lenin, socialism and religion (1905)

[ah...] The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
(...) We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies... Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.
(...) Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the “servants of God”. We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition...
(...) So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.
(...) If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog.
(...) [absolutely right] But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.

david mcnally, from financial crisis to world slump (2009)

(37): feedback loops, of course: "So, if the first phase of the global crisis centred on the financial sector, with a stunning series of bank-collapses, the second phase is concentrated in manufacturing, with a wave of failures, bailouts and massive downsizing ofnon-financial corporations. But downsizing and restructuring will, in turn, trigger big drops in global demand (as laid-off workers cut back consumption and corporate demand retrenches), which, in turn, will hit firms in services (such as hotels and business assistance) and hammer the current-account balances and financial systems of scores of nation-states, sparking yet further banking crises."

(38): this fact will be important to the larger indictment, of course: "Meanwhile, East Asia, which was the heart of the neoliberal wave of expansion (1983–2007), to be discussed below, is now the centre of the overaccumulation storm."

(38-39): China: "The centre of the wave of accumulation of the past twenty-fi ve years,
as global production-chains ran through its manufacturing base, China is now at the nexus of the overaccumulation-crisis. While predictions that Chinese industry is running at only 50 per cent of capacity may be extreme, there can be little doubt that huge numbers of factories have closed, while many are operating at dramatically reduced levels... Trying to manage an economy that needs economic growth rates of eight per cent a year just to absorb the massive fl ows of rural migrants into industrial centres, Chinese offi cials now describe the still worsening employment situation as ‘grim’ and worry openly about social unrest."

(39): the spectre of deflation: "Overaccumulation, asset-defl ation and price-cutting now threaten a downward spiral in prices and profi ts that would spell a seriously prolonged global slump."

(40): the size of the bailout, globally (see FN 18): "And we are very far from the endpoint. Despite a stunning series of bailouts of the banking system in the Global North approaching $20 trillion, or 30 per cent of world GDP, the international fi nancial system continues to stagger."

(40): "More banks will fail, more countries will be forced to turn to the IMF in order to stay afl oat." [what to make of this? especially since it was widely agreed that the IMF's time had passed? is this empirically realistic?]

(41): KEY--"[unlike] the savings-and-loan meltdown of the early 1990s, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (1998) or the bursting of the dot.com bubble (2000–1) – this one has moved from a fi nancial meltdown to a eneralised economic crisis. And, unlike crises that were regionally confi ned – East Asia (1997), Russia (1998), Argentina (2000–1) – this is a globalising crisis at the heart of the system. We confront, in other words, a generalised global crisis in the reproduction of capital and of the relations between capital and global labour that have characterised the neoliberal period. Th e neoliberal reorganisation of world-capitalism is now undergoing a systemic shock."

(41): this, clearly, he sees as his central contribution: "In what follows, I argue that we need a more dynamic, historical and nuanced account of what has happened to world-capitalism over the past quarter century than has been generally off ered. Too many radical analyses focus either on regulatory frameworks or the crisis of profi tability of the 1970s to explain what is happening today. In so doing, each approach ignores crucial features of the dramatic processes of restructuring and accumulation that ran across the neoliberal period – and that laid the basis for the current crisis. I further argue that this crisis should be analysed in terms of a breakdown in prevailing valueforms, including models of value-measurement, and that this breakdown opens up new spaces for value-struggles – struggles over the very forms for reproducing social relations – that could trace the outlines of a radical and systemic counter-project to that of capital."

(41-42): not, in other words, in these two camps: "On the Left, most analyses of the crisis have tended to fall into one of two camps. On the one hand, we fi nd a series of commentators who view the fi nancial meltdown as just the latest manifestation of a crisis of profi tability that began in the early 1970s, a crisis that has eff ectively persisted since that time. In another camp is a large number of commentators who see the crisis as essentially caused by an explosion of fi nancial transactions and speculation that followed from deregulation of fi nancial markets over the past quarter-century."

(42): absolutely right--"Th ey [the latter approach] confuse policy reactions to the globalisation of production and fi nance with causes of the current crisis. It is, of course, true that fi nancial deregulation is a contributing factor in the current crisis. But, rather than driving the process of fi nancial liberalisation, deregulation followed and responded to structural transformations... proponents of the deregulation-thesis lack an explanation as to why this crisis has not been restricted to fi nancial markets; they are unable to probe its interconnection with problems of global overaccumulation. Secondly, because these commentators are prone to describe the problem in terms of neoliberal policychanges, rather than capitalism, they advocate a return to some sort of Keynesian re-regulation of fi nancial markets."

(42-43): important--i accept this, but we still have to be able to explain generalized stagnation: "Those analyses that eff ectively read the current crisis in terms of a decline in the rate of profi tability from the mid-1960s to early 1970s have the merit of focusing on deeper problems at the level of capitalist accumulation, and, for this reason, I will engage them at considerably more length. For the most part, however, these approaches tend to be amazingly static, ignoring the specifi c dynamics of capitalist restructuring and accumulation in the neoliberal period. Th ere is a particularly unhelpful tendency in many of these analyses to treat the entire thirty-fi ve year period since 1973 as a ‘crisis’, a ‘long downturn’, or even a ‘depression’. Yet, such assessments downplay the dramatic social, technical and spatial restructuring of capitalist production that occurred across the neoliberal period, all of which signifi cantly raised rates of surplus-value and profi tability, and led to a volatile – indeed ‘turbulent’ – but nonetheless real process of sustained capitalist expansion, centred on East Asia."

(43-45): three methodological protocols:

1. "I insist, first, that we need to treat the world-economy as a totality that is more than the sum of its parts... Much discussion of the neoliberal period has focused on a number of capitalistically developed nations – most frequently the US, Germany and Japan – and treated the world-economy as largely an aggregate of these parts."
   
2. "Secondly, it is vital to recognise that an assessment of world-capitalism cannot make its focus the performance of national economies per se. Capital does not invest in order to boost Gross Domestic Product (GDP), national income, or aggregate national employment. It invests in order to expand itself via the capture of shares of global surplus-value (although what individual capitalists attend to are rates of return on total investment)."
3. "Th ird, the unique quarter-century long postwar-boom (1949–73) ought not to be the benchmark against which everything else is deemed a ‘crisis’. Th at great boom was the product of an exceptional set of social-historical circumstances that triggered an unprecedented wave of expansion. But, prolonged expansion with rising levels of output, wages and employment in the core-economies is not the capitalist norm; and the absence of all of these is not invariably a ‘crisis’. It is utterly misleading to imagine that capital is in crisis every time rates of increase in world or national GDP fall below fi ve or six per cent per annum. Indeed, where wage-compression characterises a phase of capitalist expansion, this may be favourable to profi tability while suboptimal in terms of the growth of consumer-demand and annual rates of national economic growth. Yes, capitalist expansion under such conditions throws up limits to itself. But this is what we should expect of all capitalist ‘régimes of accumulation’. Th e capitalist mode of production is inherently contradictory at multiple levels; every pattern of capital-accumulation involves self-generated limits."

(45): My analysis will build upon three main theses:

1. "Following the recessions of 1974–5 and 1980–2 and the ruling-class off ensive against unions and the Global South that took off in this period, severe capitalist restructuring did generate a new wave of capitalist growth, albeit a much more uneven and volatile one than occurred during the great boom of 1949–73... [E. Asia is important to this story, again--see actual text for details...]"
2. "Alongside and interacting with these changes, a wholesale reorganisation of capitalist fi nance occurred, stimulated by a metamorphosis in forms of world-money (analysed in Section 4 below)"
3. [so this crisis has its origins in 1997, rather than in a long, thirty-year downturn] "Th e upward trend in profi t-rates from the early 1980s sustained a wave of capitalist expansion that began to falter in 1997, with the crisis in East Asia. The East-Asian crisis signalled the onset of new problems of overaccumulation that shape the contours of the present crisis."

THESIS ONE

(47): CRITICAL: "Central to my argument is the claim that intense processes of capitalist restructuring throughout the neoliberal period created a new social-spatial reconfi guration of capital and a new, uneven and volatile wave of capitalist expansion (and drove key processes of the phenomenon known as ‘globalisation’). Th rough a dialectic of global restructuring that has reconfi gured labour and capital both within and outside the core, the world-capitalist economy has been decisively remade. I will take diff erent sides of this dialectical process in turn. While some commentary often seems to suggest that very little restructuring of capital has occurred at the core of the system since the crises of 1973–82, it is clear that major re-organisations of work-process and technology have in fact taken place."

(48): "Th e cumulative eff ects of these processes were profound. In the fi rst instance,
they involved a sustained and signifi cant rise in the rate of exploitation... [Secondly,] Th is increase in the rate of surplus-value in the US went hand in hand with major improvements in the productivity of new capital-investment. As both Mohun and Edward Wolff further show, the tendential rise in the organic composition of capital35 that characterised the period 1947–82 was abruptly reversed during the period of vigorous neoliberal expansion (1982–97) and the productivity of new investment rose."

(49): seems important--"In the absence of such powerful class-resistance, crises will serve as moments of reorganisation that create conditions for increases in labour-productivity and rates of profi t – which, in turn, make renewed expansion possible." [in other words, capitalism cannot self-destruct]

(49): tracking the profit-rate (see graph; not from article): "And it is decidedly clear in this regard that, after falling consistently from 1964–82, profi t-rates experienced a signifi cant recovery after 1982, as detailed studies for both the US and Europe have shown. True, profi tability did not return to the levels of the mid-1960s. But sustained recovery at lower levels is still that – sustained recovery that makes possible ongoing accumulation."

(49-50): "Th e mid-1980s are a decisive turning point in this regard, as capital based in Japan and Germany... turned outward in dramatic fashion... " [globalized production chains in E. Asia, etc.]

(51): CRITICAL--"Across the quarter century 1980–2005, the world’s ‘export-weighted’ global labour-force quadrupled. Most of this growth occurred after 1990 and about half of it took place in East Asia, where the working class increased nine-fold – from about 100 million to 900 million workers. South Asia, too, saw significant growth in both industry and the number of industrial workers.45 While the accuracy of these calculations can be debated, more conservative estimates still suggest that the world working class doubled in size over the past two decades."

(52): fair enough, this is one of his interventions (and it's fair, especially because it addresses the lacuna identified by Arrighi, without becoming Arrighi's narrative)--"Th e fact that, by 2002, there were twice as many manufacturing workers in China than in the G-7, where the number has been in a pretty steady decline for decades, is indicative of major structural transformations that have taken place in the global economy throughout the neoliberal period. Without accounting centrally for thesedevelopments – that is, by setting them at the heart of an account of the neoliberal period – we fail to grasp key dynamics of the system in recent decades."

(53): important--"It will not do to say that, for twenty-fi ve years, crisis was ‘postponed’ because credit was pumped into the system... sustained asset-infl ation – the ‘bubble economy’ – takes off from about 1996 on, not from 1982."

(55): "So, while the entire period after 1982 cannot be explained in terms of credit-creation, the postponement of a general crisis after 1997 can. But as the accompanying credit-bubble burst, beginning in the summer of 2007, it generated a major fi nancial crisis. And, because of underlying problems of overaccumulation, this fi nancial crisis necessarily triggered a profound global economic slowdown."

THESIS TWO

(56): "However, in many respects, the term fi nancialisation can be, and has been, highly misleading. To the degree to which it suggests that fi nance-capitalists and their interests dominate contemporary capitalism, it is especially so. And, where it has been taken to imply that late capitalism rests on the circulation rather than the production of goods – as if we could have one without the other – it has contributed to absurd depictions of the world-economy today. Moreover, the lines between industrial and fi nancial capital are, in practice, often quite blurred, with giant fi rms engaging in both forms of appropriating profit."

(56): "What the term ‘fi nancialisation’ should capture, in my view, is that set of transformations through which relations between capitals and between capital and wage-labour have been increasingly fi nancialised – that is, increasingly embedded in interest-paying fi nancial transactions. Understanding this enables us to grasp how it is that fi nancial institutions have appropriated ever larger shares of surplus-value."

(56): refers to three phenomena, in fact:

1. (57-59) the mutation in the form of world-money that occurred in the early
   1970s: "value-forms have been extended at the same time as value-measures (and predictions) have become more volatile. Th is has given neoliberal globalisation a number of distinct characteristics and a propensity to enormous credit-bubbles and fi nancial meltdowns of the sort we are witnessing at the moment...
   
2. (59-62) the financial effects of neoliberal wage-compression over the past thirty
   years: "Five dynamics fi gure especially prominently here: i) the geographic relocation of production, with signifi cant expansion of manufacturing industries in dramatically lower-wage areas of East Asia and, to a lesser degree, India, Mexico, Eastern Europe, and so on; ii) the downward pressure on wages triggered by a huge expansion in the reserve army of global labour resulting from massive dispossession of peasants and agricultural
   labourers, particularly in China and India; iii) the increase in relative surplusvalue brought about by the boosts to labour-productivity (output per worker per hour) resulting from the combined eff ects of lean-production techniques and new technologies; iv) increases in absolute surplus-value triggered by an increase in work-hours, particularly in the United States; v) sharp cuts to real wages brought about by union-busting, two-tiered wage systems, and cuts to the ‘social wage’ in the form of a reduction in non-wage social benefi ts,
   such as health-care, food- and fuel-subsidies, pensions and social-assistance programmes... Just as the wealthiest households demanded a plethora of fi nancial instruments in which to invest, large numbers of working-class people turned to credit-markets – particularly in the context of dramatically lowered interestrates after 2001 – in order to sustain living standards."
   
3. (62-66): the enormous global imbalances (revolving around the US currentaccount defi cit) that have flooded the world-economy with US dollars: "two interconnected phenomena become crucial to postponing a general slump: monumental growth of debt-loads; and the US current-account defi cit (its shortfall in trade in goods and services and interest-payments with the rest of the world), which combined to allow the American economy to operate as the ‘Keynesian engine’ of the global economy over the past decade. And, here too, as we shall see, the new form of world-money played a central role... Having driven down costs through the course of the crisis, East-Asian fi rms were soon exporting their way back to growth, developing huge trade-surpluses and soaring international reserves (mainly dollars). But this export-led growth was sustained overwhelmingly by the growing trade- and current-account defi cits in the US. As commentators have noted, the American economy eff ectively became ‘the consumer of last resort’. By 2000, for instance, US imports accounted for almost one-fi fth of worldexports, and four per cent of world gross domestic product. But this level of consumption of foreign goods could only be sustained by 2006 at the cost of an $857 billion US current-account defi cit... Th e recovery after 1997, in other words, was built on the pillars of exceptio nally low US interestrates, particularly from 2001; steady growth in consumer-indebtedness; and a swelling US current-account defi cit."
   

(60): "Whereas, in 1991, the wealthiest one per cent of Americans owned 38.7 per cent of corporate wealth, by 2003 their share had soared to 57.5 per cent."

(61): wow: "All of these trends led to a quadrupling of private and public debt in US, from slightly more than $10 trillion to $43 trillion, during the period of Alan Greenspan’s tenure as President of the Federal Reserve (1987–2005)"

(62): important to the larger argument: "The investment-boom in East Asia created enormous excess-capacity in computer-chips, autos, semi-conductors, chemicals, steel, and fi bre-optics. ‘A persistent trend to overcapacity’, observed the World Bank at the time, had induced ‘price wars and intense competition’. One key indicator of these problems of overcapacity and price-wars is the consumption defl ator, which measures prices in consumer-goods. Th at index shows that US prices for consumer-durables – electronics, appliances, cars and more – began to decline in the autumn of 1995. Th is signal of rising productivity and overproduction off ers an important clue as to the structural underpinnings of the crisis that broke out in East Asia (the centre of themanufacturing boom of the neoliberal era)."

(64): facts of overcapacity in China: "According to the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s steel industry had developed an annual capacity of 470 million metric tons at a time when actual output equalled only 350 million metric tons. Th is excess-capacity of 120 million metric tons was greater than the total real output (112.5 million metric tons) of the world’s second-largest steel-producing country, Japan. Even worse, problems of overaccumulation haunted the ironalloy industry, where capacity-utilisation had slumped to a mere 40 per cent by 2005. And significant overcapacity plagued the auto-, aluminium-, cementand coke-industries. Detailed studies suggested, for example, that by 2005 China’s home-appliance market had overcapacity-rates of 30 per cent in washing machines, 40 per cent in refrigerators, 45 per cent in microwave ovens and a mind-blowing 87 per cent in televisions."

(65-66): problem of re-starting, given the problems that set in with American indebtedness and slowdown: "But private capital had spoken. Belief in the US ‘boom’ was evaporating. Th e real-estate bubble began to defl ate, mortgage-backed securities entered their free fall, hedge-funds (fi rst at Bear Stearns) collapsed, followed by investment-banks. Th e rout was on – and it is far from over. In the process, the capacity of whopping US current-account defi cits, underpinned by debtfuelled consumer-spending, to buoy the world-economy appears to be exhausted. Yet, to rebalance the global economy, to eliminate huge US defi cits and enormous East-Asian surpluses, means to destroy the source of demand that enabled growth in a period of overaccumulation – and it would also mean much larger falls in the US dollar. For this reason, short of a long slump that destroys huge amounts of capital, it will be extremely diffi cult for the world-economy to find a new source of demand suffi cient to restart sustained growth..."

(67): "Th is is what it means when Marx says a crisis involves a destruction of capital. Th e ‘values’ of fi ctitious capitals – stocks, bills and all kinds of paperassets – which were previously treated as if they were real assets (and against which fi nancial institutions borrowed), enter a freefall."

(68): explaining credit default swaps: "But, whereas death-rates are relatively constant (at least for those whose lives can actually be insured), in the midst of a fi nancial crisis defauly-rates are not. To make matters worse, any investor can buy a Credit Default Swap, even if they do not own a single share of the company in question. Th is encourages speculators to literally bet on the failure of a particular company. If you think GM will default on its debt, for instance, buying a CDS on GM debt is a great way to get a payout many times higher than what the CDS costs. As a result, as speculative bets build up, the insuring party (the seller of CDSs) is on the hook for a growing number of claims in the event of default. In crisis conditions, however, the insurer can quickly go under, unable to pay out to every claimant. But, in that event, nobody is protected any longer against default of the toxic waste they might be holding. And that means complete and total fi nancial-market panic."

(69-70): the usefulness of derivatives in a floating-exchange rate regime: "After all, the profi ts made by foreign branches of a corporation – say in Korean won or Turkish lira – can be completely wiped out when repatriated to the home offi ce, as a result of drops in the values of those currencies. Derivatives, by allowing corporations to contract to buy a currency at a particular exchange-rate some time in the future – or to purchase the right to borrow at a certain rate of interest in a given currency – have played a crucial role in helping capitalist enterprises manage these risks."

(71): this is another of McNally's specific claims, which he sees as his contribution: "Yet, by deploying reifi ed, mathematical concepts of space and time, the models which guided derived pricing have eff ectively imploded. As a result, a classic crisis of capitalist measurement is manifesting itself, in part in the form of a breakdown in risk-measurement and derivatives-pricing. During every crisis, value-measurement is radically disrupted and destabilised. Pressures of overaccumulation and declining profi tability induce a destruction of values that re-organise the foundations of capitalist production. In the process, existing capitals are de-valued, until a new and relatively stable valuation is found. In fact, for Marx, an essential feature of crises is that they destroy the old value-relations that persisted through a period of boom, overaccumulation and declining profi tability in order to lay the basis – through destruction and devaluation of capital and labour-power – for a new set of value-norms. Today, as we have seen, derivatives off er an indirect way of trying to measure value by way of measuring risk. But, in the midst of this crisis, the risk-measurement models that have guided derivatives-markets have completely and utterly failed."

(72): and labor? -- "crises are also moments in which the subordination of labour to capital must be re-organised, and in which new spaces of resistance can be pried open. Th ey are also moments in which capital violates its own free-market nostrums and uses public resources to bail out the system, thus opening up space for debates about alternative uses of public powers. Systemic crises are, therefore, moments of great danger and opportunity for the world’s workers."

(72): "Debt, of course, is one of the oldest class relations; repayment of loans has been a great mechanism for transferring wealth from direct producers to landlords and moneyed capitalists. In the neoliberal context, debt has become a powerful weapon for disciplining the working class in the Global North."

(73): this needs to be made much more specific, but is still interesting as a general formulation: "As prices plummet for food and raw materials (copper, oil, coff ee, cocoa, timber, rubber and more) dozens of poorer countries will encounter big drops in their export-earnings. Th is will inhibit their capacities to import food, medicine and other essentials, as well as to service existing debts. Moreover, as private-capital fl ows into ‘emerging market economies’ plummet by about two-thirds in 2009, rates of investment and job-creation will turn down sharply. Trade and currency-crises may ensue, driving poor nations into the dreaded hands of the IMF. Already, Iceland, Hungary, the Ukraine, Latvia and Pakistan have had to turn to the IMF. And more will follow. Once again, the IMF will join with governments and banks in the North to set loan-conditions that open countries in the South to plunder of their assets. Th e only alternative
will be to repudiate debts, as Ecuador rightly plans to do, and to mobilise against the imperial order embodied in the domination"

(74): this is interesting, even if it may not dramatically change anything: "However much they can be derailed or diverted, all such struggles implicitly challenge the domination of society by the capitalist value-form. Th ey assert the priority of life-values – for land, water, food, housing, income – over the value-abstraction and the violent economic and social crises it entails. And one
of the tasks of the Left is to highlight this confl ict – between life-values and capitalist imperatives – that comes to the fore dramatically during times of crisis, in order to pose a socialist alternative that speaks directly and eloquently to the most vital needs of the oppressed."

(74): "It is, as we have seen, the logic of the value-abstraction to express utter indiff erence to use-values, notably to the needs of the concrete, sensuous beings who are bearers of labour-power. What matters for capital is not the capacity of a given commodity to satisfy specifi c human needs;"

(75-76): "While that was a paltry sum, even more paltry is the amount that was actually delivered – merely one tenth of what was pledged, or $2.2 billion, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Yet, somehow, governments in the Global North have in short order come up with about $20 trillion to bail out financial institutions – nearly 10,000 times as much as they have anted up to feed the world’s poor. Compressed in that simple fact is the most basic case for socialism."

(76-): a few things, he's arguing, are emerging as clear consequences of this crisis:

1. First, the crisis will induce an enormous centralisation of capital... [many examples given in the article, itself]
2. Second, this crisis will also pose again the question of the balance of global
   economic power and the role of the dollar...
3. Third, centralisation of capital and competition between blocs will also be
   played out by way of attempts to spatially re-organise capital, so that economies
   in the Global North can displace the eff ects of crisis onto ‘emerging market
   economies’ and nations in the Global South... Those economies may then encounter their own version of the Asian crisis. And, if the IMF is called in, Western governments will press
   to buy up assets on the cheap, as was done to South Korea in particular in 1997, after IMF loan-conditions facilitated perhaps ‘the biggest peacetime transfer of assets from domestic to foreign owners in the past fi fty years anywhere in the world’.
   
4. Fourth, just as nations at the top of the imperial order will try to infl ict greater hardship on the South, so we can anticipate moves toward even more draconian restrictions on the movement of migrant-labour...
5. Finally, this crisis also puts a premium on left responses that are clearly socialist in character. Th e notion of calling for a ‘leashed capitalism’ in the face of such a colossal failure of the capitalist market-system represents an equally colossal failure of socialist imagination...

karl marx, critique of the gotha program

(528): a critique of, specifically, the use of the 'bourgeois' notion of 'fairness'--here the scientific vs. utopian distinction is in evidence.

(530): at first, then, as socialist society emerges from capitalism, the principle is simple--"the same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receive back in another." ["Here, equal right is still in principle bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads..." -- exactly, bringing--for the first time--the bourgeois principles into existence.]

(530): but, of course, and this is critical--"it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."

(531): it is only in the "higher phase of communist society," once all the "nightmares of the past" are exorcised, can we say "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

(531): and here, a nascent critique of left-kenyesianism: "Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves." And then, "vulgar socialism... has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution."

(532): calling for a more measured, historically-specific attitude towards the other class, who the Lasalleans have otherwise denounced as "one reactionary mass." [though the fundamental ontology of his revolution is not at all upset, but re-confirmed]

(534): the "iron" law of wages being exposed for its Malthusian roots

(535): "consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more sever in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment." [the point about Marx believing in 'increasing pauperism' is simply not on--this, really, is the point, which--I'd argue--can be expressed in manifold ways, especially today]

(536): not at all willing to sanction the fetishizing of the State--fearing, we might say, any possibility of this State metastasizing into something outside of the proletariat ["as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeois."]

(537): KEY: "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it, and today, too, the forms of state are more or less free to the extendt that they restrict the 'freedom of the state.'"

(538): the dictatorship of the proletariat--"they are all demands which, in so far as they are nto exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have already been realized..." but, key, that this is NOT AT ALL the present-day state, at the same time: one cannot demand "things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism." must, in other words, SMASH this state.

(539-540): there is a very healthy skepticism of the State apparatus, here, that has implications for Marxist critiques of social democracy, and the soviet state, alike [this is "tainted through and through by the Lasallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles, or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism."]

(541): what is Marx saying, on child labor? confusing...

chapters 1-5, "lenin: building the party"

The uneven development of different aspects of the struggle made it necessary always to look for the key link in every concrete situation. When this was the need for study, for laying the foundations of the first Marxist circles, Lenin stressed the central role of study. In the next stage, when the need was to overcome circle mentality, he would repeat again and again the importance of industrial agitation. At the next turn of the struggle, when “economism” needed to be smashed, Lenin did this with a vengeance. He always made the task of the day quite clear, repeating what was necessary ad infinitum in the plainest, heaviest, most single-minded hammer-blow pronouncements. Afterwards, he would regain his balance, straighten the stick, then bend it again in another direction. If this method has advantages in overcoming current obstacles, it also contains hazards for anyone wanting to use Lenin’s writing on tactical and organisational questions as a source for quotation. Authority by quotation is nowhere less justified than in the case of Lenin. If he is cited on any tactical or organisational question, the concrete issues that the movement was facing at the time must be made absolutely clear.

(...)How could the endorsement of this dictatorship be reconciled with the demand for a democratic republic? One of the delegates, Posadovsky, asked the Congress whether the party ought to subordinate its future policy to this or that basic democratic principle, as having an absolute value, or “must all democratic principles be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party?” Plekhanov gave a clear and decisive answer:

Every democratic principle must be considered not by itself, abstractly, but in relation to that which may be called the fundamental principle of democracy, namely salus populi suprema lex. Translated into the language of the revolutionist, this means that the success of the revolution is the highest law. And if the success of the revolution demanded a temporary limitation on the working of this or that democratic principle, then it would be criminal to refrain from such a limitation. As my own personal opinion, I will say that even the principle of universal suffrage must be considered from the point of view of what I have designated the fundamental principle of democracy. It is hypothetically possible that we, the Social Democrats’ might speak out against universal suffrage. The bourgeoisie of the Italian republics once deprived persons belonging to the nobility of political rights. The revolutionary proletariat might limit the political rights of the higher classes just as the higher classes once limited their political rights. One can judge of the suitability of such measures only on the basis of the rule: salus revolutiae suprema lex.

And we must take the same position on the question of the duration of parliaments. If in a burst of revolutionary enthusiasm the people chose a very fine parliament – a kind of chambre introuvable – then we would be bound to try to make of it a long parliament; and if the elections turned out unsuccessfully, then we would have to try to disperse it not in two years but if possible in two weeks.

Plekhanov’s statement precisely described the actual policies of the Bolsheviks, especially in 1917; he lived to bitterly regret his own words. Martov, who by the time the Congress ended had become Lenin’s opponent, did not at this stage disagree with Plekhanov’s statement regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, his definition was much less extreme. A few weeks later, in a report on the Congress to the League Congress of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, Martov tried to “defend” Plekhanov by toning down his statement: “These words [Plekhanov’s] aroused the indignation of some of the delegates; this could easily have been avoided if Comrade Plekhanov had added that it was of course impossible to imagine so tragic a situation as that the proletariat, in order to consolidate its victory, should have to trample on such political rights as freedom of the press. (Plekhanov: “Merci.”)”

(...) How could Martov and Trotsky, who wholeheartedly supported Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, which proposed that absolute authority should be given to the Central Committee of the party, reject Lenin’s definition of party membership? To combine a strong centralist leadership with loose membership was eclecticism taken to an extreme.

The harsh necessity for democratic centralism within the revolutionary working-class party is derived from the harsh imperatives of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Martov and Trotsky balked at this. Moreover, the leadership of a revolutionary party must provide the highest example of devotion and complete identification with the party in its daily life. This gives it the moral authority to demand the maximum sacrifice from the rank and file. Years earlier, Engels, in arguing against the anarchists, had said that the proletarian revolution demanded a very strong discipline, a strong authority.

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. [23]

Thus the revolutionary party cannot avoid making strong demands for sacrifice and discipline from its own members. Martov’s definition of party membership fitted the weakness of his conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(...) In his 230-page review of the 1903 Congress and its aftermath, called One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (written February–May 1904), he says that to “the individualism of the intellectual, which already manifested itself in the controversy over Paragraph 1, revealing its tendency to opportunist argument and anarchistic phrase-mongering, all proletarian organisation and discipline seems to be serfdom.” [50]

He quotes a letter written to Iskra (now a Menshevik paper), which denounced him for visualising the party as “an immense factory” headed by a director in the shape of the Central Committee. Lenin’s comment is that the writer

never guesses that this dreadful word of his immediately betrays the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual unfamiliar with either the practice or the theory of proletarian organisation. For the factory, which seems only a bogey to some, represents that highest form of capitalist co-operation which has united and disciplined the proletariat, taught it to organise, and placed it at the head of all the other sections of the toiling and exploited population. And Marxism, the ideology of the proletariat trained by capitalism, has been and is teaching unstable intellectuals to distinguish between the factory as a means of exploitation (discipline based on fear of starvation) and the factory as a means of a technically highly developed form of production. The discipline and organisation which come so hard to the bourgeois intellectual are very easily acquired by the proletariat just because of this factory “schooling.” [51]

(...) In tsarist Russia, the differentiation between consistent revolutionaries, centrists, and reformists was impeded by the autocratic regime itself. In Western Europe, the most moderate elements of the labour movement were frankly describing themselves as reformists. But under the tsarist regime, even the most moderate of socialists could not constitute themselves into a party of reform. The “parliamentary road to socialism” could not attract where parliament did not exist. A semi-parliament at least was needed – the Tsarist Duma of later years – for a parliamentary cretinism to raise its head. Nobody in the Russian socialist movement in 1903 openly unfurled the banner of reformism.

(...) The difference between the concept of centralism expressed in What Is to Be Done? or Letter to a Comrade on our Organisational Tasks, and the reality among the Bolsheviks in 1904 and 1905 is remarkable! There was a total cleavage between the ideal of a coherent, efficient party structure as visualised in Lenin’s writings, and the ramshackle party organisation that existed. Lenin had to strive with all the power at his command, to build up an organisation independent of and in opposition to the Mensheviks, and to create a party machine. He was so absorbed in the struggle against the Mensheviks that, incredible as it may seem, during the whole of the year 1904, there are only three references in his writings to the Russo-Japanese war. The overwhelming dominant theme is the split with the Mensheviks. A whole volume of his Collected Works, one of the stoutest, is all but filled with his writings on the Congress and the split, written in the most polemical, hard and irritable fashion. Was it not madness to concentrate on building a party machine while an earthquake was shaking the state? But Lenin was not one to deviate from a decision arrived at centrally.

(...) Unlike Marx and Engels, who lived in a period of expanding capitalism and hence did not emphasise party organisation, the immediacy of revolution for Lenin meant that party organisation was of cardinal importance. He could never have written, as Marx did to Engels on February 11, 1851:

I am much pleased with the public and authentic isolation in which we now find ourselves, you and I. It perfectly corresponds to our principles and our position. The system of reciprocal concessions, of half-measures tolerated only in order to keep up appearances, and obligation to share in public with all these asses in the general absurdity of the party – all that is done with now.

Nor could he have replied to Marx as Engels did on February 12, 1851:

We now have a chance again at last ... to show that we need no popularity, no support from any party whatsoever ... From now on we are responsible only to ourselves, and when the moment comes that these gentlemen need us, we shall be in a situation to be able to dictate our own terms. Till then we shall at least have peace. To tell the truth, even a certain loneliness ... How can people like us, who avoid official positions like the plague, ever find ourselves at home in a “party”? ... The principal thing for the moment is: some way of getting our ideas into print ... What will all the gossip and scandal mean which the whole émigré pack may circulate against you, once you answer them with your political economy?

(...) To a person standing on the sidelines – even to many of those involved – 1903–04 was a period of squabbles, interminable discussions, splits between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, argument, and splits inside the Bolshevik faction itself – at a time when Russia was on the eve of a revolution. Trotsky at that time considered Lenin’s factionalism to be sheer lunacy. In a pamphlet written in April 1904, he states: “Just at a time when history has placed before us the enormous task of cutting the knot of world reaction, Russian Social Democrats do not seem to care for anything except a petty internal struggle.” What a “heartrending tragedy” this was, and what a “nightmarish atmosphere” it created; “almost everybody was aware of the criminal character of the split.”

I practiced liberalism as an ideological method that respects private property, private investment, and respects public freedoms. I turned—I went to a social liberalism, a pro-socialist liberalism, so that the economy benefits the people and not just the economic elites. And this irritated the economic elites. They thought it was dangerous for me to organize the social sectors, and they planned the coup d’état.

If we look at the entire country from a distance, during the period between 1978 and 1992 there were two great sectors: a public sector that was still largely based on socialist production relations and a private sector in which family production relations prevailed. Looking a little closer, in urban areas, the public sector was dominant, with a thriving family economy at the margins, while in rural areas, the family economy was dominant, with a growing township and village enterprise sector, which harboured both socialist and small-scale capitalist production relations. This was, indeed, a non-capitalist market economy, although it was changing quickly. Since 1992, much more radical market reforms have changed everything.

It is still a fact that these moves dealt a blow to women’s chances of overcoming their subordinate social position. Capitalism had presented the potential for equality, but that equality could not come to fruition within the system. In the interests of the reproduction of labour power, women were isolated and atomised in the home. Their work was seen as serving their husbands and their families. They were denied financial independence. This “ideal” was never the reality for all working class women; many always engaged in wage labour. But the ruling ideas propagated the notion of the family as sacred, projecting the stereotype of the bourgeois family on to the working class as a means of ensuring reproduction. And the stereotype was what working class women and men accepted as the “norm” even if it did not match their own personal reality. Even today, as the development of capitalism has drawn the majority of women into the labour market, this view of women has not disappeared although it has been severely eroded. Attitudes to women, and of women to themselves, have advanced enormously under the combined impact of control over contraception and entry into the workforce. The way changed material conditions have changed attitudes is itself an argument against seeing oppression as the result of some mystical male ideological hold that never changes.
(...) To suggest otherwise is to deny that material conditions can change ideas or structures of society. Sheila Rowbotham makes the same mistake when she argues that the capitalist family contains elements of feudal forms of production and so is a “mode within a mode”.19 Yet vestiges of pre-capitalist society that endure within capitalism do not remain at all the same as previously. The monarchy is a remnant of feudal society but has been so totally transformed by capitalism that it bears really little relation to its previous role. So with the family. It may look the same (although even that is dubious) but its role and functions, its foundations have been transformed by capital. Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system – a revolutionary overthrow of society – means that the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact.
(...) The Marxist theory of the family tries to explain women’s continued oppression in the context of women’s role as childbearer and rearer. Hartmann claims that Marxism is ‘sex-blind’; in other words can explain why people are in certain places but cannot explain why these people are women. Yet the theory does precisely that. It locates women’s oppression historically, or locates its continued existence in the individual responsibility for reproduction, which in turn structures the whole of women’s lives. It also puts a solution to that problem in terms of a socialism which would begin to break down both the material conditions which create women’s oppression, and the ideas which have arisen from them – ideas with which we are so familiar, about the family and childcare being natural, women in the home being natural. It can do so by switching responsibility for childcare from the individual to society as a whole. That on its own would open up a new world for millions of women and allow us to behave as equals in a new society.
(...) The feeling is that nothing can be done, so all we can do is sort out our own ideas. Consequently, arguments about changing the whole of society are replaced by exhortations to change our own lifestyles. Instead of activity we are confronted with an abstract moralism which demands that the small number of men (and women) who accept the ideas of women’s liberation purge themselves of ‘deviations’ as a substitute for changing society. The logic is that if we change the attitudes of men we can change the world – as though it were men, not capitalism, which is the problem. It is from these ideas that the theory of patriarchy has developed and which now in turn reinforces these ideas.

"che guevara and the cuban revolution," mike gonzalez

take-home: it's impossible, of course, to disagree with the bulk of the author's critique of Che's sense of "revolutionary impatience." he was beholden to a kind of military vanguardism, no doubt.

at the same time, however, there is a way in which this critique is too easy--for by presenting the entire history of guerrilla warfare through the prism of this commitment to a misguided heroism, mike gonzalez is able to recover a "lost possibility:" "if only they'd remembered to make links to the working-class," one thinks. a more responsible book about che would begin with the premise that it is never this easy--does it not make more sense to think of "military vanguardism" as the recognized worst of all possible options? could it not be that, amidst a workers' movement that is uninviting and co-opted, che took refuge in sheer voluntarism. not because he was self-involved, but because he couldn't stomach "patience" or failure? rather than allow us to wrap ourselves in the wonderful gifts of hindsight and orthodoxy, that would permit us to ask the really important questions: "they were aware of what they were doing, of their departures from the orthodoxy, and they still failed. now what?"

there is a way in which this line of defense, of course, is itself "too easy." nonetheless, the author can't be allowed to get off so easily--he often elides the question of "leadership" and "vanguardism" by supplying this trite rendering of revolutionary theory as dedicated entirely to "self-emancipation" (it seems like everyone's read a different translation of "What is to be done?" than I have, to be honest). but--again-- what do you do when self-emancipation doesn't present itself? perhaps one ought to ignore the feeling of urgency that motivated che (and the book makes a strong case for the futility and analytical fallacies of that impatience), but the author doesn't do his thesis any favors by implying that the alternative is more-or-less as simple as "making links with the workers" and snapping your fingers.

none of that is to deny the points of value in the book, just to object at the simplicity of its pedagogy. the author makes important points about the way in which the pathetic state of Communist politics in pre-WWII (owing in large part to the diktats of the Stalinists) turned an entire generation off of Marxist politics, and--he seems to suggest--towards this path of "revolutionary impatience." (at the same time, he doesn't answer the question this begs--if these were the only two alternatives, was Che preferable to the "bureaucratic patience" of the orthodox Marxists of the time?)

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(7-18): Che's upbringing in the context of the history of Argentina

1880s: President Hipolito Yrigoyen in power; Argentina becomes a meat-exporting economy, exchanging foodstuffs for goods from Europe (lots of Italian, Spanish and German immigrants drawn to the country at this time)

1916, 1918: full male suffrage introduced, as well as social security. author gives this as time of increasing militancy of this immigrant working-class, which complemented the "rising discontent of an urban middle and lower middle class largely excluded from political life." a university reform movement which demandeda "democratic higher education."

1930: the "old interests" respond--a military coup, and in 1933 the new gov't signed a trade agreement with Britain, a defeat for the working-class. this military harbored sympathies for the Axis powers; Che's father was active in anti-fascist circles.

1940: military gov't of Castillo, though, locked into dependence with Britain, of course; and "there were also ideological reasons why an authoritarian nationalist government would feel neutral towards the old imperial power, Britain." regardless, "war, for a country whose main exports--meat and wheat--drove the competing armies, was a commercial opportunity."

1943: because of Castillo's suspected sympathies for the Allies, the GOU--a group of army officers--launched a coup; state of emergency was declared. nonetheless, by 1945 the army had declared with the allies, even though the fact that many Nazis fled to the country indicates that this was more opportunism than anything else. Juan Domingo Peron was among the officers now leading--he becomes Secretary of Labor, a position which gives him a pulpit for his populism. "Peron's base of support was a layer of newly arrived workers, recent immigrants from the countryside or the smaller provincial towns, who had gravitated towards the capital in search of work in its expanding industries... Evita came from the same world as they... They were Peron's mass base..."

1946: elections pitting Peron (who enjoyed support from business groups and right wing nationalists, as well) against the Democratic Union (which enjoyed support from other business interests as well as socialists and Communists). the Communists' base had been eaten into by Peron, and they also saw his support for the German-Italian axis through the eyes of the Soviet Union. Guevara's parents' sympathies were similar, resoundingly anti-fascist. all this spelled disaster for the Communists, insofar as they were "siding with imperialism, with the US government which was relentless in attacking Peron, and with the old landowning and industrial class against the man who claimed to speaking for all Argentines..."

(17-18): "Peronism had mobilised masses of working-class people, but in support of an authoritarian figure whose devotion to the people's cause seemed shallow and temporary. In any case, the people with whom the young Ernesto talked politics were unlikely to offer any kind of defense of Peron--they shared his distrust. On the other hand, authentic revolutionary tradition--the Communists and the socialists--were a poor lot in the Argentina in which he was growing up. They were rigid, corrupt, and manipulative, and unprincipled in their willingness to form alliances with people who should logically have been the enemies of the class they claimed to represent."

(20): "In many ways, the history of modern Argentina is a struggle between the city on the banks of the River Plante, whose connections were always with Europe, and an interior--a vast expanse of varied landscapes--whose natural links are with Latin America"

(24): in 1952, revolution (at the forefront of which were miners) and co-option in Bolivia

(29-30): history of Guatemala:

1900s: coffee and later banana economy, oriented towards the US market--"for the first forty years of the 20th century is the history of one major North American company, United Fruit, and its founder and owner, Sam Zemurray... By the early 1940s, some 40 percent of Guatemala's land was under the control of the company known throughout Central America as La Yunai.

1944: Rafael Arevalo annuonces a reform program--key to which was land reform and trade union rights

1951: Jacob Arbenz, a young military officer who had served under Arevalo, comes to power, intending to carry the program through to completion. "It is important to emphasize that Arbenz was no revolutionary. In a sense, his project was the modernization of the economy under a Guatemalan state able to control and determine the allocation of its own resources. But the process of fairly moderate reform that he set in motion unleashed other forces which he could not easily control... The process, therefore, was announced from above but driven from below."

1954: "...several key figures in the Washington government were intimately involveed with the United Fruit Company--among them John Foster Dulles, Secretary of Staet, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA... Together they organized the overthrow of Arbenz, which was to led by a financed military force under Carlos Castillo Armas."

(31-32): "At a fairly basic level, the intransigence of the North Americans encouraged Che's instinctive feeling that there was no alternative to armed resistance. When the coup came, and Guatemala City was bombarded from the air for weeks, there was very little armed resistance. The reasons why are still a matter of debate..."

(34): what Che would learn from the Arbenz coup:

He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to... Now we see the result.

(39-40): Cuban history:

1898: Cuban "independence"

1901: Platt Amendment, which gave US right to intervene to defend its interests. Guantanamo Bay ceded on a 99-year lease--"Washington nominated the head of the national bank, the customs service, and the police. It was an early step in the incorporation of Cuba into the US economy--as a supplier of the sugar that was becoming so important a component of the new urban diet, and as a market for US goods [raw materials and captive market, check] "Within the first three years of indepdence... speculators from US... bought up an estimated 60 percent of the land."

1921: by this date, US owned bulk of large sugar plantations.

1929: Depression hit Cuba hard--popular resentment against then-in-power Machado grew.

1933: protests toppled the government--the leader of the non-commissioned officers in the army, Batista, called upon the students to name the new president. He was a professor named Grau San Martin. He "introduced the eight-hour day, rescinded the Platt Amendment, and announced the coming nationalisation of the electric industry."

1934: Sergeants' revolt led by Batista takes power, though, with tacit backing of US--Batista in effective control from this point on, though he takes presidency in 1940. Communist Party supports him, owing to the "popular front policy"--"this strategy was not a consequence of the particular conditions in any one country, but the result of the Soviet Union's concern to build a wide international coalition against Nazism... its political cost was enormous... In Spain for example, the consequence was that the Communist Party opposed the development of a revolutionary response to the fascist uprising of 1936 and instead threw in its lot with a coalition of centre and right wing parties whose one unifying feature was their fear of a workers' revolution."

1944: Grau San Martin becomes president. by 1947, after the end of the peace of the "popular front" era, he has turned on the Communists.

1948: "the slippery and corrupt" Prio Socarras takes his place.

1951: Chibas kills himself on air in the run-up into the 1952 Congress elections. soon after Batista takes power in a coup that was to last till the revolution. "His immediate actions once in power were a sign of things to come: he banned political parties, filled the state with his cronies, and launched a campaign of repression."

(44): "Like many middle-class student nationailsts, [Castro] was suspicious of the Communists... In Cuba, as elsewhere, they had colluded with governments that were corrupt and authoritarian in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Communism was a discredited and corrupted notion by the time Castro's generation encountered it."

(46-47): Raul was the link between the July 26 Movement, and the Communists. Nonetheless: "For Raul and Fidel, change could be the result of armed actions of a minotirity. They, and not the working class, would be the subjects of this process of change. This way of understanding what it means to be a revolutionary reflected the group's middle-class background, but much more importantly it betrayed the political distance between them and workers. Their project saw an independent state which could decree change in society from above. In this process, the main instrument was not mass organization or the power of workers, but the arms held by the revolutionaries."

(58): December 1956--Celia Sanchez was to meet them; but waited two days and left. There was also an abortive urban uprising, led by Frank Pais. "Of the 82 men who had boarded the Granma, just 19 had survived. Another eight would join them later... The 26 July Movement had supporters and sympathisers scattered across the island, but they were not connected with the trade unions or any other organizations outside their own circle... "

(59): "No guerrilla group (or foco, as Che would later describe it) could survive without the support of an urban movement. The relationship between mountain (sierra) and plain (llano) was at the heart of the political debates in the years that followed--above all, in the argument about which section should lead the movement."

(62): "The reality is that in [Che's] vision of the revolutionary war--a war conducted by revolutionaries on behalf of the masses--the staet of the workers' movement or the mass urban resistance was not an essential issue. In Che's view, the heart of the struggle was in the guerilla struggle in the mountains--la sierra."

(66): Frank Pais making the right noises about building support in the urban areas, maybe opening another front; Fidel, though, "imposed his political vision. The building of the rebel army was to be the absolute priority, and a call was to be issued for the organization of a 'civic resistance' whose essential function was to support the guerrilla fighters..." Author attributes this to increasing authoritarianism on Fidel's part.

(70): [crux of author's critique]"[Che] identified urban politics (the llano) with reformism and the politics of the guerrillas in the hills (the sierra) with revolution. Che spoke about the city as an undifferentiated place. In fact, his dismissal of the urban struggle effectively marginalised trade unions and workers too. Yet the sierra was not rural Cuba, where a class of peasant farmers and agricultural workers might have been seen as an alternative base for a revolutionary movement. These sections of Cuban society lived on the 'plains' too. Che (and Fidel) meant the more remote and difficult terrain of the Sierra Maestra--ideal for a cat-and-mouse military strategy, but not a region whose sparse and scattered population could build a social movement. The strategy that Che and Fidel had in common envisaged a guerrilla war conducted by small groups of revolutionary fighters rather than by the masses in whose name they claimed to be waging the struggle."

(72): failure of the Cienfuegos attack in 1957--300 tortured and killed by Batista. US increasing fed-up of Batista, it seems, rumors of possible contacts through Frank Pais?

(73): Che on discipline: "Che was extremely harsh with his own men and with anyone who endangered the cause, deliberately or otherwise. He readily executed informers and deserters, yet was magnanimous with enemy soldiers. This was a response that could only have arisen out of military code of honour."

(73): "He described himslf as a Marxist now. Yet for Marx, a revolution was the moment when the working class achieved its own liberation through collective action. This does not appear in Che's worldview."

(78): failure of the general strike called by 26 July Movement in 1958 (Batista had postponed elections). "In the aftermath, the 26 July Movement made a decisive turn..." towards the guerrilla struggle. Fidel's authority confirmed.

(78): "Che had reached the conclusions that he would later develop in Guerrilla Warfare.First, that a popular army can win a military struggle against a regular army. Second, that in the particular conditions of Latin America it is the poor peasants who are the most revolutionary class-rather than organized workers in industry or agriculture. Third, that the conditions for revolution do not need to exist before the struggle begins--the revolutionary foco can create them."


(79): Key page of author's critique [not very satisfying, i must say, particularly this strange fealty to the orthodox prescription in demonstrably heterodox circumstances]: "Che was reacting against a certain pessimist gradualism that he had heard from other socialists--the notion that 'objective conditions' had to exist before change was possible... Yet in identifying the poor peasantry as the key social group in the revolution, Che was specifically rejecting Marxistm's central idea--that it is the power of the organized working class alone that can bring about a social revolution. Some countries in Latin America were still dominated by small-scale agricultural production--and the argument that the peasantry was a revolutionary class still had some weight in those circumstances. But like his own country, Argentina... Cuba was integrated into an international economy as a mono-producer of sugar and was already highly urbanized... Che's conception of revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting. They alone were the revolutionary actors. What of the uban workers, the students, the people in the small towns? Their task was to supply the fighters... In a military structure there could be neither democracy nor transparency--both could spell disaster in a military context. But in a society, their absence would be a disaster."

(83): Fidel towards the Communists was at this stage, pragmatic--didn't want to give the US an opportunity, in particular. "Che, on the other hand, while fiercely critical of the Cuban Communists in many respects, described himself as a Communist. He supported the Soviet Union... Yet as the revolution evolved, Che would become increasingly critical of the Soviet model while Fidel would become the leader and symbol of Cuban communism."

(89): the tide turned mainly due to objective factors: "The failure of the elections, the sucess of small-scale but well publicized guerrilla actions in the area, the increasing brutality of Batista and the growing alienation of the population that it produced, had accelerated the collapse of the regime--particularly as increasing numbers of conscript soldiers gave up the fight."

(92-93): argument here that though Fidel was eager to take full credit on behalf of the 26 July Movement, there were many other factors that led to Batista's downfall, notably the ending of support by the US (an arms embargo was in place), as well as agitation by other political organizations.

(95): dispensing "revolutionary justice:" about 55 executed in Havana in the first few days (70 executed by Raul, in Oriente). By May the number had risen to around 550. "These were the torturers, the police spies, the most zealous servants of Batista's police state."

(102): again, the critique re-phrased: "The notion that revolution comprises the self-emancipation of the working class is absolutely central to Marx's thought. From being the objects of the interests of others, the majority become the governors of their own lives by transforming society through their own actions. It is a core principle in revolutionary Marxism. Yet the guerrilla war theory replaces this idea with another--that the revolutionaries will make the revolution on behalf of the wider class."


(105-106): "Who were these young revolutionaries? ...they came largely from the middle class and were driven above all by a hatred of imperialism. They were largely nationalists for whom national independence and self-determination was the most important issue. For the most part they did not come from a Communist tradition... When Che insisted that revolutionaries need not wait for the objective conditions for revolution to exist, he was obliquely referring to the Communist parties..."

(106-108): three concerns in the early months--(!) how to ensure defence of the revolution; (2) an economic program, and what kind of land reform (class of peasants, or collectivization); (3) what would the political direction of the revolution be?

(108): "How could a small economy, dependent for more than 80 percent of its export earnings on one product--sugar--break its dependency? One answer was to diversify the economy--the other was to develop industrially."

(123-124): The beginnings of revolutionary terror--Che making illegal any offense to "revolutionary morality," founding a "labor camp," etc.

(125): "At first, the response of the Cuban population was extremely positive. Yet there was a missing element in Che's argument. Involvement and participation could be ends in themselves, provided they were real. Endless declarations of loyalty by the leaders to the led, however, were no substitute for a genuine workers' democracy in which it was the popular organizations which made the decisions and the government which carried them out."

(127): on eve of Bay of Pigs, Cuban state rounds up 35,000 people!

(129): by 1962, 500,000 people, bulk of Cuba's professional class, had fled to the US

(131): "Che's impatience with material realities was at the heart of his political theory. If the revolutionaries could substitute for the masses in making the revolution, the revolutionary state could overcome the material limitations it faced, he argued."

(140-141): "Che emphasises over and over again in his essay that the guerrilla army must be located in the countryside, and recruit above all among the peasantry, because it is they who have suffered the most brutal exploitation. But suffering, of course, does not create revolutionaries. On the contrary, without collective organisation and the confidence that comes from the experience of struggle, and without the power to strike at the very heart of capitalism--the machinery of production--suffering can produce despair and a sense of impotence." This impatience, the author argues, came into conflict more and more with the USSR's commitment to "peaceful coexistence."

(148): Che's critique of the USSR in Algiers, declaring in favor of Third World solidarity--decrying the USSR for their failure to support liberation movements, calling them 'accomplices of imperialism.'

(149): on Man and Socialism: "Why did he lay such emphasis on the question of a new consciousness? It was certainly not for economic reasons, or because committed people are more efficient producers... It went to the very heart of Che's political ideas, for it emphasized the subjective over the objective, the effort of will that could overcome uncompromising material conditions. This was a central notion in his Guerrilla Warfare... It flew in the face of a revolutionary tradition which recognized the dialectical relationship between the individual and his or her circumstances...

(149-154): misadventure in Congo, where the "disorganization was total." Nasser had warned him that he would become 'Another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading and protecting them... It can't be done.'


(160): most salient critique of Che's strategy in Bolivia--he set up shop in the Eastern region, which was home to the peasantry that the 1964-coup leader, Rene Barrientos, had wooed. much more suited would have been the mining areas of the West that Barrientos had repressed and home to a "glorious revolutionary tradition."

(164): "This was not an ideal moment for a major offensive, but it would have been a perfect time for the patient rebuilding of political organization, especially with the enormous moral authority of Che behind it. Guevara, however was wedded to the idea of guerilla warfare, and did not see the organized working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution."

(168): in the words of one Richard Harris:

The defeat of Che's guerrilla operation and the main flaw in Che's strategy--as well as Debray's theorising about revolutionary guerrilla warfare... might be called a kind of military vanguardism. By reducing popular revolution to a special form of guerrilla warfare, Che's strategy and Debray's early writings overemphasized the military aspects of initating a revolutionary struggle against an unjust regime. And they underemphasized the political dimension of organizing the base of popular support needed for a successful revolutionary struggle.

(168): "It does Che's memory no credit to refuse to acknowledge the brutal truth that this was a terrible and costly failure born of Che's insistence that the will of the revolutionar can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class. That way lies martyrdom, not social revolution."

This ‘red terror’ should nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs, Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. [4] Even in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech, they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list, but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped. For Stalinism, however, even such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors who are less than human.

part I:

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the pride of the international socialist movement before the First World War. It was founded in 1875 in Gotha as a fusion between the Marxist Social Democratic Labor Party led by August Bebel and Willhelm Liebknecht, and the General German Workers' Association led by Ferdinand Lassalle, a critic of trade unions who looked to state-funded producer cooperatives as labor's panacea. Marx wrote a famous critique of the new party's program, which he believed made too many concessions to the Lassalleans. During its early years, the SPD faced harsh repression in the form of the Exceptional Laws (Bebel was twice imprisoned), and this pushed the party in a more radical and Marxist direction. Banned but not destroyed, the party managed to grow considerably in a period of boom accompanied by relatively little class struggle. From the 1880s right up to the war, strikes were uncommon and workers' living standards rose, even if they didn't keep pace with profits. The party's numbers grew steadily, reaching 1,085,905 members in 1914. Its vote increased from 311,900 in 1881 to 4 million in the 1912 elections, when it sent 110 deputies to the National Assembly (Reichstag), in addition to more than 3,000 other officials into lower bodies. The party maintained 90 daily newspapers, employed 267 full-time journalists and 3,000 manual and clerical workers, and led trade unions totaling 2 million members. In the absence of public institutions, the party created libraries, workers' schools, youth groups, women's groups, sports leagues, and entertainment venues. It was more than a political party-it was a way of life for many workers.
(...) [1905] From then on, Broué argues, the SPD leadership, both the Right and the Center, “categorically turned its back on the party's identification with revolution, and references to revolution in the ensuing debates were few and far between.” (19) This debate within the SPD was not simply a battle of ideas detached from social forces. The ideas of the Right were firmly rooted in the trade-union bureaucracy and the elected officials, whose jobs were most dependent on the political system that supervised German capitalism. The ideas of the Center tended to be strongest among the party officials, who were concerned primarily with holding the SPD together. The Left's positions tended to be championed by journalists or full-time party workers who were not directly responsible for any organizational questions. Of course, there were important exceptions to this description (such as Liebknecht), but Broué's discussion of the rise of the SPD bureaucracy is an important starting point to understand the outcome of the debate.
(...) [not enough Lenin, it seems] Why did it take four months for Leibknecht to break SPD discipline? Why was the Left so weak? According to Broué, despite their hostility to the growing bureaucracy within the SPD and the drift to the right, they never sought to systematically organize themselves as a coherent group to fight for leadership of the SPD. The theoretical basis of their passive attitude to the question of organization lay most clearly in Luxemburg's understanding of the relationship between the socialist party and the working class. She believed that the party bureaucracy was conservative and that it was an outgrowth of the excessive centralism of power in the hands of the full-time party apparatus. She argued that, while the Left should oppose this tendency toward bureaucracy, the spontaneous struggle of the working class would be the key factor in overcoming the bureaucracy's conservatism at the decisive moment. Her book about the 1905 Russian Revolution, The Mass Strike, argued that Russian workers had discovered that the merger of mass economic and political strikes were the means by which to fight capitalism and simultaneously overcome conservative or bureaucratic elements within their midst. Broué agrees with her emphasis on mass struggle. But he notes that her understanding of the Russian situation completely overestimated the role of mass action in overcoming reformism and underplayed the importance of organization, which, from her limited German experience, she assumed generally plays a retarding role in the struggle.
(...) Luxemburg consistently opposed Lenin's method of building up a principled and, crucially, organized group of revolutionaries, with its own press and system of communication that aimed to carry its positions into every party branch and every group of workers possible. She rejected as sectarian Lenin's practice of constructing a faction that had the common experience of working together over the course of years and submitting to a commonly agreed upon discipline. Broué believes that she incorrectly identified Lenin's insistence on limiting membership in the revolutionary group to those who agreed to work in a disciplined and centralized manner as the same tendency towards bureaucracy she was fighting against in the SPD. Paradoxically, her tenacious opposition to bureaucracy and centralism in general blinded her from taking any organizational measures to combat it in specific, as well as a fatalistic attitude towards new forms of organization.
(...) The 1917 February Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar and raised the confidence of the working class and the Left in Germany. The Bolshevik Revolution in October ended the war with Germany in short order (although at great expense to Russia) and convinced millions of workers that socialist revolution was on the order of the day. 1918 was a year of devastating economic hardship for German workers and catastrophic killing of soldiers. The USPD grew by leaps and bounds at the expense of the SPD and the left wing of the USPD became radicalized under the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea of a Russian-type socialist revolution based on workers' councils became very popular among millions of workers and soldiers. In November 1918, sailors mutinied in Kiel and set into motion a rebellion in the army. Workers launched a general strike, quickly leading to the overthrow of the Kaiser, the collapse of the German government, and the proclamation of the German Republic. Workers' councils were formed in dozens of cities in imitation of the Russian soviets. The Spartacus leaders felt vindicated by the rush of events. “Yet the building of the revolutionary organization lagged behind the audacious political analyses and perspectives of the revolutionaries, and they were unable to take advantage…of the revolutionary ferment that was rising throughout 1918,” writes Broué.
(...) The chaos of revolutionary events allowed the disciplined apparatus of the SPD to gain positions of power all out of proportion to the political mood of the working class.
(...) Meanwhile, a sharp debate broke out within the USPD. The Right of the party favored throwing its weight behind the SPD-USPD government and pushing for new elections to the Reichstag, essentially an attempt to return to the prewar focus on parliamentary elections as the main socialist tactic. Luxemburg spoke for the Spartacus League and in favor of building up the power of the workers' councils as a dual power, aiming to eventually replace the Reichstag and the capitalist state bureaucracy with a Russian-type system based directly on the workers' councils alone. A vote of 485 to 185 at a mid-December conference in favor of the Right's perspective showed that with the war ending, the majority of the USPD leadership were opposed to a renewed wave of workers' struggle to usher in socialism.
(...) During the years 1914 to 1918, the Spartacus leaders never fully clarified the purpose of their work among themselves. Was it to prepare for the founding of a separate revolutionary party or simply to try to push the USPD to the left? At each crucial stage, they were left wondering who was with them and who was against them. Rather than setting the pace, they could only react to events-in August 1914, in January 1917, and again in November 1918. The USPD majority decision to turn away from the workers' councils finally forced the Spartacus leaders to found their own party, but not until after the first phase of the revolution was coming to a close. Broué draws the painful lesson that the Spartacus League's revolutionary ideas and ability to inspire outbursts of struggle proved to be no match for the organized parties of the SPD and USPD. The revolutionaries were pitifully unprepared for the revolution. By way of comparison, in January 1917, the Bolsheviks had roughly 25,000 members with a fifteen-year tradition of common party activity, the experiences of 1905 under their belts, and an impressive underground and legal press that was distributed to tens of thousands of workers. The Spartacus League had a few hundred members, did not have its own regular publication, and possessed very little experience of organized, common struggle against the other factions and parties, or in leading the day-to-day class struggle.But the KPD had no substantial organized base, with only around 3,000 members who had any notion of acting as an organized party. Compared to the national apparatus and mass membership of both the SPD and USPD (both had more than 100,000 members), the KPD was virtually powerless. Its forces were so meager that they struggled simply to communicate between cities and even between sections of Berlin. Compounding this problem was the party's infusion with the ultra-left enthusiasm that Levi described and the lack of an experienced leadership team that commanded the allegiance and respect of the party's rank and file. While Lenin hailed the party's founding, it was a party that could not yet coordinate events regionally or nationally.
(...) Despite their losses, the KPD and the revolutionary vanguard of the working class were not finished. They spent the next four-and-a-half years waging a bitter struggle to solve the riddles left unanswered by the martyrs of 1919. This period will be the subject of Part II of this review.

(...) [I.] First, the First World War confirmed that political ideas matter; indeed, they can lead people to different sides of the barricades. The debate between Bernstein and Luxemburg had real life consequences, even if it was not completely obvious at the time. Kautsky's attempt to paper over these fights, merely served to disorient the Left and gain time for the Right to consolidate its control of the party apparatus.
(...) [II.] Second, the capitalists are ingenious when it comes to patching up their system and passing on the costs of the crisis to the working class. Yet, the ruthless economic competition that lies at the heart of the capitalist system forces the capitalists, and the governments they control, to confront one another in the hopes that they will be the last man standing, even if it threatens their common ruin. Kautsky could not believe European capitalism would plunge into full-scale war. In fact, it did so twice between 1914 and 1945. Capitalism breeds war and that danger will only pass when it is replaced with socialism-a lesson with obvious lasting value in today's world.
(...) [III.] Finally, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were political giants Yet, lacking a powerful political party with clear Marxist ideas based in the working class they could not put their revolutionary principles into practice. Broué's book will help a new generation of revolutionaries learn these truths.

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part II:

The futility of isolated uprisings, not coordinated by a centralized, revolutionary party was a lesson learned very dearly. This explains why anarchism never played an important role in the German workers’ movement during the height of the revolution. Paul Levi, who emerged as the principal KPD leader after the murders of Luxemburg and other KPD leaders in 1919, stated:

There is not a single Communist in Germany today who does not regret that the foundation of a Communist Party did not take place long ago, before the war…(453)

(...) The question then became how to build this party. At its founding convention in December of 1918, the KPD had only several thousand members. Although it did grow rapidly during the bloody repression of early 1919 to upwards of 90,000 members, it was shot through with ultra-leftism—recall at its founding conference that the majority opposed running candidates in parliament and refused to work inside existing trade unions—and hardly functioned at all as a coordinated national party. For the young, impatient activists inside the KPD, the question of how to reach the big battalions of the working class that still held illusions in the reformist SPD or the centrist Independent SPD (USPD), was not an issue. Most of the young party’s members refused to recognize the impact of the defeat of early 1919 on the working class. The dismantling of the workers’ councils in December 1918 led most workers to accept that the best way to defend their class interests was to vote for socialist candidates in the parliamentary elections. The SPD gained 11.5 million votes on January 19 and the USPD won another 2 million, together totaling 46 percent of the national vote, and constituting the overwhelming majority of the working-class vote. The KPD’s call for a boycott of the election was entirely ignored. Yet most young communists refused to recognize this reality, instead calling for the immediate overthrow of the newly formed SDP government, including SPD leader Friedrich Ebert, who was elected president of the republic by the new Reichstag in January 1919.
(...) By the fall of 1919, Levi had become convinced that the ultra-lefts had to be expelled at all costs in order to achieve unity with the revolutionary workers who remained in the left wing of the USPD. He reorganized the party from top to bottom and insisted that all members who did not agree to participate in the parliamentary elections and who refused to recognize the authority of the KPD’s central committee be expelled. Levi’s tactics lost the KPD well over half of its membership. Lenin and Radek agreed with Levi’s desire to transform the KPD, but they opposed the split. Lenin even publicly offered to mediate between Levi and some factions of the ultra-lefts.
(...) Levi, Lenin, and Radek, as well as all the principal leaders of Bolsheviks and the KPD, agreed that the only way to transform the KPD into a mass, revolutionary party, was to find a way to win over the hundreds of thousands of militant workers who had refused to join the KPD until then and remained inside the left wing of the USPD...
(...) But this political schizophrenia did not prevent the party from growing rapidly, from 100,000 in November 1918 to 300,000 in March 1919, and to 800,000 by the fall of 1920. The USPD had fifty-seven newspapers and could count on millions voting for it at the polls. It was perceived by millions of workers as the radical alternative to the SPD, while the KPD remained in the shadows.
(...) The radicalization of the USPD and the ongoing debate between Levi and Lenin received a jolt when right-wing army officers and a politician named Wolfgang Kapp launched a coup against the SPD government in March 1919. The coup threatened to install a military dictatorship, wiping out not only the KPD, but the SPD and the USPD as well. While Ebert and all his government ministers fled Berlin to find the safety of a loyal general, the workers of Berlin rose up in a general strike. They were led by left-wing members of the USPD and Carl Legien, who was the main leader of the SPD trade unions in Berlin. Legien was not himself a left-winger, but, unlike Ebert whose main power base was in the electoral apparatus, Legien’s power rested on his strength in the unions and he realized that Kapp and the coup makers intended to smash not only the extreme left wing, but also all workers’ organizations, so he threw his considerable authority into the struggle. On March 15, the coup makers’ government was paralyzed. “The general strike now grips them with its terrible, silent power,” described a Belgian socialist.
(...) The October 1920 USPD convention in Halle, Germany, was a showdown between the Right and the Left. Russian Bolshevik leader, Gregori Zinoviev, in his capacity as leader of the Communist International (Comintern) spoke at the convention, arguing for the USPD to join the Comintern. Broué describes the scene,

The battle really was to begin when Zinoviev mounted the platform. He was to speak for more than four hours, in German, with much difficulty and a certain apprehension at the beginning, and then with an authority which enabled him to win his greatest oratorical triumph in an already distinguished career. (439)

As if to highlight the interwoven nature of the Russian and German Revolutions, Julius Martov, the main leader of the Mensheviks, replied to Zinoviev’s speech, beseeching the USPD militants not to join with the KPD. In the end, Kautsky, Bernstein, and Rudolph Hilferding could not prevent the majority of the USPD delegates from voting in favor of Zinoviev’s proposition, and the right-wingers walked out of the convention. They exacted their revenge on Zinoviev by having him expelled from Germany twelve days later.
(...) Having achieved the prerequisites of mass size, clear principles, and organizational independence, and operating in a field of acute capitalist crisis, it seemed that the KPD and the German working class were finally on the road to revolution. However, very quickly, two closely related problems emerged. First, could the leadership of this new party function effectively as a guiding force for the hundreds of thousands of party members; and, second, what strategy and tactics would help the party win the decisive section of the working class over to revolution?
(...) The most remarkable thing about the Bolshevik leadership is that, despite the immense pressure that was brought down upon it in 1917, it did not split, but expanded. Even Zinoviev and Kamenev’s leaking of the plans for the October insurrection did not lead to its fragmentation. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of why this was the case, but some factors that account for the Bolshevik success were: the shared experience of revolution and repression in 1905; Lenin’s appreciation of the role of leading cadre; and the existence of a long-standing leadership team that was accustomed to carrying out sharp debates but then acting in unison. The united KPD Zentrale certainly had shared the experience of revolution and repression, but they had not done so in a common party. Even within the core of the historic Spartacus leadership, Heinrich Brandler and Wilhelm Pieck did not have much experience working with Levi, and even less so with Clara Zetkin. Worse, within three months of the party’s formation, Levi, Däumig, Brass, and Hoffman all resigned from the party and Geyer left shortly thereafter. Zetkin did not quit the party, but she resigned from the Zentrale along with Levi. In other words, six of twelve of its elected leaders, including its two co-chairmen were gone entirely from the party or its leadership soon after its founding.
(...) Broué goes to great lengths to trace the impact of the Comintern on the KPD, which he gives as the third reason for the KPD leadership’s split.
(...) During this crisis, Lenin and Trotsky were absorbed with the work of keeping the revolution afloat and the leadership of the Comintern fell more and more exclusively on Zinoviev and a small group of doubtful international “commissars” whom he dispatched to carry out his orders. Increasingly, the International retreated from the ideal of democratic debate into bureaucratic fiat. In the context of the KPD, this meant that Zinoviev’s agent in Germany pounded away at Levi’s supposed opportunism, insisting on driving him out of the Zentrale. Broué points out that it is certainly possible that at least part of Zinoviev and Radek’s attacks on Levi had to do with a desperate attempt at “artificially accelerating the speed of the revolution” in order to break Russia out of its isolation. (532) However, even if this is entirely true, it only goes to point out that the KPD leadership was not strong enough to stand up to this type of intervention, and was easily picked apart.
(...) The KPD Zentrale launched an irresponsible attempt to “provoke” a strike and armed insurrection, even though the working class was in a passive and demoralized mood. In other words, to embark upon the type of action that the KPD had done in January of 1919 and which Levi and Radek and Brandler had fought against for the proceeding two years. Indeed, it was this type of action that had repelled the left wing of the USPD from joining the KPD back in December of 1918. Frölich was ideologically predisposed to ultra-leftism, but it is more difficult to understand why Brandler, who had always supported Levi against the ultra-lefts, went along with it, and in fact, was the lead organizer of it. In the end, the so-called March Action was an unmitigated disaster. The KPD call for a general strike was met with indifference by the mass of workers, so party leaders ordered unemployed members to attempt to physically stop workers from going to work. This provoked fist fights and even gun fights between communists and other workers. (501) In the aftermath of the fiasco, the party was driven back underground and lost over 200,000 members, reducing the party to some 150,000 members. Hundreds of party activists were jailed, four were sentenced to death, and Brandler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. (506)
(...) the French army occupied the main coal- and iron- producing region of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, in order to extract war debts mandated in the Treaty of Versailles. Ebert’s SPD government and the German ruling class tried to use the invasion to win German workers, especially in the Ruhr, to unite with them against the French. The KPD agreed that the French should be resisted, but refused to agree to ally with the SPD or the bosses.
(...) On January 23, 1923, the dollar was worth 8,000 marks; by September 7, it was worth 60 million, and a miner had to work for an hour to buy one egg. Hyperinflation wiped out wages and savings, and led to a dramatic rise in unemployment and homelessness. By the summer of 1923, the crisis was laying bare the uselessness of the reformist socialists’ belief in the sanctity of capitalism and the trade union bureaucracy’s reliance on negotiating pay raises once a year. The KPD’s influence grew quickly and 20,000 factory and workers’ councils sprang up all over Germany in the desperate struggle for food. These councils were not the same as the soviets that grew up in November of 1918 because they organized only within individual workplaces. And, unlike the Russian soviets in 1917, they did not represent the rank and file of the army. However, the massive surge of rank-and-file organization at the factory level, surpassed no more than a handful of times in the international history of the working class, was clearly once again raising the question of the potential for dual power. Furthermore, the KPD became the leading force in the workers’ council movement, gaining the allegiance of millions of workers beyond their membership. To defend workers from the police and from the far Right, the KPD initiated a militia called the “proletarian hundreds.” By May 1, 1923, 25,000 of these men marched through downtown Berlin with red armbands, a “real workers’ militia,” says Broué.
(...) To Brandler’s credit, he realized that the KPD had to show that it could lead a nationwide movement to coordinate the disconnected strike waves rolling across Germany as well as give leadership to the brewing civil war between the police and the fascists on the one hand and the workers’ councils and militias on the other. If the KPD did not lead, then the danger loomed of useless and scattered resistance burning itself out across the country, as it had done in 1919. He proposed an “Anti-Fascist Day” on July 29, 1923.
(...) Unable to decide for themselves, they sent a telegram to Moscow asking what to do. Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin were all on vacation. Radek received the telegram and warned against the mistakes of 1921. Zinoviev and Bukharin, by telegraph, argued to defy the ban. Stalin disagreed. In the end, Radek telegraphed to Brandler, “We fear a trap,” and the Anti-Fascist Day was called off. (741) Certainly it was not a crime in asking the Bolsheviks for their advice, but canceling what might have been the start of the fight for power in Germany on the strength of a telegram once again exposed the weaknesses of the KPD’s leadership.
(...) It is clear that within weeks of calling off the protest, the government of conservative Prime Minister Cuno collapsed under the pressure of a wave of mass strikes. The fall of the Cuno government in mid-August finally jarred the KPD and the Communist International into realizing that the crisis in Germany was analogous to Russia in the months of September and October 1917, that is to say, a pre-revolutionary situation was maturing and the KPD would soon be faced with a fight for power.
(...) In October 1917, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led the insurrection through the Soviets, that is, in alliance with the extreme left wing of several other parties, but at no time did they give the leadership of those other parties, who were caught between reform and revolution, the opportunity to veto their actions. Unfortunately, in Germany, Brandler, with Zinoviev’s blessing, publicly proposed in late October to the leadership of the left wing of the SPD to start the revolution together. When the SPD minister refused to go along with a KDP-proposed general strike at a conference of factory committees, Brandler called off the insurrection. To add insult to injury, in Hamburg, the KPD did not receive the news that the insurrection had been canceled. There, the party proceeded with its plan and was isolated and wiped out. Twenty-one were killed, and hundreds were wounded or taken prisoner.
(...) Now, having raised the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file KPD members and millions of radicalized workers to the point of the fight for power, the sudden, and chaotic letdown destroyed the party as a fighting force. For some weeks, Zinoviev tried to pretend that everything was fine and that the insurrection was simply delayed. But as time wore on, the German bourgeoisie took the opportunity to impose martial law and it became obvious that the revolution was defeated.

(...) Broué’s conclusion must be the starting point for Marxists to come to grips with the defeat in Germany. The objective economic circumstances of prewar German capitalism dialectically conditioned the political forms of organization adopted by the working class and this history, in turn, shaped the ideas and experiences of the leading socialist revolutionaries. Looking back on it, Levi was certainly correct to conclude that they should have begun in 1903 to build an independent revolutionary party, but that presupposes Luxemburg and Liebknecht drawing lessons from circumstances that did not occur in Germany (as they did in Russia) or had not yet occurred in Germany. Having realized their error too late, the political leaders most capable of correcting it (Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, Jogiches) were all gunned down in early 1919. What they left behind was not an organized Bolshevik Party, but the idea of a party, supported by Lenin to be sure, but populated by unstable and impatient ultra-lefts, hostile and separate from the working-class revolutionary leaders who remained in the USPD until 1920.
(...) But if the KPD failed to lead the revolution, the peaceful, reformist capitalist democracy that Bernstein and Kautsky had dreamed of turned out to be a cruel joke. It ended in the victory of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 and the total liquidation of the workers’ movement in Germany, and in much of Europe. The defeat also doomed the Russian Revolution to permanent isolation, creating the desperate conditions upon which Stalin built his bureaucratic state capitalist monstrosity, which politically and physically negated the core of Bolshevik theory and practice. At a terrible price, Rosa Luxemburg’s warning that either socialism or barbarism would prevail proved prophetic. But only those who believe that capitalism is humanity’s highest and final product can fail to appreciate the heroics, alongside the follies, of the generation of men and women of the KPD who gave their lives for a better world.