This electoral shift in the suburbs, of course, mirrors even more fundamental changes in the American voting universe. In 1976 when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, the active electorate was 90 per cent white non-Hispanic. Last November, the white share was down to 74 per cent; a transition toward voter diversity whose future is assured by demographic momentum. Nearly half the babies, for instance, born in the United States during the last few years had Spanish surnames, and American ‘minorities’ separately counted would constitute the twelfth most populous nation on earth (100.7 million). [35] Over the course of the Bush administration, the Latino voting-age population in Virginia increased 5 times faster than the population as a whole, 11 times faster in Ohio, and almost 15 times faster in Pennsylvania. [36] As Karl Rove and other nervous Republican strategists well understand, the gop has probably already harvested its maximum crop of white evangelical votes and will be culturally and politically marginalized unless it sinks new roots amongst immigrants and the coming ‘minority-majority’.

introduction to marxism and politics, with vivek chibber
lecture 1 -- class

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why is class important? synonymous with "marxism," of course--but made so by the degeneracy of "left" culture (used to be the way any self-respecting marxist thought about capitalism, vivek is arguing)

part of the reason class has been so singularly associated with "marxism" has to do with the history of the Stalinization of the workers' movement.

vivek is stressing, though, that Marxists don't have a monopoly on the concept of class. nothing here is specific to Marx, himself--almost any 19th and 20th century socialist would recognize its importance.

nonetheless, why do we give class this importance? we still have to justify this.

it has to do with the issues that the Left is animated around--all those things which afflict vast numbers of people (poverty, disease, inequality, etc.)--all these things are maintained by people in power.

what the Left found, was when it tried to organize for better wages, etc., it found that it met with resistance. social justice is not going to be something that the well-endowed will agree to.

so, (a) the Left had to understand why the powerful resist / (b) what is the source of their power?

this is what leads, ultimately, to the recognition of class. the view on the marxist left has been that the central arbiter of power is class. and the reason that this is the case is because wielding power requires resources; and class is the chief distributor of resources in a capitalist society (indeed, in any society).

resources include: money, time, space, etc. -- again, the unequal distribution of resources translated into an unequal distribution of power, which facilitates the perpetuation of the status quo.

it's surprising, vivek is saying, how few people can justify the importance of class--it should never be a doctrinal commitment. we need to justify our attentiveness to class.

---

we come, then, to the question of how class appears and reproduces itself--and how does it bring about these inequalities.

surplus

class is not just any old social relation. class is associated with inequalities. what vivek wants to argue, though, is that not all inequalities are class inequalities. only certain kinds give you class relations of inequality.

inequalities that come about through exploitation.

most of human history has lacked "social surplus," don't forget. for exploitation to occur, surplus is a precondition.

imagine an agrarian society--everybody owns a small plot of land, big enough to grow enough food for the family unit. if they live in a village, then there's some common land, as well. after each agrarian cycle, there may be enough surplus to be stored in case of disaster. but basically they consume what they produce.

in a society like that, we can say that there's nothing left after people's needs are met. and thus: a group exercising structural and systematic power will not emerge.

maybe a priesthood will emerge--these priests won't work, will appropriate some of the surplus in the name of the ancestors, etc.

the difficulty, however, will be this, of course--where will the crops/produce come from in order to enshrine these classes. the only way in which such a group can emerge, is if the producers make enough to satisfy their own needs and the desires of an extractive class.

here, historically, in the emergence of this parasitic class, we see the birth of armies, retainers, etc. you will invariably meet a lot of resistance when you ask people to give things up.

therefore, this is also a question of technology--the state of the productive sources has to allow such a situation.

for classes to exist, there must be a social surplus. this is what the surplus does.

already we know two things:
(1) classes that are in power, do so by extracting a surplus produced by others
(2) they maintain that power via other institutions, armies and the State.

---

let us think, a bit, about how class worked during feudalism, in order to understand better the emergence of capitalism.

imagine a society in which there is a bit left over in the form of a surplus. a group of people arise to lay claim to that surplus. the feudal lords, who live of the labor of their peasants. the question, here, is how this happens.

a lord says to the peasants--"it's a bad, rough, mean world. all these other lords will come around with their retainers and seize your produce. i will protect you, at a price."

the basis, then, for taking some of the crop is a direct threat to the peasant. feudalism was simply "organized violence--knights as the guys that busted kneecaps." distinct from what your landlord will do if you don't pay rents to, today--violence was much more direct, overt. the threat of bodily harm underlay this system, always and constantly.

what are the ways in which lords actually obtain this surplus?

serfdom: how did serfs produce the surplus? the month is divided into days you work on your own land (which the lord is indirectly laying claim to), and days that you work on the lord's. it looks like a "rental" payment, but "rent" is more obviously a fiction in feudalism. (obviously, productivity has to be high enough in order to produce his necessities in the three or four days that he's working on his own land). there is absolutely no hiding the fact that the lord is getting fat off of the labor of the peasant. how can it be justified? (god made it this way? not coincidental that the ruling ideology was religious--it is very helpful that the church, itself, was a gigantic feudal lord. the priests, the pope, none of them did any labor, don't forget.)

----

the question then, arises: how in capitalism does exploitation arise? how is it reproduced? (remember: the key in feudalism is that plots of land were, nominally, in the posession of the peasant; the village unit is intact, as well. a fundamental fact, here, is that peasants don't need their lords; lords enforce their right to appropriate surplus through coercion.)

it seems, in capitalism, that there's nothing unfair going on. the serf is told to work on the lord's land, "or else." in capitalism the oppression is more subtle, hidden. in feudalism, the lord seeks out the peasant; in capitalism, the worker has to continuously seek out the capitalist. there doesn't seem to be the same kind of coercion. moreover, workers are free to quit. and thirdly, when workers come in, they agree on a wage.

nobody is being forced to work for any particular employer. they negotiate over their conditions of work, etc. so what's the problem? where's the exploitation? these are the foundations of the ruling ideology, don't forget. so we must be prepared to define exploitation in spite of this.

so we need to ask: is there a surplus in capitalism? where and how is it appropriated?

how does a factory work? how does the capitalist run his factory?

he sells a product for $100. out of that, wages account for 60$. means of production would be, say, $15. rent and overhead account for $10. his profits, then, are $15.

you might say to yourself--alright, you call call the profit a surplus, but so what? the worker is getting his wages, and the capitalist his. where is the devious plot? the capitalist gave them a job, for god's sake. he used his assets to give workers jobs. and they all go home. why would you call that exploitation?

what do economists say about the labor supply curve? what's the fiction about this relationship that we have to expose?

it's true that workers go looking for the capitalist, in a sense. it's absolutely true that he was not ordered to go to Wal-Mart, etc. BUT: the worker is not free to extricate himself from the production process, in toto. and when they negotiate with the capitalists, their independence is not of equal weight. the worker will last days without the capitalists; the capitalist will last for months. the capitalist has assets, that he can alienate to survive, if forced. workers have nothing to fall back on--they depend on selling their labor-power.

so workers need not work for any particular capitalist, but he still needs to work for Capital.

mainstream counter-argument--(1) capitalist has got the skills, (2) he's in possession of the assets (and that took money).

but let's look at it from a systemic level. a class of people with the assets are putting the workers to work. those assets have not been given to you through free exchange--how can it be simply the fact of ownership that entitles you to those profits? that ownership did not fall from the heavens. (political philosophy in the 20th century has failed to justify the unequal distribution of assets, absent the fiction of free exchange).

and the first defense? what are the skills that the capitalist possesses? most of these skills are acquired, and how? you do so by buying them, from business schools, or whatever. that means that the unequal distribution of skills simply reflects the unequal distribution of wealth.

---

capitalism is unlike feudalism in one very crucial respect--peasants have some control over the means of production (their own land). capitalism is different--the first time in human history where the private possession of the means of production is generalized. (and here, of course, we can tell also the story of "primitive accumulation")

the monopolization of the means of productions means that capitalists no longer need to coerce the workers--and, what's more, capitalists set the terms because of their superior structural position.

---

mainstream notions of class associate the concept with income, absolutely -- if someone is making x thousands of dollars, they are assigned to a specific class.

but here, we have defined class such that it precedes the concept of income. we are relating it to the process of production--your place in the class structure, in this sense, determines your income. and you will not fight poverty without fighting the class structure.

you're not a capitalist because you're rich. you're rich because you're a capitalist. it's not because you're poor that you're working class. it's because you're working-class that you're poor. moreover, there's a causal connection between one's wealth and the other's poverty. (and all this, of course, is maintained, in the final analysis, by force).

---

so, there is exploitation transpiring in capitalism. and this appropriation is rooted in domination and coercion, in the final analysis. (workers have to show up to work--they are not free to not work. the capitalist, moreover, can imposes these conditions because he owns the assets).

we've shown that class exists, then, and that it depends on exploitation.

exploitation is not simply a moral problem, it is a material fact. as long as these classes exist, you will have inequality (and conflict).

---

vivek is here making a further distinction between the not-exploited (permanent unemployed, lumpen elements, etc.) and the exploited (in whom the capitalist class still has a stake, don't forget--it needs Labor, and it can never forget this fact)

---

what differentiates classes, fundamentally, is their relation to the means of production, and the powers that flow from that fact.

The autonomists did not grasp that the oppressors took advantage of the limitations of a rebellion that took militant action, but lacked organization, leadership, and ideological coherence. Moreover, they celebrate these features as a sign of the uprising’s novelty (“a festival without programs, nor objectives”). The assemblies emerged when the collapse of government institutions turned neoliberal propaganda against politicians and the “government” into a radicalized mobilization against the entire regime. The assemblies focused popular participation in the key moments of the uprising, but they declined when the ruling class regained the reigns of power. Many autonomists refuse to see this, forgetting that the oppressed cannot liberate themselves if they do not develop their own political project. They do not consider this to be an obstacle because they think that the social movements will construct a new society from the spontaneous act of rebellion.
(...) The autonomists refuse to grasp the fact that the representatives of the ruling classes co-opt many popular movements. They do not recognize the importance of the challenges that confront the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, the landless of Brazil, or the cocaleros of Bolivia in the face of betrayals, neoliberal policies, and right-wing repression from the governments that emerged from their struggles. They promote an idyllic image of the social movements, acting as if these groups advance from strength to strength.
(...) The autonomists trust in the sufficiency of the social struggle and dismiss the necessity of a socialist political project of the oppressed. They think that the accumulated experience in popular action leads to the spontaneous development of anti-capitalist sentiments within the population. But if it were so simple, the MST of Brazil would not be forced to fight the disillusionment created by Lula and the piqueteros would not be fragmented in the face of Kirchner’s machinery of cooptation. Nor would the Zapatistas feel compelled to participate in the crisis unleashed by the attempt to drive López Obrador out of office.
(...) Actions of this type would permit the development of an emancipatory political practice in the face of the alienation of capitalism. Holloway11 correctly emphasizes that the fetishism created by this system not only conceals exploitation, but it also unleashes liberating responses from the oppressed. But he reduces these acts of resistance to spontaneous anti-commercial acts (“the child that forgets to pay”) or to basic expressions of rebellion (“the worker who resists”). He disregards the fact that these acts alone can only lead to experiments with fleeting forms of liberation. In order to do away with capitalist domination, the exploited need to go further than Holloway’s “constant anti-fetishization” to embrace a socialist political program and action.
(...) These characterizations adequately take account of the brutal changes that have been created by the opening of local markets to imports, the corporatization of agriculture, the shuttering of numerous industries, and the recession in the world market. But from the recognition of these transformations it does not follow that there has been a radical change in the protagonists of social struggle. The autonomists do not see that the map of resistance in Latin America is very diverse and differentiated. The weight of rural sectors in the Andean region coexists with the preeminence of urban workers in the Southern Cone and the notable presence of public employees in all countries. The most significant feature of this process is the mixture of traditions between social subjects who share methods of struggle. To emphasize the role of the excluded at the expense of formal workers is to downplay this multiplicity and convergence.
(...) The autonomists magnify the role of the excluded at the expense of traditional workers, because they place more weight on the relations of domination than on the forms of exploitation. They have lost sight of the neurological center of capitalist reproduction located in the extraction of surplus value. For this reason, they tend to take up certain notions of post-industrialism and interpret the retreat of the traditional workers’ movement as a symptom of the structural decline of work. They forget that, whatever the dislocations or changes in the labor process there have been, capitalism would cease to exist without workers’ labor. Understood this way, the arguments of the autonomists lose all meaning.
(...) The operation of the contemporary economy and the complexity of the political choices that confront society today demand that we delegate authority and use legislative tools. The different forms of direct democracy proposed by autonomists could only contribute in a complementary way to the organization of society in the process of constructing a socialist society.
(...) Other critics of the radical Left question the Leninist conception of constructing firm political organizations dedicated to promoting socialist consciousness. They think that this strategy disdains the self-emancipatory capacity of workers and leads to Stalinist totalitarianism. This appraisal distorts Lenin’s advocacy of building of stable organizations in order to transform the social struggle into conscious workers’ political action. The Bolshevik leader also emphasized the role of organization in confronting powerful enemies. In the conditions of clandestine struggle against Tsarism he argued for rigorous organization, but he never claimed this was a universal model of revolutionary action. He always encouraged the adaptation of forms of organization to changing political realities (for example, emphasizing professionalism in some periods and flexibility in others). To present Lenin as a precursor to Stalinist massacres is a liberal caricature. To interpret any political discipline as inexorably leading to terror would mean that we would have to object to all forms of collective structure, including those adopted by social movements that the autonomists support!
(...) “Changing the world without taking power” is the strategic project of many autonomists. But how can one avoid the state? How can the target of every popular demand be ignored? The state can be combated or reformed, but it cannot be ignored. All demands made by social movements are directed towards the state. The Zapatistas demand pro-indigenous legislation from the Mexican congress, the piqueteros demand unemployment benefits from the Argentine Ministry of Labor, and the MST raises the demand of expropriation of land and the legalization of landless peasants’ encampments to the Brazilian parliament. In “developed” countries, “illegal” immigrants demand citizenship rights (France) and public housing residents ask for social legislation. The last of these are particularly “statist” demands.
(...) Holloway counsels against any form of power because he concludes that any exercise of power will reproduce oppression. But he doesn’t take into account the fact that refusing to take over the state leads to the preservation of the status quo and the consolidation of the impoverishment of the dispossessed. If we want to change the world, it is not enough to reject the state. We have to look for strategies to extinguish it progressively until the end of a process of socialist transition. This transformation would necessarily begin with the establishment of a new state administered by the popular majority. The proposal to change the world without taking power disqualifies one road without suggesting another. Thus, it leaves us with a bitter sensation of impotence. It demands insubordination and rebelliousness, but it never suggests how to triumph in the difficult battle against oppression.

So if Zubaydah had already yielded all the information he had, why was there a need to turn to torture? The answer: There was a ticking clock, but not one attached to a bomb. The Bush administration wanted its war against Iraq and thought that the perfect justification would be a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq--a link that the Bush and Cheney White House had asserted, but couldn't prove because no such link existed.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million American hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities, with half of the hogs kept in giant facilities with 5,000 animals or more.
(...) But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of Big Pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype. In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

I repeat; there is no excuse today for babbling nonsense about Leninism, the Vanguard Party and the totalitarian state. In 1917 the Bolshevik Party consisted, I believe, of 78,000 members. And the majority of them were not very good Bolsheviks, not even good proletarians. In a population of over 150 million what else could they be but a vanguard ? Lenin saw that and drew the conclusions. In 1945 in Italy the Communist Party had over three million members. It completely controlled the organised trade union movement, In France the situation was not too different, and for a time the French Communist newspaper, L’Humanité, was the most widely sold daily newspaper in France.
(...) To believe that Bolshevism, or to be more precise, Leninism, would under the circumstances advocate or preach the theory of the vanguard party is to continue slander of Leninism, but not to his theory of the party (that is no longer viable) but to his central doctrine – the role o| the proletariat in the preservation of society from barbarism. To interpret Leninism as the advocacy of a vanguard party of three million is nearly as bad as the doctrine of Goebbels that Christ was not a Jew.

Among them was Gavriii ll'ich Miasnikov, a metalworker from the Urals and a Bolshevik since 1906. One of the most vocal of the early oppositionists, he is also one of the most obscure. Yet during the early 1920s he blazed into prominence as a critic of Lenin's policies, posing questions of the utmost importance: Who is to decide what is in the interests of the workers? What methods are permissible in resolving disputes among revolutionaries? At what point does honest criticism of party officials become "deviation" or insubordination? Miasnikov, seeing his deepest revolutionary aspirations thwarted, evolved an elaborate and penetrating critique of the dictatorship in the making, pointing to dangers whose full consequences were not yet apparent.
(...) He was deeply troubled by the oligarchical tendencies within the party, the drift towards authoritarianism and elite rule, a process greatly accelerated by the Civil War. He was dismayed by the growing concentration of power in the hands of the Central Committee, the divorce of the leadership from the rank and file, and the suppression of local initiative and debate. Equally disturbing, though he did not yet raise his voice in public protest, was the introduction of labor discipline in the factories, along with the elevation of technical specialists to positions of authority and the replacement of workers' control by one-man management and bureaucratic administration.
(...) In May 1921, moreover, he exploded a bombshell in the form of a memorandum to the,Central Committee, calling for sweeping reform. A crushing indictment of the Communist leaders, their theories and methods, the memorandum demanded the abolition of the death penalty, the liquidation of bureaucratic forms of organization, and the transfer of industrial administration to producers' Soviets-, it counterpoised revolutionary principle to the expedients promoted by the Central Committee.
(...) Freedom of the press, Lenin sought to convince Miasnikov, would, under existing circumstances, strengthen the forces of counter-revolution. Lenin rejected "freedom" in the abstract. Freedom for whom? he demanded. Under what conditions? For which class? "We do not believe in 'absolutes.' We laugh at 'pure democracy."' Freedom of the press, Lenin maintained, would mean "freedom of political organization for the bourgeoisie and its most loyal servants, the Mensheviks and SRs." The capitalists are still strong, he argued, stronger than the Communists. They mean to crush us. To give them freedom of the press would facilitate this task. But we will not do it. We have no intention of committing suicide. (32) Freedom of the press, according to Lenin, was a "nonparty, antiproletarian slogan."
(...) "The trouble is that, while you raise your hand against the capitalist, you deal a blow to the worker. You know very well that for such words as I am now uttering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workers are languishing in prison. That I myself remain at liberty is only because I am a veteran Communist, have suffered for my beliefs, and am known among the mass of workers. Were it not for this, were I just an ordinary mechanic from the same factory, where would I be now? In a Cheka prison or, more likely, made to 'escape,' just as I made Mikhail Romanov 'escape.' Once more I say: You raise your hand against the bourgeoisie, but it is I who am spitting blood, and it is we, the workers, whose jaws are being cracked." (34)
(...) On February 15, 1922, the Orgburo commission, having completed its investigation, recommended his expulsion from the party. This recommendation was referred to the Politburo, which, on February 20, declared Miasnikov expelled for "repeated violations of party discipline," and especially for attempting to organize a faction within the party, contrary to the resolution on party unity passed by the Tenth Congress. The Politburo, however, added the proviso that, should Miasnikov reform his ways, he might apply for readmission after a year.(42) For the first time, then, the penalty prescribed by the Tenth Congress for factionalism had been imposed. This was the first instance, moreover, except for that of S. A. Lozovsky in 1918, who was reinstated the next year, where Lenin actually expelled a well-known Bolshevik of long standing.(43)
(...) In such circumstances, Lenin felt, to criticize the Central Committee, to call for democratic procedure, was to play into the hands of the counterrevolutionaries. Furthermore, if Miasnikov's demands were granted, if freedom of the press and free elections to the soviets were permitted, the party would be swept from power and a reaction inevitably follow, of which the Bolsheviks, Miasnikov included, would be the first victims.
(...) Miasnikov found no defenders at the [11th Party Congress]. But one delegate, V. V. Kosior, argued that Lenin had taken the wrong approach to the question of dissent. If someone, said Kcisior, had the courage to point out deficiencies in party work, he was marked down as an oppositionist, relieved of authority, placed under surveillance, and-a reference to Miasnikov-even expelled from the party. The party, Kosior, warned, was alienating itself from the workers. (51)
(...) For Miasnikov the NEP had come as a shock. He viewed it as a continuation of the retreat from socialism begun during the Civil War. Its roots could be traced to the Ninth Party Congress, which had endorsed one-man management and the employment of technical specialists. By this action, as Miasnikov saw it, Lenin had deprived the workers of their most fundamental revolutionary conquest, the chief lever with which to advance their cause. "The organization of industry since the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party," declared the manifesto, had been carried forward in a "purely bureaucratic way" and "without the direct participation of the working class." (59) The manifesto demanded that the administration of industry be turned over to the workers themselves, beginning with the workers in each factory. It denounced the bureaucrats and apporatchiki for whom such words as "solidarity" and "brotherhood" were empty shibboleths and who were concerned only with increasing their privileges and power. It attacked them at every turn-their insolence and hypocrisy, their contempt for ordinary workers, their pious mouthing of socialist phrases, belied by their bourgeois ambitions and way of life.
(...) What then was to be done? For Miasnikov the degeneration of the revolution could be halted only by the restoration of proletarian democracy. He remained unshakable in his belief in the initiative and capacity of the workers, the class from which he himself had sprung. The defects of the regime could no longer be corrected by the Bolshevik leadership. Remedies, rather, must come from the working-class rank and file, both party and nonparty. Without worker participation in every area, he insisted, the attainment of socialism would be impossible. Lenin, by contrast, lacking Miasnikov's faith in mass initiative, clung to administrative solutions, rejecting any proposal that would have allowed a democratic breeze to blow through the party apparatus. This he considered more dangerous than bureaucratism itself. He relied, to the very end, on bureaucrats to reform the bureaucracy, setting one section of the apparatus against another.
(...) In Lenin's absence, the task of anathematizing the Workers' Group fell to Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev. Trotsky, denouncing Miasnikov's manifesto, recalled "the old theory of the now forgotten Machajski" that "under socialism the state will be the apparatus for the exploitation for the working class." Radek poured contempt on Miasnikov's "high-flown formula" of freedom of the press. Zinoviev declared that "every criticism of the party line, even a so-called left criticism, is now objectively a Menshevik criticism." Miasnikov, he added, maintains that "the worker is against us and we are against him." Such a notion is "rubbish ." "I was personally bothered by him for almost a year. Vladimir ll'ich occupied himself with Miasnikov, wrote to him, reasoned with him." A special commission, of which Bukharin was a member, sought to bring him around. To no avail. Miasnikov "has betrayed our party." Whatever its mistakes, insisted Zinoviev, the party had driven the old ruling elite from its entrenched power. The "hegemony of the proletariat has survived under the most difficult circumstances, and will continue to survive, I hope, to the end (applause)." (74)
(...) [once in Germany] Miasnikov was able to publish, in booklet form, the manifesto of the Workers' Group,(77) prefaced by an appeal, drafted by his associates in Moscow, "to Communist comrades of all lands." The appeal, in brief compass, recapitulated the main points of the manifesto. Quoting Marx's inaugural address to the First International ("the liberation of the workers must be the task of the, workers themselves") and the second stanza of the "Internationale," it concluded with a set of slogans proclaiming the aims of the Workers' Group: "The strength of the working class lies in its solidarity. Long live freedom of speech and press for the proletarians! Long live Soviet Power! Long live Proletarian Democracy! Long live Communism!"(78)

One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, written by Lenin, an outstanding member of the Iskra group, is a methodical exposition of the ideas of the ultra-centralist tendency in the Russian movement. The viewpoint presented with incomparable vigor and logic in this book, is that of pitiless centralism. Laid down as principles are: 1. The necessity of selecting, and constituting as a separate corps, all the active revolutionists, as distinguished from the unorganized, though revolutionary, mass surrounding this elite.
(...) Looking at the matter from the angle of the formal tasks of the Social Democracy, in its capacity as a party of class struggle, it appears at first that the power and energy of the party are directly dependent on the possibility of centralizing the party. However, these formal tasks apply to all active parties. In the case of the Social Democracy, they are less important than is the influence of historic conditions. The Social Democratic movement is the first in the history of class societies which reckons, in all its phases and through its entire course, on the organization and the direct, independent action of the masses. Because of this, the Social Democracy creates an organizational type that is entirely different from those common to earlier revolutionary movements, such as those of the Jacobins and the adherents of Blanqui. Lenin seems to slight this fact when he presents in his book (page 140) the opinion that the revolutionary Social Democrat is nothing else than a "Jacobin indissolubly joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests." For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself.
(...) Social Democratic activity is carried on under radically different conditions. It arises historically out of the elementary class struggle. It spreads and develops in accordance with the following dialectical contradiction. The proletarian army is recruited and becomes aware of its objectives in the course of the struggle itself. The activity of the party organization, the growth of the proletarians' awareness of the objectives of the struggle and the struggle itself, are not different things separated chronologically and mechanically. They are only different aspects of the same struggle, there do not exist for the Social Democracy detailed sets of tactics which a Central Committee can teach the party membership in the same way as troops are instructed in their training camps. Furthermore, the range of influence of the socialist party is constantly fluctuating with the ups and downs of the struggle in the course of which the organization is created and grows. For this reason Social Democratic centralism cannot be based on the mechanical subordination and blind obedience of the party membership to the leading party center. For this reason, the Social Democratic movement cannot allow the erection of an air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment, the nonparty sections of the proletariat.
(...) Now the two principles on which Lenin's centralism rests are precisely these:

1. The blind subordination, in the smallest detail, of all party organs to the party center which alone thinks, guides, and decides for all.
2. The rigorous separation of the organized nucleus of revolutionaries from its social-revolutionary surroundings.

Such centralism is a mechanical transposition of the organizational principles of Blanquism into the mass movement of the socialist working class. In accordance with this view, Lenin defines his "revolutionary Social Democrat" as a "Jacobin joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests."
(...) The fact is that the Social Democracy is not joined to the organization of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat. And because of this, Social Democratic centralism is essentially different from Blanquist centralism. It can only be the concentrated will of the individuals and groups representative of the working class. It is, so to speak, the "self-centralism" of the advanced sectors of the proletariat. It is the rule of the majority within its own party. The indispensable conditions for the realization of Social Democratic centralism are:

1. The existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the class struggle.
2. The possibility for the workers to develop their own political activity through direct influence on public life, in a party press, and public congresses, etc.

(...) We misuse words and we practice self-deception when we apply the same term -- discipline -- to such dissimilar notions as: 1, the absence of thought and will in a body with a thousand automatically moving hands and legs, and 2, the spontaneous coordination of the conscious, political acts of a body of men. What is there in common between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation?
(...) It is a mistake to believe that it is possible to substitute "provisionally" the absolute power of a Central Committee (acting somehow by "tacit delegation") for the yet unrealizable rule of the majority of conscious workers in the party, and in this way replace the open control of the working masses over the party organs with the reverse control by the Central Committee over the revolutionary proletariat.
(...) Lenin says that intellectuals remain individualists and tend to anarchism even after they have joined the socialist movement. According to him, it is only among intellectuals that we can note a repugnance for the absolute authority of a Central Committee. The authentic proletarian, Lenin suggests, finds by reason of his class instinct a kind of voluptuous pleasure in abandoning himself to the clutch of firm leadership and pitiless discipline. "To oppose bureaucracy to democracy," writes Lenin, "is to contrast the organizational principle of revolutionary Social Democracy to the methods of opportunistic organization," (page 151).
(...) In most socialist parties in Western Europe there is undoubtedly a connection between opportunism and the "intellectuals," as well as between opportunism and decentralizing tendencies within the labor movement. But nothing is more contrary to the historic-dialectic method of Marxist thought than to separate social phenomena from their historic soil and to present these phenomena as abstract formulas having an absolute, general application. Reasoning abstractly, we may say that the "intellectual," a social element which has emerged out of the bourgeoisie and is therefore alien to the proletariat, enters the socialist movement not because of his natural class inclinations but in spite of them. For this reason, he is more liable to opportunist aberrations than the proletarian. The latter, we say, can be expected to find a definite revolutionary point of support in his class interests as long as he does not leave his original environment, the laboring mass. But the concrete form assumed by this inclination of the intellectual toward opportunism and, above all, the manner in which this tendency expresses itself in organizational questions depend every time on his given social milieu.
(...) [BRILLIANT] If, like Lenin, we define opportunism as the tendency that paralyzes the independent revolutionary movement of the working class and transforms it into an instrument of ambitious bourgeois intellectuals, we must also recognize that in the initial stage of a labor movement this end is more easily attained as a result of rigorous centralization rather than by decentralization. It is by extreme centralization that a young, uneducated proletarian movement can be most completely handed over to the intellectual leaders staffing a Central Committee.
(...) If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee. On the other hand there is no more effective guarantee against opportunist intrigue and personal ambition than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat, as a result of which the workers acquire the sense of political responsibility and self-reliance.
(...) In view of this, we find most astonishing the claim that it is possible to avoid any possibility of opportunism in the Russian movement by writing down certain words, instead of others, in the party constitution. Such an attempt to exercise opportunism by means of a scrap of paper may turn out to be extremely harmful -- not to opportunism but to the socialist movement.
(...) Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.

collected figures/snippets, to help trace the origins of the Fall

- According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,367 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day. Historian Michael Ellman claims the best estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet Repression during these two years is the range 950,000 to 1.2 million, which includes deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag as a result of their treatment in it. He also states that this is the estimate which should be used by historians and teachers of Russian history.

- The governing body of the CPSU was the Party Congress which initially met annually but whose meetings became less frequent, particularly under Stalin. Party Congresses would elect a Central Committee which, in turn, would elect a Politburo. Under Stalin the most powerful position in the party became the General Secretary who was elected by the Politburo. In 1952 the title of General Secretary became First Secretary and the Politburo became the Presidium before reverting to their former names under Leonid Brezhnev in 1966.

-"Soviet rule in Russia could not have been maintained for three years -- not even three weeks -- without the iron dictatorship of the Communist Party. Any class conscious worker must understand that the dictatorship of the working class can by achieved only by the dictatorship of its vanguard, i.e., by the Communist Party . . . All questions . . ., on which the fate of the proletarian revolution depends absolutely, are decided . . . in the framework of the party organisations." Zinoviev in Kommunistische Rundschau (1920)

-"They [the workers' opposition] have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy! . . The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship . . . regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class . . . The dictatorship does not base itself at every moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy." Trotsky, 10th Party Congress, 1921.

-"Obedience, and unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions of Soviet directors, of the dictators elected or appointed by Soviet institutions, vested with dictatorial powers." Lenin, Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, April/May 1918

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.

Local residents of the shantytown pay 3.22 dollars per cubic metre of water, compared to just 45 cents of a dollar that is paid a few blocks away, across the main avenue, in Rinconada del Lago, one of Lima’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.

At the centre of the crisis too is the contradiction between US imperialism and the people of the Third World. This is exemplified by the fact that the consumption of the US, including its gargantuan military expenditure, is being funded from the savings of China, other East Asian countries, and the Gulf oil producers. Though US imperialism is still dominant worldwide, its economic dominance has long been in decline, tending to make this parasitic extraction ever more unsustainable. (Dogged insurgencies in countries under US military occupation have played a significant role in further undermining US hegemony, preventing it from achieving its strategic-economic aims, forcing it to increase its military expenditure abroad, and deepening its dependence on foreign inflows.) The waning of the US’s economic and political power too underlies the current crisis. However, the pattern of trade in recent years (giant US trade deficits, giant trade surpluses of certain Third World countries) and the perverse pattern of financial flows (from the poor to the rich countries) have not been brought about by the US elite on their own, but with the help of the elites of the Third World; and the latter too have flourished unprecedentedly therefrom. These patterns represent, in a sense, a compact between the elites of different worlds against their people, who are the losers in the entire scheme.

So the effects of Obama's drone war are not limited to the few houses destroyed here and there. The attacks have spawned, or greatly added to, a humanitarian catastrophe that remains largely hidden from the world -- and certainly from the well-wadded Western "liberals" who cheer Obama's savvy toughness in the "good war" on the Af-Pak front. As The Times reports, almost a million people have been driven from their homes in Pakistan's Tribal Areas to escape the American drones, and the bombs of Washington's Pakistani proxies:

Most of us remember all too well the praise from the Bush administration lavished on the Awakening Groups, a Sunni militia comprised of former resistance fighters and al-Qaeda members (according to the US military), each member paid $300 per month of US taxpayer money. They grew in strength to 100,000 men. US aid to the Councils was cut off last October on the understanding that the members would be absorbed into Iraqi government forces. To date, less than a third have been given government jobs.

lecture 18, "the dark years: vichy france"
john merriman

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the fall of France, and collaboration

1936, again, possibly a time when Hitler could have been stopped in the Rhineland.

all of this has to be seen, in France, in the context of World War I and its legacy--there was a strong feeling, Wilson, etc., that wars were bad things done by evil people (and this was implicit in the resolution of the Treaty of Versailles, of course)

no one wanted another war, but Hitler had been agitating for one from the outset.

there was a feeling that another war would be unthinkable, in France. have to remember the tremendously traumatizing effects of WWI.

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Hitler had of course been building military capacity in Germany, re-arming the nation, etc. Hitler's advisors had been expecting a war to begin, though, in 1940/1941--as we all know, the war actually begins on the 1st of September, 1939, when Hitler invades Poland (he takes power in 1933).

militarily, why does France fall so rapidly?

their respective troop strengths were relatively equal at the time of the invasion of France in May 1940. in tanks, the allies actually had superiority, though German tanks were lighter and faster (and they were used in divisions, which gave them an advantage).

Germans had a clear superiority in fighter power (and they had tried them out in Spain, don't forget)

how had the British and French been planning? they believed that it would be another war of attrition--a long, drawn-out battle in which a strong, defensive line would be critical.

the Germans, by contrast, believed in rapid attack--the "blitzkrieg"

the French are assuming that the forests in N. France and E. Belgium will be physical impediments to the German invasion, but did not prove to be this. 10 tank divisions pour through the forests and they simply waste these French tanks. in four days they're way inside France. the German High Command thought it would take 9 days--and it took 4!

Hitler does make one mistake, prof argues, which is he refuels, allowing the evacuation of French and British troops at Dunkirk.

you have refugees, and German fighter planes picking them off as they fled.

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a new French government, then, collaborates with the Germans--Vichy France is born. (France is divided in two zones; the "collaborationist" government has its capital in Vichy.)

involves people who actively assist the Nazis in achieving their goals, acting on their aspirations. by the end of 1943/1944, if you were a French collaborator and you find graffiti with the word "K" on your door, you were toast--because it meant that the Maquis (or the resistance) was confident enough to make that kind of threat.

again, it's not only France--in Belgium, for example, the right-wing Flemish were more likely to collaborate, and it remains a tension. in Budapest, way you see a goulish shoe-memorial to Jews and Communists gunned down by Hungarian collaborators.

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the historiography and history of collaboration is fascinating, prof is saying.

there's a myth of universal resistance, perpetuated by people who had actively collaborated and also by Charles De Gaulle (he needed people to forget the Communist resistance, and lead the French people to identify with his person and leadership--part of the mantle he'd assume.)

there was a movie from 1953-1954 about the Jews arrested in Paris in 1942--taken away, put in a transit camp north of Paris. in the film you see French guards--so what they do is they photoshop it, effectively.

three series of crucial events have jolted this myth, prof is arguing:

(1) the film called "the sorrow and the pity", which is 4.5 hrs long. what the producer does is he goes to one single town and he looked at what happened there in collaboration--some of the best documentary scenes about intentional forgetting, etc,--where teachers forget about their Jewish friends/colleagues. it was only shown in one theatre. made for French TV, but not shown until 1981/1982. why? because it told the awful truth, which was that lots of people believed better Hitler than Blum.

(2) "vichy france," by bob paxton in 1972. it cut through the intentional forgetting to look squarely at collaboration--bob paxton, actually, didn't have the right to french archival documents (the 50 year rule, and a "troublemaker"). but when this book came out, it had a very powerful effect. here was a great historian saying it "wasn't like what you learned in school."

(3) the trials--as collaboration came to be something that people wanted to know about--then people with bad histories were tracked down. one of the first was Touvier, who was involved in the torture of resisters, deportations of jews/communists. he was hidden by right-wing groups (bounced from monastery to monastery). but finally tracked down and tried. at this trial, Paxton became an "expert witness." and there was a trial of Barbi, as well, who had tortured people in Lyons. and then there was Maurice Papon, a functionary who signed the death-certificates of hundreds and hundreds of Jews. he went on to a very successful career in the fourth and fifth republic. and they caught up with this very very old man, and there was the question of whether he ought to be tried (in 1998, 1999 -- at one point he escapes, and they find him at a fine restraunt in Switzerland; he insists, "I was a good bureaucrat.") he used the "shield argument"--that if it wasn't for me(/we), thing would have been even worse. he was found guilty, and sent to jail.

"the Vichy syndrome."

so, from having no official memory of Vichy--only bits that had to do with the resistance--France underwent this re-evaluation of its relationship to the regime. and that was important for people who had lost their family members, for Jews (some 75,000 Jews never returned to France after Vichy). the big round-up in June 1942, for example, was not done by the Germans, but by the French police. one of the worst institutions of all was the milice (the militia), created in January 1943, to get tough on the Jews, the communists, the resistance.

remember, the militia's tactics required very personal forms of betrayal--people sending letters to the police, etc. (in the days after war, almost 10,000 collaborators were executed)

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voting left superimposed on a map of de-christianization and there would be remarkable similarities, as prof said before. that is not true of collaborationists--this is not regional, or from one social class (this is the case in Belgium, though.) of course you're more apt to have people from the middle-classes collaborate, but it's difficult to generalize (you have working-class collaboration).

what about religion? the role of the Pope in all of this, professor is saying, is nauseating. the Pope knew, but did nothing. zero. the Catholic Church hierarchy was generally very collaborationist.
Roosevelt and these people knew (they knew before they did anything, prof reminds us), but their dilemma is trickier (can you bomb death camps? train tracks?)

the Church got what it wanted, during Vichy France--no divorce, two people executed for abortion. (though he is also insisting that it is not this open and shut)

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now, what did the people who collaborated want? a couple of themes

(1) argument made by Petain after the war. by collaborating with the Germans, you were saving the French State. but, as Paxton says, "they may have been saving the French state, but they were destroying the French nation."

(2) the xenophobia that characterized the French right, before the occupation, was obviously a prevalent theme during the collaborationists. no Italians, no Spanish (especially no Marxists).

(3) anti-semitism--the French Vichy regime (it's only in November of 1942 that the Germans occupy the Vichy zone, because the resistance is mobilizing) puts in laws depriving Jews of rights that the Germans didn't even ask them to do. in some ways even harsher than the infamous Nuremberg laws of the Reich.

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Petain, for the fascists, will be an answer for:

(1) the "decadence" and "feuding France" of pre-Vichy France

(2) the restoration of the earthly power of the Church. restoration of the soul of France; the old, Catholic/Christian values. a return to the "moral order"--when things are passed down from the "moral orders."

(3) nationalism, of a new sort--away from the legacy of the French revolution, towards a nationalism of patriotism and values. and, of course, with this comes an exclusionary ethic.

(4) authority--not the dirtiness of "democracy"; authority flows from the top, down.

(5) peasantism. "true France," not the France of Jews, striking workers, communism, etc., virtue is found in the soil (Joan of Arc is a peasant girl, remember--she becomes a symbol of all this). cities are places where Jews and workers hang out. the true France is the France of peasants on the soil.

(6) corporatism--they've read about Mussolini and Italian fascism, making the argument that workers and bosses have the same interests. and you can resolve these conflicts in the idea of the Nation--strong, marching, plutonic warriors

It is important to bear in mind that the state has always remained a relatively distant entity for many people, especially in the non-urban parts of Sindh and Balochistan. In these peripheral regions, the state continues to be conceived of predominantly as an oppressive apparatus of coercion and the above-mentioned functions typically associated with the modern state are conspicuous by their absence (or by their selective provision). Increasingly it appears as if the state is coming to be conceived of in similar ways even in the Punjabi heartland of Pakistan.

lecture 17 -- "the popular front"
john merriman

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France in the 1920s and 1930s has to be understood in the context of the international situation in Europe--and, in particular, the rise of fascism.

by 1939, only, in Central and Eastern Europe, only Czechoslovakia remained a parliamentary regime--when you think of fascism you think of Mussolini and Hitler, but it's important to remember that there were no parliamentary regimes left in the entire region. and even where democracy survived in W. Europe, there were indigenous Fascist movements (not to mention the case of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939).

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so, today, the rise of the Right in France; and its relation to the Popular Front.

the Popular Front era in France is remembered as one of the "magic" moments of French history.

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the political details of the Cartel de Gauche (Left-leaning) that came to power after World War I can be left to the reading. but, for all these countries, the right-wing temptation of the 1920s was evident. Mussolini was on the cover of Time magazine eight times in the US--known as the man who got the trains running on time (even if it was only to the ski resorts that American journalists frequented, quips prof).

Hitler doesn't come to power till 1933--and Hitler was of course only the most successful of a bunch of right-wing leaders in Germany agitating for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic.

one of the salient tactics is corporatism--the philosophy that you can get rid of social strife by organizing industries in a vertical way. Mussolini talked a good game in this regard.

so: Fasicsm was a European phenomenon, as well as a French one.i

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the spiritual leader of French fascism was [de la Rochelle?]. a novelist whose work was obsessed with suicide. in his autobiographical novel he thought Fascism could resurrect a medieval, Christian spirituality in France. Accion Frances was also, at this time, a pro-Monarchist group operating on similar principles. in France, the extreme right and Catholicism were interlnked.

and these groups begin to create paramilitaries (which is obviously what happened with the Nazis in Germany, and Mussolini in the early 1920s). the Accion France, then, takes the tactics of the early Boulanger movement and resurrects them. you have, also, the growth of right-wing groups through the trade union federation, the CGT.

they want to abolish parliamentary democracy. this activism develops to the extent that they are condemned by the Pope. and, indeed, many members leave the organization at this time, fearing ex-communication.

a number of other groups, who are even more radical, start up. Faisceau, which had begun in 1919, but increases its membership, and believes in violent struggle ("will to power"). another, the "Cross of Fire," attracted war veterans--founded in 1928 as a non-political organization, and its membership swells to 60,000 people.

of course, there has to be money behind these movements. interestingly, a bunch of producers of luxury products were funding these folk. and, because the newspapers,etc. are controlled by the right, much of these groups have ready means to disseminate their message.

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why were middle-class people attracted to these movements? (a phenomenon characteristic of Italy and Germany, as well)

has to be seen in the context of the hard times of the 1920s--Europe is basically in a long depression, with the exception of the period from 1924-1929. E. Europe is in a very severe agricultural depression the entire time.

with this rampant inflation (of course nothing comparable to Germany), the people who get burned are middle-class people on pensions. people who have saved their entire life, and their savings are wiped out.

in Germany this is quite clear--you had bourgeois families forced to sell silvers/antiques in order to make ends meet.

these grievances are expressed, then, through various components of fascist ideology, which are virulently anti-communist, anti-Bolshevik, anti-communists, and virulently anti-semitic (Hitler begins as a socialist-hater, before he despises the Jews).

in the 1930s, of course, you have huge numbers of Spanish refugees into France. a further grievance.

furthermore, these groups despise parliamentary regimes. the Europe of the 20s and 30s was dictatorships. characterized by an aggressive nationalism.

this ties into xenophobia in France quite obviously--the population in France was basically stagnant, remember. France has relatively few numbers of people under the age of 20 (only about 30%), and relatively more people who were elderly. and beginning in 1935, more people died in France than are born there. who makes up the difference? Italians, Poles, Spaniards, Belgians, Jews--all are significant minorities (half of the 325,000 Jews had come after 1918).

7.5% of the French population consists of immigrants--highest of any country.

why, with the exception of Oswald Mosley, does the UK remain relatively immune? immigration in that country was relatively small compared to these other places (despite the fact that it was only in London that you would run into people of color, as early as the 18th century, because of the British empire, prof is noting).

you only need to look at the success of the National Front, prof is noting, today, to see the continuities.

the idea of "True France" is being threatened. immigrants are not included, of course. (Hitler's own pernicious view, prof is arguing, took this to its extreme--the power of deciding who remained part of the German people lay with the Fuhrer).

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this culminates in February 6th, 1934. a political scandal gives the extreme right an opportunity for action (this is a country that had political scandals before, of course). and so now the Republic is accused not only of being soft (not virile--a weak system without a strong executive), but also of being corrupt. the France of "camping out" will conquer the France of the Apertif(!).

the police look the other way as the right mobilize their forces on the street.

a Ukranian Jew, con-man, who made an illict fortune. gradually it all collapses on his head--in December 1933 he flees to the Alps, rents a villa. revelations pile up, one after the other. Stavisky was protected by government minister, who happened to be the brother of the Prime Minister. the Right takes full advantage, and urges a full protest against the Chamber of Deputies.

the Police move in to arrest him, and Stavisky blows his brains out. he leaves a suicide note to his son, though, which didn't seem quite right--the right-wing suspected the Republic was covering itself. on top of that he was a Jew, of course.

these demonstrations turn into riots, toppling the gov't (which is replaced by a coalition government).

on February 4th, 1934, every right-wing group plans to march in front of the Chamber of Deputies, plans to perhaps even overthrow the Republic. the police batter them back--prof's uncle claims to have been in a counter-demonstration.

14 demonstrators were killed, and several thousand were injured. several hundred policemen hurt.

on February 8th, the prime minister resigns, again.

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on February 12th, the largest demonstrations in French history occurs (until May 1968), in defense of the republic. organized by the Popular Front, which was organized in the wake of these right-wing demos. millions of people march, 24-hr strike following. the Republic seemed to have a new lease of life--but it could also be called, of course, a new "lease of death."

"something had changed," prof says, "these three parties--communists, socialists, radicals--were frightened."

in 1920, the Communist Party split from the Socialist Party. it retained some elements of the Guedist party; it was fairly top-down, along lines of democratic centralism. in 1922-1923, intellectuals were tossed from the party, as it obeyed quite faithfully orders from Moscow. provided very good social services, however, and so it had a prestige that quite predated their resistance during WWII. (330,000 members by 1936--particularly strong in the red belt around Paris, and with railroad workers/engineers)

they considered the socialists (and Leon Blum) to be a reformist party, so this was a painful alliance for them.

Blum himself was "bourgeois." Blum was an intellectual, literary critic, socially radical ("on Marriage"), etc. when Jaures was killed on 31st of July 1914, Leon Blum was the logical successor. he becomes the dominant figure in the socialist party.

Leon Blum was also Jewish. and one thing that you heard in 1934/1935/1936, right-wing students would chant "better Hilter, than Blum." at one time he was almost beaten to death by right-wing thugs.

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in the meantime, government after government falls.

in June 1934, the Communist party repudiates class vs. class strategy--allowing their alliance with the "bourgeois" socialists. and the three parties meet and decide on a compromise program--tax reform, shorter work week, unemployment benefits, international disarmament,, support for league of nations, dissolution of fascist league.

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on the 7th of March, 1936, German armies move into the Rhineland. Hitler wins the big bluff against the League of Nations and the Allied Powers (his advisors warn him against the move, but Hitler gets away with it)

this leads to May 1936, when the Popular Front wins the election (57% of the vote--386 of 608 seats in the Chamber of Deputies). the communists refuse to participate in the cabinet, but their adding to the mix of three has made this victory possible.

on 3rd June, 1936, Leon Blum becomes prime minister.

what happens now, however, is that the largest wave of strikes (until May 1968) break out in France. in June 1936, there are 12,000 strikes, involving 2 million workers (for the first time ever, workers occupy factories; this happens in Flint, Michigan too, at the same time). there are pre-existing grievances, fanned by Popular Front rhetoric before the election (Taylorism, as well; "killing one's soul 8 hrs of day," factory as prison).

what is interesting is that the strikes take the labor federation and the communists by surprise. this isn't the last time this happens--happens in May 1968 as well, prof notes.

Leon Blum calls the government and employers together, and sign the Matignon Agreements, which promise 15-20% raises, 40-hr work week, paid vacation for a month, and free admission to the Louvre. (working-class resorts at beach develop in this period, prof is noting--"the working-class vacation"). an important conquest.

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

but why does the Popular Front fail in the long run?

one of the reasons is because the employers have no intention of obeying their imperatives.

but really, it's the fact of the economic crisis--can't really bear the burden of these reforms, prof is arguing. wealthy people, also, run with their gold/silver to Switzerland. (Leon Blum does not put controls on currency).

and so at this point the Popular Front begins to unravel. in March 1937, police fire on demonstrating workers in Paris--the Communist Party denounces the gov't. the stock market goes into a tumble, the gov't has to devalue the Franc several times because of the outflow of gold.

but there's yet another reason that the Popular Front fails, says Prof, and that is Spain. people who lived in the late 1930s saw the war on Spain as a "war of Civilization." at the time people realized that it was a dry run for a war that was to come, later. the counter-revolution really starts in 1936 in Morocco--by 1939, an atrocity-filled war (but atrocities overwhelmingly on the side of the Fascists, no question, says prof) is ending.

the question was what was going to happen in Spain? but, of course, nobody gave arms to the Republicans. German planes strafe Guernica, though, and Italians try out their tanks.

there's a moment in France, when Blum is facing a crowd chanting "arms for spain, arms for spain"--and with tears streaming down his cheeks, Leon Blum says "I can't, I can't" (because the British and the Americans didn't want him to).

and, of course, Franco's regime lasts until 1975.

the Spanish Civil War is one of those moments, perhaps--maybe history would have been different if Hitler had been stopped at the Rhineland. or if Franco had been defeated.

as it pertains to the Popular Front in France, it survives, but in name only, until 1939. all this takes its toll. the government is defeated. Leon Blum ends up in jail, survives the war, and is active in politics during the Fourth Republic.

we live in a time of historical nostalgia, of course. prof's generation grew up listening to these tales of "arms for spain, etc." lots of the things that are good about France, prof is arguing, came out of this period of the Popular Front.

For two reasons. One is, it makes you actually very vulnerable if you’re a heavily debt-encumbered homeowner. And actually, the initial legislation was kind of interesting, the debate around it back in the 1930s, when it kind of said debt-encumbered homeowners don’t go on strike, and because it’s—you know, you’ve got to pay your mortgage. And so, this becomes, as it were, a millstone around your neck. And that then makes you very vulnerable to fluctuations in the market like we’re seeing right now, particularly if you have variable rate mortgages, things of that kind, and you can really easily get caught out. So, in effect, what we’ve seen in the housing market is a tremendous plundering of the assets of some of the most vulnerable people in the country. I mean, this has been the biggest loss of asset wealth to the African American population that there’s ever been.
(...) But as soon as the big guns get into trouble, the state bails them out. And this is what we call moral hazard, that actually because you’re bailing out Wall Street all of the time, then Wall Street will take high risks. And they’ve taken immensely high risks over the last thirty years and again and again and again being caught out. And each time they get caught out, the state steps in and saves them. That’s the connection, if you like, between the state and Wall Street. That’s the connection that has to be broken.
(...) I don’t see the neoliberalism as dead, if you say that neoliberalism is about consolidation of class power, because actually we’re seeing the further consolidation of it right now, rather than the lessening of it. And that’s what I—when I talk about the bank bailout, that’s what it was doing. So I’m kind of concerned.

Well, I’m starting to call a series of pieces I’m doing “Operation Rebranded,” because what we’re seeing unfold with the Obama administration’s foreign policy is basically continuing many of the worst parts of Bush’s foreign policy and sort of repackaging these policies. So, for instance, the Obama administration has dropped the use of the term "global war on terrorism” and uses phrases like “contingency operations” to describe the US occupation of Iraq. The latest news we have is that the Obama’s administration has decided on its mercenary firm of choice. Clearly, Obama did not want to continue at least a public relationship with Blackwater.

Well, they’re connected, because, you see, one of the great dangers of an economic crisis is it can lead to war. I remember Hitler coming to power very well. There were six million unemployed in Germany, and Hitler said it’s all due to the Jews and the communists and the trade unions. “Give me power,” said Hitler, “and I will give you jobs.” And he did. Half the unemployed, he put in the arms factories. The other half, he put in the German army. And we had another bloody war. And the two European wars from 1914 to 1945, in thirty-one years, cost 105 million lives, were lost in two wars, and that was not unpredicted with the grave economic crisis in the 1930s.

lecture 16, "the great war, grief and memory"
bruno cabanes (john merriman)

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the great war, "grief and memory"

mass death and mourning a fact of life in France well before the end of the first world war: around 50% of the soldiers killed during WWI lost their lives in the seventeen month period from August 1914-December 1915.

one must also add the deaths of the Spanish Flu in 1918, which killed up to 20 million people(!)

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but these figures mean nothing, prof argues, if one does not consider them in relation to private and collective mourning. i.e., we need more than a statistical, demographic understanding of mass death.

the challenge, then, is to grasp this process in its fullness.

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first, who were the people who were mourning? who were these "communities in mourning"?

second, the specificity of mourning in the aftermath of WWI--it can be studied, in this sense, in a comparative perspective, as well.

third, examine the mourning process itself--the relationship between personal suffering, and collective mourning--how grief becomes a collective process.

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from a demographic perspective, this is difficult. war widows lost their benefits, and so vanished from the statistics in 1920 and 1921. the numbers then that you find about 600,000 widows and 760,000 orphans is very rough--and this is not to mention the extended families.

so the concept of "communities in mourning" is a very useful one, as a way to grasp the scale of mourning after WWI.

EVERY social structure went into mourning after the WWI, prof is arguing.

"circles of mourning," as well.

the first: fellow soldiers--"mourning the dead." what did soldiers do on armistice day? first tried to find the bodies of their fellow soldiers, in order to bury them.

notion, also, of the "survivor's syndrome"--guilt at having been spared. predominant amongst French soldiers after WWI.

the second: parents, grandparents, family, etc.--larger family group has, most times, been underestimated. mourning a lost relative becomes a way to participate in the conflict, in a distant sense.

the third: friends--the story of friendship in wartime still needs to be written--especially from the perspective of the history of bereavement.

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second larger point--specificity of WWI mourning.

the generational mourning had been reversed--a whole generation was lost. many people in the cities were suffering from depression (Emile Durkheim died of grief, only one year after his son's death in 1915).

death was also experienced by the soldiers in a very solitary way--must be seen specifically in the extreme violence of the war, and in light of the religious rituals that were prevalent in the war. one of the pervasive fears was of dying alone in no man's land, abandoned by comrades. soldiers who fell wounded between the lines lay dying for hours, sometimes days. (1/3 of the 20,000 men who died on the Sommes in 1916 might have been saved had they been seen to). and this added an unbearable toll to the bereavement. "horrible, pitiful deaths on the fields of honor."

all the traditional stages of grieving, as per the Catholic tradition, were eliminated--absence of dead bodies (around 30% of the dead bodies were completely destroyed, could not be identified; after 1918, bodies remained on the battlefield until the French gave permission to repatriate them, which did not happen until 1920!--they were arguing for the abstract equality of the mourning process, even as prof is stressing the specificity, as well)

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third point: new rituals, new traditions

the violence of the war experience, the absence of dead bodies required new ways of commemorating the dead.

two major cultural processes, in particular, as personal grief was translated into collective mourning

(1) the nationalization of mourning--in the 1920s and 1930s, the battlefields were converted into commemorative sites, through a network of military cemeteries, parks, etc. these new sites of memory were often represented in objects, paintings, pictures, and a number of ceremonies were organized to pay homage.

and they clearly played a role in forging a new conception of french national unity. on november 11th, each commune would name the dead from "the lost generation," at their respective war memorials (unity of time, space, action).

(2) the spiritualization of mourning--the 1920s and 1930s were characterized by a type of spiritual revival. prof giving one emblematic example.

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”.

lecture 7, "the kansas-nebraska act and the birth of the republican party"
david blight

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the urgency of political tumult motivated by the discovery of gold in California. California was ready for statehood--and already people realized how big/rich it was. would it be a free state, or slave state?

the South's greatest leader delivered what became known as "The Southern Address", and in it John C. Calhoun said many things: that the North threatens to reduce the question to "resistance or submission." he makes California the litmus test.

one of the oldest ideas in US political culture is that great conflict comes when one side cannot accept the result--that they cannot accept a political outcome. this is the question in the 1850s--can some kind of compromise be reached?

Clay invites Daniel Webster, Northern Whig, who was anti-slavery (though never a card-carrying abolitionist), had been in Congress since 1823. seen as the voice of New England. "Liberty and Union," was his phrase--he always seemed to be the union man, even as he was an anti-slavery man. Henry Clay, slaveholder from Kentucky, founder of the Whig Party, its organizational genius, original founder of the American Colonization Society, was someone with great influence in Congress. He pulls in Clay and says we've got to save the union.

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what were the issues in 1850?

(1) California is ready for statehood, overnight almost. miners flock there.

(2) DC was a huge center of the slave-trade. there was a massive slave jail 2.5 blocks from Congress. foreign visitors would stand in awe of the Capitol, and they would ask, "where's the slave jail?" so there were a lot of Northerners who were saying lets deal with this question as part of the larger compromise.

(3) Fugitive Slaves, in the so-called underground railroad. and the term "underground railroad" emerges in debates on the floor of the House and Senate. Southerners wanted a federally-enforced Fugitive Slaves Act.

(4) and then there was the issue of Texas--the boundaries had never been determined. and the question was how would you divide up Texas (there was no New Mexico or Arizona, yet). the idea was that if you moved the border back 300 or 400 miles, you might free up space for new states (and they would, in the Southern imagination, be slave states, further tipping the national balance in their favor).

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Daniel Webster's support for the five measures of the Compromise of 1850

(1) California would be admitted as a Free State (Clay said that if you were to hold a referendum there there's no question that it would be a Free State; they're all little people that are flocking there)

(2) in return, the South is going to get a whole new, much stronger, federally-enforced Fugitive Slave Act.

(3) abolish the slave trade in DC--Northerners will like that.

(4) let's move the boundary back 350 miles back, and let southerners dream of 2-3 more states in that open space. let's let them feel secure that California may come in as a Free State, but there's potential for new Southern states in the future.

(5) how would slavery be determined in the SW? popular sovereignty--let the people have a referendum, and vote. (except for California, remember--this is the stuff of compromise).

(NB: Daniel Webster says I can't take the Fugitive Slave Act back to MA; Henry Clay says you must).

how was the Compromise finally passed? there was no certainty it would work--after Clay initiated the debate, with an emotional speech. Daniel Webster held forward, in the 7th March speech--"I speak today for the preservation of the Union." he was asking, remember, Northerners to vote to be complicit in the slave trade. people call it the greatest speech in the history of the US Senate--it also ruined Webster's political career.

Calhoun was unable to deliver a speech. he was too sick (he'll be dead by the Fall). delivered, instead, by his colleague Mason. Calhoun's speech actually frightened many Northerners into voting for the Compromise, despite their disdain for it. and so it passed, in early August, 1850.

Henry Clay was terminally ill, had gone home to Kentucky. he'd be out of the picture by the end of that very year. Webster was to be denounced, forever, in his own political party and constituency.

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but it passed. and, in some ways, saved the union. BUT: "it was far more an armistice than it really was a compromise. it began to collapse almost as soon as it passed." people were certainly relieved in the North, and there were rally celebrating its passing.

at the same time, the State of Georgia legislature passed its conditional approval of the Compromise, saying that it depends on the North's good faith. North replied in kind.

there were vehement protests against the Fugitive Slave Act. above all else, it was this Act that led to further conflict. it led to as many as 20,000 free blacks and freed slaves leaving the Northern states for Canada, between 1850 and 1857/8.

this will lead to the establishment of special federal magistrates, whose sole job it was to set up a police apparatus to retrieve fugitive slaves and identified (there was a monetary incentive to convict vs. acquit!). this led to famous fugitive slave rescues--abolitionists carted a slave from Syracuse off to Canada, a slave broken out of jail in Boston taken to Concord, MA and then to Montreal.

there were many other slave rescues, as well.

resistance to slavery was direct, sometimes violent--the underground railroad had become overground.

one could argue that the most important thing that happened in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. she made everyone complicit in the slave story (the most despicable character in the book is Miss Ophelia, a thoroughly racist anti-slavery character). the whole world was suddenly reading a work of fiction about slavery (it sold 300,000 copies in its first year; re-printed into 20 languages in its first 5 years of existence). brought an awareness of the slavery problem, as never before.

in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, now, though--the country had to face this question, by 1853/1854 was what was going to happen with Kansas and Nebraska territories. the parts left over from the Louisiana Purchase (1803).

but the Kansas-Nebraska Act was at the front of the agenda of the US Congress at the end of 1853, in the environment of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act (which was enforced fairly effectively in the North, despite this well-known resistance to the Act). the Anthony Burns rendition case: after the earlier freeing, his trial became a litmus test. there was an all-night vigil held by abolitionists, in protest. eventually they bought him back from a farm in SC.

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what was firing the American imagination at this time was not just the West, but the Railroad West. would the eastern terminus of the West-going railroad be in Chicago, or further south in a slave state? stephen douglass, the man who negotiated the Compromise of 1850, wanted the terminus in Chicago. (though, prof is saying, his approach to slavery is critical: Stephen Douglas believes that climate will solve the problem of slavery--if the soil is good, temperatures are right, slavery will exist--climate will solve the problems!).

back to Kansas-Nebraska--what principle will you apply? had the Compromise of 1850 superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820? so which rule is in play? do you apply, even the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (which said it will never exist in the early Northwest)?

in other words, this is the great question of the 1850s--would the American pragmatic tradition "continue" to solve this?

Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. he wrote three different versions, in fact. went from vaguest to most specific, because Southerners put his feet to the fire.

version 1: January 4, 1854--"as their constitution may prescribe." (leave it to time, climate, and good sense--Southerners said not enough).

version 2: January 10, 1854--a direct statement of popular sovereignty. "decision to be left to the people residing therein." (but, Dixon tells him that he must rid the bill of geographic shackless--repudiate Missouri Compromise, etc.

version 3 (which passed): two measures--(1) explicit repeal of Missouri Compromise line; (2) popular sovereignty. (note: this opens up the whole of the West to the possibility of slavery).

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the Kansas-Nebraska Act is arguably the seminal event of American politics in the 1850s: (1) it will sectionalize American politics; (2) break apart what's left of the Whig party; (3) give birth to the first successful third party coalition movement (the Republican party)

note the vote count: Northern Democrats were split right in half, Southern Democrats voted 57-2 in favor; Northern Whigs voted 45-0 against, and Southern Whigs 12-7. and the four Free Soilers voted against, of course. (113-10 passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but it breaks apart the system, and brings about an anti-slavery coalition that will elect a President within six years).

lecture 15, "the home front"
john merriman

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1917 and 1918--the mutinies.

the mutinies have to be seen in the context of all this, but in particular they have to be seen in the context of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, which was the darkest period in four years of dark days.

began on July 1st, 1916--on the first day, almost 40,000 British soldiers were wounded, 20,000 were killed. there was a casualty for every half-meter of the front line. there were more British soldiers killed in the first three days of this battle than there were Americans killed in WWI, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq combined(!). those are phenomenal losses.

it's easy, perhaps, to poke fun at Oxbridge class society--but, in WWI, the flower of British youth perished in these battles.

1917 is the crucial year in determining the outcome of a war that seemed like it was going to go on forever. by the end of 1917 and into March 1918, the military planners begin to think that they'll win the war by 1920, 1921. as so many people died, to win a few kilometers, there were wags who said we'll reach the Rhine by 2007(!).

but two things happen in 1917, that are crucial.

(1) Bolshevik Revolution, after the February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar--people wake up and discover that the Emperor has no clothes. Kerensky's provisional government keeps Russia in the war. But by October the Bolshevik's take power, and withdraws Russia from the war by March 1918 at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (there was a deceleration in the war effort before this; and there were any way quite a number of desertions, though less than you might have thought.) (2) the other thing that happens is that the Americans enter the war. they were officially neutral, though the majority of the population supported the Allies, but it's not really that that brings the US into the war. the German High Command had decided that the only way they could win was to knock Britain out of the war. and the way they were going to do that was to sink ships supplying munitions, etc. to the British (a submarine campaign). they placed warnings at ports in US and Philadelphia. sunk the Lusitania on her maiden voyage on 1915, killing 1,200 civilians. (in the 1960s/1970s divers found that the ship was carrying munitions, and that was the German claim). over the long run, the man that was going to keep the US out of the war, Woodrow Wilson, ends up taking the US into WWI (despite widespread domestic opposition--Wilson couldn't get the Treaty of Versailles ratified by Congress, after returning home).

what did the entry of the Americans really mean? not so much troops--troops don't really make the difference, really. the big difference is that the curves cross--the ability of the Germans to supply their own war-machine cannot compete with the combined power of American industrial might. factories easily transformed into the production of arms. and it's at that point when many people in the French and British High Command realize that they will win the war--though they're still unsure at what cost.

all this helps set up March 1918, when the Germans decide that "it's now or never"

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what about the mutinies?

most people in France did not want war in 1914. but because it was easy to portray Germany as the aggressors, the vast majority of the population recognized the urgency of the fight.

to be sure, there are tensions within French society re: the war. there was tremendous resentment. at the Opera, they distributed coal as per rations--as people waited in line, they saw the fancy people in their big cars going off to the restraunts (people who had profited tremendously from Big Business' role in war). so there is class tension fueled by the War.

more than that, you have tensions felt by peasants, who are conscripted without any real possibility of refusing (unless they've already had two brothers killed!).

you have refugees, as well--refugees from the North (sometimes even German-speaking, and Flemish), settling in other areas, as a strain on local resources. you have grumbling, then, about these "Germans" of the North.

many women and men also go on strike in 1917 (689 strikes, affecting 300,000 workers--as compared to 98 strikes in 1916)--not defeatist strikes, but they're agitating for better conditions. why should you work in terrible conditions when the "Big Hats" are simply getting more wealthy?

there are attempts to break these strikes.

but, in sum, 1917 is a year when morale on the home front is lower than ever. (prof just noting that conditions are worse in Berlin than they are in Paris; better in London than in either place)

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what about the mutinies? how serious?

there were probably only two totally reliable divisions standing between Paris and the Germans, after these mutinies.

nobody on the home front really knew about them (part of this is that letters sent home were censored, remember). nor did the Germans, nor did the British.

it's not too hard to say why these mutinies take place when they do. or why they take place at all. it is not defeatism, but these tactics of trench warfare were killing hundreds of thousands of people for nothing--for no reason. there isn't any hope, in this sense.

the mutinies were, indeed, widespread--refusals to "go over the top" simply spread like wirefire. soldiers say they don't want to get killed any more for five cents a day (in some places red flags go up--in some places black flags). though remember socialists had joined the war effort (jules guesde ends up a minister in 1915).

two regiments decide that they're going to march on Paris, and convince the Chamber of Deputies to stop the war. most of the Generals foolishly claim Bolshevik propaganda behind this.

in May and June about 40,000 soldiers were involved in collective acts of refusal (other statistic goes as high as 70,000). the first signs that the soldiers supposed to go "over the top" started ba-ing like sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse. there was socialist and anarchist literature that had gotten into the trenches, but it was obviously not a Bolshevik conspiracy.

a General ends the policy of these mad attacks, over the tops. there were some people who were put up against the wall and shot, for sure, but we don't know. there were 3427 condemnations--about 10% of the people who were court-martialed. 49 were condemned to death, which were carried out immediately.

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in the Spring of 1918, the Germans launch a major offensive (Ludendorf Offensive)--their first since 1914.

at the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is having all sorts of problems (Franz Joseph I, Emperor-King since 1867, dies in 1916). all the predictable cracks are opening up--the Germans are quite unsure whether the Austrian-Hungarian Empire will be able to hang on, fighting against the Italians, for example.

the Americans have, by the Spring of 1918, 325,000 soldiers.

so Ludendorf decides on a massive offensive. encouraged by the fact that there are younger soldiers, barely 18, that have newly arrived in the ranks. and older troops have arrived, as well. so on the 21st of March, 1918, after a relatively brief bombardment of 5 hours, 1.6 million men attack the allied defenses in five separate offenses across a front of 40 miles. and they do break through--some pass 40 miles to the other side.

on Easter Sunday, shells fall on Paris, and they begin taking lives.

but what happens, is predictable. as on a small scale, the Germans begin to outrun their cover and supplies. they begin to encounter stiff resistance at all of these five points. in July, they try a final offensive, they fail, and know that they're simply not going to win.

at that point, morale plunges dangerously in Germany. in January 1918, 250,000 workers had anyway defined the government by going on strike. in July, the British, French, Americans counter-attack quite effectively, using tanks. on the 8th of August, 1918, the German army's darkest day, a British force moves 8 miles(!). at this point, Ludendorf tells Wilhem II that "it's all over but the shouting."

and, at the end, Willhelm the II will slink over the Dutch border, and sign an armistice in a railroad car north of Paris. the war ends on the 11th of November, 1918 (people were killed, afterward, because they didn't know that the armistice had come along).

and, alas, the Spanish Flu comes on the tail of the War. the biggest pandemic since the Black Death.

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the statistics, which are simply staggering:

Russia (1.8 million dead, 5 million wounded--nothing like WWII, of course, when 25 million died)
France (at least 1.4-1.5 million dead, 4.3 wounded)
British, including the Empire (908,000 dead, 2 million wounded)
Italy (508,000 dead)
Serbia (208,000 dead)
Belgium (38,000 dead)

Germany (2 million dead, 4 million wounded--how do you explain losing this many and losing the war? well that's something that the Right would latch on to, in the war's aftermath. it was the socialists, of course)
Austria-Hungary (1.1 million dead, 3.6 million wounded)

in France, there are 36,000 communes, and there were only 12 that didn't have somebody killed. that's why you see war memorials everywhere.

"if God exists, how could he let this happen?"

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