Anarchism vs anarcho-syndicalism (1992)

Related articles

From the archive of struggle; new at MIA

Some texts newly up at the Marxist Internet Archive.

Keep calm, occupy, and have a pint

Let’s start with two snippets from the mainstream media. This morning on Radio 4, DJ Tayler, Orwell biographer, was talking about the Orwellian quest for the perfect pub. You can listen in some parts of the world here, or read about it here.

A roaring open fire. The bartender knows your name. Your pint of draught stout comes in a china cup. Did George Orwell have the recipe for the perfect pub?

Who knows who you might bump into in the perfect pub

… In an article written for the London Evening Standard in 1946, he produced a detailed description of his ideal watering-hole, The Moon Under Water, which “is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights”.

The Guardian has a nice photo gallery of posters from the Occupy movement, with an emphasis on the retro look. Here’s one:

Turning to the alternative, Entdinglichung has a round-up of the latest in German on the Marxist Internet Archive, as part of the on-going project of bringing socialistica to the masses.

He also introduces to a great archival website called Workerscontrol.net, which “aims to be a virtual open library for the collection and access to documentation and theoretical essays on past and current experiences of workers’ control”. Material in a few languages by Cornelius Castoriadis, Ken Coates & Tony Topham, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernest Mandel, Paul Mattick, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, and Leon Trotsky, as well as stuff like “The Universe of Worker-Recovered Companies in Argentina (2002-2008): Continuity and Changes Inside the Movement” and “The South London Women’s Hospital Occupation 1984-85“. Check it out.

But my favourite is this post of old papers, as it has a nice greeting to me, as well as nice newspaper images:

Radikale

First, a link to a book review – A Hidden History of National Liberation: Ngo Van’s In the Crossfire, AK Press. Really interesting stuff.

Now, it’s good to have Entdinglichung back, who has this up:

More catching-up on old stuff recently made available online, today it is about stuff from France from groups „beyond“ stalinism and social democracy:

Bataille Socialiste reminds us, that a number of issues of the left-socialist underground journal L’Insurgé which was produced by a group in the Lyon area around Marie-Gabriel Fugère has been made available online by Gallica:

On La Presse Anarchiste:

* Two issues of Organisation Libertaire

* The first La Voix du travail , of the AIT, August 1926

* The first six issues of La Revue Anarchiste, 1929-1930

News stuff from the RaDAR from the vaults of the French section of the Fourth International:

* On the issue of „Trotskyist music, a 1947 songbook of the PCI in Bretagne, including Zimmerwald

* The first 14 issues of La Lutte de classes, the clandestine journal of Groupe communiste 1942-44, the group around Alexander Korner (Barta) which finally evolved into Lutte ouvrière

* From 1973 by the Ligue Communiste about contemporary fdascism and armed para-state units: Les bandes armées du pouvoir – 1 and Les bandes armées du pouvoir – 2

A number of new articles from BILAN on Collectif Smolny

And this:

Zunächst eine „Entschuldigung“, da es rein zeitlich und materiell nicht mehr leistbar ist, wird es in absehbarer Zukunft keine Updates mit dem Titel „Neues aus den Archiven der radikalen (und weniger radikalen) Linken“ mehr geben, stattdessen werde ich versuchen, mehr Qualität statt Quantität zu bringen und (thematisch mehr fokussiert) einzelne frisch online gestellte Archivalien vorzustellen, hier also drei Lesehinweise zur spanischen Revolution, gefunden aufLibCom:

Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (1991) von Michael Seidman ist inzwischen auch in deutscher Sprache erschienen (einen Auszug hier), die vollständige englischsprachige Fassung gibt es auf LibCom als pdf- oder html-Fassung

Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (2005) von Chris Ealham

The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-39 (1996) von Agustin Guilamòn

And, below the fold, some recent additions to the Marxist Internet Archive.

The Irish Revolution

From the excellent blog of that name:

The Limerick Soviet, 1919

The Story of the Limerick Soviet, April 1919
By D. R. O’Connor Lysaght (1979)

Introduction
On 21st January, 1919, Dáil Éireann held its opening session and the Irish Volunteers drew their first mortal blood since 1916 at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary. These facts have set the seal for subsequent historians of the first months of the year.[...]

SPI leaflet re visit by George V, 1911

Visit of King George V
Leaflet distributed by the Socialist Party of Ireland in 1911

Fellow-Workers,

As you are aware from reading the daily and weekly newspapers, we are about to be blessed with a visit from King George V.[...]

Founding statement of Irish Republican Socialist Party

Irish Republican Socialist Party press statement December 13, 1974

At a meeting held in Dublin on Sunday, 8.12.’74, a decision was made to form a new political party, to be known as THE IRISH REPUBLICAN SOCIALIST PARTY. The inaugural meeting was attended by approximately 80 delegates from Belfast, Armagh, Co. Derry, Derry City, Donegal, Dublin, Wicklow, Cork, Clare, Limerick and Tipperary.[...]

Markievicz on Fianna Eireann and 1921 Treaty

FIANNA EIREANN AND THE 1921 TREATY

Simplicity and directness of vision and love of the true and noble are part of the attributes of youth.  Our Headquarters’ staff instinctively took the straight, hard road, and when the “treaty” was signed, reaffirmed their allegiance to the Republic.  Since then the Fianna Eireann have carried on the fight, and many a noble boy stood true in spite of the soul-stifling misery of prison and the horror of torture.  Some, alas, went wrong and threw in their lot with those who sold their honour to the British Government, and became part of the English king’s garrison in Ireland.  These renegades did England’s dirty work, spying on their comrades who stood true and often sending them to a cruel death.  But this must not discourage us; it must remind us that human nature is weak and foolish, and that there are traitors everywhere, and that even among the Twelve Disciples there was one traitor.[...]

Related articles

From the archive of struggle: the Spanish Civil War at Warwick, the Marxist Internet Archive, and more

It is a long time since I have done one of these posts, and my comrade Entdinglichung has been relaxing for a while, so we have not had the benefit of his services to the cause. First, some news (thanks Liz in a comments thread), from the Modern Records Centre in Warwick, in the UK:

Work is now underway on a major new project to digitise internationally significant archives relating to the Spanish Civil War.

The project will result in over 10,000 pages of archive material being made available online free of charge. Transcriptions will be available for every item, allowing researchers to search through the mass of material for key words or phrases.

It is anticipated that the project will be completed in Spring 2012.

What is being digitised?

The archive collection of the Trades Union Congress includes 45 files on different aspects of the conflict. The files contain correspondence, minutes, reports, memoranda and propaganda material produced by members of the British and Spanish governments; political groups; international, British and Spanish trade unions; pressure groups, aid organisations, and other interested parties.

In addition, we are also digitising a small number of publications from the collections of the Trotskyists Henry Sara and Hugo Dewar. These include examples of bulletins (in English and Spanish) produced by Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM).

This is great news. Those interested might also be interested in some of their other digital resources:

Examples of documents relating to the conflict in Spain are included in our online resources for the History Department module ‘Anti-fascism, Resistance and Liberation in Western Europe (HI392)’. Photographs of Basque refugees in Britain are included in our image gallery ‘North Stoneham Camp for Basque Children: Snapshots of a Volunteer’.

Below is extracted from the former, and I urge you to spend some time there:

Letter from Willy Brandt of the German Seamen’s Group, Oslo, to Edo Fimmen, Secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, 1937Willy Brandt was Chancellor of West Germany between 1969-1974 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his attempts to improve relations between the East and West. As an active socialist and anti-fascist, Brandt (born Karl Herbert Frahm) fled to Norway in 1933 to avoid arrest by the Nazi authorities. It was then that Frahm adopted the new name that he would use for the remainder of his life. [Added, from Wikipedia: "After passing his Abitur in 1932 at Johanneum zu Lübeck, he became an apprentice at the shipbroker and ship's agent F.H. Bertling. He joined the "Socialist Youth" in 1929 and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1930. He left the SPD to join the more left wing Socialist Workers Party (SAP), which was allied to the POUM in Spain and the Independent Labour Party in Britain. In 1933, using his connections with the port and its ships, he left Germany for Norway to escape Nazi persecution. It was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt to avoid detection by Nazi agents. In 1934, he took part in the founding of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations, and was elected to its Secretariat." -Poumista][Included in the records of the International Transport Workers' Federation, document reference: MSS.159/3/C/A/52]

‘The Spanish Revolution’, Bulletin of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), 3 February 1937English language bulletin published in Barcelona. This edition counters Communist or Stalinist accusations against POUM. One of the inside pages also includes a reference to a visit to the offices of the publication by “the well-known British author” Eric Blair [George Orwell].[One of a series of publications on the Spanish Civil War from the papers of Henry Sara, Trotskyist; document reference: MSS.15/3/8/255/9]

‘Barcelona Bulletin’, second edition, 15 May 1937Anarchist news sheet describing the fighting between the Communists, and the anarchists and the Trotskyists (POUM) in Barcelona. It includes reports by Jane H. Patrick and Ethel Macdonald on events between 5-9 May.[One of a series of publications on the Spanish Civil War from the papers of Henry Sara, Trotskyist; document reference: MSS.15/3/8/243]

More archival news from the Alliance for Workers Liberty:

The archives of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and our forerunners, deposited at the library of the London School of Economics, are now catalogued and available to researchers. http://archives.lse.ac.uk/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=RefNo&key=AWL The archives include all the documents and publications of the AWL and our forerunners except the most recent stuff, which is on this website or (in the case of more recent minutes of AWL committees) in electronic archives available to AWL members.

The rest of this post is a round-up of some of the main radical digital archive sites.

From HathiTrust:

•  Worker-Student Action Committees: France, May ’68, by two participants in the event, Fredy Perlman and Roger Gregoire [via Criticism &c]

From Robert Graham:

• Luce Fabbri: Transforming Democracy (Luce Fabbri (1908-2000) was an Italian born anarchist writer who spent most of her life in Uruguay, where her family eventually emigrated after being forced to flee Fascist Italy. Her father was the great anarchist critic of fascism and totalitarianism, Luigi Fabbri (Volume One, Selection 113). Luce Fabbri experienced dictatorship both in Italy and, for a time, Uruguay. In the following excerpts from her article, “More on the Matter of Democracy,” translated by Paul Sharkey, she argues that anarchy and democracy are not incompatible, but that anarchy represents a further step forward in the struggle for human liberation.)
• Jorge Silva: Libertarian Self-Management (1996)
• Felipe Corrêa: From Party Politics to Libertarian Socialism (2005)
• The New Anarchism: Beyond Neo-Marxism with Murray Bookchin (1978)
• Gaston Leval: Principles and Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1954)

At the Kate Sharpley Library:

• Iron Column by Abel Paz printed: The story of the Iron Column: militant anarchism in the Spanish Civil War by Abel Paz, a Kate Sharpley Library copublication with AK Press, is back from the printers. If you can’t wait until we get copies, AK are already selling it at: http://www.akpress.org/2011/items/storyoftheironcolumn
• New publication: Anarchism In Galicia : Organisation, Resistance and Women in the Underground. The Anarchist movement in Galicia is unknown to English-language readers. These essays tells the stories of the men and women who built it, fought for it, and how they kept it alive in the face of incredible odds. ‘The FAI in Galicia’ by Eliseo Fernández gives a brief history of Galician anarchism before the foundation of the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica: Iberian Anarchist Federation) in 1927. It goes on to detail the structure and activities of the FAI in Galicia, and shows how the tensions and tactical disagreements within Spanish anarchism played out at a local level, including within the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo: National Confederation of Labour). ‘Vigo 1936’ by Antón Briallos records the desperate – and ultimately unsuccessful – battle in the streets against the fascist revolt of July 1936. Full biographical details of anarchists mentioned show the roots, structure and fate of the anarchist movement in Vigo before, during and after the Spanish Civil War. ‘The Anarchist Homes of Libertarian Women’ by Carmen Blanco tells how Galicia’s anarchist women sheltered other militants and were central to attempts to rebuild the anarchist movement. This tribute reveals the extent of their involvement and the terrible price they paid. Edited and translated by Paul Sharkey. ISBN 9781873605127 Publication details and online review copy
• July 2011 KSL Bulletin online: KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No. 67, July 2011 has just been posted on the site. You can get to the contents here or read the full pdf here.

At Libcom:

• La « Garde rouge » raconte (“The “Red Guard” tells its story”): The centre of gravity of the workers’ committee movement in Italy in the late ’60s to late ’70s was the Milan area, and it was the committee of Magneti Marelli in the Crescenzago factory which was the most advanced expression of the committees in this region, and thus in the whole country. This book by the Italian historian Emilio Mentasti examines the whole history of the committee from its birth during the economic crisis of 1973 to its dissolution under the blows of judicial repression and industrial restructuring. Unfortunately, there is no English edition available as yet…
• The IWW Reply to the Red Trade Union International: Executive Committee, R.I.L.U., Moscow, Russia.
• The Left in the Detroit Labour Movement – Martin Glaberman: Martin Glaberman reviews – and contests the accuracy and honesty of – two books on the Detroit union movement: Christopher H. Johnson, Maurice Sugar: Law, Labor, and the Left in Detroit, 1912-1950(Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1988); Margaret Collingwood Nowak, Two Who Were There: A Biography of Stanley Nowak(Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1989).
• Rediscovering Two Labor Intellectuals – Steve Early: Steve Early reviews collections of writings by Martin Glaberman and Stain Weir, while tying their experience and outlook to the emerging split within the AFL-CIO in 2004: Singlejack Solidarity. By Stan Weir. (Edited and with an afterward by George Lipsitz. Forward by Norm Diamond.) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 369 pp. $19.95, paperback; Punching Out & Other Writings. By Martin Glaberman. (Edited and introduced by Staughton Lynd.)Chicago, Ill: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2002. 229 pp. $15 paperback.
• Radical Unionism and the Workers’ Struggle in Spain – Ruben Vega Garcia and Carlos Perez: A piece on Spanish trade unionism since the Franco’s death. The Spanish labor movement inherited a revolutionary legacy whose most important landmarks are the general strike of 1917, the proletarian insurrection of 1934, and the zealous antifascist reaction of 1936. However, as a result of its defeat in the Spanish Civil War, the prolonged iron dictatorship profoundly disrupted the continuity of this tradition.
• Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts – Michael Seidman (PDF). PDF of the complete book.
• The Old and New in Anarchism: A Reply to Comrade Malatesta Piotr Arshinov’s 1928 reply to Errico Malatesta. In the anarchist organ Le Reveil of Geneva, in the form of a leaflet, comrade Errico Malatesta has published a critical article on the project of the Organisational Platform edited by the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad.
• The Struggle in the Factory: History of a Royal Ordnance Factory. The History of Dalmuir R.O.F. is the history of any other war-time factory, it is the story of the workers’ struggle against the forces of capitalism aided an abetted by the fakirs of the trade unions and the Communist Party. Faced with these odds it is creditable that the workers did not succumb entirely, and that a band of them continued in opposition and endeavoured to preserve some degree of sanity throughout the welter of lies, distortions and intrigue that surrounded the worker.

At Workers Liberty:

• From “Militant” to the Socialist Party: a collection Debating the Socialist Party/ Militant. See also Sean Matgamna: The Socialist Party and the workers: “every sect is religious”
• Edd Mustill: 1911: a time of possibility
• The life and death of Henk Sneevliet, Internationalist
• My Expulsion from Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League (Sean Matgamna)
• Dan Katz reviews Robin Blackburn’s Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

At the Marxist Internet Archive:

Added to the POUM History Archive:

• The Collectivization of the Vilardell Stores, 18 November 1936

Added to the Max Shachtman Archive:

• Sacco and Vanzetti, Labor’s Martyrs (1927)
• Trotsky taught us class action (1942) (reminiscences about Trotsky)
• What is the role of a revolutionary organisation? – Five years of the Workers Party (1945)
• Socialist policy in the war (1950) (position on the Korean War)
• Kerensky, head of the government that Lenin ousted, debates Max Shachtman (1951) (report on debate with Kerensky)
• An open letter to “our friends in Asia” (1951) (response to open letter by former left-wing intellectuals)
• For a democratic foreign policy (1953)
• Twenty Five Years of American Trotskyism (1953)
• Why the working class is central (1953)
• The Stalinist Social System (1954) (short analysis of Stalinist Russia and the new countries it had spread to)
• October was a true working class revolution (1957) (defence of the Russian Revolution while discussing fusion with Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party)
• The October Revolution was made for freedom in equality! (1957) (defence of the Russian Revolution on the occasion of the 40th anniversary)

Added to the Spanish Helmut Wagner Archive:

• El anarquismo y la Revolución española, 1937 [Thanks to Jonas Holmgren & Círculo Internacional de Comunistas Antibolcheviques]

Added to the Tony Cliff Archive:

• Alexandra Kollontai – Russian Marxists and Women Workers (1981)

Added to the U.S.A. History Section:

• 24 issues of Labor Defender, the monthly journal of the International Labor Defense. Completed are the full first two years of journal, 1926 – 1927. The Labor Defenderwas an “pictorial” magazine with dozens of photographs and drawings from the best labor illustrators of that era. Articles were written and edited by, variously, Upton Sinclair, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, James P. Cannon, Max Shactman, Carloline Scollen and Eugene V. Debs.

Added to the Raya Dunayevskaya Archive:

• The New Russian Communist Manifesto 1961

Added to the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line new Militant Project, part of the Left Opposition Publications Digitization Project:

• All 55 issues of The Militant for Volume VI, 1933 and all of the last year of The Militant, 1934. These additions represents the end of the Communist League of America (Opposition) era before merging with the American Workers Party (lead by A. J. Muste) that formed the new Workers Party of the U.S. which published The New Militant. This new period ended the period of being a public faction of the Communist Party of America while seeking to win that party back to what the Trotskyists of the CLA considered a genuine Leninist and revolutionary program. Both the failure of the German Communist to prevent Hitler from coming to power and the leadership of the CLA in the Minneapolis Teamster Strikes of 1934, the CLA concluded that it can have more of impact on revolutionary politics as a party in it’s own right than a faction of one they believed was playing an increasingly negative role in the workers movement in the U.S. and internationally through the Communist International.
• All the issues of the New Militant for 1935 and 1936, its entire run, published by the newly formed Workers Party of the U.S. This brings to an end the newspaper publication efforts of the Trotskyists in the form of The Militant and then the New Militant due to their organized entry into the left-moving Socialist Party of America. After this point it is not until August of 1937 with the start of publication of Socialist Appeal do the Trotskyists again publish a weekly workers paper.

Added to the C.L.R. James Archive:

• Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question (1939) (James’s notes in preparation for his discussions with Trotsky in Coyoacan)
• Notes Following the Discussions (1939) (As the title suggests some notes James made after his discussions with Trotsky in Coyoacan)
• On Gone with the Wind (1939) (Initial call by the SWP for a boycott of the racist film)
• On Gone with the Wind (1940) (Critique of the Communist Party’s campaign against the film)
• The Economics of Lynching (1940) (The title is self-explanatory)
• “My Friends”: A Fireside Chat on the War (1940) (Workers Party pamphlet against American entry into the war)
• With The Sharecroppers (1941) (Study of the position of sharecroppers and of their campaign to protect their rights)
• White Workers’ Prejudices (1945) (Attempt to explain why white workers were prejudiced)
• The Rapid Growth of the NAACP (1947) (Analysis of the rise of the main black organisation of the time fighting against racism and for civil rights)
• The Communist Party’s Zigzags on Negro Policy (1939) (Extract from an article on the SWP’s work with African Aericans)
• The 1919 Race Riots in Chicago (1939)
• The Destiny of the Negro – An Historical Overview (1939) (Educational series on the origins and history of African Americans)
• On Native Son by Richard Wright (1940) (Book review)
• Marcus Garvey (1940) (Short article on the significance of Marcus Garvey)
• Public Awareness of the Negro Question (1945)
• Joe Louis and Jack Johnson (1946) (Article on 2 Black boxing heroes from different eras)
• Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro Question (1947)
• The Two Sides of Abraham Lincoln (1949) (Critique of Lincoln)
• Key Problems in the Study of Negro History (1950)
• Capitalism and the Welfare State (1950) (Extract from an unsigned editorial in Fourth International)
• Free For All: The nine year old leader, in Race Today, 14, 3, May-June, 1982

Added to the new Raymond Challinor Archive in the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL):

• Remember Lansbury (1957)
• H Bomb Front – Now Black the Bomb! (1958)
• Tory Attack on National Health Service (1961)
• Charity is not enough (1961)
• Challinor’s Choice (1969)
• Military Discipline and Working Class Resistance in World War II (2001)
• Labour – Yesterday and Today (2001)

Added to the Alexander Shliapnikov Archive:

• On the Eve of 1917 (1923) (Book-length memoir of his experiences in the underground both in Russia and abroad during the World War I by Alexander Shliapnikov, a Bolshevik organiser and later leader of the Workers’ Opposition)

Added to the Periodical Page:

• The Class Struggle was a bi-monthly Marxist theoretical magazine published in New York City by the Socialist Publication Society. The SPS also published a series of pamphlets, mostly reprints from the magazine during the short period of its existence. Among the initial editors of the publication were Ludwig Lore, Marxist theoreticians Louis B. Boudin and Louis C. Fraina, the former of whom left the publication in 1918. In the third and final year of the periodical, The Class Struggleemerged as one of the primary English-language voices of the left wing factions within the American Socialist Party and its final issue was published by the nascent Communist Labor Party of America.

Added to the Murray Bookchin Internet Archive:

• State Capitalism in Russia, 1950. Article by Murray Bookchin when he was associated with the German ex-Trotskyists of the IKD putting their view on the nature of the USSR and historical retrogression.

An addition to the Spanish-language Archivo Andreu Nin:

• La concepción marxista del poder y la revolución española (1937)

At Anarkismo:

From the archive: special features

Recently discovered, via a Greek radical history website that made me wish I spoke Greek. Plus, at the bottom, some things from Histomatist and other bloggers.

Sidney Fournier: obituary

Download the article here.

New Zealand ‘Wobblies’

Download:New_Zealand_Wobblies.pdf 

‘Don’t be a conscript, be a man!’: A History of the Passive Resisters’ Union, 1912-1914

Download: PDF 228kb

Prophets from across the Pacific: The influence of Canadian agitators on New Zealand labour militancy in the early twentieth century

H M Fitzgerald (ATL photo 1/2-007676-F)

Two Kinds of Socialism

Anti-militarist: Syd Kingsford

— From the Evening Post, 8th July, 1913

Wyatt E. Jones: watchmaker and anarchist

Sample:

• Cresciani, Gianfranco, ‘Italian anti-fascism in Australia, 1922-45′, in Wheelwright, E.L. & Buckley, K. (ed.), Essays in the political economy of Australian capitalism, volume three, 1978 edn, vol. 3, Australia & New Zealand Book Company, Brookvale, 1978, pp. 86-101. [  |  | Details... ]
• Gibson, Ralph, ‘Struggle against war and fascism’, in My years in the Communist Party, International Bookshop, Melbourne, 1966. [  |  | Details... ]
• Manton, Joyce, ‘War can be prevented’, in The centenary prepares war, Melbourne University Council Against War, Melbourne, 1934. [  |  | Details... ]
• Smith, Bernard, ‘The realisms of war’, in Noel Counihan: artist and revolutionary, 1993 edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne & New York, pp. 180-97. [ Details... ]
• Smith, Bernard, ‘The fascist mentality in Australian art and criticism 1946′, in The critic as advocate selected essays 1941-1988, 1989 edn, Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 44-51. [ Details... ]

The Faber Fantin Research Project Site

This is a portrait of Francesco Giovanni Fantin [1901-42] pictured just before he left Italy as an antifascist emigre in 1924. Note the foulard which was an anarchist dress symbol. Since 1985 I have been researching the biography of Fantin, an important Italo Australian anarchist activist who was assassinated by fascist conspirators whilst interned as an enemy alien at Loveday in the SA Riverland, 16 November 1942. This website contains previously unpublished photographs, supplied by friends and relatives of Fantin, and interpretative argument by me about Fantin’s life and times. Fantin is presented as a significant figure in the history of political heterodoxy, emigration and multicultural diversification which were beginning to assume historical proportions in Italo-Australian relations during his lifetime. This then is the larger than life story of a grass roots activist who explored democratic notions of citizenship resolved `to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. It should be of interest to all interested in the history of democracy and Italo-Australian social and political history, whether they share Fantin’s anarchism, or, like myself, only his socialism.

From Histomatist

New work: Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time

Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time
by Ian Birchall

Hardback £25 9781905192793/Paperback £16.99 9781905192809

Tony Cliff came to political consciousness in the darkest period of the 20th century and spent his life developing revolutionary Marxism against Stalinism. From his early days as a revolutionary in British-occupied Palestine, through years of obscurity and isolation in London and Dublin to the high points of struggle in post-war Britain, Cliff worked to restore lost ideas and traditions, fan flames of resistance and develop our understanding of a system in constant change. Ian Birchall’s lovingly crafted book is the culmination of years of work, drawing on interviews with over 100 people who knew Cliff and painstaking research in archives around the country. It is a majestic example of political biography at its best.

Available direct from Bookmarks Bookshop from 30 June 2011, and nationwide from October – see here. Ian will be launching his biography at Marxism 2011, and describes some of his experience of researching Cliff’s life here.

New study of EP Thompson

I have just finished reading The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics a highly readable new study by Scott Hamilton of Reading the Maps fame. I can happily and heartily recommend it to readers of Histomat as a fine companion volume to Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978). Hamilton’s work comes with what now reads as a rather poignant recommendation from the late socialist historian and EP Thompson’s partner, Dorothy Thompson, and overall I found it a fascinating introduction to Thompson the thinker and writer – someone who I didn’t know before now was given cricket lessons by Nehru while a boy. Personally would have liked a little more on Thompson the great Marxist historian, but I am aware that would have probably meant a different book – and in any case, myself and Hamilton had a little debate about Thompson and Marxist historiography about five years ago – a debate I am not sure either of us feel the compulsion to return to just now. Many congratulations anyway to Scott on the publication of his homageto EPT.

Owen Hatherley on Marx, Eagleton, Lenin and Lih

 As [Eagleton] acknowledges, our age of no-strings-attached state handouts to banks and punitive cuts to social services has embraced a form of capitalism so grotesque that it resembles the caricatures of the most leaden Soviet satirists. Eagleton presents his book as the fruit of “a single, striking thought: what if all the objections to Marx’s thought are mistaken?” In order to demonstrate this, each of the chapters of this erudite yet breezy (occasionally too breezy) tract begins with a series of assertions about Marx and Marxism, which Eagleton then proceeds to debunk, one by one.

From Hatherley’s review of Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right and Lih’s Lenin. Personally I disagree very slightly with Hatherley’s conclusion, at the end of his discussion of Lih’s biography of Lenin: Yet what really endures here is the sense that, for Lenin, a revolutionary leader has a duty to lead the working class into revolution, and all the theory in the world won’t help if the political and economic conditions are missing. Lenin believed that the first world war offered a real chance to destroy capitalism, and when – in 1919, as revolution briefly engulfed Europe – he seemed to be proved right, he felt vindicated, even relieved. He learned his mistake, and died deeply troubled by it.Yet Lenin was not ‘mistaken’ when the world revolution failed to triumph outside of Russia post First World War – the conditions did exist for the successful socialist revolution in Europe – not least in Germany which underwent two revolutionary situations in 1918 and then again in 1923. Lenin knew that making the revolution in Russia was a gamble, but, he wagered, it was right to make that gamble – a gamble after all that was critical to ending the bloodshed of the First World War and, everything taken into account did demonstrate the possibilities for socialist revolution in the 20th century.

As Rosa Luxemburg noted,‘Everything that a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness, and consistency in a historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky, and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which the Social Democracy of the West lacked were represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism.’

From Tendence Coatesy

Louise Michel

I recently saw the film Louise-Michel.

It’s a bit, so-so (I went for the name- see below).

The film begins with a coffin being jammed in a Crematorium while the Internationale plays. A textile factory, in Picardy, is delocalised. The boss leaves the women workers in the lurch. Rather than go for a nude Calender, or take up stripping, they decide to hire a killer to bump him. Louise (Yolande Moreau),  finds one, a man transsexual. Louise turns out to be man.

The comedy, such as it is, takes place the surreal Picardy environment, a decaying Communist bastion, with co-ops and council housing falling apart. The only real laughs are in the search for the ultimate boss responsible for the closure. This takes the pair, Louise and her pro ((Bouli Lanners) to a posh gala dinner, Brussels ( with , nonantes and septantes  said every other sentence, and finally to Jersey where a much appreciated bloodbath of the bourgeoisie ensues.(Here.)

The only really good scene in Louise-Michel – and still a bit Little Britain in its humour – is when the duo pass by and visit the farm where Louise had shot a bank-manager out to forfeit her indebted property. It’s now an organic bed-and-breakfast heaven, with fair-trade coffee, bio bogs, hand-woven degradable carpets,  spring water showers, crystal therapy breakfasts, and recycled air -in the dull flat Picardy mud.

Anyway, apart from the chance of seeing Siné in the flesh – in a walk-on part –  I wouldn’t recommend the film.

But at the end there is a quote on the screen from the real-life Louise Michel.

Now she is someone the English-speaking left should get to know.

“Michel became highly admired by French workers and revolutionaries, particularly for her association with theParis Commune. From after her death until 1916, a demonstration was held every year at her tomb at Levallois-Perret.

A legendary figure of the labour movement, Michel had the ability to incite crowds to act. Frequently, the language used to describe her is that reserved for saints and heretics; she is often referred to as “Bonne Louise” (Good Louise) or the “Vierge rouge” (red Virgin). For better or worse, Michel seems to have fascinated her contemporaries. This woman, educated and cultured, intelligent without being shy and retiring, and lacking the beauty of certain demimondaines and other women of loose morals who populated the period before the Belle Epoque, was surrounded by many male celebrities. They were often her steadfast friends, until the end of her life, or more frequently to the end of theirs. For a period when women still had essentially no rights, she was in many respects an exception.”

L’œillet rouge.

If were to go to the black cemetery

Brothers, throw on your sister,

As a final hope,

Some red ‘carnations’ in bloom.

In the final days of Empire,

When the people were awakening,

It was your smile red carnation

which told us that all was being reborn.

Today, go blossom in the shadow of the black and sad prisons.

Go, bloom near the somber captive,

And tell him/her truly that we love him/her.

Tell that through fleeting time

Everything belongs to the future

That the livid-browed conqueror

can die more surely than the conquered.

The Paris Commune is not dead

There is a very well expressed article by Nick Rogers in the latest Weekly Worker on the 140th Anniversary of the Paris Commune – Here.

He concludes,

The historical experience of the Paris Commune teaches us a threefold lesson.

First, the key role of political leadership and programme. The Commune clearly lacked coherent political leadership. It did not even have a clear idea of what it sought to achieve. This was partly a question of political ideology, but it was also an expression of the lack of any working class party to speak of. In Paris (and in the other cities of France, where during this period several communes of only a few days’ duration were declared) there were political traditions, clubs and conspiratorial groupings. Lacking from the political firmament was any party seeking to democratically represent the interests of the whole class.

The International came closest and was subsequently blamed by the French government for the uprising. It banned the International in France and wrote to governments around Europe urging them to take the same action. But the Proudhonist majority in the French section held to a theoretical position that rejected political action (and trade unionism, for that matter). It was not ready to lead a workers’ revolution.

Second, the spontaneity of the working class is capable of great feats. What was achieved in Paris during April and May 1871 by the citizens of the city retains the capacity to inspire. Local initiatives proliferated. Right up to the last week a mood of festival prevailed. It is not the role of a political party to subsume or subdue such initiative, but to provide a focal point for directing the working class’s capacity for political and organisational creativity in an agreed direction.

Third, a workers’ revolution transforms the political and constitutional landscape or it is not a revolution. That is why communists raise democratic and republican demands. It is a lesson most of the present-day ‘revolutionary’ left has forgotten. The rediscovery of Kautsky “when he was a Marxist” can help hammer home that lesson.

This is a crystal-clear summary of the Commune’s enduring political meaning.

Also read:

At Coatesy: Lenin. Lars T. Lih. Review: a ‘Heroic Scenario’. / Localism and the Big Society: An Emerging Left Critique. / Vanessa Redgrave and the Red Sex Slaves: A Marxist Analysis, er.. / Everything Flows. Vasily Grossman. A Review. / Levellers’ Day, Burford. / 33 Revolutions Per Minute. A History of Protest Songs. Dorian Lynsky. Review. / Leninism’ and the Socialist Party (Taaffe). / Les Maoïstes. Christophe Bourseiller, Review and Reflections.

At Shiraz Socialist:

Mr Taaffe lashes out: condemns self out of own mouth… / Peter Taaffe: what is your answer? / Miriam Karlin: feminist, anti-fascist, socialist, trade unionist

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