Currently viewing the tag: "Revolution"
”I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world wide war of the social revolution. In that war, I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” – Eugene V. Debs
“To those who does not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.” – Bertolt Brecht
Further Reading:
“Questions from a Worker Who Reads” by Bertolt Brecht, 1935.
“The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.” – C. L. R. James
(via Paul Le Blanc’s excellent piece: “What Do Socialists Say About Democracy?”
Further Reading:
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James
”The people’s revolution instead of the proletarian revolution? [The argument is that] 95 percent of the people are interested in the revolution, consequently it is not a class revolution but a people’s revolution… In reality, the worker-Communist should say: of course, 95 percent of the population, if not 98 percent, is exploited by finance capital. But this exploitation is organized hierarchically: there are exploiters, there are subexploiters, sub-subexploiters, etc. Only thanks to this hierarchy do the superexploiters keep in subjection the majority of the nation. In order that the nation should indeed be able to reconstruct itself around a new class core, it must be reconstructed ideologically and this can be achieved only if the proletariat does not dissolve itself into the “people,” into the “nation,” but on the contrary develops a program of its proletarian revolution and compels the petty bourgeoisie to choose between two regimes. The slogan of the people’s revolution lulls the petty bourgeoisie as well as the broad masses of the workers, reconciles them to the bourgeois-hierarchical structure of the “people” and retards their liberation.” – Leon Trotsky, “Thälmann and the “People’s Revolution”“, April 1931
(via Alexander)
Further Reading:
Class politics needed to build the Occupy movement by the Socialist Workers Party of Ireland
“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”
“What you win in the immediate battles is little compared to the effort you put into it but if you see that as a part of this total movement to build a new world, you know what could be. You do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America. There is another America!” – Anne Braden
“To learn to see all the crimes against humanity, all the indignities to which the human body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of the existing social system, in order to direct all our energies into a collective struggle against this system – that is the direction in which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.” – Leon Trotsky, “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism”, November 1911
(Thanks Pete!)
The fact that we needed organisations like the Red Cross, etc., to operate in Japan and New Orleans, Louisiana (i.e. in two of the “richest” countries on Earth) speaks so well to who owns the wealth in the imperialist centers. I often hear from people in the US that we should “help people over here before we help people over ‘there’.” – as if the owners of society give a shit about ordinary working people – either “at home” or abroad. Only when we recognise our common interests in seeing the end of the imperialist capitalist system, of patriarchal and white supremacist capitalism, will we begin to make any progress. We’ve seen movement in that direction: Muslims in Egypt protecting Coptic Christians after the bombing in Alexandria, cross-racial hunger strikes and protests in Ohio and Georgia prisons, a worker rebellion in Wisconsin (including firefighters and police!!), people giving countless amounts of their own limited funds to people in New Orleans, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Haiti (which the capitalists then often squander, e.g. in Haiti). The list goes on. There is much reason to hope! – and much work to be done!
“Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murder, or Theft; and all landlords live in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou shalt not steal, nor kill.” – The Diggers
“(…even the most radical constitution could be exploited by the Revolution’s enemies and hence the necessity for the dictatorship, i.e., a power not limited by fixed and written laws).” – Antonio Gramsci, Q3§56
“Consensus is imposed on everyone. The Constitution is sacred and it absolutely unimaginable that it is possible to replace it with another one (which is not the case in Europe!) and private property provides the inviolable foundation for the permanence of this mode of social organization (no horizon beyond capitalism is imaginable).” Samir Amin, “Consensus or Inventive Democracy?”
Here in the United States we must deal with an incessant worship of the Constitution. Upon this document rests a whole load of claims of the exceptional nature of the nation and its people, who, through divine inspiration, forged the most libertarian document of governance ever conceived. Having reached the ideal form of government, the constitution is worshiped and change is seen as both impossible and undesirable.
As Gramsci points out in the above note, whatever advances the U.S. constitution ushered into the world, it has been used primarily as a tool by reactionaries to prevent further progress. In revolutionary periods, only a new power not limited by the rigid and formalistic methods of operation can successfully ensure the success of the Revolution, the suppression of its enemies, and the permanent stability of a new society.
Only this new power – a democracy of the vast majority, i.e. a “dictatorship of the working class / proletariat” over and against the old exploiting classes and in the interests of the immense majority – can ensure the stabilisation of a new form of socialist democracy and the destruction of all forms of oppression and exploitation which comes along with the current dictatorship of capital.
All of us must struggle against the fetish of outdated forms, of documents and habits of old, if we wish to see birth of the final and most emancipatory stage of human history.
“Humboldt [did not] understand in 1790 that capitalistic economic relations perpetuated a form of bondage which, long before that in fact, as early as 1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be “even worse than slavery,” writing: “it is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil, whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters, who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? ‘He is free,’ you say. That is his misfortune. These men, it is said, have no master. They have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters: that is, need. It is this that that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.” And if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage, as every spokesman for the enlightenment would insist, then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited, what Fourier referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history. The first having made serfs out of slaves, the second wage earners out of serfs and the third which will transform the proletariat into freemen by eliminating the commodity character of labour, ending wage slavery and bringing the commercial, industrial and financial institutions, under democratic control.”
It is worth repeating that for all their praise of “orderly transitions” the bourgeoisie came to power through some of the most tumultuous revolutions in history.
(Thanks Shaun!)
There’s an inner thing in every man,
Do you know this thing my friend?
It has withstood the blows of a million years,
And will do so to the end.
It was born when time did not exist,
And it grew up out of life,
It cut down evil’s strangling vines,
Like a slashing searing knife.
It lit fires when fires were not,
And burnt the mind of man,
Tempering leandened hearts to steel,
From the time that time began.
It wept by the waters of Babylon,
And when all men were a loss,
It screeched in writhing agony,
And it hung bleeding from the Cross.
“The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this ‘defeat’ into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this ‘defeat’.
‘Order reigns in Berlin!’ You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!”
The last written words of Rosa Luxemburg, 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919, revolutionary marxist, leader of the socialist movement in Germany, betrayed by the social democrats, murdered by the fascists.
Editor: While I have some political differences with this piece, its one of my favorite pieces by Dellinger. Its incredibly powerful and I definitely recommend reading it. (Its not too long either). As reprinted in Dave Dellinger’s autobiography, From Yale to Jail: The Life of a Moral Dissenter, the editorial, titled “Declaration of War,” written in 1945 after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fire bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, reads:
—
“The atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed whatever claims the United States may have had to being either “democratic” or a “peace-loving” nation. Without any semblance of a democratic decision—without even advance notice of what was taking place—the American people waked up one morning to discover that the United States government had committed one of the worst atrocities in history.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace, rumors ofwhich had been trickling through censorship for months.
The atom bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier. The only reason that the fighting was still going on was the refusal of American authorities to discontinue a war which postponed the inevitable economic collapse at home,* and was profitable to their pocketbooks, their military and political prestige, their race hatred, and their desires for imperialist expansion.
The “way of life” that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and is reported to have roasted alive up to a million people in Tokyo in a single night) is international and dominates every nation of the world. But we live in the United States, so our struggle is here. With this “way of life” (”death” would be more appropriate) there can be no truce nor quarter. The prejudices of patriotism, the pressures of our friends, and the fear of unpopularity, imprisonment or death should not hold us back any longer. It must be total war against the infamous economic, political and social system which is dominant in this country. The American system has been destroying human life in peace and in war, at home and abroad, for decades. Now it has produced the crowning infamy of atom bombing. Besides these brutal facts, the tidbits of democracy mean nothing. Henceforth, no decent citizen owes one scrap of allegiance (if he ever did) to American law, American custom or American institutions.
There is a tendency to think that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an excess that can be attributed to a few militarists and politicians at the top. That is the easy way out. It enables us to express our horror at the more obvious atrocities of our civilization while remaining “respectable” supporters of the institutions which make them inevitable. But obliteration bombing by blockbusters, incendiaries and atom bombs was a logical part of the brutal warfare that had been carried on for nearly four years with the patriotic support of American political, religious, scientific, business and labor institutions. The sudden murder of 300,000 Japanese is consistent with the ethics of a society which is bringing up millionsof its own children in city slums. The lives of 300,000 “enemies” are distant and theoretical to business and labor leaders who find excuses for enjoying $15,000 incomes (and $150,000 incomes) while hiring workers for less than $1,500. Workers who passively accept starvation wages, periodic employment and relief checks, at the order of private owners and civic authorities, will also accept orders to put on a uniform and mutilate their fellow men.
No, the evil of our civilization cannot be combated by campaigns which oppose militarism and conscription but leave the American economic and social system intact. The fight against military conscription cannot be separated from the fight against the economic conscription involved in private ownership of the country’s factories, railroads and natural resources. The fight against the swift destruction of human life which takes place in modern warfare cannot be separated from the slow debilitation of the human personality which takes place in the families of the rich, the unemployed and the poor. The enemy is every institution which denies full social and economic equality to anyone. The enemy is personal indifference to the consequences of acts performed by the institutions of which we are a part.
There is no solution short of all-out war. But there must be one major difference between our war and the war that has just ended. The war against the Axis was fought as a military campaign against people, with the destructive fury, violent hatred regimentation and dishonesty of military warfare. The combatants were conscripts rather than free men. Every day that war went on they were compelled to act in contradiction to the ideals which motivated many of them. Therefore, “victory” was predestined to be a hollow farce, putting an end to killing that never should have been begun, but entrenching white imperialism as the tyrant of the Pacific, and contributing unemployment, slums, and the class hatred to the United States. The American people won half the world and lost their souls.
The war for total brotherhood must be a nonviolent war carried out by methods worthy of the ideals we seek to serve. The acts we perform must be the responsible acts of free men, not the irresponsible acts of conscripts under orders. We must fight against institutions but not against people.
There must be strikes, sabotage and seizure of public property now being held by private owners. There must be civil disobedience of laws which are contrary to human welfare. But there must be also an uncompromising practice of treating everyone, including the worst of our opponents, with all the respect and decency that he merits as a fellow human being. We can expect to face tear gas, clubs and bullets. But we must refuse to hate, punish or kill in return. We must respect the owners, policemen, conservatives and strike-breakers for what they are—potentially decent people who have been conditioned by a sick society into playing anti-social roles, the basic inhumanity of which they do not understand.
This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the modern world is sick or maladjusted. Slick businessmen and bosses, parasitical coupon clippers, socially blind lawyers, scientists and clergymen are as much victims of “a world they never made” as are the rough and irresponsible elements of America’s great slums. The only way we can begin to break the vicious cycle of blindness, hatred and inequality is to combine an uncompromising war upon evil institutions with an unbending kindness and love of every individual—including the individuals who defend existing institutions.
This is total war. But it is a war in which our allegiance transcends nationalities and classes. Every act we perform today must reflect the kind of human relationships we are fighting to establish tomorrow.
*I was wrong on this one. The collapse didn’t come until much later than I had anticipated. “
Socialist Politics:
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