Why the German Revolution of 1848 went down to defeat

Amazon review of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany by Engels:

In 1848 bourgeois-democratic revolutions broke out in much of Europe. In France a Republic was proclaimed again, but still, the working class was dealt a heavy blow. Germany then consisted of 36 principalities, but only two major powers—Prussia and Austria. The bourgeoisie had an opportunity to get rid of feudalism, unite the nation, and establish a democratic republic.

It is necessary for revolutionaries to draw a balance sheet of defeats as well as victories, so Engels writes: “But how it came to pass that thirty-six millions were at once called upon to decide for themselves which way to go, although partly groping in dim twilight, and how then they got lost and their old leaders were for a moment allowed to return to their leadership, that is just the question.”

“If, then, we try to lay before the readers of The Tribune the causes which, while they necessitated the German Revolution of 1848, led quite as inevitably to its momentary repression in 1849 and 1850, we shall not be expected to give a complete history of events as they passed in that country. Later events, and the judgment of coming generations, will decide what portion of that confused mass of seemingly accidental, incoherent, and incongruous facts is to form a part of the world's history. The time for such a task has not yet arrived; we must confine ourselves to the limits of the possible, and be satisfied, if we can find rational causes, based upon undeniable facts, to explain the chief events, the principal vicissitudes of that movement, and to give us a clue as to the direction which the next, and perhaps not very distant, outbreak will impart to the German people.”

Later Engels writes:

“On February 24th, 1848, Louis Philippe was driven out of Paris and the French Republic was proclaimed. On March 13th following, the people of Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich, and made him flee shamefully out of the country. On the 18th of March the people of Berlin rose in arms, and, after an obstinate struggle of eighteen hours, had the satisfaction of seeing the King surrender himself into their hands. Simultaneous outbreaks of a more or less violent nature, but all with the same success, occurred in the capitals of the smaller States of Germany. The German people, if they had not accomplished their first revolution, were at least fairly launched into the revolutionary career.”

Marx and Engels both took part in the revolution: Marx as a revolutionary writer and editor; Engels as a military officer in the revolutionary forces. The bourgeoisie proved to be more afraid of the working class, which together with the students played the leading revolutionary role, than it was of the feudalists. The Austrian peasants succeeded in largely smashing feudal relations in the countryside, but otherwise the revolution went down to defeat. Marx and Engels wound up in England, and many other revolutionaries also had to flee, some ending up in the United States, where they played a big role in the labor movement and in the Union Army in another bourgeois-democratic revolution.

This is an analysis of what happened and why. In the course of it, the national question in Eastern Europe, and many other questions are explored. Marx and Engels supported independence for Poland and Hungary, but they mistakenly thought that the smaller national groupings would fade from history. With the passage of time, this didn’t happen, and Lenin later set this question right in his works; see National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism and Lenin's Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23, among other sources.

The amount of writings by the two revolutionaries is enormous, some books to start with after this and the Manifesto are: The German Ideology; Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics);Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; The Paris Commune: Including the "First Manifesto of the International on the Franco-Prussian War," the "Second Manifesto of the International on the ... "the Civil War in France" (Classic Reprint); Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
This book may also be the first time the expression “parliamentary cretinism” is used. There’s a lot of it in the US, especially during pre-election periods.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1OSR6C252LEB7/ref=cm_cr_rdpvoterdr?_encoding=UTF8&thanksvoting=cr-vote-R1OSR6C252LEB7#R1OSR6C252LEB7.2115.Helpful.Reviews

Mayor Livingstone, anti-semitism, and the "anti-Zionist" left

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/6586

European Union: a Marxist View

Communist League: Vote Leave, oppose UK imperialism

The following statement was issued by Jonathan Silberman for the Communist League in the United Kingdom.

The Communist League in the U.K. is calling for a vote against EU membership, while opposing the British nationalist demagogy of both the Remain and Leave campaigns.

Britain’s capitalist rulers have used membership in the European Union and its predecessors from the outset to strengthen their hand in pressing down wages and job conditions of the working class at home and weakening our unions. They rely on the EU to bolster their imperialist interests against oppressed peoples of the semicolonial world, and to boost British capital’s position in fighting for profitable markets against imperialist rivals in Europe, North America, and the Pacific.

Working people in other EU member states — our brothers and sisters — from Germany to Greece, face the same types of attacks from the exploiting classes and governments in those countries.

In opposing the capitalist rulers in the U.K. and voting to leave the EU, the Communist League rejects the reactionary “British sovereignty” banner of the Leave campaigns of Boris Johnson and UKIP, which appeal to working people to subordinate ourselves to the rule of British capitalists.

Workers have no interest in supporting Cameron’s deal, which serves the interests of the U.K.’s ruling families. Backing pro-EU campaigners such as Corbyn, who falsely claim that a “social Europe” benefits workers, deals a blow to the working class and unions.

Independent working-class political action means organizing solidarity with union and other workers’ struggles here and around the world. It means fighting for immediate demands to unite and defend workers from efforts by the employers and government to make workers pay for the devastating impact of today’s global capitalist depression and serve as cannon fodder in London’s wars and military interventions.

Join the Communist League in advancing a course to forge a party that will mobilize working people in revolutionary struggle for a workers and farmers government.

The Militant - June 13, 2016 -- Communist League: Vote Leave, oppose UK imperialism

http://themilitant.com/2016/8023/802359.html

--

Debate on UK vote highlights EU rivalries,

workers anger

BY PAUL DAVIES

LONDON — Growing competition between capitalist countries worldwide is tearing at the fabric of the European Union. The EU is a protectionist trading bloc and would-be political union whose member countries have rival national ruling classes with different and often opposing interests.

Economic stagnation and sharpening competition, as well as the refugee crisis and its roots in the Middle East conflicts, are at the center of divisions within the EU today. A June 23 referendum on whether to continue the United Kingdom’s EU membership is marked by these tensions and by the growing discontent of millions of working people.

The “Remain” campaign, headed by the Conservative Party government, is supported by the dominant sections of the capitalist class for whom the economic benefits of EU membership appear overwhelming, especially given their precarious prospects for profitable production and trade. Industrial output in the U.K. is in recession and labor productivity lags behind its competitors.

The capitalist magnates point out that the EU is the biggest trading area in the world. Through membership, British companies can sell goods across the continent paying fewer tariffs, and the U.K. serves as a platform for companies from the United States and elsewhere seeking to trade within the EU. As a result, the U.K. now has one of the highest levels of foreign direct investment in the world. EU membership, the bosses argue, offsets Britain’s decline as a world power, allowing London to “punch above its weight.”

London has already secured an opt-out from the “ever closer union” in the EU’s founding charter, and from a number of other EU regulations, and the British rulers have maintained their own currency, the pound, instead of joining the EU’s eurozone. The government-led Remain campaign argues this means the U.K. has the best of both worlds.

The Remain campaign has the backing of the Labour Party, Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats, as well as most of the trade union officialdom, the Confederation of British Industry, Washington, the main EU governments and international financial institutions.

Workers face growing social crisis

Despite this lineup of bourgeois political forces and the pro-capitalist union officialdom, the outcome of the vote hangs in the balance.

Millions of workers will vote to leave, frustrated with years of declining living standards and growing social crisis, angered by the bloated EU bureaucracy and distrustful of the traditional parties of government. This distrust is reinforced by events such as U.S. President Barack Obama’s April visit to Britain, during which he declared that if London leaves the EU, the “U.K. is going to be in the back of the queue” on trade deals with Washington.

The “Brexit” debate is driving a political crisis within the Conservative Party. Nearly 40 percent of Tory members of Parliament have declared support for the “Leave” campaign. Some are calling for the resignation of the party leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, whatever the outcome of the referendum.

The other major party campaigning for a British exit is the populist UK Independence Party, which argues that London needs to defend “British sovereignty,” including imposing greater restrictions on immigration from other European countries. They say further expansion of the EU will lead to increased immigration, especially from Turkey.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to take advantage of the surge of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Mideast and North Africa to press Ankara’s long-held objective of EU membership. For more than two decades, member governments across the continent have found one excuse after another to block entry of the EU’s first “non-European” member. In return for visa free travel into the EU for Turkish citizens, the Turkish government is now taking measures to slow down Europe-bound refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Remain and Leave campaigners have traded exaggerated threats of the dangers of their opponents’ stand. Cameron claims that leaving the EU will result in imminent economic crisis and war. Fellow Tory MP Boris Johnson argues that the EU “is an attempt to do … by different methods” what Napoleon and Hitler had attempted, to “recreate the dream of the Roman Empire.”

But support for leaving has little to do with these arguments. “I’ll be voting leave,” Kevin Gallagher, a factory worker from Dagenham in East London, told the Militant. “The money that is spent on the EU should be spent on things we need like hospitals. Whatever the outcome of the vote the government will still be going after workers rights,” he added. Other workers told this reporter they would vote to stay in, despite disliking the EU, because they are uncertain what a British exit would mean for living standards.

The referendum debate is sharpening factional tension within the Labour Party. The party’s recently elected London mayor Sadiq Khan has joined with Cameron to campaign for Remain. While party leader Jeremy Corbyn has demurred sharing a platform with the Conservative leader, he argues that EU regulations protect workers and are the road to “a real social Europe.”

Leaving would lead to a “bonfire of rights,” says Corbyn. This rings hollow in light of the assault on workers underway in France today led by the Socialist Party government of Francois Hollande (see article on page 4).

Similar developments are fueling political crisis across the continent. The two dominant capitalist powers, the rulers in Germany and France, push for greater European political integration as they squeeze weaker countries such as Greece, with devastating consequences for working people and much of the middle classes. Meanwhile from Germany to France to Italy to Austria, anti-EU parties and movements are growing. Attitudes to the EU differ between and within the traditional capitalist and bourgeois labor parties.

Despite “stimulus” measures, growth remains sluggish across the eurozone. While unemployment averages over 10 percent, there are vast regional differences. Germany’s official unemployment rate is 4.5 percent; Greece’s stands at a quarter of the population.

Whatever the outcome of the UK referendum, further fracturing pressures will dominate the EU.

The Militant - June 13, 2016 -- Debate on UK vote highlights EU rivalries, workers anger

http://themilitant.com/2016/8023/802303.html

The bitter fruit of reformism in Venezuela

Today's New York Times article on Venezuela can be found here:

A Starving Country - NYTimes.com:  http://mobile.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/06/20/world/americas/a-starving-country/s/20160620-VENEZUELA-slide-XERF.html

The Militant has been covering this story from a revolutionary socialist perspective for years.

Some recent highlights:

From 2016:

....Chávez and Maduro used the nation’s oil profits — Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world — to subsidize housing, food, health care and social programs. Many of the social programs have been carried out with the help of revolutionary Cuba, which has tens of thousands of health-care workers, teachers and other volunteers who go to some of the most impoverished and least accessible areas of the country.

The Venezuelan government in return has provided cheap oil to Cuba.

The world capitalist economic crisis has had a devastating affect on Venezuela. A precipitous drop in the price of oil — which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s export earnings — was countered by printing money. Policies aimed at managing the crisis, such as price controls and a special exchange rate for dollars for companies that import and export, fueled inflation and shortages of goods, as many capitalists found it more profitable to speculate on the exchange rates instead of manufacturing.

The country’s oil exports fell 49 percent in 2015, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. A drought made matters worse, bringing the water level at the Guri hydroelectric dam, which generates 75 percent of the country’s electricity, to a record low.

Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar, has tumbled in relation to the dollar by 99.1 percent since 2012. Imports of basic foodstuffs, including sugar, flour and eggs have declined. People have to stand in line for hours hoping to buy products, often to find empty shelves. The inflation rate is estimated at 720 percent — likely the highest in the world — up from 180 percent in 2015.

Starting April 26, Maduro placed most government employees, more than 30 percent of the workforce, on a two-day workweek to conserve energy. Public hospitals are exempt. The government has also initiated rolling four-hour blackouts throughout the country, and pushed the clocks forward 30 minutes to increase daylight hours.

The Militant - May 30, 2016 -- Washington uses crisis to push for pro-US gov’t in Venezuela

http://www.themilitant.com/2016/8021/802150.html

From 2014:

....In a 2008 interview, Christopher Hitchens asked Chávez what the difference was between him and Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. “Fidel is a communist. I am not. I am a social democrat,” Chávez replied. “Fidel is a Marxist-Leninist. I am not. Fidel is an atheist. I am not.”

Since Chávez was elected, the number of government employees increased by more than 1 million. Today nearly one of every five workers is employed by the government.

Through cooperative agreements between the Venezuelan and Cuban governments, Havana helped establish social programs known as “missions,” staffed by tens of thousands of Cuban volunteers, from teachers and sports instructors to agronomists. Barrio Adentro, staffed by 20,000 Cuban doctors, today provides free medical care to working people across the country.

Anti-imperialist trade policies

Venezuela gives Cuba 100,000 barrels of oil a day at preferential prices, which has been a lifeline for Cuba, replacing oil it used to receive from the Soviet Union before it collapsed.

Caracas’ ties with Havana and the two governments’ initiation of new trade and diplomatic alliances in Latin America and the Caribbean to counter U.S. imperialist domination of the region have provoked the ire of Washington.

This includes the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), a trade bloc of nine Latin American countries formed in 2004, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), an alternative to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States. In 2005 the Venezuelan government launched PetroCaribe, which provides Cuba and 13 other Caribbean countries with oil at preferential prices, weakening the stranglehold of imperialist-dominated oil monopolies.

Government subsidies and social programs since 1998 have helped improve living conditions of working people. At the same time they have strengthened workers’ dependence on the capitalist state and promoted the illusion that something other than independent working-class political action can advance their interests. Today, many government programs are in decline, while the government is weaker without the strong Bonapartist leader it had with Chávez.

Oil production in crisis

Maintaining subsidies for fuel, food, housing and an expanding state bureaucracy has become increasingly difficult. Venezuela’s oil production has declined by roughly 25 percent since 1999, a major problem for a country that depends on oil for 95 percent of its export earnings and 45 percent of federal budget revenues.

Venezuela owes more than $60 billion to foreign creditors and Maduro has made sure that they are paid on time. Domestic capitalists are owed some $50 billion.

Maduro had floated reducing subsidies for gas prices, which stand at roughly 6 cents a gallon. But he has shelved the idea since the latest wave of opposition protests began.

The government has implemented a complicated auction of U.S. dollars for Venezuelan businesses at the official exchange rate of 6.3 bolivars to the dollar, one tenth the black market rate.

Some capitalists, especially those with ties to the government, are taking advantage of the gap. They are making fortunes in currency speculation buying dollars at the official rate, ostensibly to import needed goods, and selling them on the black market.

The government has tried to impose price controls and passed a law stating that capitalists will be allowed a 30 percent maximum profit rate, leading to acute shortages of goods at the official prices and a thriving black market at whatever price the market will bear.

While chastising greedy capitalists, Maduro has also criticized workers who demand higher wages. He labeled steelworkers on strike at the Sidor company in September and October as “labor criminals, anarcho-syndicalists.”

In a move to head off opposition in the armed forces, the government announced in September that it was giving members of the military a pay raise and vehicles, furniture and appliances for their homes. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Maduro has appointed more than 300 active duty or retired military officials to government posts.

Although the crisis is hitting working people the hardest, “the protests shaking the capital this month have been dominated by the city’s middle- and upper-class residents,” the New York Times reported Feb. 28. “Yet in the city’s poorer sections, life has mostly gone on as usual.”

The Militant - April 28, 2014 -- Venezuela workers distrust pro-imperialist opposition

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7816/781654.html

Cynical pattern of British policy in Palestine after 1918

From the 1979 Ink Links edition of Weinstock's book on Jewish settler movement in Palestine and founding of Israel.

Weinstock does a useful job on chauvinism of Jewish settler movement, and the way London used a divide-and-rule strategy of incitement to create increasing escalating tensions and violence between Jews and Arabs while they had the mandate.

....What policy was Britain actually pursuing? It appears, above all, to have been trying to strengthen its position as an indispensable intermediary by sometimes backing the Zionists, sometimes the Arab nationalists. A typical example of this is the election of the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. The Mufti had to be chosen by a small number of voters, this latter body being itself elected by limited franchise (the vote was restricted by a property qualification). According to law, the government should have appointed one of the top three candidates to the post of Mufti. In fact, Haj Amin al-Husseini ran a poor fourth. He was not qualified for the office in any case, being neither an alim (scholar of Islamic sciences), nor a graduate from a higher religious college, nor having earned the title of “sheikh”. Moreover,, he had only just been pardoned by the High Commissioner after being sentenced to a term of imprisonment for his role in the April l920 Jerusalem disturbances. Yet the High Commissioner – who had favoured his appointment even before the elections were held – awarded him the job. Just to be on the safe side, however, even though the newly-recognised Mufti promised “to cooperate with the (British) Government”, he never actually received an official letter of appointment, nor was his appointment ever gazetted. He had, after all, been defeated in the elections. [37] Bentwich adds that the Mufti had given an undertaking to renounce all political agitation, a promise that he did apparently keep for a few years. [38] The choice of this arch-reactionary big landowner, whose religious fanaticism and extreme right-wing nationalism were well-known, can only be explained by the deliberate desire to counter-balance Zionism. It was Britain, and not the Arab masses, which deliberately raised Hitler’s future ally to this influential position. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations protested on many occasions against the ex officio appointment by the British administration of the members of the Supreme Moslem Council presided over by the Mufti. [39] Moreover, the complex intricacies of Britain’s contradictory promises to the Zionists and the Arabs had paved the way for these cynical manoeuvres. All things considered, playing off the Jews against the Arabs was merely a new version of the old colonial policy: divide and rule. In the end, the Mandatory Power was to be trapped in the web of its own artfulness The day would come when its balancing act between both parties would break down under the violent impact of exacerbated nationalist passions, leading to the downfall of the colonial structure. [40]

British policy thus took the form of a cyclical repetition of a standard pattern: encouragement of the Zionists – Arab opposition – restrictions on Jewish colonisation. Even its executants were caught between several conflicting options. The vision of a loyal Jewish Dominion close to the Suez Canal was reassuring: “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. [41] On the other hand, the support given to Arab nationalism called for concessions. Both causes could be defended for the greater glory of His Imperial Majesty. The wavering character and the various sudden volte-face of British policy can therefore perhaps be explained by disputes between imperialist factions. In any case, Zionism served as an indispensable scapegoat in Palestine, and it proved all the more valuable because it was a real threat to Arab interests. The Zionist enterprise diverted the anti-imperialist movement of the Arab masses into a struggle against the handful of Zionist immigrants. In short, an ideal buffer between the coloniser and the colonised....

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7trXEFcZimVWXdCY0VHMlhmZlU/view?usp=drivesdk

National Struggles in Post-World War One Palestine

From the Weinstock book, the chapter on post-World War One Palestine.

....Suddenly, in 1920, after a renewed wave of Arab nationalist agitation, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jerusalem and in the north of the country, where several Jewish settlements had recently been founded. As far as Jerusalem was concerned, it was an unprecedented occurrence: never before had the Arab population molested the Jewish inhabitants. But to the Jewish observer, the disturbances unfailingly evoked the dreaded spectre of a pogrom. In reality, however, these bloody incidents expressed in a deflected form the hostility of the Arab masses to political Zionism. After the ruthless suppression of the outbreak, a military commission appointed to enquire into the causes of the incidents, highlighted the following motives [27]:

a) the Arabs’ disappointment following the failure to carry out the promises of independence made during the 1914-1918 War;

b) the Arabs’ conviction that the Balfour Declaration implied the denial of their right to self-determination, and their fear that the establishment of a Jewish National Home would mean a considerable increase in Jewish immigration, which would lead to their economic and political subjection to the Jews;

c) the intensification of these feelings by the propaganda conducted from abroad about the proclamation of Emir Faisal as the King of a reunified Syria in Damascus, which had the effect of reinforcing the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic trend, on the one hand, and the activities of the Zionist Commission, which was in Palestine at that time, supported by the influential resources of all world Jewry (sic!) on the other hand.

These conclusions contain in substance the explanation that all subsequent commissions were to give for anti-Jewish riots in Palestine. Jabotinsky, who had taken personal command of his Jewish unit in order to intervene in Jerusalem, and Amin al-Husseini, the future Mufti of Jerusalem, who had led the rioters and harangued the crowd assembled for the Nebi Musa festivities, were both given heavy sentences by military tribunals. Both were later given reprieves.

This was the first manifestation of a process which was to recur in magnified form in the years to come. The Arab landowning leadership and the British authorities attempted, with the help of Zionism, to divert the growth of the anti-imperialist consciousness of the Arab masses into an inter-communal conflict, pitting Jews against Arabs....

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7trXEFcZimVWXdCY0VHMlhmZlU/view?usp=drivesdk

Women and draft registration

....The pro-imperialist position of the bourgeois feminists comes as no surprise. When the Carter administration reinstituted registration for the draft as part of the U.S. rulers’ renewed militarization drive following their defeat in Vietnam, the national leadership of NOW took the stance that if there was going to be conscription, women should have the "right" to be drafted alongside men. It’s useful to read how the Socialist Workers Party rejected this position in 1980.

"The question of the draft cannot be separated from the class character and function of the military," the party said. "The military is the centerpiece of the bourgeois state--the armed ruling class against the working class. Moreover, the U.S. imperialist army cannot fight a progressive war. It can’t advance the struggles of the oppressed and exploited one iota anywhere in the world. We say, not one soldier for this army. Are women excluded? Good. It is that much less cannon fodder."

SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters explained in "Washington’s Third Militarization Drive," printed in New International no. 7: "By linking the fight for the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] with extending draft registration and the draft of women, figures in NOW and other women’s rights organizations gave the kiss of death to the ERA. The idea that ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment might bring closer the conscription of young women was used demagogically by the enemies of the ERA. Many women and men who had been inclined toward it, or undecided about it, turned against the amendment."

http://www.themilitant.com/2002/6623/662337.html