"Anybody's Son Will Do"

http://www.countercurrents.org/willers200410.htm

In 1983, the National Film Board of Canada produced a 57-minute film, "Anybody's Son Will Do". Arguably the best anti-war film ever made, and tailored for public television, it scared the hell out of the U.S. military machine, which has done its best to "disappear" it. For years it has been nearly impossible to find a copy, but some kind soul has posted it on YouTube where it can be seen in six segments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DShDaJXK5q

Video: Terry Eagleton

The Death of Criticism --

Terry Eagleton

(From Spoken English Example Videos for Language Study)

Prolific author and literary critic Terry Eagleton speaks at UC Berkely on "the death of criticm." Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, and Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Dr. Eagleton is probably best known for his "Literary Theory: An Introduction".

During this hour, Professor Eagleton demonstrates how unscripted speech may rival in its sophistication practically any highly polished and edited prose. Listening to lectures such as this will do more for your proficiency with English language that any quantity of grammar or vocabulary study.

Difficulty level: 8/10

Dialect: British (RP) English

Points to look for: one use of "criterion" which should be "criteria".

Tea Party re-branding

A False Flag Operation: On the Lie of Tea Party Tolerance, White Supremacists, and Liberal "Infiltrators"

....The repackaging of the Tea Parties as tolerant and inclusive political organizations is happening as we speak. It will continue from its own momentum regardless of the facts on the ground. In much the same way that Dr. King has been reimagined by conservatives to be a Republican (notice how Glenn Beck, the Pied Piper for the Tea Parties, is increasingly appropriating both the language and symbolism of The Civil Rights Movement), the tea baggers will be depicted as forces of American virtue and pluralism. As this false flag operation continues to develop, here are a few things to watch for in the upcoming weeks:

1. More coverage of the "racial diversity" of the Tea Parties. Expect to see the same talking heads and black and brown apologists trotted out on the major networks;
2. The discussion of agent provocateurs will take on the weight of fact as opposed to speculation;
3. There will be more videos of white supremacists, nativists, and overt "Birthers" being thrown out of Tea Party rallies;
4. Simultaneously, there will be a great deal of attention paid to "incidents" where Palin supporters and tea baggers are assaulted by "anti-Tea Party" forces and "agents of the Obama regime";
5. The Right wing media frame will continue to emphasize their long standing narrative that Conservatives and "real Americans" are "victims" of the Left and Progressives;
6. Similar to what happened with the ACORN pimp and prostitute scandal (a fraud staged by Breitbart and company), the efforts to "infiltrate" the Tea Parties will be exposed as events planned by the Right;
7. Loose lips sink ships: one of the "white supremacist" or other "agent provocateurs" will give up the fact that they are on the payroll of someone semi-connected (for reasons of plausible deniability) to the Right wing media and/or political establishment.

US Black struggle and liberation

Place of Black workers
in coming revolution
Leon Trotsky’s 1933 discussion with
American communists about Black struggle

The following is the 14th in a series of excerpts the Militant is running from Pathfinder Press’s latest book, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. We encourage our readers to study, discuss, and help sell the book. This excerpt is from the chapter “Black Liberation and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The footnotes used here are added by the Militant, based on facts provided in the book. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

It was [Leon] Trotsky,¹ basing himself on the political conquests of the Communist International, who first explained to us scientifically that it was awakening Black working people to their self-worth, not to their oppression, that would open new prospects for revolutionary struggle in the United States.

In response to questions the party leadership had asked [Arne] Swabeck² to discuss with Trotsky in 1933, the Bolshevik leader explained:

The Negroes will, through their awakening, through their demand for autonomy, and through the democratic mobilization of their forces, be pushed on toward a class basis. The petty bourgeoisie will take up the demand for equal rights and for self-determination but will prove absolutely incapable in the struggle; the Negro proletariat will march over the petty bourgeoisie in the direction toward the proletarian revolution.

The meaning comes through loud and clear, even translated into English from the German-language notes taken by Arne, whose first language was Danish!

Twice in this country in the twentieth century, we’ve seen in practice how the Black proletariat had to “march over the petty bourgeoisie”—white and Black, including the trade union officialdom, with all their limitations and hesitations—in order to advance the struggle against Jim Crow segregation and other institutions of racist discrimination.

The first time was during the political radicalization that developed under the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and the spreading capitalist crisis in the decades following World War I. Struggles by exploited farmers and other working people in the 1920s laid the foundation for the labor battles and social movement of the 1930s centered on building mass CIO industrial unions. Workers regardless of skin color more and more fought shoulder to shoulder for union rights and other social goals. These interconnected working-class struggles gave such momentum to the fight to bring down Jim Crow that the impetus outlasted the broad retreat of the labor movement during and after World War II.

As for the second time, some of the people in this room lived through the Black rights battles of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s and took an active part in them….

Trotsky’s starting point in the discussions with Swabeck was the fact that racist oppression and anti-Black prejudice in the United States were the largest obstacle to revolutionary unity of the working class. As a result of such oppression, Trotsky pointed out, few “common actions [take] place involving white and Black workers,” there is no “class fraternization.” “The American worker is indescribably reactionary,” Trotsky said. “This can be seen now in the fact that he has not yet even been won to the idea of social insurance.” And, Trotsky added, “The Negroes have not yet awakened, and they are not yet united with the white workers. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the American workers are chauvinists; in relation to the Negroes they are hangmen as they are also toward the Chinese, etc. It is necessary to make them [white workers] understand that the American state is not their state and that they do not have to be the guardians of this state.”

Those conditions, of course, have changed substantially since 1933 as a result of class battles. They began shifting in the mid-1930s as a product of the labor struggles that built the CIO, growing opposition to fascism and the spreading imperialist world war, and motion toward a labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. These changes accelerated in the 1950s with the conquests of the mass civil rights movement and Black liberation struggles, which had their roots in the massive urbanization, migration to the North, and shifts in the composition of the industrial workforce that began prior to World War II. As a consequence of these struggles, and as a component of them, workers in the United States did fight for an important form of social insurance: Social Security. And as a result of the labor battles of the 1930s and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, they came to see an expanded version of that Social Security, including Medicare, Medicaid, and related programs, as rights.

With the rise of industrial unions, more and more workers who are Black, white, Asian, and Latino—native-born and immigrant—today do work alongside each other in many workplaces, often doing the same jobs. They do engage in common actions and class fraternization. But the fight to combat multiple forms of segregation and racism, and to overcome national divisions in the working class—through mutual solidarity and uncompromising struggles using any means necessary—remains the single biggest task in forging the proletarian vanguard in this country.

Trotsky, in his exchange of views with Swabeck, went on to point out that during a major rise of revolutionary struggle and proletarian class consciousness in the United States,

it is then possible that the Negroes will become the most advanced section… . It is very possible that the Negroes will proceed through self-determination to the proletarian dictatorship in a couple of gigantic strides, ahead of the great bloc of white workers. They will then be the vanguard. I am absolutely sure that they will in any case fight better than the white workers.

But this can only happen, Trotsky emphasized, “provided the communist party carries on an uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers”—prejudices brought into the working class by the bourgeoisie and the imperialist masters, through their petty-bourgeois agents—“and makes no concession to them whatsoever.”

This is what Trotsky had learned from Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party and Communist International, and from his own long revolutionary experience in the tsarist prison house of nations. Trotsky had deepened this understanding through his discussions with delegates from the United States to the first four congresses of the Communist International from 1919 through 1922. And this is what he worked with the Socialist Workers Party leadership and the rest of the world communist movement, from 1929 until his death, to apply in practice.

---

1. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was a central leader of the October 1917 revolution in Russia and of the Bolshevik Party and Communist International in the early years of the Soviet republic. From the mid-1920s, he was the principal leader of the fight to continue the communist course charted under the leadership of V.I. Lenin against its reversal by a counterrevolutionary privileged caste headed by Joseph Stalin. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and later assassinated by Stalin’s agents in Mexico.

2. Arne Swabeck (1890-1986) was a founding leader of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919. He was expelled for supporting the political fight led by Trotsky. He was the national secretary of the Communist League of America in the early 1930s.

Interview with Eastern European Marxists

The Left and Marxism in Eastern Europe
Gáspár Miklós Tamás Interviewed by Imre Szeman

You now describe yourself as a Marxist, with plans for a Marxist theory group in Hungary in addition to your ongoing work as a writer and political commentator from the Left. Why Marx now? In Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, Marxist ideas and theories were hard-pressed to survive their connection to state socialism and the elimination of courses in Marxist-Leninism in universities. Even though the economic collapse has discredited neoliberal ideology -- at least its most extreme variants -- Marxism in the region is still linked with totalitarianism.

Indeed, as you know, there are ongoing attempts to formalize the connection between communism and fascism as little more than variations on the same totalitarian theme. Budapest's Terror House Museum makes no distinction between Bela Kun's 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, Admiral Horthy's regency, fascism, and post-War communism -- it's all just "terror" by comparison to liberal capitalism. The "Prague Declaration" announced by the Czech Senate in June 2008 calls for the European Parliament to recognize communism and Nazism as aspects of Europe's totalitarian legacy. In Hungary, the Supreme Court has recently rescinded the sentence of one of the police officers who shot and killed communist and anti-fascist Endre Ságvári in 1944 -- a purely symbolic move whose implications for the Left are chilling.

What work do you hope that Marx and Marxism can do in this context?

To all this we may add that the Romanian Parliament has promulgated a solemn statement, based on a report by a committee appointed by the Romanian president, chaired by Vladimir Tismăneanu, professor of government at the University of Maryland, which states that communism is a crime against humanity or some such thing. (Professor Tismăneanu -- witness his articles and interviews in the Romanian press -- believes that people such as Slavoj Žižek or myself are a major danger to human freedom.) Similar decisions by the Polish Supreme Court are forthcoming. In Hungary, the hammer and sickle, the red star, the swastika, and the arrow-cross (the coat-of-arms of the Hungarian Nazis) are all banned as "totalitarian symbols." The European Court of Human Rights has exempted the red star and the hammer and sickle from the Hungarian ban, but the Hungarian state refused to comply.

Still, after all this, when a few of us have announced our allegiance -- which, of course, includes a repudiation of "real socialism" of all stripes -- our audiences weren't on the whole upset, but rather incredulous! Not so much for the apparent reason of the folly of joining the defeated (I, for one, feel defeated in my former avatar of an Old Whig, but certainly not as a revolutionary socialist) or of confessing to a belief compromised by the terrible things done in its name, but for the mere implausibility of having social and political principles of any kind at all! Most people don't regard Marxism as criminal, but as naïve. But this is people's opinion of liberalism or Christianity as well. Any view seemingly contradicting individual or collective selfishness or self-regard seems incredible. As I personally cannot be accused of any collusion with the former regime (except, rarely and absurdly, by very young Nazi slanderers who cannot spell "Capital") and as I have no reason for apologia in this respect, critics are content to call me out of date, as they fail to follow intellectual fashions that have reverted to the pre-1989 normality in the West: radical chic is on the left again. All this does not prevent the radical right to bay for my blood, but they have been doing this since I was a rather conservative liberal. This has nothing to do with my substantive view; nobody who is not an ethnicist can be exempt. It is even a smidgen nicer to be a Marxist than a liberal: at least I am not considered to be sold out to foreign capital, although I can still be slandered as being soft on Jews.

Which traditions of Marxism are you drawing on? Are there any contemporary writers or theories which you find especially useful, compelling, or relevant?

Several. Even when I was ideologically very remote from Marxism, I did not stop reading some of its literature. I was quite influenced by the early and middle work of Cornelius Castoriadis -- I also knew him, an astonishing man -- and Karl Korsch. Although I was personally close at one time to many people from the Lukács School, it is only now that I have read him with sustained attention. (His pupils have gone in the opposite direction, e.g., my erstwhile friend Agnes Heller has become a conservative with an increasingly strong Judaic interest, and a cold warrior après coup, who is bizarrely accusing her old friend and colleague, István Mészáros, author of Beyond Capital and guru to Hugo Chávez, of having been expelled from Canada as a Soviet agent -- Mészáros is an 1956 political émigré, an emeritus professor at Sussex University with impeccable anti-Stalinist credentials.) I am an avid reader of operaismo and of pre-Empire Negri, and also at the opposite end, the Wertkritik school, in my view the best heirs to Critical Theory (Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Michael Heinrich, but also the unruly genius, Robert Kurz, and the "cult" periodicals of this tendency, Krisis, Streifzüge, Exit!) as well as authors like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, David Harvey, Michael Lebowitz, and various Marxists working in England too numerous to mention. The greatest impact came, however, from Moishe Postone's magnum opus. These choices may seem eclectic, but I don't belong to any of these currents. I am working on my own stuff and I am learning from all of them.

Your writing over the past decade has perceptively examined the rise of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary. This is a development that has been relatively under-reported in the West; it has taken Berlusconi's anti-Roma policies to raise greater awareness about the rise in violence towards Roma throughout Europe and in the post-Soviet region in particular. The most obvious form of right-wing populism lies in the revival of xenophobia and ultranationalism in the region (for instance, it is now common to see t-shirts and bumper stickers with maps of Hungary prior to the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, even around Budapest). But you've pointed to other, somewhat subtler forms, too: Gyurcsány's proposal in 2008 for a "work test" for the unemployed, which was intended to establish who is competent to work, and which is just the tip of the iceberg of an ongoing withdrawal of the rights of citizenships and the rise of fascism in the region.

What accounts for this right-wing populism? In what ways do the failed promise of post-Soviet democratic renewal and the twenty-year drama of neoliberal economics contribute to its rise? (That is: in what important ways is this populism different than early forms in the region?) How and where do you see it expressing itself? What needs to be done to arrest it?

What you call right-wing populism, I think, erroneously, I call post-fascism (see my "On Post-Fascism" in Boston Review, Summer 2000). There are, of course, important differences between post-fascism and "classical" national socialism -- the former is not militaristic, it is not "totalitarian," and so on -- but the parallels are striking, too. That the enemy is both bourgeois liberalism and Marxism (which for the far Right means all varieties of the Left, from social democrats to anarcho-syndicalists, a usage inherited by the North American mainstream press which is in the habit of calling "Marxist" any peasant Jacquerie in the Himalayas if they're hoisting a red flag) is certainly telling, i.e., they are still romantically (and insincerely) opposed to all forms of modernity and are daydreaming about caste society, sacred kingdoms, the superiority of the warrior to "his" woman, racial purity, the cleansing properties of mother earth, and the like. As I am writing these responses, the phone rang, and a friend reported that posters with the likeness of Socialist Party candidates have been decorated with Stars of David of the prescribed (by the Gestapo) "canary yellow" hue, but then my own posters were so decorated in 1990 -- I was elected, however. This time, the affair is much more serious. The common element between "communism" and "liberalism" is the fantasy figure of the Jew (the candidates in question are reliable Gentiles) embodying mediation and universalism. Jews as physical persons are less threatened, though, than the Roma who are victims of racial killings and open discriminatory practices everywhere in Europe. (Also the Canadian government is restricting travel -- demanding visas -- from countries that the Roma are trying to flee.)

The reasons for this are crystal clear.

With the development of technology and the participation of the new industrial powers (China, India, and Brazil) in the international division of labor, with the increasing intensity and speed of work, with the lengthening of labor time in the global rust belt, the workforce is everywhere becoming "precarious" and unemployment is a universal fact of life for huge masses of people. Concomitantly, improving health stretches life expectancy to unprecedented heights. Health insurance, social services, and central state redistribution of resources are becoming ever more important, frequently the only reasonable source of livelihood for entire regions, social strata, and various populations and generations. There is a grim competition for state resources.

Mainly, the competing groups are the struggling and endangered middle class and the poorest underclass or, in global terms, the crisis-ridden North and the famished South. No capitalist state can afford to satisfy both. In keeping with the fundamental character of liberal societies, the transformation of Western liberal societies into white middle-class fortresses needs legitimation.

This legitimation is offered by various stratagems of "re-moralizing" politics, that is, of stigmatizing underclass, precarious, immigrant, and other ethnic minority populations as "undeserving poor," people abusing the social welfare system, work-shy, criminal, etc. Contemporary racism and "welfare chauvinism" is everywhere. The latter is typified by the Tea Party movement in the United States, where middle-class audiences and opinion groups are vociferously rejecting help for those (including other middle-class subgroups) that are outside the health benefit/insurance system. These are tacitly acknowledged as being black or Latino/a, allegedly protected in a partisan manner by a black president. Ronald Reagan's white working-class and lower-middle-class voters may be back. According to Karl Kautsky -- in a brilliant essay unearthed by the London periodical Historical Materialism (easily a competitor to Grünberg's Archiv) -- the answer to Werner Sombart's famous question as to why there is no socialism in the United States is blacks. This situation is now extended to the whole white world. The class struggle is foiled by the ethnic conflict, clearly exacerbated by deliberate and well-aimed political action -- in Western Europe chiefly against Muslim immigrants, in Eastern Europe against the Roma plus Northern Caucasus ethnics and Kosovar Albanian migrants. Nor are traditional enmities neglected: ethnic Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and the Ukraine are prevented from freely using their mother tongue in shameless violation of their constitutions and of international and European law.

The Left is everywhere faced with an intractable dilemma: how to achieve a political situation wherein the blue-collar workers of the global rust belt, the precarious sub-proletarians, the civil servants of various kinds, the students, and the ethnic minorities (including the migrants) are able to make common cause and turn against the system instead of turning against one another? This recipe has not been found. The post-Trotskyite Socialist Workers' Party in Britain and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (ex-Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire) in France are forging alliances with Muslims -- but with those attacked by the other members of the Left for neglecting the plight of oppressed Muslim women and so on. Basically, the mainstream Left is increasingly using veiled racist (properly speaking) ethnicist/culturalist arguments. One of the two co-sponsors of the draft bill banning the Islamic veil in public places at the National Assembly in France is a communist. The other is, of course, a Gaullist. The far Left, though, is increasingly identified with ethnic issues and it is gradually slipping towards the ineffectual liberal rhetoric of human rights. The result is naturally the triumph of the likes of Sarkozy and Berlusconi and some of their even worse colleagues in Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and everywhere in Eastern Europe.

The social/ethnic discrimination has its secondary uses as well. It legitimizes a return to the police state that was hardly a real danger for majorities in the West. But it is now. Prisons chock-a-block with mainly ethnic sub-proletarians are not any longer a peculiarity of the United States. Left-wing radicalism is beaten by the wave of social and racial exclusion (and in some places by fascist activism) and so is the hope of egalitarian or socialist transformation.

The necessary fusion of the various sectors of the oppressed is -- again or, if you wish, eternally -- the problem of emancipation and, what is the same thing, of anti-capitalist combat, and this need a renewal of radical political philosophy -- beyond the already quite considerable results it has achieved, but which have failed to help to overcome this largest of obstacles.

What comes next for you -- politically and theoretically?

I think this flows from my previous response. It is increasingly necessary to create a theory that can overcome the perennial temptation of Rousseauian egalitarianism with its ineluctable aporias around the General Will, but which is nevertheless able to offer a normative view of communist society without utopianism. In the absence of that, the Left will be necessarily led back to a political practice aimed at a homogeneous society created against personal autonomy in order to get rid of the mortal sin of exclusion, humiliation, and injustice. If we have learned one thing from the twentieth century, it is that this is neither feasible nor desirable.

Nor is it tolerable that we should acquiesce in what I have called in a Paris conference (Puissance[s] du communisme, in the memory of our friend, recently deceased, Daniel Bensaïd, theoretician of the LCR/NPA and many other lives besides, at the Université de Paris-8, Vincennes Saint-Denis) une civilisation de merde. This is not to be borne any more.

For this, I feel we need a renewed interpretation of the state and of law, of labor and money, of justice and legitimacy. Most of the prevailing theories concerning these are tailored to suit the needs of liberal class societies that clearly are in a deep -- and by no means only economic -- crisis. This is work enough. I'll try at least to start it, and of course I am not the only one (far from it!) to be willing to engage in it. The results will have to come, since they are sorely needed.

---

Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a prominent dissident in the 1980s and a parliamentarian in the first years of the Hungarian government following the end of Communism, is a political philosopher. Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies, and Sociology at the University of Alberta. The text above is a brief excerpt from Imre Szeman, "The Left and Marxism in Eastern Europe: An Interview with Gáspár Miklós Tamás" (Mediations 24.2, Spring 2010); it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. Click here to read the full text of the interview.

One in four Black workers are without full-time jobs

For Black workers, it’s
a ‘Great Depression’

BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
It has been “a Great Recession for whites,” writes Kevin Hassett recently in the conservative magazine National Review, but for Blacks “it has been a Great Depression.” No matter how economists try to explain it, Hassett concludes, the simplest explanation is that “discrimination is alive and well.”

Black workers have been among those hardest hit not only by rising unemployment, but by foreclosures on houses and cutbacks in social services.

“African Americans are the caboose,” Marc Morial, president of the Urban League, told the media March 24 upon release of the group’s State of Black America report. Last year Black families made 62 percent as much as white families, a decline of 3 percent from 2008 as the economic crisis deepened.

The official unemployment rate for Blacks in March rose by 0.7 percent from the previous month, to 16.5 percent, nearly double the figure for white workers. In some states Blacks’ jobless rate is higher, like in Michigan, where it is 21 percent.

Black workers are also having a much harder time getting another job after they are laid off. They face “longer stretches of unemployment than the general population,” says a congressional Joint Economic Committee report released last month.

The report notes “the overall unemployment rate for the United States has masked the depth of the unemployment problem within the African American community.” One in four Black workers are without full-time jobs, being either unemployed or underemployed, according to this study. For teenagers who are Black more than 40 percent are without work, compared to the overall teen jobless rate of 26 percent.

According to the Labor Department, the overall unemployment rate for March was 9.7 percent, unchanged from the previous two months. “U.S. Economy Added 162,000 Jobs in March, Most in 3 Years,” headlined the New York Times, pitching the report as a sign that the “still-sputtering recovery was gaining traction.”

The hiring of temporary census workers for a few months accounts for almost one-third of these jobs. Hundreds of thousands more census takers are being hired over the next several months.

Barack Obama administration officials have made clear that despite this increased hiring, the jobless rate will remain steady or actually rise since “discouraged” workers—those the government doesn’t count as unemployed or being part of the workforce—are rejoining the jobs search in hopes of finding work. An additional 200,000 people were looking for jobs last month, according to the Economic Policy Institute. One million workers were still considered “discouraged” by the Labor Department in March.

Meanwhile, those facing long-term unemployment grew to 6.5 million without work for at least six months, an increase of more than 400,000 from February.

Texas textbooks: no historians, sociologists or economists consulted

The Texas school of falsification

Nicole Colson looks at the Stalin-style revision of historical events carried out by right-wing Republicans on the Board of Education in Texas.

April 16, 2010

New education standards in Texas present a glowing view of conservatism, Christianity, capitalism and U.S. military might

POP QUIZ: What do you get when you allow Texas right-wingers to rewrite social studies textbooks?

A) A defense of McCarthyism
B) Excision of important Latino and African American cultural figures like Cesar Chavez, Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman
C) Removal of key events in the fight for women's suffrage and African American history
D) Poorly educated kids and a bigoted view of history
E) All of the above

If you guessed E, give yourself a gold star.

Last month, the Texas Board of Education approved a host of curriculum changes to history and economics textbooks that are the stuff conservative dreams are made of.

By a 10-to-5 vote, the board voted for curriculum changes "stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers' commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light," according to the New York Times.

And, surprise surprise, the 10 board members who voted in favor of the changes are all Republicans.

"We are adding balance," Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, told the Times after the vote. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

McLeroy's day job? He's not an educator or an historian--he's a dentist.

Despite the fact that people like McLeroy might consider themselves experts, the Times noted that, "There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings."

So, exactly what are some of the changes that these self-styled experts made to "correct" the curriculum--which will remain in place for the next 10 years? Among other things, they are making sure students learn more about the heyday of U.S. conservatism by adding a plank about the importance of "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association."

As historian Eric Foner noted in The Nation, there's nothing wrong with students learning about the conservative movement. But the new historical "standards" are a thinly veiled excuse to expose students to right-wing propaganda--and a worldview that glorifies capitalism, social conservatism, American military might, nationalism and any number of other pet causes of the right.

As Foner wrote:

Judging from the updated social studies curriculum, conservatives want students to come away from a Texas education with a favorable impression of: women who adhere to traditional gender roles, the Confederacy, some parts of the Constitution, capitalism, the military and religion. They do not think students should learn about women who demanded greater equality; other parts of the Constitution; slavery, Reconstruction and the unequal treatment of nonwhites generally; environmentalists; labor unions; federal economic regulation; or foreigners...

The changes seek to reduce or elide discussion of slavery, mentioned mainly for its "impact" on different regions and the coming of the Civil War. A reference to the Atlantic slave trade is dropped in favor of "triangular trade." Jefferson Davis's inaugural address as president of the Confederacy will now be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's speeches.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

YET THE Republicans on the board are not only attempting to indoctrinate students with an interpretation of historical events that are in many cases patently false. They're also out to polish the image of social conservatism by taking credit where credit is most certainly not due.

This effort includes new standards on teaching the civil rights movement. Under the new rules, "textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported."

"Republicans need a little credit for that," McLeroy commented to the Times. "I think it's going to surprise some students."

Sure, the Republicans can be proud of their party's history on civil rights--back when it was the party of Abe Lincoln. But that's not what the board members had in mind. And it's a good bet that Republican "achievements" in civil rights won't include discussion of prominent civil rights opponents like Barry Goldwater or, whoops, George H.W. Bush, who campaigned against the 1964 Civil Rights Act when he was running for the Senate. They likely won't be mentioning that, while running for governor in 1966, Ronald Reagan encouraged the repeal of the Fair Housing Act. He explained why: "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so."

In addition, Texas school kids will now be learning history that's even whiter than before.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Peter Marshall--an evangelical minister who was one of six handpicked "experts" who advised the board on the changes--spoke out last year against inclusion of both United Farm Workers organizer Cesar Chavez and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice on the Court.

Hispanic board members were largely defeated on proposals to include more Latino role models. According to the New York Times, one member of the board, Mary Helen Berlanga, left the meeting in protest, saying of her fellow board members: "They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist...They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians. They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world."

Another change--this one personally pushed by McLeroy would, in the words of the New York Times, "ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman has been removed as an example of "good citizenship" for third graders in favor of Red Cross founder Clara Barton. (Although the board did include Helen Keller--presumably only because they were unaware that Keller was a dedicated socialist and anti-imperialist.)

Progressives are, naturally, targets for the new standards. One of the newly approved changes mandates that students study "the unintended consequences" (presumably negative) of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation.

And socialists and communists are particularly vilified in an amendment that requires that the history of McCarthyism now include "how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government."

There you go...the Red Scare and McCarthysm were entirely justified. Why? Because a dentist and other members of the Texas Board of Education say so.

The benefits of capitalism as an economic system are also to be reinforced. The revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek to the usual list of economists to be studied. And, because of its "negative connotation," the term "capitalism" is being replaced with "free-enterprise system." (One imagines that a few too many members of the board might have been called "capitalist pigs" in their time.)

Even poor Thomas Jefferson didn't pass muster for the Texas board. He was cut from a list of people whose writings inspired 18th and 19th century revolutions--and replaced with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.

The reason? Conservatives didn't want to emphasize Jefferson's pesky belief in the necessity of a wall of separation between church and state.

In another of the more ridiculous amendments, Republican board member Cynthia Dunbar unsuccessfully tried to strike from the standards any reference to the Scopes "monkey trial" that put teaching about evolution on trial. Dunbar also sought to eliminate the famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow as well as the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

AS MAVIS Knight, a Democrat on the Texas Board of Education, told the New York Times, "The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda."

But the new conservative history "standards" on Texas are hardly an anomaly. Witness Virginia, for example, where Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell recently declared April to be "Confederate history month." In his proclamation "honoring" soldiers who fought on the side of the South, however, McDonnell made one small omission: he neglected to say a word the institution of slavery or about the millions of slaves who lives and labor built the South. According to the Washington Post, McDonnell justified his omission by claiming that "there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia."

Funny that McDonnell didn't realize that slavery might be significant to the African Americans who can trace their roots to human chattel brought to plantations in Virginia.

Unfortunately, it's not just Texas kids who may suffer the consequences of their new curriculum. Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the country--which means that the curriculum changes could be forced into other states' textbooks, since larger-selling books are generally cheaper, an attractive feature to cash-strapped school districts.

"The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they'll end up in other classrooms," Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education, told the Washington Post. "It's not a partisan issue, it's a good history issue."

The irony, of course, is that while the right wing harps endlessly about how leftists "indoctrinate" children with left-wing ideas through liberal education "biases," the revisions to the Texas curriculum are a blatant ideological attack designed to reach the minds of kids and teens. With right-wing social conservatism largely discredited, and poll after poll showing young people to be more liberal than previous generations on a host of social issues, it's not surprising why conservatives might be desperate to push back in whatever way they can.

But just because conservative ideas are enshrined in textbooks doesn't guarantee that their ideas will gain more currency. As Howard Zinn put it in a 2005 essay "Changing minds, one at a time," presenting a people's history requires breaking down the barriers that keep ordinary people from feeling as though we can not only study history, but make it:

It is a challenge not just for the teachers of the young to give them information they will not get in the standard textbooks, but for everyone else who has an opportunity to speak to friends and neighbors and work associates, to write letters to newspapers, to call in on talk shows.

The history is powerful: the story of the lies and massacres that accompanied our national expansion, first across the continent victimizing Native Americans, then overseas as we left death and destruction in our wake in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and especially the Philippines. The long occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the repeated dispatch of Marines into Central America, the deaths of millions of Koreans and Vietnamese, none of them resulting in democracy and liberty for those people.

Add to all that the toll of the American young, especially the poor, Black and white, a toll measured not only by the corpses and the amputated limbs, but the damaged minds and corrupted sensibilities that result from war.

Those truths make their way, against all obstacles, and break down the credibility of the warmakers, juxtaposing what reality teaches against the rhetoric of inaugural addresses and White House briefings. The work of a movement is to enhance that learning, make clear the disconnect between the rhetoric of "liberty" and the photo of a bloodied little girl, weeping.

And also to go beyond the depiction of past and present, and suggest an alternative to the paths of greed and violence. All through history, people working for change have been inspired by visions of a different world. It is possible, here in the United States, to point to our enormous wealth and suggest how, once not wasted on war or siphoned off to the super-rich, that wealth can make possible a truly just society.

The juxtapositions wait to be made...The false promises of the rich and powerful about "spreading liberty" can be fulfilled, not by them, but by the concerted effort of us all, as the truth comes out, and our numbers grow.

And that's a fact that even the Texas Board of Education can't write out of history.

Their recovery and our depression

‘War of attrition’ on jobless pay

BY SETH GALINSKY
Looking out for their bottom line, some U.S. companies are taking measures to block workers from collecting even the meager unemployment benefits authorized by law.

Weekly benefits cover between 50 percent and 70 percent of workers’ wages prior to layoff.

Talx, a firm that promises that it “simplifies the unemployment process,” is convincing large corporations to let it handle the paperwork for their response to unemployment filings.

Talx boasts that it saved a bundle for Exelon Corporation, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States. “In the first year of outsourcing [to Talx] Exelon removed $408,500 in charges to its unemployment accounts due to favorable protests,” the Talx Web site says.

Talx says it handles more than 30 percent of U.S. jobless claims, including those from AT&T, FedEx, McDonald’s, Sears, Tyson Foods, and Walmart.

“Talx often files appeals regardless of merits,” Jonathan Baird, a lawyer at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, told the New York Times. “It’s sort of a war of attrition.”

The actions by Talx and similar firms are so egregious that several states passed laws to limit challenges to benefit approvals. According to the Times, Wisconsin state unemployment office staff complained that Talx reported in error that applicants were dead, filed “frivolous protests,” and held up many benefit requests.

While capitalist bosses are boosting their profits by blocking many workers from collecting unemployment, they are also going after workers who have fallen behind on their bills.

According to the Times, garnishments—pay seizures—jumped 121 percent in the Phoenix area since 2005, 55 percent in the Atlanta area since 2004, and 30 percent in Cleveland between 2008 and 2009 alone.

Sidney Jones, a maintenance worker, took out a $4,000 personal loan from Beneficial Virginia, now owned by HSBC. In March 2003, after winning a default judgment that included 26.55 percent interest, the bank garnished his wages. Six years later the bank had deducted more than $10,000 from Jones’s paychecks but says he still owes $3,965, a sum nearly equal to the original loan.

Defending Lenin

Lenin’s fight to defend working-class
power and revolutionary internationalism
A course to strengthen worker-peasant alliance,
combat national oppression, and proletarianize
and politicize state and party bodies
Printed below is the second part of the new introduction to Pathfinder Press’s 2010 edition of Lenin’s Final Fight. The book contains the speeches and writings of V.I. Lenin, central leader of the world’s first socialist revolution, during his final political struggle, five years after the victory of the October 1917 revolution. The final part of the introduction will run in the Militant next week. Copyright © 2010, Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES
AND STEVE CLARK
The Soviet republic “is based on the collaboration of two classes: the workers and peasants,” Lenin emphasized in what turned out to be his last article, “Better Fewer but Better,” dictated over several days in early February 1923 in preparation for the upcoming twelfth party congress in April. At the time of the October 1917 revolution, some 80 percent of the population of the new Soviet republic were peasants, and 10 percent were workers. By the early 1920s, in the wake of the devastation of the civil war, the industrial working class had declined both in relative size and political strength.

“In the final analysis,” Lenin said, “the fate of our republic will depend on whether the peasant masses will stand by the working class, loyal to their alliance, or whether they will permit the ‘Nepmen,’ i.e., the new bourgeoisie, to drive a wedge between them and the working class, to split them off from the working class. The more clearly we see this alternative, the more clearly all our workers and peasants understand it, the greater are the chances that we shall avoid a split [in the Communist Party leadership], which would be fatal for the Soviet republic.”

Lenin’s proposals to strengthen the worker-peasant alliance were not limited to the tax in kind and revival of light industry to supply food to the cities and needed farm tools and other basic goods to the countryside. He also encouraged the voluntary organization by peasants of state-supported cooperatives to market their produce, provide low-cost government credit to co-ops, and sell manufactured goods in the villages. Such cooperatives, he said, would make possible “the transition to the new system,” toward socialist relations of production, “by means that are the simplest, easiest, and most acceptable to the peasant.” Cooperatives were a means, he said, “to build socialism in practice in such a way that every small peasant could take part in it.”

Finally, Lenin emphasized the interconnected effort to promote literacy and education among workers and peasants, to advance electrification (necessary, among other things, for those in the countryside even to be able to read and study after sundown), and to expand industrialization and with it the size and social weight of the industrial working class.

While insistently demanding reduction in state expenditures, including for the revolution’s armed forces, Lenin called for increased funding of the People’s Commissariat of Education. “Far too little is still being done by us to satisfy … the requirements of elementary public education,” he said.

As Lenin pointed out at the eleventh party congress, increased attention to education and training was essential for another reason as well: the lack of “culture among the stratum of the Communists who perform administrative functions.” The defeated landlords and capitalists themselves were woefully deficient in culture, he said, but “miserable and low as it is, it is higher than that of our responsible Communist administrators… .”

State monopoly of foreign trade
In October 1922 Lenin wrote to Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Central Committee since April, insisting that the committee reverse a recent decision to weaken the state monopoly of foreign trade. Relaxing state control of imports and exports had first been raised by central party leaders Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin earlier that year. Although the Political Bureau adopted a motion by Lenin in May rejecting this course, the Central Committee reversed that decision at its October meeting, from which Lenin was absent due to the effects of the strokes he had suffered earlier in the year.

Bukharin and others contended that individual traders, the “Nepmen,” would be much more successful than state agencies in collecting farm produce from peasants for sale abroad, thus raising overall export income and revenues for the Soviet republic. Lenin countered that Bukharin “refuses to see that the profits accruing from the ‘mobilization of the peasants’ stock of goods’ will go wholly and entirely into the pockets of the Nepmen. The question is: Will our People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade operate for the benefit of the Nepmen or of our proletarian state?”

Lenin also dismissed the argument that legalizing private import and export trade would hit hard at illegal smuggling engaged in by growing numbers of profiteers. To the contrary, Lenin said. It would deal a body blow to the worker peasant alliance, since “instead of combating professional smugglers we shall have to combat all the peasantry of the flax-growing region. In this fight we shall almost assuredly be beaten, and beaten irreparably.”

In mid-December Lenin, unable to attend the upcoming December 18 Central Committee meeting, asked party leader Leon Trotsky to “undertake the defense of our common standpoint on the unconditional need to maintain and consolidate the foreign trade monopoly… . [I]n the event of our defeat on this question we must refer the question to a party congress.” In face of these initiatives by Lenin, a majority of the Central Committee at its December meeting reversed the October decision.

A voluntary union of soviet republics
The Bolshevik-led government sought from the outset to establish a union of proletarian Russia and the oppressed peoples long encased within the old tsarist prison house of nations across Europe and Asia. But that goal could only be achieved by the voluntary action of those peoples, whose unconditional right to national self-determination was recognized by the new government.

The Soviet congress in January 1918 established the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) “leaving it to the workers and peasants of each nation to decide independently at their own authoritative congress of soviets whether they wish to participate in the federal government … and on what terms.”

By late 1922, twenty-one autonomous republics and regions had been established within the RSFSR itself, and the revolutionary government was collaborating with soviet republics in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine to form what in December 1922 would become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin, however, objected to Stalin’s initial draft of a Central Committee resolution, which negated the Bolsheviks’ long-standing proletarian internationalism by calling for “entry” of these other republics into the Russian federation.

“We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR, and others equal,” Lenin wrote in a September 1922 letter to the party’s Political Bureau, and “enter with them on an equal basis into a new union, a new federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.”

In a note to the Political Bureau the following day, Stalin acquiesced to an amended form of this proposal and several other of “Comrade Lenin’s unimportant amendments,” as he called them. Stalin’s note dismissively referred to Lenin’s uncompromising opposition to Great Russian chauvinism as the “national liberalism of Comrade Lenin.”

Two months later Lenin was outraged to discover that Central Committee member Grigory Ordzhonikidze, in the presence of another CC member, Aleksey Rykov, had physically struck a Communist from Georgia during a dispute over national rights. In Lenin’s late December letter to the upcoming party congress, he wrote that the Bolsheviks’ support for the right of national self-determination “will be a mere scrap of paper” if the party is “unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, in substance a scoundrel and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is.”

And Lenin concluded: “That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question; he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view.”

In early March 1923, Lenin, who knew he was too ill to attend the upcoming Central Committee meeting later that month, wrote Trotsky with an “earnest request that you should undertake the defense of the Georgian case in the party CC. This case is now under ‘persecution’ by Stalin and [Feliks] Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their impartiality.” Trotsky did so but, as recorded later in these pages, the motion he placed before the Central Committee was defeated.

Proletarianizing the party and state apparatus
None of these political challenges could be addressed, Lenin insisted, without substantially increasing the weight of politically tested workers and peasants in leading bodies of the party and state.

During the civil war, Lenin pointed out, “We concentrated our best party forces in the Red Army, we mobilized the best of our workers, we looked for new forces at the deepest roots of our dictatorship.” Vast numbers of those selfless cadres had been killed in combat or felled by disease. Now it was time to renew this effort under the current conditions facing the Soviet republic.

Lenin’s first proposal, presented in the opening sentences of his December 1922 letter to the party congress, sometimes years later referred to as “Lenin’s Testament,” was to increase the size of the Central Committee to “a few dozen or even a hundred,” and to do so by electing workers. Not only would this “raise the prestige of the Central Committee” among Soviet working people, Lenin said, but “the stability of our party would gain a thousandfold.” (Lenin made clear that “in this part of my letter the term workers everywhere includes peasants.”)¹

What’s more, Lenin said, “the workers admitted to the Central Committee should come preferably not from among those who have had long service in Soviet bodies,” since “those workers have already acquired the very traditions and the very prejudices which it is desirable to combat.” He urged that they “be mainly workers of a lower stratum than those promoted in the last five years to work in Soviet bodies; they must be people closer to being rank-and-file workers and peasants… .”

Lenin linked this measure to strengthen the worker-peasant alliance and proletarian character of the state apparatus with an assessment of the leadership qualities of members of the Central Committee then holding the greatest political responsibilities. Lenin was second to none in the Bolshevik leadership in recognizing the objective social forces and class relations underlying all challenges confronting the party and still-young proletarian dictatorship. For that very reason, however, he also understood the concrete, even decisive importance at each turning point in politics and the class struggle of what individual party leaders did—their accountability for how they conducted themselves.

“I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the CC as Stalin and Trotsky,” wrote Lenin in the letter to the party congress. “I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split [in the party], which could be avoided, and this purpose, in my opinion, would be served, among other things, by increasing the number of CC members to 50 or 100.” (The Central Committee at the time had 27 regular members.)

Turning first to Stalin, Lenin noted that, “having become general secretary, [he] has concentrated unlimited authority in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

As for Trotsky, Lenin said, “as his struggle against the CC on the question of the People’s Commissariat of Communications has already demonstrated, [he] is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present CC, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.” Lenin was referring to the tenth party congress’s rejection in 1921 of Trotsky’s proposal as people’s commissar of communications to “shake up” union officialdoms by imposing on them the military discipline and direct state administration temporarily applied to the railway union during emergency civil war conditions.²

“These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present CC can inadvertently lead to a split,” Lenin wrote, “and if our party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.”

Lenin, who had suffered new strokes in December 1922, dictated this letter to the party congress a few paragraphs at a time over thirteen days between December 23 and January 4. By the time he completed it, he had come to the conclusion that the congress, in addition to acting on his other proposals, had to remove Stalin as the party’s general secretary. “Stalin is too rude,” Lenin wrote on January 4, “and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary.” Lenin suggested “appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”

“This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail,” Lenin concluded. “But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a detail, or is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”

‘Anointed with soviet oil’
Those were Lenin’s proposals at the end of 1922 to deepen the proletarianization of the Communist Party and party leadership, and strengthen the worker-peasant alliance on which the advance toward socialism depended.

What about the administrative apparatus of the Soviet state? Five years of experience, Lenin wrote in his letter to the party congress, had demonstrated that workers and peasants had taken it “over from tsarism and slightly anointed [it] with Soviet oil.” Now, he said, “we must, in all conscience, admit [that] the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us. It is a bourgeois and tsarist hodgepodge.”

In two articles, dictated in late January and early February 1923 after partially recovering from his latest strokes, Lenin made proposals, focusing on the reorganization of a Soviet government institution called the Workers and Peasants Inspection (WPI). These articles, entitled “How We Should Reorganize the Workers and Peasants Inspection” and “Better Fewer but Better”—the last Lenin wrote before a final debilitating stroke on March 10, 1923 (he died in January 1924)—were published in January and early March in Pravda, the daily newspaper published by the party’s Central Committee.

The Workers and Peasants Inspection, a government body established in early 1920, had been chaired by Stalin from its origins until his election as general secretary in April 1922. Its record up to that point, Lenin said, had been “a hopeless affair.” It did not “enjoy the slightest authority,” and “everybody knows that no other institutions are worse organized.” But Lenin rejected as “fundamentally wrong” solving this problem simply by abolishing the Workers and Peasants Inspection, the alternative Trotsky had proposed.

Instead, Lenin urged that it be combined with the Control Commission of the Central Committee, which was mandated, among other tasks, with “combating the bureaucratism and careerism that have crept into the party.” He proposed that the party congress elect seventy-five to one hundred new members to the Control Commission. “They should be workers and peasants,” he said, “and should go through the same party screening as ordinary members of the Central Committee, because they are to enjoy the same rights as the members of the Central Committee” and meet together with them.

In addition, Lenin proposed that a selection be made of “a compact group” of these new Control Commission members “whose duty it will be to attend all meetings of the Political Bureau.” It was essential, he emphasized, that they “not allow anybody’s authority without exception, neither that of the general secretary nor of any other member of the Central Committee, to prevent them from putting questions, verifying documents, and, in general, from keeping themselves fully informed of all things and from exercising the strictest control over the proper conduct of affairs.”

In the opening sentence of “Better Fewer but Better,” Lenin cautioned that the Workers and Peasants Inspection should not “strive after quantity” or “hurry.” The state administration, he said, “is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not been overcome… .”

By drawing more combat-tested and politically respected workers into leading bodies of the party and state, and providing them the education and training necessary to guide and monitor the functioning of these bodies, Lenin said, “we must make the Workers and Peasants Inspection a really exemplary institution, an instrument to improve our state apparatus.”

This process of political rejuvenation within the Soviet Union, Lenin emphasized, would be reinforced by the results of the encouragement the October revolution and Soviet republic were giving to the nationally oppressed toilers “of the East, India, China, etc… . The general European ferment has begun to affect them, and it is now clear to the whole world that they have been drawn into a process of development that must lead to a crisis in the whole of world capitalism.”

Finally, in the closing paragraphs of “Better Fewer but Better,” Lenin pulled together the central political threads of the half-year-long political battle he was leading. “We must strive to build up a state in which the workers retain the leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants,” Lenin wrote. “… We must reduce our state apparatus to the utmost degree of economy. We must banish from it all traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from tsarist Russia, from its bureaucratic capitalist state machine.

“Will not this be a reign of peasant limitations?” Lenin asked, provocatively posing the question he knew would be raised by members of the Central Committee who opposed his course.

No, Lenin replied. Only by exercising “the greatest possible thrift in the economic life of our state” would the Soviet leadership, “speaking figuratively, be able to change horses, to change from the peasant … horse of poverty, from the horse of an economy designed for a ruined peasant country, to the horse which the proletariat is seeking and must seek—the horse of large-scale machine industry, of electrification… .”

“These are the lofty tasks that I dream of for our Workers and Peasants Inspection,” Lenin said. “That is why I am proposing the amalgamation of the most authoritative party body [the Control Commission of the Central Committee] with an ‘ordinary’ people’s commissariat [the Workers and Peasants Inspection].”

‘Politicizing the ministry’
At the twelfth party congress in April 1923, the Stalin-led majority of the Central Committee quashed all mention of several of Lenin’s proposals, while paying lip service to others and gutting them of any revolutionary proletarian content.

Georgian communist P.G. Mdivani, for example, was ruled out of order at the congress when he sought to read from Lenin’s March 1923, letter to him saying Lenin was “indignant over Ordzhonikidze’s rudeness and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky” and was preparing “notes and a speech” on the rights of oppressed nations to present at the party gathering. Lenin’s March 6, 1923, letter to Mdivani can be found in chapter 9 of this book.

At the same time, claiming to act on Lenin’s final proposals to the party congress, Stalin presented the report “On the Organization Question,” which was adopted. The report increased the size of the Central Committee from twenty-seven to forty regular members; expanded the Control Commission and merged it with the Workers and Peasants Inspection; and called for electing to these positions “primarily local party workers, and, in particular, those from the working class who have the best ties with the proletarian masses.”

What Lenin had proposed in his last two articles, however, was not an administrative shuffle, but the revival of a truly revolutionary internationalist course—the proletarianization, and simultaneously the politicization, of the entire state and party structures—with the aim “to create a republic that is really worthy of the name of Soviet, socialist, and so on and so forth.”

“Let us hope,” Lenin said, “that our new Workers and Peasants Inspection will abandon what the French call pruderie, which we may call ridiculous affectation, or ridiculous swagger, and which plays entirely into the hands of our Soviet and party bureaucracy. Let it be said in parentheses,” he added, “that we have bureaucrats in our party offices as well as in Soviet offices.”

Some four decades later, addressing similar leadership challenges during the opening years of the Cuban Revolution, Ernesto Che Guevara—speaking to young communists working in Cuba’s Ministry of Industry, which Guevara himself headed—noted the “qualitative change in our party [that] occurred when all the bad leadership methods were abandoned, and exemplary workers, vanguard workers—those workers on the production front who could really speak with authority and who were also the ones going to the front lines—were elected to membership.”

That was the spirit in which Che called on the young communists “to politicize the ministry.” Doing so, he said in the May 1964 talk, was the only way to fight to transform it from being a “cold, a very bureaucratic place, a nest of nit-picking bureaucrats and bores, from the minister on down….”³

(To be continued next week)

---

1. The record of Joseph Stalin’s efforts to suppress this letter, first by keeping it from the party’s leadership committees and congress and later by denying its authenticity, is explained in footnotes 1 and 3 of chapter 5, “Lenin’s Letter to the Party Congress,” pp. 222, 223.

2. Lenin’s views in this political dispute—which has come to be known one-sidedly as the “trade union debate,” although much broader issues of communist leadership and program were at stake—can be found in the opening 100 pages or so of Lenin’s Collected Works, volume 32.

3. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Youth Must March in the Vanguard” (May 1964), in Che Guevara Talks to Young People (Pathfinder: 2000), pp. 147,150 [2009 printing].